Popular Music and
Society: From Tin Pan Alley to Punk
Instructor Biography
Mike Daley is a popular music researcher, lecturer and professional musician based in Hamilton, Canada. He has completed degrees in Jazz Performance, Music History and Theory and Ethnomusicology. His Master’s thesis examined the early vocal style of Bob Dylan, and he is currently undertaking doctoral research on the music and critical reception of Jimi Hendrix. He has also published an article in the journal Popular Music on Patti Smith. Mike has been teaching at the university level since 1994 and has won a Students Union award for teaching excellence for his popular music course at McMaster University. As well, Mike maintains an active performing career and has appeared on several Canadian recordings.
Course Goal - Who Should Take This Course
Popular music has become an integral part of everyday life across the globe. The popular music industry accounts for billions of dollars in sales every year, and rock, pop, soul and rap music is used to sell shoes, toys and toothpaste. Especially over the past forty years, popular music has become the defining mark of youth culture. In short, popular music is the preeminent expressive form of the twentieth century.
This course will serve as an excellent introduction to the history of popular music and its interactions with social and political movements. As well, it will acquaint the student with some basic musical concepts to aid in “educated listening”. Thus, this course will provide an historical context for the popular music fan, and a vocabulary for the discerning popular music consumer.
Learner Goals
Take this course if you
want to be able to:
* Differentiate popular music styles by ear
* Articulate the place of current music within the history of popular music
* Describe the relationships between popular music and political movements
* Interpret the sounds of popular music intelligently
* Make educated purchases of popular music recordings
List of Course Lessons
1. Introduction:
what is popular music?
2. Beginnings of popular music - Tin Pan Alley, jazz, country and western, blues,
rhythm and blues
3. Early rock and roll - rockabilly, updated R&B
4. Rock and roll in the late 50s - innovators, teen idols
5. The early 60s - the folk revival, girl groups
6. The mid 60s - the British Invasion, Motown
7. The late 60s - psychedelia, soul, funk
8. Heavy Metal, New Hybrid Forms; Singer-Songwriters and Rock Criticism
Lesson 1: Introduction:
What is Popular Music?
Goals:
After completing this lesson you’ll be able to:
* discern the differences between several early popular styles
* apply Adorno’s theory of musical standardization to a current artist
* define the main qualities that make popular music unique
What Do
You Know? defining popular music
Hitting the Books! early styles and general characteristics of pop
music
Learning in Action standardization and current popular music
How Did You Do? feedback on your short essay
Making Connections minstrelsy today?
What Do You Know?
Write a quick list of the defining characteristics of popular music as you see it. Include musical factors, such as beat or lyrics, as well as how popular music is produced and consumed. Try to come up with 10-15 points that you feel define what popular music is.
Hitting the Books!
This course is designed
to give the student a clear account of the history and some of the pertinent
issues of Western popular music, especially after the second world war. The
history of the music industry and the artists and the entrepreneurs within it
are tied closely to the social history of the West, with an emphasis on the
United States. As well, it is intended as an introduction to musical concepts
for the student with no prior musical training.
In defining popular music, a distinction must be made between the three broad
areas of Western music: art music, folk music, and popular music. In some ways,
popular music is defined by its differences from art and folk musics. Art music
has been an integral part of Western music for several hundred years, and folk
music, by definition, dates back to the dawn of mankind. But popular music is
a product mainly of the twentieth century. It is tied to processes of mass mediation
and consumption that were impossible even 150 years ago. The violent social
upheavals of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the world wars
set the stage for the emergence of mass popular culture in general, and further
changes continue to be reflected in popular music.
In short, popular music is intimately tied with commerce; in its early history,
popular music was primarily disseminated through sheet music, and later through
recordings. From at least the beginning of the 20th century, popular music has
been designed and marketed to appeal to as many people as possible, and has
been mediated on a mass level.
That said, this course deals mostly with the popular music that followed the
second world war. The preceding 75 or so years are dispensed with in a single
chapter, a very difficult but necessary task. Postwar popular music has some
very unique qualities that I will touch on briefly. First on the list would
have to be the incredible mixing of black and white cultures that occurred during
and after the war, as southern blacks migrated to northern cities in enormous
numbers. The harder, more rhythmically driving sounds of Chicago blues and New
York R&B reflected the harsher, more alienated city life, with its arduous
and lucrative factory work and faster pace. The second factor is a decisive
shift in demographics following World War II. The postwar “baby boom”
created a huge population of children who were to come of age in the 50s and
60s. This powerful new youth market, growing up in a strong economy, demanded
leisure products that reflected their desires for new sensations and the clearing
away of old ways. To a large extent, these youths seized on the sounds of black
culture and created an industry that was eventually to completely transform
the music business. Finally, postwar popular music has developed in a time of
rapid technological change. This has helped to speed its development, and has
contributed to the creation of amazing new sounds never thought possible 50
years earlier.
Tin Pan Alley
Popular music in the sense
of a mass-mediated, mass-reproduced vernacular form begins in the late 19th
century with the first rumblings of Tin Pan Alley. Tin Pan Alley is a term that
refers to a number of things - first, a street, (more accurately, a series of
streets) where New York’s music publishing houses were concentrated. Second,
it refers to the professional popular music business as a whole. as it was manifested
in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Third, it refers to a way of
songwriting, a certain professionalism and perhaps emotional disassociation,
an orientation towards selling as many copies of a song as possible.
Tin Pan Alley was an empire built on sheet music. Records were not to be an
important force in the music business until the 1920s. Music publishers, who
made their living by buying songs from songwriters, then printing and selling
the sheet music, usually kept a staff of in-house songwriters, who would work
a 9 to 5 day turning as many potential hit songs out as possible. In order to
streamline their working methods, the Tin Pan Alley songwriters often worked
in groups, with many lyricists and composers brainstorming on a song. It is
not uncommon to see a song of the time credited to five or more composers and
lyricists. They tried to employ quasi-scientific songwriting techniques in an
effort to make songwriting as predictable as possible. As a result, Tin Pan
Alley songwriting quickly became a mechanical process.
A great many Tin Pan Alley songs conform to a consistent formal scheme, a 32-bar
AABA pattern consisting of two verses, a contrasting “bridge”, and
a final verse, with all sections eight bars in length. As well, many of the
internal details were similar from song to song, including chord progressions,
melodic shapes and lyric themes, which strayed little from the topic of sentimental,
idealized love. These standard forms and styles helped to make the compositional
process a predictable one, as well as providing listeners with a comforting,
predictable basis for popular songs.
The first real Tin Pan Alley hit was a song written by Charles K. Harris called
“After The Ball”. This sentimental parlour ballad was published
in 1892, and went on to sell some 10 million copies. Sales of this magnitude
were simply not possible in America fifty years previous. The combined effects
of rapid population growth, the rise of the middle class and an accompanying
rise in disposable income made such numbers available. The overwhelming popularity
of “After The Ball” and the incredible profits accumulated by the
publisher and composer (at the peak of the song’s popularity, Charles
K. Harris was earning $26,000 a week from it) established the music business
as we know it.
A great many of the Tin Pan Alley songwriters were Jewish-Americans who had
emigrated from Eastern Europe. European Jews arriving in America found many
of the “legitimate” businesses closed to them, so they found work
in the growing entertainment businesses, like Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley. Probably
the prototypical Tin Pan Alley composer was Irving Berlin (1888-1989), born
Israel Baline in Temun, Russia. The author of “White Christmas”
(1942) and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1911), was raised in
the Lower East Side in New York. After running away from home in 1900, he became
a singing waiter and “song plugger” (an employee of an music publisher
who would perform the publisher’s songs for prospective buyers, especially
vaudeville performers). After his first hit in 1909, he became one of the most
successful songwriters of the century, publishing hundreds of songs and composing
the unofficial national anthem of the United States, “God Bless America”
(1939).
The main audience for the publishers were the people who attended the travelling
variety shows known as vaudeville. If a song became popular among vaudeville
audiences, sheet music sales would increase as more and more people wanted to
play and sing the song at home on their pianos. In the days before television
and even radio, the piano was the entertainment centre of the middle-class home.
One or more members of the household, usually female, would play the piano while
the rest of the family listened or sang along. Since there was little means
to learn songs by “ear”, new songs, in the form of sheet music,
were in constant demand. And Tin Pan Alley was there to meet that demand.
The songs of Tin Pan Alley were generally simple, using well-worn, predictable
chord progressions (generally drawn from the musical vocabulary of romantic-era
art music), and lyrics that were sometimes beautiful but more often vapidly
sentimental and overwrought, or simplistic and cheery. As various “exotic”
musics entered the American consciousness in the early part of the 20th century
(including the black forms ragtime, jazz and blues), Tin Pan Alley composers
would include superficial features of these forms to make their songs stand
out from the crowd. Often the songs would include a reference to blues or jazz
in the title, while the song itself did not sound in the least bluesy or jazzy.
Adorno
This practice was noticed
by one of the first serious writers on popular music, a German-Jewish cultural
critic named Theodor Adorno. Adorno (1903-1969), wrote on many subjects, especially
classical music, which he loved and thought to be the highest expression of
musical genius. In a famous essay, “On Popular Music”, he turned
his attention to the popular music emerging from America in his time, the 1930s.
Adorno found the similarities between Tin Pan Alley songs and the anti-Semitic
propaganda appearing in his own country to be unsettling, having watched the
ways that the Nazis appropriated popular forms like film and music for the purpose
of mass indoctrination. He saw the incredible popularity of this music, combined
with its seemingly artless quality and large amount of repetition, a dangerous
combination with the potential to lull the people into a stupor for the purposes
of mind control.
Adorno basically felt that popular music was an assembly-line creation, the
product of a cynical and uncreative manufacturing process. He called this process
standardization; each song “product” is basically the same because
the composers know that the audience doesn’t know any better or even care.
He likened the creation of popular songs to the construction of custom-built
automobiles - while in great art music, each part was inextricably part of the
whole unifying concept, each part of a pop song was interchangeable, and one
lyric or melody could basically be substituted for another without affecting
the overall product. The technique of adding elements from other styles of music
to make this undistinguishable product seem different he called pseudo-individuation.
That is, popular songs were standardized products that were merely made to appear
different and new.
While Adorno can be criticized on a number of counts, including ignorance of
the music and his inability to see the popular music audience as anything but
a passive, undifferentiated mass, he made several prescient and compelling points.
In many ways, we are presently living in the world that Adorno warned us about.
Popular music has been thoroughly co-opted, not by fascists but by corporate
culture. We can see the processes of standardization and pseudo-individuation
at work in the popular music of today. Most popular songs still adhere to a
strict verse/chorus format, with predictably placed bridges and instrumental
sections. A large proportion of new bands seem to sound identical to the biggest
band of last year. This is a form of product standardization. In a competitive
marketplace, standardization is safe marketing, because it is an established
fact that consumers crave the familiar. We might see the modern version of pseudo-individuation
in the current trend towards self-consciously “produced” records.
By including a well-placed sample or electronic blip, a producer can make a
record stand out from the crowd without substantially changing the song itself.
But it can be argued that Adorno was judging musical sameness in popular music
by the standards of what is important in classical music - harmony, form, etc.
It has been shown that popular music listeners are extremely attuned to timbre
and rhythm, sometimes more than lyrics or melody. So what Adorno might have
heard as “the same” could sound quite differentiated to a dedicated
popular music fan. As well, art music has never been wholly safe from commercialization,
and it is subject to many of the same processes of production as popular music.
In any case, Adorno’s remarks remain hotly contested today in academic
circles.
Theodor Adorno was not the first or only detractor of Tin Pan Alley popular
music. Self-appointed guardians of moral and artistic taste were quick to attack
the validity of the new popular style, especially as it incorporated jazz elements.
In 1913, well-known violinist Maud Powell commented:
“unspeakably depraved modern popular song...which consists of brazenly suggestive words to a catchy rag-time accompaniment. Its effect on young people is shocking. The vicious song is allowed in the home by parents, who, no doubt, have not troubled themselves to look at the words. As a result the suggestive meanings are allowed to play upon immature minds at the dangerous age. It is from the popular song that the popular suggestive dance sprang. Together and apart they are a menace to the social fabric”.
Though Tin Pan Alley is the first example of what we can call “popular music”, other musical styles were fermenting in the background and soon to play a part in the musical revolution that began in the 1920s and culminated in the rock and roll of the 1950s. The first of those forms that we will discuss is ragtime, a primarily African-American form, that had an unusual genesis.
Ragtime
In the mid 1800s, a form
of white entertainment called the blackface minstrel show flourished. Beginning
in the 1830s with a troupe of former circus performers, this was a variety show
where white performers would blacken their faces with makeup or burnt cork and
perform comedy routines and musical numbers that made fun of black people in
a stereotypical, exaggerated manner. Invariably, blacks were portrayed as stupid,
lazy and dishonest. The songs the minstrels sang were not unlike the usual crop
of white pop songs, though often the songs had “humorous” lyrics
and were sung in a parody of black dialect. These shows were quite successful,
and minstrel troupes toured the United States steadily up to the 1940s.
It is interesting that such a racist form of entertainment would lead to the
first commercial black musical form. Black performers, seeing the success of
their white counterparts in the blackface shows, began putting together their
own minstrel troupes, again presenting exaggerated, stereotypical black characters,
and sometimes even further darkening their faces with burnt cork. The music,
though, was different. The black minstrels would perform many of the same songs
as the white minstrels, but in an uneven, “ragged” rhythm. This
process of altering the rhythm of a song is called syncopation. Syncopation
is a kind of rhythm where notes do not fall on the expected beats, but on the
offbeats. The effect may be initially disorienting, but then it can be quite
propulsive and exciting. Some contemporary styles, like rap and jungle, are
highly syncopated, while dance and alternative tend to be much more rhythmically
“straight”.
This form of music survived and developed beyond the blackface entertainments,
and was called ragtime. Ragtime bands began to appear in the late 1800s. The
instruments in these bands were drawn from both marching bands and black folk
music. Thus, a trumpet might be played alongside a washboard or a banjo. These
unusual combinations came to be called jug bands. They were so named because
of the whiskey jug which was often used as a rhythm instrument by blowing across
the mouth to the beat. This would create a low rhythmic accent for the sound
of the jug band, which tended to be a bit tinny and clattery.
It was only a matter of time before ragtime was urbanized and refined. This
was to come in the form of the black composer and pianist Scott Joplin (1868-1917),
who adapted the sound of ragtime jug bands for solo piano. In the jug bands,
a complex, rhythmically driving sound was achieved by juxtaposing a regular
bass rhythm with an irregular, syncopated melody. Joplin, along with other travelling
“piano professors”, achieved a reproduction of this sound by playing
a regular bass rhythm with his left hand, and a free, syncopated rhythm with
his right. He began as an itinerant piano player, entertaining in saloons and
travelling shows, but he soon began composing instrumental songs and settled
down in Sedalia, Missouri, then St. Louis. He published a number of successful
works, including “The Entertainer” (1902) and “The Cascade”
(1904), but his most successful rag was his first, “Maple Leaf Rag”
(1899). Joplin succeeded in bringing ragtime to mainstream attention by rendering
it as a form printable on sheet music and playable on the family piano.
Tin Pan Alley was quick to incorporate ragtime, or at least its superficial
elements, into white pop music. Irving Berlin, who composed dozens of “rags”,
including “Oh, That Beautiful Rag” in 1910 and “Alexander’s
Ragtime Band” (which contained nary a trace of syncopation) in 1911, was
crowned the “King of Ragtime”. As Charles Hamm has observed, “though
Scott Joplin and a handful of other black ragtime musicians realized a modest
profit from their music, the important money went to the white publishers, performers,
and composers of ragtime songs.”
Recording
Probably the most important
development in the history of popular music is the invention of sound recording
in 1877 by Thomas Edison (1847-1931). The advent of recording, in retrospect,
was a cataclysm in the history of music and sound. Before recording, music could
only be heard in its original context, be it a concert hall or around the campfire.
Edison did not, at first, see the potential of recorded music. To be sure, the
quality of early recording was very low, and musical recordings of the time
would not be very listenable. The recording machine was marketed at first as
a kind of dictaphone, a method for businessmen to verbally record memos and
letters for later transcription by a secretary. When the gramophone, as the
playback machine was called, was eventually used to record music, classical
music was the style of choice. Until 1887, with the development of disc recording
(the phonograph) by Emile Berliner (1851-1929), grooved wax cylinders were used.
These fragile cylinders were mounted on a spool, which was turned with the aid
of a crank. The sound quality of the cylinders was quite rough, and they would
typically wear out after a few plays. The disc, as it turned out, was a more
practical medium. It was made of shellac, which was much more rigid than wax.
Thus discs could withstand more listenings than cylinders, with better sound
quality. Also, the discs had two sides, which allowed up to six minutes of recording
time on one disc (three minutes per side). The shellac discs were played on
a phonograph turntable that rotated at 78 revolutions (full turns) per minute
(RPM).
The development of the record disc ushered in the modern era of sound recording.
Records began to be manufactured in mass quantities after the turn of the century,
and a greater variety of music appeared on disc. Not only classical, but ragtime,
minstrelsy and various ethnic musics began to be recorded. Record companies
sprang up by the dozens, often as subsidiaries of phonograph manufacturers.
These record companies released anything that they thought would sell, but record
sales climbed fairly slowly until the 1920s.
There were to be further improvements in recording technology, culminating in
the introduction of electrical recording in 1925. Before 1925, recordings were
made using an acoustic process. This meant that the physical vibrations of sound
were used, through a series of mechanical processes, to carve grooves into a
master disc. This master disc would then be used to press multiple copies. In
the pre-electrical recording days, the musicians would gather around a large
recording horn. The sound which entered the horn would be transferred to a rotating
master disc through a series of mechanical couplings. This was not a method
which would yield maximum fidelity, and musicians had to be careful not to cause
the cutting stylus to skip with strong, abrupt bass signals. If the sound was
too distant or quiet, though, the music would not be audible above the significant
surface noise of the disc. Due to the inflexibility of the recording diaphragm,
some instruments did not record well. Instruments producing complex sounds,
such as the violin, recorded weakly. Not surprisingly, horns recorded best.
Consequently, marching band numbers were prominent in many early recordings.
To produce a clear recording, the number of instruments would also be kept to
a minimum fifteen or so for a band, four or so for a choir. With all of
these limitations, it is amazing not only that so many records were made between
1887 and 1925, but that some of them have relatively excellent sound.
Electrical recording operated on a different principle. The sound was picked
up by a microphone, which would convert the sound vibrations into electrical
signals. These signals were used to disturb the cutting stylus, which would
then encode a representation of the sound onto the master disc. There were several
advantages to this process. For one, several microphones could be used, and
their volume levels balanced with each other using a mixer. Also, musicians
could play or sing as loud or soft as they liked - the recording engineer would
simply adjust the volume level of the microphone. Finally, sound quality was
greatly improved.
The development of the microphone was to have implications for “live”
performance as well. Before the microphone, music was performed completely without
amplification. Certain instruments are inherently louder than others, and almost
all of them are louder than the human voice. When a singer performed with a
band or orchestra, he or she had to basically shout, in a precise, stilted diction
to be heard above the instruments. This style of singing, associated with vaudeville,
can be heard in the recordings of Al Jolson and others. With the development
of the microphone, singers could use a much wider dynamic range, from loud to
very soft. They didn’t have to worry about being heard because they were
being amplified with a P.A. (public address) system. Some singers took advantage
of this and began to cultivate soft, relaxed, intimate singing styles. This
way of singing was known as crooning, and its most famous early exponent was
Bing Crosby (1903-1977). Crosby parlayed his murmuring, romantic crooning style
into an incredible career which saw him recording over 2,500 songs and selling
250 million records. Other singers were to adopt the crooning style to great
success, including Frank Sinatra (1915-1998) and Perry Como (1912- ).
Learning In Action
Write a 500 word essay applying Adorno’s theories of standardization and pseudo-individuation to a current act or performer. Cite specific aspects of the performer’s modes of musical production that suggest to you that Adorno’s ideas might be applicable (try www.ubl.com for a listing of fan webpages that can tell you more about a specific artist or group).
How Did You Do?
Send me your essay for feedback.
Making Connections
In your Notebook, write a short reflection on minstrelsy and how it might be still happening today on television, in the movies and on the radio.