Actionable solutions

Bruce Springsteen, talking with President Barack Obama.

Then came the country music in my late 20s and 30s. Looking for other solutions than Rock music provided. Rock music was a great music and there was some class anger in it and that agreed with me. Ah, then there was a beautiful romanticism and melodies, a lot of energy. But as you were getting older, it didn't address your adult problems.

So I went to Country music. Country music was great, incredible singing and playing, but it was rather fatalistic. You know?

So, I said well, “Who's trying to play…Where is a music of hope?” And when you went to Woody Guthrie and Bob [Dylan], you know... They were spelling out the hard world that you lived in, but they were also providing you, somehow, with some transcendence and some actionable solution to societal, and your own, personal problems. You could be active.

That drew my attention because I was now a relatively big rock star. I was interested in maintaining ties to my community. I was interested in giving voice to both myself and folks in my community. I was also interested in being active to a certain degree, taking some of what I was earning, putting it back into the community […] And that was where I found my full satisfaction and that's how I put all the pieces together.

Bruce Springsteen, talking with President Barack Obama in the American Music episode of their podcast series Renegades, via @kattvantar.

Ask an 11-year-old

“Then there’s the really fascinating part. People in their 20s are having a new experience: They are, for the first time, noticing some of the things actual teenagers enjoy and are being completely appalled, both morally and aesthetically. A flood of young rappers is scoring hits with music that baffles grown rap fans with its slurry boneheadedness […] If the last version of pop was driven by people who desperately wanted everyone to care and everything to matter, it’s only natural for the next wave to be interested in what it looks like when you don’t care, and nothing matters.”
— 25 Songs That Tell Us Where the Future of Music is Going, Introduction by Nitsuh Abebe, New York Times Magazine, Sunday, March 11

The introduction concludes with,

"Keep scanning along that birth chart, and it will emerge that the highest number of births in American history seems to have come around 2007. If you want to know where music is going, ask an 11-year-old."

"A tangy, lemony, electrical emotional wave"

“I was coming down the stairs at the front of the bus when a sound hit me like a lightning bolt. It was more than a sound, actually. It was a tangy, lemony, electrical emotional wave. Have you ever dealt with skunk spray at very close range? It goes past being a smell — it’s like a wave of high voltage meat that engulfs you so fully that you can’t tell which of your senses you are experiencing. That was the intensity of this sound”
— Guitarist Damian Kulash, on hearing Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’ for the first time at age 7. (link)

Ungovernable Hybridity

“And if ‘vibes’ are now considered intellectual property, let us swiftly prepare for every idiom of popular music to go crashing into juridical oblivion. Because music is a continuum of ungovernable hybridity, a dialogue between generations where the aesthetic inheritance gets handed down and passed around in every direction. To try and adjudicate influence seems as impossible as it does insane. Is that the precedent being set here?”
— It’s okay if you hate Robin Thicke. But the ‘Blurred Lines’ verdict is bad for pop music. Chris Richards, Washington Post, March 11, 2015