Tracy had one of her Contemporary Christian favorites on her car radio when I started the car for our errands together, and I declined to keep listening when she asked. It occurred to me that there is now too little variation to interest me. I can understand people who want to use it for a particular type of individual worship as they are driving or preparing dinner, a way of keeping connection, however loose, to deep issues even when you are engaged in shallow activities. I usually just think about things for that sort of activity - I always say I like the radio station that plays in my head - but sometimes I will hum, or even sing out loud for that type of worship experience. Sometimes I will play something that has more difficulty in it, such as complicated lyrics or harmony. Michael Card and Bob Bennett aren't really background music. I play them when I can spare some brain space for listening.
But the Contemporary Christian genre is too smoothed out for my taste. It means too many things already anyway, but even beyond that it is formulaic. Modern country music has that. If I listen to older country music I will encounter more songs that irritate me (Alexa! Next!) but also things of more interest. I post 60s and 70s oldies music here, but I don't really like those stations when I hear them playing in the stores. They have been curated into insipidity at this point. There are a few dozen Motown or R&B songs that I used to like but am now tired of. Same with British Invasion music. When I look at old Top Forty lists, I am aware of a higher percentage of songs that I didn't like then and don't like now, but also lesser hits that I haven't heard in years and might like to have another go at. "Good Vibrations" is a far better song than "Caroline No," but I'm tired of it at this point.
I love African American Spirituals, but a few are just trite at this point. I can go down the rabbit hole with Doo-wop on YouTube, but I think the discount store and dentist office stations play pretty much the same few on repeat.
I think I specifically mentioned in my funeral preferences that "Amazing Grace" should not be played, and I hope I mentioned "How Great Thou Art" as well. Yet there were times years ago when I loved both.
What makes us tired of a good song?
ReplyDeleteMaybe Uncle Screwtape was right, and our lives need rhythms of this and then that and then this again.
ReplyDeleteCountry has become the same way, formulaic. Very disappointing, this creative desert our culture is in, at present.
ReplyDeleteIt's not that good country music isn't being made, it's that the distribution system is bad. That's why I often post 'new country' or 'new Western' music: you'll probably never hear it on the radio. They don't tend to get big contracts out of Nashville, and they don't play in big venues.
ReplyDeleteIn a way it's similar to the early phase of the Outlaw Country era, when Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson left Nashville over a similar sort of formualic culture and repressive contracting process; they went out to Texas and started playing smaller venues and making a new kind of sound. Eventually this turned out to be very productive, as their "Wanted: The Outlaws" record was country's first platinum album. Then they could serve as a new nexus for artists, for a while.
Once you have a notion of who the new acts are that are good, programs like Spotify can help you find others you haven't heard of that also are good. It's one of the things I do with my spare time, because I also like spirited music and not the formulaic stuff.
james, I'd go even more fundamental than that. We're a pattern-matching animal but that means we also need to recognize a change in the pattern (the lift, the key change, the punchline, the plot twist) and get a dopamine hit from recognizing that, too. Hearing the same thing over and over just dulls our sense of surprise at the shift, and we start to crave something new.
ReplyDeleteChristopher B, that fits with an irritated post I was just going to put up, but perhaps it is better to bury it here. When people are good at something, they like to tinker with it, for their entertainment and those of others who have their recognition. I am singing with the choir for Advent and Christmas, and in one anthem which combines many standard carols, the bass harmonies are complicated, with lots of half-step movements and weird intervals. For someone like me, these carols have solid harmonies already, and it's Christmas and it's worship, not a recital, dammit, and people want to sing lustily. But these guys (it is men especially, I think) cannot stop tinkering with it. Makes me crazy.
ReplyDeleteIt is similar to home brewers and microbrewmasters, where they keep trying (to my mind completely unnecessary) variations. "I tried putting in some Grains of Paradise...some special hops that originate in the Czech Republic..." You make a very good beer, stop f-ing with it! But to each other it is all fascination. Shop talk. They, not the customer, often become the main audience.
I know, I know, this is where improvements come from, as with furniture-makers or decorative arts. But it is so easy to get out of control. Bah! Humbug!
“We're a pattern-matching animal but that means we also need to recognize a change in the pattern (the lift, the key change, the punchline, the plot twist) and get a dopamine…”
ReplyDeleteLong time commenter Pierchello at the Hall was a concert musician as well as a mathematician. He developed a formal theory for exactly how that mechanism worked that he shared with me several years ago. He considered it a unified mathematical theory of beauty.
I haven’t seen him for a while, but if he pops up again I will ask him to weigh in.