This evening I chaperoned a high school junior prom. As always, it was fun to see the kids all dressed up and ready to have a great time. What followed next was three hours of very loud “music” that had a beat, a very strong and loud beat, with lots of rapping. I kept asking the other chaperones: “Where’s the melody?” The answer was simple: “There is none. That’s what the kids want to hear: the beat, and nothing but the beat.” But does it have to be sooooooo loud?! I can hear my heart pound to the beat, almost as if it wants to jump out of my body. “Yes,” was the reply. The louder, the better!
It was a good thing, a very good thing that I sat in the lobby that night, checking kids in and monitoring their comings and goings. At least the “music” was muffled by the double doors that led to the dance floor. And it made me think back to the time when I was growing up in the late 1960s and 1970s and in high school and college, when music really did have a melody with lyrics that you could understand. There was real singing, too. And yes, there was a beat you could dance to, but it was always balanced out with the melody. And each song had a beginning, a middle and an end, a definitive end. Most songs were under three minutes long. Music at that time seemed so universal: everyone was able to sing along with each song that was played on the radio. And the music was happy and fun, and uplifting. The majority of the songs back then became classics and have withstood the test of time. I’ve heard some of these classics being incorporated into today’s music – a riff here, a melody line or two there, all thrown into a “new” song. The funny thing about this is that kids today think it is indeed a completely new and original song. Uh, no!
When you ask kids these days if they know anything about yesteryear’s music, the majority of them would say “no.” And to me that’s very sad to hear. While growing up, I was extremely fortunate to have been exposed to all kinds of music: classical, ragtime, Big Band, jazz, songs from the Great American Songbook, R&B, rock and roll, blues – it was a wonderful learning experience that to this day I treasure and always will.
Times have changed, music has changed. Call me “old fashioned” when it comes to my taste in music, but when given a choice to listen to today’s music or yesteryear’s music, I choose the latter. What about you?
