A Shared Vocabulary
In my far-too-long-ago last entry here (I apologize to those who may have been checking in), I ended by quoting from a book that rests very near the top of my short list of essential music criticism, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America by Craig Werner. “[R]eal dialogue,” Werner writes, “requires a shared vocabulary.” It is the absence today of that sort of common musical language that I think we sense when we point to a lack of significance in current popular music (what I’ve been going on about in my previous two enries here), and in popular culture generally.
What exactly do we mean when we say that today’s pop artists no longer share a vocabulary? There are many ways to answer that question, but one way I think we can tell that musicians and music fans share a language is when we see artists and audiences clearly listening to one another across genres. This communication was most famously present in the sixties, when we know that legends like the Beatles and Stones, Dylan and Otis and Aretha and Hendrix and Marvin and James Brown and so many more were inspiring one another to push themselves in new (but still largely similar) directions. And, partly, this was possible because rock ‘n’ roll was still a big tent back then, still understood to take in all the acts listed above, despite their differences.
But once largely integrated rock ‘n’ roll was replaced for white fans by largely segregated rock music, and once that division was reinforced by punk and its aftermath, we arrived in a world where the Beatles and Otis Redding were percieved to be working within seperate and not even equal genres–a time when they and their descendents were played on different radio stations for different demographics (an insdious word, that; it almost always has some relationship to racial segregation)–well, that’s when the common vocabulary began to dissapear.
Back before all that went down, however, a common language was there for those who wanted to speak it, and that reality provided us with at least the potential to shout across the divide–with cover songs and with influences and allegiances worn unhidden and unmistaken on sleaves, with a repertoire of numbers (and rhythms and chord changes and melodies) known in-common by the rock ‘n’ roll world: “Money (That’s What I Want), “Little Latin Lupe Lu,” “Easy Rider,” “Memphis,” “I Got a Woman,” “House of the Rising Sun,” “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy,” “Kansas City,” “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” “Suzie-Q,” and on and on.
And on…”Hi-Heel Sneekers,” besies being played by some bar band or other in every town, every Saturday night, ” made the Hot 100 five times in the sixties, in versions by Tommy Tucker, Jerry Lee Lewis, Stevie Wonder, Ramsey Lewis, and Jose Feliciano. Take a moment and ponder the variety of artists on that list. Then, more interesting, ponder their similarities. One of the biggest is that they shared a vocabulary, a repertoire. They all knew “Hi-Heel Sneekers,” and so did their audiences. Or, rather, their audience.
Put it another way…So many of the greats of sixties rock ‘n’ roll could hear one another so well because they all spoke…Pennemanese. Paul McCartney took his “Wooo” from Little Richard. In his highschool yearbook, Bob Dylan identified his ambition as “To join the band of Little Richard.” For a time, Otis Redding did just that, and Jimi Hendrix briefly backed Penneman as well. Early in his career, James Brown shared a manager with Richard. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Travelin’ Band” is a blatant Little Richard rip-off…
Well, if nothing else, what I’ve done above is prove the undeniable significance of Little Richard. But we could do something similar with Berry-ese, Presley-ese, and Domino-ese, Perkins- and Cooke- and Cochran-ese, and with, later, the tongues of the Beatles and the Stones and the Family Stone. All of this, and so much more, nurtured a world where people could perhaps talk to one another and hear one another, see ourselves in one another, and understand our destinies as bound up with all sorts of people we didn’t even know. I trust that the connections between all I’m only waving at here and to the poltiical struggles of the period are obvious.
What are the contemporary or near-contemporary songs today that everyone knows? Who are the contemporary acts everyone listens to and even covers, who speak a language that “everyone” understands or who are even reaching for such a language? Obviously, I don’t think popular music is able to facilitate these connnections and conversations like it once did.
But where does that leave us? I’ll try to have some preliminary thoughts about that next time.