New harmonies for kids and parents?

New harmonies for kids and parents?

Posted on January 18th, 2011 by Chris Matarazzo

Paradigms do shift, don’t they? It occurred to me that — what? — fifty or sixty years’ worth of musical conflict is now evaporating. I mean, kids and parents still work diligently to find new things to shake their heads behind each other’s back about, but the old “how-can-you-listen-to-that-noise?” bit is now sort of resolving itself into a dew, isn’t it? If teenagers today have parents who grew up on Led Zeppelin, it is sort of hard for them to shock the old gene-donors with long hair, screaming vocals and raunchy guitars anymore.

It’s sort of all been done. Alice Cooper did the dismemberment thing. Zeppelin did the Satanic howls. Kiss did the glitter and blood thing and the New York Dolls, Bowie and countless others did androgyny. NWA covered cussing and street reality. What’s left? We parents have heard and seen it all, from cucumbers in the Spandex to misogyny and the macabre (sometimes all mixed together).

I suppose bands still try to do more of the same-old-same-old. Gwar puts giant penises on stage that spew, uh, stuff on the audience. (Neo-Gallagher?) Marylin Manson wears lingerie, praises the devil and puts metallic contacts in his eyes. Scream-o is all about making the weirdest, most unearthly howls into the microphone possible — but, in essence, none of them are doing anything we grown-ups haven’t seen in some form or another. These current acts’ attempts to shock, at least to me, move them into the realm of the comic and desperate, though, not the terrifying. (You want to really scare me? Write a pop song with more than three chords that goes beyond simple major and minor triads and doesn’t depend on Pro Tools manipulation. Then, I’ll crap myself on the spot.)

It was easy for kids in the fifties and sixties to make their parents squirm. Elvis was out of control with the hips and the Beatles with their ridiculously long hair were . . . Well, what were they — boys or girls? And that Jagger fellow was downright pornographic compared to the suit-clad crooners of the forties and even compared with that nice (and clearly studious) Holly boy in the fifties — though that throbbing floor-tom clearly worked a beguiling and evil magic on the nether regions of the impressionable youth.

The parents of the kids who listened to early rock and roll had grown up on very civilized, very controlled music — music that was written by real, trained composers (or wondrously talented phenoms like Irving Berlin), played by schooled musicians who could actually read music and performed by singers who did that and only that: sing. There was a nice, sane, formal feel to popular music back then, even if big band made a small parental ripple. There was a harmonic and melodic sophistication in that stuff that we may never see again in pop, sadly.

Then, rock and roll lumbered in, sweating and dragging its knuckles: an incontinent orangutan dangling from the opera box. And kids used that to their advantage.

But now it ain’t so easy. Many parents today like their music loud — in my case, whether it is heavy rock or the Chicago Symphony — just as their children do. So what do kids do now? They’ll have to drop the old reliable music thing if they want to rattle any cages.

In a way, that’s sort of chilling. I can’t help but feel that the now old-fashioned mostly symbolic protests waged with long hair and loud music might turn into something more concrete and dangerous. Exactly how, I’m not sure. Even the drugs thing is kind of . . . I don’t know . . . dulled in its impact now.

Or, just maybe, the sharing of music between kids and adults will create a new harmony in our society. There is something cool about seeing a family together at a Tom Petty or a Springsteen concert, from mom and dad down to the teens and even younger kids. The iPod is broadening kids’ appreciation of older popular music and I often see young musicians gaping up in incredulous awe at the three virtuosic old farts in Rush.

In a show at Wembley Stadium, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones came onstage to jam with the Foo Fighters. Dave Grohl actually wept in joy. What’s that smell? Respect? Could it be? Time was, that was not in the rock and roll recipe.

Maybe the future is bright, if not so much for pop music, itself, then for the hope of its filling in the gaping chasm of the generation gap that it once helped to create.

Chris Matarazzo’s ARTISTIC UNKNOWNS appears every Tuesday.

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Chris Matarazzo

Chris Matarazzo is a writer, composer, musician and teacher of literature and writing on the college and high school levels. His music can be heard on his recent release, Hats and Rabbits, which is currently available. Chris is also the composer of the score to the off-beat independent film Surrender Dorothy and he performs in the Philadelphia area with the King Richard Band. He's also a relatively prolific novelist, even if no one seems to care yet. His blog, also called Hats and Rabbits, is nice, too, if you get a chance...