Have you ever felt that your time has passed? Or am I the only one wondering what happened to contemporary music? Why it sounds like a trite refrain, a concoction of stale melodies we heard before, more often a cocktail of lame sounds and unspeakable lyrics, horrible potions, sung by singers without a voice, often played by musicians without musicianship.

I stopped listening to the airwaves years ago. Those rare times I dare tuning in, I wonder what happened to meaningful writing, authentic talent, moving tunes and powerful music? Yes, there are John Mayer, Alicia Keys, Norah Jones, but where are the Beatles of today? Who is going to write secular music for the 21st century?

A couple of weeks ago, I went to see The Police, live concert, at Philips Arena, and I found myself jumping on my seat, singing aloud, cheering and screaming out of my lungs like a teenager. Three days after, when the excitement resumed and reality came around, I found myself wanting to push the envelope of secular music, which as an European I tend to associate to the writing of classical music over the centuries, from baroque (Vivaldi) to modern (Stravinsky). At the concert, I either witnessed a surviving pieces of pop culture, or I launched a deep probe into the troubles of our culture. I shall leave the judgment to this clever and sophisticated audience.

It is an accepted fact that the music of The Beatles – particularly timeless pieces like Michelle, Yesterday or Eleanor Rigby – has attained the level of secular music. It has been orchestrated, re-interpreted, adopted, used in movies, programs, jingles, even phone rings. But most importantly, it is the inner-conscience music of several generations, the spirit of an age. Undeniably, most of Beatles’s tunes were quite catchy, but the fame of their music is connected to its ability to encapsulate and carry unique feelings. Music reflects its time, but often transcends it. It happened with Orrf’s Carmina Burana, which were written in the last century but sound and feel like medieval music. But magic seemed to occur on a regular basis within the Lennon-McCartney-Harrison collaboration. As a result, an uncanny, poetic level of expressivity was reached that captured the indescribable qualities of a lover (Something), or remembered someone highly revered (Julia), exorcized with sarcasm the indignation of seeing nouveau riches dressed like penguins, pretending to be gentlemen (Piggies), or used a joke to bring the gay out of the closet (Ob-la-di, ob-la-da), not to mention, narrated the wonder of being seduced by a young woman (Norwegian Wood). That music sold everywhere because it brought people together around bonds of collective, human experience.

Conversely, in the past twenty years, musical and fashion trends have become an overnight event, here today, gone tomorrow. The market needs something new every season. This anxiety of contemporary culture to offer “something new” does not bear a chance to bring to the forefront of musical culture valid artists, let alone schools of thought. Musicians that don’t have a voice and can hardly handle an instrument are given access to the media, and the few good ones who are out there are stressed out by a market that demands a hit every week. After a few years of sincere efforts to understand what was happening, I altogether turned off the radio and refused to listen to the music production of today, especially since sub-culture took over culture as I knew it.

Typically we listen to music in the privacy of our homes –or cars– and it does not occur to many, that thousands of individuals may be having the same experience at the same time. But those who had a chance to see Paul McCartney’s recent tour know what it feels like experiencing the thrill and excitement of collective consciousness. The concert of The Police was something analogous. It was a sudden awakening and a confirmation that many of my impressions and suspicions about the state of contemporary culture had a basis. I will get there in a moment, but let me back off to the starting point of my personal journey.

As some of you may know, I have an extensive teaching experience. My assignment as a young professor came right at the time in which a new generation came to college, a generation filled of expectations, but lacking sense of duty or self-responsibility, confusing human rights for self entitlement, having no idea of the history or heritage of their own country. A disaster. In time, I came to understand the root of their reaction, stemming from broken and dysfunctional families, as well as from a political system that does not give a rat’s ass about citizenship, education, health, human rights and the amelioration of society.

Back to music, some time ago, after hearing out my complaints about the abysmal state of contemporary music and culture –a condition resembling a sub-culture of unrealized expectations and morbid existentialism, if often a ghetto, with its materialistic pursuits, inane values and unspeakable lyrics, yet with its common, desperate cry for attention– a friend of mine warned me that “disliking the music and the trends of one’s time is the first true sign of aging.” Ouch! His words bore heavily on me.

I make no mystery that I have long mourned the disappearance of single–archetype paradigms of cultural expressions such as “Blues” or “Classical” music, as it has become clear that the emergence of human rights has pushed aside the universal experience of music, confusing the spontaneous manifestation of clearly defined form of expression like Reggae or Rap, which are well defined forms of social vindication, with secular culture, which is supposed to bring us all together (all colors and creeds) and follow us down the centuries, like a solid and reliable vessel. Try to imagine the problems NASA would encounter nowadays in encoding a musical message to be sent out of space for the purpose of contacting other civilizations: whose music and whose pictures would be there to represent mankind? NASA would have a hard time making everybody happy. Do you begin to see my point? Where do we stop with group divisions, and who is going to talk about unification? This anxiety of our culture to be “politically correct” and to offer space to every microcosm, including people who cannot sing or play music, has in turn passed off the principle that “no music is good for everybody”. Its unfortunate byproduct is that every “fart” one may pass, may be music. As a result, when we speak about cultural expression today, we need to ask ourselves the question “whose music?” and “for which audience?”

Notice, dear readers, that I am simply asking questions here. I am not passing moral judgments upon which condition may be more desirable or better for our time. Of course, I miss the old paradigm. I miss it because it was reliable and harmonious, but do I miss it because of what my friend was saying about coming to age? Or is it because our culture has changed? Please, bear with me for a moment of pure nostalgia. It used to be one music, including Jazz, which although of almost pure black-American origin, in fact, was undoubtedly consumed and revered by a vast majority of white listeners. This is how universal was the content of music (white or black). You could hear it in the sweetest anguish of the unique voice of Billie Holiday, so close to heart to all who have experienced disgrace, failure or a broken heart. Instead of that oneness that made us think and feel that all humans, regardless of color or ethnic origin, experience the same things inside, I see today pretence, divisions and incomprehensible idioms. It is as if the reference mode, say “rock”, has been suddenly associated with the attempt of some government to transform the planet into a happy democracy – you can see the results! This is complete not-sense, as the music industry is not known to have given a penny to any campaign. Yet, the music industry is governed by the mighty dollar.

I never quote the Bible, but this breakdown into thousands of little groups of interest, looks like a biblical admonition –the legend of the Tower of Babel– except there is no more uninhabited land to run to for each separate group, no silent airwaves, no quiet spot, no vacation place without a Hilton, an internet connection or the ubiquitous Starbucks…

The deep irony of all this is that, the obsession of modern society with group distinctions (you are red, he is black, she is white, Wasp, Serbian, Kurdish, Hutu, Hamas, Fatah, or what have you) has produced deep divisions and an overall flatness, a musical landscape where every piece of music sounds alarmingly the same, and it is not because it has common roots. It is because it does not know where to go. In contrast, universal culture was holding under its wide wings an amazing diversity of expressions. But in a moment in which basic human rights are wildly violated everywhere, at home and abroad, it is understandable that smaller groups, or groups and entities that do not have access to the dominant culture, want a piece of the action, and there is nothing better than music to protest, emerge, make one’s dismissed group visible. The media and the music industry, with their sophisticated marketing strategies, bull targeting of specific ages, generations, groups, even genders, is a significant player, perhaps more relevant than the groups themselves. This is actually a more significant factor that it may appear at first, in that no one can appreciate music, which one was not exposed to. And exposure does not occur in a vacuum, unless you are capable of switching off everything, but how and where? In our cultural climate, no one dares setting the bar high, so that access to music, for instance, may be granted only to those who can play music, or to noble lyrics only. Everyone seems to have the right to appear before the general public, and a single Simon (American Idol) fearlessly stating: “that was a dreadful perfomance! You cannot sing!” cannot make a difference in a world in which every young teenager feels that he or she can build up a career out of nothing, not even a voice, after all, like the majority of their misbehaved idols. Their failure may as well be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and mediocre idol may, after all, sound terrific to mediocre ears.

Back to the matter at hand, I remember the time in which we would buy a rare import record from England and play it over for days at the time, like when Sgt. Peppers came out, or like we did with the legendary, “in a Glass House” by the still largely unknown Gentle Giant ¬¬–arguably the most talented group of musicians ever assembled¬– or the first time Pink Floyd made their timid appearance. Those were times of wonder and elation. The trend continued for decades. In fact, musically speaking, I was comfortable up to the eighties, during which, even for the richly textures and multiform pop-rock era that came out of the sixties and its dead heroes (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison), one could still tell apart soul music, such as outer reaches of Rhythm & Blues (say, Boz Scaggs or Stevie Wonder), from Cat Stevens-like continuations of the Gothic, story-telling trends of the British Rock (Jetthro Tull, Genesis, Yes).

One can hear Mahalia Jackson, Etta James and Ray Charles behind the gravely voice of Joe Coker –if you want to hear a masterful quintessential work of re-interpretation, play his soulful version of Lennon-McCartney “With a little help from my friends”. Even when Latin rhythms merged-in with Carlos Santana leading the pack, the blending result was still very harmonious. In a nutshell, the entire pop-rock culture had deep roots, with Blues and Rock & Roll as their backbone, giving birth to killer funky syncopations like James Brown’s uncanny riffs (Hot Pants, Sex Machine), to innovative orchestration like Isaac Hayes score for Shaft (a trend-setting piece of music, the sound of which was dubbed by everyone, from Earth Wind & Fire and Barry White, to the Michael Jackson-Quincy Jones partnership. There were straight-ahead blues bands like Buddy Miles, John Mayall and the legendary Allman Brothers. On the other side of the rock area, there were the poets (Guthrie, Cohen, Dylan), the minstrels and story tellers (Neil Young, David Crosby, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Peter Gabriel and many others), then the rock per se, stemming directly from clever reinterpretations by amazingly receptive European musicians like John Lennon, Eric Clapton (Cream), Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin), Roger Chapman (Family), Ron Wood (Faces), Keith Richard (Rolling Stones), Pete Townsend (Who), of music legends like Jerry Lee Lewis, Bud Holly, Chuck Berry, and Elvis, yes the King of Memphis himself.

This is the musical environment within which I grew up as a teenager. Take into account that at that time, my father was poised on Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and my mother was set on classical music. Pop was no sacrilege, but it wasn’t high culture either. So when the Beatles arrived I was primed, in terms of my ability to discern sources. My dad got me Please, Please me, and the rest is history. And so it goes that, the deeper the Beatles subtext went (Happiness is a warm gun, a Glass Onion, You Know My Name, etc.), the more I convinced myself that I was witnessing a new kind of secular music on the make. Well, at the least this time I was right about it.

Well, a point that I am proposing is that universal music as a concept seemingly ended in the early nineties with a few groups, The Police, Dire Straits, and perhaps the downright and straightforward AC/DC. Short of these exceptions, in my opinion, music became either cacophonic, at the least to my ears, or too teenage-superficial, like with Duran Duran. I hate to dish out ultimate judgments, but in my view those three groups marked the end of music as I knew it. Of course, there have been amazing episodes of musicianship like Talking Heads, Prince, Tori Amos, John Mayer, Alison Kraus, an eternally inspired Stevie Wonder and the beacon of David Bowie and Lou Reed, but the rest of it is a squalid landscape of mediocrity. The solitary genius of Brian Eno, who dared outside all the existing forms (Apollo, Music for Airports), ended into a cleft which is neither pop, nor is it yet recognized as classical music. And who’s got the throne of contemporary classical? Not those who really deserve it, like Michael Torke (Orange), or the stunning John Barry (Out of Africa and many other scores), but the boring-to-death Philip Glass.

Fast forward twenty years, and you find yourself in this strange now, immersed into a multi-source culture that, while still obsessively thirsty for originality, seems to be uninspired, mixing things that don’t belong together (and never will), a culture which is desperately attempting to create a new concoction, like Hip-Hop did. The problem is that its digestion of the sources is superficial, in most cases it does not even exist, and I wonder if one can build a future without a solid platform beneath. Casual references are like quoting Shakespeare without any idea of the issues that his work addressed, and his general opinion of the humanity – not a particularly high one! For this sophisticated audience, I could get a level deeper, arguing, for instance, that the concept of improvisation, which is synonymous of “variation”, is completely antithetical with the “techno” use of computer-generated percussion, which, by its very nature, does not and cannot vary (is inhuman). At the other antipode, Jazz is the ultimate affirmation of secular music, largely delegating to live-performance the task of passing the “know-how” to new generations, therefore making it difficult for the music industry to tamper with the process. The proof is that most Jazz musician have great difficulties making ends meet. This is why, in order to make a buck, the industry had to resort to horrible surrogates, like Kenny G., whose banal regurgitations have been labeled “Jazz Flavors”, but truly, are straight elevator music.

I had other premonition of my passing of age. Years ago, I was teaching the opening class of freshmen architecture 1001, at Georgia Tech. Looking at the glazed eyes and blank stairs of thirty students, as I named a few major architects, I quickly switched to contemporary music, looking for common ground to establish a shred of a discourse. I was quickly loosing their attention. Music got me back on track. So, I asked them: what do you listen to? They all knew what they were talking about, but I did not recognize a single one of their favorite artists, except R.E.M., which I have instant recognition for, between their bargain existentialism and their funereal whining, they elicit an instant allergy reaction on yours truly, shortly followed by running for dear life. In fact, my idea of hell is a place where a dull D.J. plays their sorry lament over and over. Pardon, young UGA Athenians… Back to my Tech students, at the end of the round, one of them asked me: and, what do you listen to? Well, I said, mostly Jazz and Classical (meaning Miles Davis and, say, Beethoven). It took him thirty seconds to process my reply, then a light bulb went off: “Aaahh, he proclaimed, I like the classics too! I love the Rolling Stones!” It stopped me on my tracks! I was only 37 then, but it is the first time I realized I was born in a different era, that I was a dinosaur at 37. That was my first meeting with the reality of musical trends, and the obsolescence of the universal paradigm.

Prompted by those experiences and not having liked much in contemporary pop music, I convinced myself that I did possess the means to understand it. It put a temporary stone on it. This feeling lasted until that Saturday night at Philips Arena. The Police’s concert, change it all. I came out of it with a different understanding of what might have happened to contemporary music.

Recently reunited after more than a decade of individual pursuits, this stunning group rocked a house of more than 22,000. Three musicians, no props, pre-recorded material, dubbing and effects. No B.S., just loads of good music. I was visibly elated the following morning, when I decided to write this. Nothing has bothered me for two weeks, as I have been walking on air. Floored and dumbfounded by such a fabulous concert, I feel as if someone had given me a boost of super vitamins and granted me with five years of additional life. The concert was nothing short than stunning: a sea of people singing along, dancing hands in the air, in one collective voice. Not a seat left in the arena. Standing ovations, people dancing in the isles and corridors. Entire sections singing the background voices the group could not play, like in “Roxanne, you don’t have to put up the red light”. It was very emotional and deeply, deeply moving.

I could not believe the modernity, originality and the freshness of their sound, twenty five years from their advent as a group. The consumed and unsurpassed musicianship of these three masters is unparalleled. They used no tricks not pre-recorded aids, no props, no other musicians. Yet they can outplay anyone in the music scene, bar none, including groups of six or more. Unlike groups that mow you over with a wall of 130 decibels, The Police sounds like an orchestra. Their sound is clear, essential and intelligible in all its parts. You can hear everything, including Sting’s stunning voice, which is nothing short than a miracle at his age.mI could not believe the sheer amount of catchy tunes they wrote either. You realize that when you hear them one after the other. I sang along, even got teary eyes, because of the emotions I was experiencing. I have seen hundreds of live concerts, but together with Pink Floyd, this was one of the best one I have ever experienced. It rocked my musical soul inside out. It moved my bones. I must have left earth for two and a half hours. It was a near transcendental experience.

I may be destined to extinction, but with neither divine nor mortal interferences (I am often interrupted by both) and with the fair assumption that Gods and humans should have plenty of people to bug in the coming weeks, I will be able to concentrate on more important matters, and on my numerous privileges and blessings, which made it through my door in spite of the chaotic and irrational nature of the trends and paradigms that surround us. You, my readers, (yes, you) are one of the blessings!

From a crafty carved heaven-on-earth,
this is your humble correspondent,

Giancarlo Pirrone