don't want your love anymore

This is of course the first line of "Cathy's Clown," my favorite song by the Everly Brothers. The Everly Brothers seem to me to belong to a musical lineage that would include the Blue Sky Boys, Bill and Charlie Monroe, Jim and Jesse, and certainly the Louvin Brothers, among others. But check out how the back beat is slowed waaay down on this one, and the close harmony acutually seems to sport a high lead...this is definitely the rock era, but it carries such a weight of tradition at the same time.

I have been meditating on this for a long time...it seems to me that a key to 20th century music is, first of all, improved transportation, but much more so, radio. When the radio came out, the situation in various localities in the US was the following: people had a very limited pool of music, in one sense, by which they were influenced. In a diachronic sense, some of the music being played had been developing for hundreds of years; British ballads were showing up in Appalachia, for instance. But the way music was played was very much a regional thing. The radio suddenly exposed everyone to what everyone else was doing. All of a sudden, there was a syncretic explosion of creativity. This resulted in an amazing efflorescence of interreferential yet original music that lasted for perhaps 50 or 60 years. At ground zero was the earth-shaking synthesis that was acheived by Bill Monroe, perhaps the eminent example of traditional forms coming into contact with one another and producing a world-changing synthesis...but one should certainly include hundreds of other artists who produced such amazing music, which undermined the high/low culture distinction and resulted in a body of recorded music that could keep us all busy for the rest of our lives. Certainly, Bob Dylan is a great example of the syncretic ideal: a Minnesotan middle-class boy who remade himself into an authentic blues poet, seemingly by sheer force of desire. However, regardless of what the high water marks are, the flood itself seems undeniable.

After a certain amount of time passed, the same force that brought so many regional forms together seems to have undermined its own source of power--now, everyone everywhere knows the same styles everyone else knows, and there no longer are regional styles per se. The radio extends into the furthest reaches of what had once been the unknown America--we all hear everything we all hear. Artists who do still manage to write songs in the folk idiom must do so by abstracting from what they hear every day--the radio has become a cancer and popular music has grown more and more homogeneous. This is why we are not likely to hear a song as good as "Cathy's Clown," no matter how far we retreat into the self-conscious renunciation of "underground" or "indy" music--because the latter always bespeak an ex post facto refusal of the flood of inanity that washes over all of our heads in the form of a 24-hour background of white noise. This is the same refusal, though in the direction of eclecticism rather than simplicity, that "traditional" forms must assert once they have become self-conscious. "Folk" becomes a presentation of or comment on folk, an ultra-purist renunciation of pop in the name of an unreachable folk before pop, itself a placeholder which points to the unknowable place where folk and pop are indistinguishable.