A few days ago, Flea – known for being (most of the time) a bass player for the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and (sometimes) one of the greatest heroines known to mankind, two facets that (often) coincided – published a cryptic tweet: said it may seem impossible, but there was a time “when music critics, when they wanted to talk about youth culture, they actually wrote about music”.
Having no tool to quantify the number of characters gossiping about the lives of today’s pop stars, or describing choreography and videos and the meaning of lyrics or a particular Instagram post (in short: the characters are engaged to everything related to created music), I admit that, at first glance, humanity suggests that it is more concerned than ever about what depends on musical production, and not on music. Maybe it’s just a consequence of living in the data age: if the numbers say that Billie Eilish’s clothes at the Met Gala are worth talking about more, then more Billie Eilish’s clothes at the Met Gala are published. .
The hypothesis that the tweet in question is the complaint of an old man should not be ruled out: there always comes a time in the lives of most musicians when they stop talking about themselves, when they stop understanding the codes of youth culture, which – frankly – they are no longer a part of. What often follows is an idealization of the past, similar to the narrative process of a Philip Roth novel, in which an idealized childhood in a peaceful America is followed by the tragic protagonist’s discovery that current life has been reduced to rubble.
Yes, there was a time when writing about music was about music; in particular, writing about jazz and progressive rock could be quite technical. But as popular youth culture grew, even music writing abandoned the more technical aspects and relied on its descriptions of a song to images and metaphors that more quickly served to convey the “feel” of a song. . Furthermore, the images and metaphors serve to make up for the fact that music critics have not made it past their third year of piano lessons and can barely read a staff, much less discuss an augmented ninth.
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Source: Observadora
