The Styles That Got Away

One of the most fascinating aspects of music, as with any form of art, is watching how differing styles begin to cross-pollinate. Hearing how what’s considered Popular Music has developed in the last sixty years is nothing short of astounding and shows a direct parallel with the social circumstances that ran alongside it. As society lost the veneer of innocence and grew more comfortable revealing it’s seedier attributes, so too did music grow more vulgar and trashy until now we have people who think Ke$ha is worth sullying ones ears with. It makes me wonder whether someone like Sinatra would even get famous in today’s world or whether he’d be overlooked because the subtlety of his performance would be lost upon ears grown accustomed to mediocrity.

It’s fascinating to watch a genre mutate until it’s virtually unrecognizable from the form it took initially, in many cases in even starker contrast than the aforementioned atrophy of Pop. Perhaps most amusingly of all is the strange case of Punk, a fiercely political style that put no emphasis on music whatsoever and all of it’s weight behind anarchy. Formulating in Britain in the mid to late Seventies, Punk put the power of an idea into the hands of your average frustrated youth, and the fact that none of these kids could play an instrument didn’t matter at all. It was almost the point of it that the music they made sounded wretched; all the better to parody not only societal collapse but also the ego-tripping Progressive Rock scene with their adoration of overt proficiency.

But things change and within a few years, Punk had run it’s course. Because it couldn’t stand as a musical form it had relied on the spark of its politics and I guess it’s inevitable that the whole thing would be subverted before too long. The first real ripples came with The Police, Stewart Copeland’s desire to play in a Punk band unintentionally taking the style to the masses like none had done before when Sting’s songwriting made the ruckus seem palatable. From there the bets were off. Punk was recast as New Wave and was treated with synthesizers and abstract production aesthetics before being done the ultimate indignity of reduction to marketing fodder in the nineties. Pop Punk grew to be accepted as the definition of what Punk sounded like and all of the political leanings were thrown out the window.

Similar is the evolution of Industrial music, which started with the tuneless grinding and snide intelligence of Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and Nurse With Wound. TG gave a name to the style with their Industrial Records and based their existence on the decay of humanity, summarizing their thoughts with the motto Music From the Death Factory. But TG was not to last long, and after they split in 1981, Industrial music began its transformation into something ultimately so much more infantile than the brooding intellect they presented. Ministry and Nine Inch Nails would later sell “Industrial” music to the masses, by which point any resemblance to the originators of the style was all but undetectable. TG would eventually resurface as an Avant-garde unit in 2004, realizing that what was so shocking from them in the Seventies would be standard fare in such a jaded era as this.

In this day and age one could rightly imagine that we’ve already heard pretty much all the different styles one could possibly hope to create and thus what is exciting is how existing styles will be combined in fresh and unexpected ways. TV on the Radio brought about a minor Renaissance a few years ago with the startling juxtaposition of Bowie glam with drum machine beats, washy shoegaze guitar and distorted brass. The ensuing melee was enough to offer hope for musical evolution in some of the most cynical amongst us and show that a different context can make old news seem really fresh.