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close ↑From "White Christmas" to Sgt. Pepper: The Conceptual Revolution in Popular Music (Extract) David W Galenson. Historical Methods. Winter 2009
Introduction
1 .         In 1942, Bing Crosby sang "White Christmas" in the movie Holiday Inn. The song became a hit that year, spending 10 weeks in first place on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade countdown, and it went on to become perhaps the most successful popular song ever written. Not only has Crosby's version sold more than 30 million copies, but "White Christmas" has been recorded by scores of other musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, Charlie Parker, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, the Beach Boys, the Supremes, the Jackson Five, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, Bob Marley & the Wailers, and U2 (Mast 1987, 39; Rosen 2002, 6-7). Irving Berlin wrote both the lyrics and music for "White Christmas." When the song was released in 1942, he was 54 years old.
2. In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine announced that a poll of 273 experts had named Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as the greatest rock and roll album ever made.
The magazine's music editor explained: "The Beatles, after all, were the most important and innovative rock group in the world. And Sgt. Pepper arguably set the tone for what an album could be" (Gunderson 2003). Eleven of the songs on Sgt. Pepper were written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and one was written by George Harrison. When Sgt. Pepper was released in 1967, Lennon was 27 years old, McCartney was
5 , and Harrison was 24.
3. The age difference of the writers of "White Christmas" and Sgt. Pepper is striking: Irving Berlin was twice as old as any of the Beatles when they produced their respective landmark works. This might be dismissed as an isolated anomaly. In fact, however, it wasn't. During the mid-1960s, a revolution changed the nature of popular music. One consequence of this revolution was a dramatic change in the creative life cycles of the artists who write popular songs. This article describes how popular music was changed by this revolution and documents the change in the life cycles of popular songwriters that accompanied the revolution.
Popular Music
4 . In 2005, the critic Terry Teachout (2005, 61) published an article titled "Why They Don't Write ’em Like They Used To." The article considered the history of American popular music in the twentieth century, raising the question of what explains the rise of rock music: "why did so many composers in the baby-boom generation feel the need to write songs in a style radically different from that favored by their parents?" Teachout placed this question within a particular historical perspective: "To understand the emergence of rock as an alternative popular music tradition, it is necessary first to look at the relationship between Broadway and the professional tradition." 5. Defining genres always has an arbitrary aspect: artists make art, but they rarely categorize their work, so issues of definition are left to critics. These issues become more difficult in the presence of innovation-if an artist introduces a new element into a genre, does the work still belong to the old genre? Conceding the arbitrary component to the present investigation, this article is based on the same premise as Teachout's article: there is a single genre, popular music, that in the first half of the twentieth century was dominated by songs written for the musical theater, and in the century's second half was dominated by rock music.
6. A central element in this formulation is the belief that the most innovative popular music of the early twentieth century was written for the musical theater. This case has been made by a number of students of popular music, including the composer Alec Wilder (1972), who wrote American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950, which is generally considered the leading work on the subject (e.g., Teachout 2005, 60; Jenness and Velsey 2006, xi). James Maher, Wilder's editor, wrote that Wilder "during his study of some seventeen thousand pieces of sheet music discovered convincing evidence to support his conviction that there are three levels of sophistication in the music of American popular songs: theater songs, film songs, and Tin Pan Alley songs, reading downward in that order." 7. Maher continued: It follows, then, that most of the great innovators of American popular song have worked in the theater-have, in fact, made their careers in musical theater. Some of them have also written for musical films. But only rarely, and then almost inadvertently, have they composed songs independent of theater or film productions. (Wilder 1972, xxx-xxxi)
8 . After 1950, popular music changed, as the sophisticated innovators of the Golden Era were replaced by innovators whom they refused to consider their heirs, and whom they considered incompetent. But to explain that attitude here would be getting ahead of the story, for this is one basic consequence of the central thesis of this article.
The Golden Era 9. In his 1995
study of The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924-1950, Allen Forte (1995, 28-29) observed that the popular ballad was "usually sincere, earnest, and straightforward." Lyricists avoided "the obscure, the esoteric, and any elements that would render the ballad inaccessible to the ideal patron" and made "a conscious effort to reach the average man and woman." In their 2006 monograph, Classic American Popular Song, David Jenness and Don Velsey (2006, 9-10) made similar comments. Thus, they noted that "an invariable feature of the good song is that . . . the metrical fitting of words and phrases to a given melodic contour follows the natural prosody of spoken English," and that the lyrics "are invariably in a familiar mode. . . . They deal with common topics: either the experience that is common to all humans, or about topics that a generation or a group has in common." In their 2006 book, America's Songs, Philip Furia and Michael Lasser (2006, xxvi) observed that "the song writers who gave us what has come to be known as the Great American Songbook were not writing about themselves; they were writing about us. They were democratic populists who gave voice to the American people."
1 0. The songwriters of the Golden Era generally regarded themselves as craftsmen rather than artists, as they created "a professional tradition . . . based upon a relatively sophisticated command of music" (Wilder 1972, xxxvi; also, Rosen 2002, 182; Furia and Lasser 2006, xxvi). Their desire to write songs that reflected everyday life in their society without artistic pretentiousness was neatly expressed in a tribute paid by one great songwriter to another, as Jerome Kern wrote of Irving Berlin: "He doesn't attempt to stuff the public ears with pseudo-original, ultra modernism, but he honestly absorbs the vibrations emanating from the people, manners and life of his time, and in turn gives these impressions back to the world-simplified-clarified-glorified" (Woollcott 19
5 , 2משפטים).
1 1.       Forte (1995, 28) observed that the classic popular song was "written exclusively in the vernacular." Late in his life, Berlin explained that he had always aimed to write "in the simplest way . . . as simple as writing a telegram" (Rosen 2002, 4). Berlin's principal considerations in writing lyrics were "ease, naturalness, every-day-ness. . . . 'Easy to sing, easy to say, easy to remember and applicable to everyday events' is a good rule for a phrase" (Furia 1998,
4 3). Looking back on his own development, Cole Porter took pride in the fact that "my songs are easier than they used to be musically and lyrically" (McBrien 1998, 364). Throughout his career, Porter's music was frequently described by critics as sophisticated, but he rejected their intended praise: "I've worked like a dog to keep all ['sophisticated'] implies out of my music." He told an interviewer that what he really wanted was to write "genuine American folk songs" (ibid., 200).
12.       Alec Wilder (1972, 119) observed that Irving Berlin "never deviated from his purpose of writing songs which stem from the music of the people, whether it be ragtime, swing music, country music, or the work of his contemporaries." Berlin wanted his music to reach everyone: "The mob is always right. It seems to be able to sense instinctively what is good, and I believe that there are darned few good songs which have not been whistled or sung by the crowd" (Furia 1998, 194). His peers generally shared this attitude. So, for example, George Gershwin explained why he insisted on calling Porgy and Bess a folk opera rather than simply an opera: "I hoped to have developed something in American music that would appeal to the many rather than to the allured few" (Wyatt and Johnson
2 004, 218). Richard Rodgers declared: "All I really want to do is to provide a hard-worked man in the blouse business with a method of expressing himself. If he likes a tune, he can whistle it, and it will make his life happier" (Block 2002, 201).
13.       The practices and attitudes of the Golden Era songwriters stemmed in large part from their recognition of the role of their work, for their songs were virtually always created in response to the needs of musical comedy scripts that had been written before the composers or lyricists ever became involved. Early on, songwriters accepted as a test of quality that their songs should not disrupt the continuity of the play. Thus, Jerome Kern told an interviewer: "It is my opinion that the musical numbers should carry on the action of the play, and should be representative of the personalities of the characters who sing them. . . . In other words, songs must be suited to the action and the mood of the play" (Boardman 1980,
1 49-50). Furthermore, over time the degree of integration of the songs into the plot, and their role in developing characters, came to be considered increasingly important criteria for a songwriter's success. So, for example, Gerald Mast (1987, 85) noted: "Dramatically, Porgy and Bess [1935], following the lead of Show Boat [1927] but building with absolute consistency on its example, defined a song or musical passage as a highly particularized expression of just that character just then just there. No American piece of musical theater had adhered so ruthlessly to this principle before Porgy and Bess; no major piece of American musical theater would retreat from it after Porgy and Bess." Similarly, Geoffrey Block (1997, 170-71) observed:
14.       As early as the 1920s Rodgers strove to create musicals in which songs were thoroughly integrated into the dramatic whole. In his finest efforts with [Lorenz] Hart, including On Your Toes [1936] and Pal Joey [1940], and in his first collaboration with [Oscar] Hammerstein [II], Oklahoma! [1943], Rodgers often succeeded in making the songs flow naturally from the dialogue and express character. But it was not until Carousel [1945] that Rodgers created a thoroughly unified musical score which also achieved a truly convincing coordination (i.e., integration) between music and dramatic action.
משפטים.       Hammerstein complimented his collaborator Rodgers by describing him as "essentially a composer for plays. He writes music to depict story and character and is, therefore, himself a dramatist. He is not an abstractionist in any sense and, as far as I can see, he has no interest in the mere creation of sound, however unusual or ingenious. He composes in order to make words fly higher or cut deeper than they would without the aid of his music" (Block 2002, 81).16.  
1 6. In addition to tailoring their songs to advance plots and develop characters, some Golden Era songwriters produced songs intended for specific actors. A biographer of Cole Porter noted that as a Yale undergraduate, when Porter was writing the score for a fraternity musical, "Cole expressed to [the director] a practice he retained all his life: 'Tell me whom you select for different parts, and I can write fitting songs the more easily'" (McBrien 1998, 45).
Many years later, the star actress and singer Ethel Merman noted that one of Porter's most famous songs was an example of this: "What Cole had done was to analyze my voice and turn out songs which showed off its variety. 'You're the Top' brought audiences to their feet because it was a new kind of love song" (ibid., 171). More generally, William Zinsser (2001, 103) observed that during 1935-38, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields, and George and Ira Gershwin all wrote some of their finest songs for the actor Fred Astaire:
"They knew that whatever they wrote, he would sing it perfectly, every note true, every syllable clear, every nuance of emotion and humor caught with natural elegance and timing and taste. Knowing this, they stretched their wings and reached a high level of freshness and artistry."
1 7.       Golden Era songwriters were experimental artists. This is witnessed by both the form and the substance of their work, as they used informal, vernacular language clearly and simply to treat common topics, familiar to a wide audience, in a realistic and convincing way. Thus, a biographer of Irving Berlin tellingly compared his most famous masterpiece to the greatest work of a great experimental poet: "As a song, 'White Christmas' is the counterpart to Robert Frost's great modern poem, 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,' which uses the simplest of rhymes and the barest of imagery to evoke a beautiful but melancholy scene" (Furia 1998, 204).4 The Golden Era songwriters' experimental approach is equally reflected in the modesty and diffidence with which they approached their work, for their unwillingness to claim the status of artist was a result of their perception that they were not autonomous but rather made up only one part of a larger whole: for them, songwriting was not an end in itself but was done in the service of musical comedy. The greatest of the Golden Era songwriters took plots and characters designed by others and brought them to life with music and lyrics carefully created to complement them. Like many other experimental artists, these songwriters therefore denied they were artists at all, claiming instead that they were highly skilled professional craftsmen.
The Conceptual Revolution Dylan was a revolutionary. Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body. He showed us that just because the music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellectual. . . . He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve and changed the face of rock and roll forever. -Bruce Springsteen, 1988 (Hedin 2004, 203)
1 8.       The emergence of rock and roll in the
1 950s separated popular music from musical comedies, as more songs were written to be performed by individual singers or groups. Yet the experimental nature of popular songwriting did not change in the early years of rock and roll, as professional songwriters continued to use vernacular language and simple images to treat common ideas and emotions. Elvis Presley and other important early figures in rock and roll were celebrated as performers but continued to sing songs written by professional writers. Thus, the critic James Miller (1999,
1 95) observed: "In the early Sixties, it was customary for rock and roll acts to record songs written by somebody else. That, after all, is how Elvis Presley had done it. It was how the music business had been run for a century.
Songwriters wrote, and singers sang-a division of labor that helped to maintain a certain (often minimal) standard of professionalism."
1 9.       This situation changed during the 1960s, as a revolution occurred in popular music. Within a few years in the middle of the decade, popular songwriting was transformed from an experimental to a conceptual art. This changed not only the locus of the creation of popular songs, as professional songwriters were replaced by singer-songwriters but also the form and substance of popular music. Today, more than four decades later, the conceptual approach to popular songwriting remains dominant.
20.       Although there were many contributors to the revolution, three men -Bob Dylan and the team of John Lennon and Paul McCartney – were clearly recognized as the leaders at the time, and their legacy continues to dominate popular music today. The influence and conceptual nature of their art have made these musicians the subject of a vast amount of criticism and scholarship, and numerous studies of their work effectively describe the revolution. Thus, the music scholar John Covach observed that "Lennon and McCartney begin their careers aspiring to be songwriters in the American Pop tradition, and accordingly they view themselves as craftspeople, using formal designs and arrangements schemes that are common to much of 1960s pop." A transition began in 1964: "the space between
1 964 and 1967 is an important time in pop music's developing sense of aspiration in general. . . . The change from pop songwriters to songwriting artists occurs gradually in the Lennon-McCartney songs from that period." At the end of the transition, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band makes its mark as the album that . . . elevates rock music from simple dance fare to serious listening music. Rock musicians no longer aspire so much to be professionals and craftspeople; rather, they aspire to be artists" (Womack and Davis
2 006, 38-39).
21.       The art in question was to be conceptual.
James Miller (1999, 227-28) described the change in the nature of the Beatles' music during this period of transition: "Up till then, rock and roll had been primarily a music of revelry, a medium for lifting people up and helping them dance their blues away. Under the combined influence of marijuana and Bob Dylan's unkempt persona, the Beatles would turn it into something else again: a music of introspective self-absorption, a medium fit for communicating autobiographical intimacies, political discontents, spiritual elation, inviting an audience, not to dance, but to listen-quietly, attentively, thoughtfully." Dylan's music was changing at the same time, in a similar way, as he was becoming a conceptual artist even more deliberately and self-consciously. Thus, Miller (ibid., 221) noted that in 1964 Dylan recorded a number of new songs that "featured unromantic and sometimes inscrutable lyrics that were involuted, hermetic, yet seething with an undefined, faintly intoxicating sense of self-righteous rage." Within a year, under the inspiration of a conceptual young genius of the nineteenth century, he had transformed his music: "A poet and a prophet, he would write out of his own life, with no apparent regard for the pieties prevailing in society. In the spirit of Rimbaud, he would make himself a 'seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of the senses,' . . . concentrating the force of his personal revelations in a music of delirious immediacy" (ibid., 227).5
Mark Polizzotti (2006, 39) remarked: "Lyrically, Rimbaud's influence is palpable in what Dylan termed his 'vision music,' songs that defy conventional definition to create a powerfully suggestive ambient landscape. . . . But even more than this, Rimbaud . . . shows through the attitude underlying these songs:
young, street-smart, arrogant, rebellious, and highly seductive."
2 2.       In place of the earlier experimental popular music that treated familiar subjects clearly and simply, from 1964
onward Dylan and the Beatles created a new, conceptual popular music that was complex and often incomprehensible. The critic Mike Marqusee (2003, 138) noted:
"As you listen to [Dylan's albums of 1964-66], the images, characters, tropes sail past in a strange ether. They're experienced as free-floating metaphors, signifiers uprooted from the signified. These songs often feel like allegories but they cannot be decoded as such." Dylan (2004b, 50) himself commented on the greater complexity of his recent work in a 1965 interview:
"The big difference is that the songs I was writing last year, . . . they were what I call one-dimensional songs, but my new songs I'm trying to make more three-dimensional, you know, there's more symbolism, they're written on more than one level." In a 1966 interview, he acknowledged that after he'd written "Like a Rolling Stone" the previous year, he'd realized that he'd done something distinctively innovative: "After writing that I wasn't interested in writing a novel or a play. I just had too much, I want to write songs. Because it was a whole new category. I mean, nobody's ever really written songs before, really" (Marcus 2006, 70). The critic David Hajdu (2001, 234, 280) explained that in this music Dylan "was not pursuing refinement, sophistication, and clarity of expression, those ideals of the Cole Porter generation of songwriters, but their near opposites: kinetic energy, instinct, and ambiguity. . . . He was making rock and roll a modern art, a form of idiosyncratic, frequently obtuse personal expression." Dylan never claimed to be writing for the public at large. Asked in 1965 who he was writing and singing for, he responded, "Not writing and singing for anybody, to tell you the truth. Hey, really, I don't care what people say" (Dylan
2 004b, 41). In another interview the same year, he bristled when asked how he liked being called the voice of his generation: "I can't be anyone else's voice. If they can associate with me that's O.K., but I can't give a voice to people who have no voice" (ibid., 51).
23.       Conceptual artists innovate by creating unexpected syntheses of earlier art forms, and this is precisely what Dylan and the Beatles did during the mid-1960s. Marqusee (2003, 131) described the remarkably wide variety of Dylan's influences: "Drawing on folk, blues, country, R & B, rock'n'roll, gospel, British beat, symbolist, modernist and Beat poetry, surrealism and Dada, advertising jargon and social commentary, Fellini and Mad magazine, he forged a coherent and original artistic voice and vision." Marqusee noted that Dylan's use of literary sources emphasized range over depth: "Apart from the Beats, Dylan's reading was sporadic and undisciplined, but he was a magpie, and even a casual acquaintance with Eliot, Cummings, the French symbolists, and the surrealists left traces in his work.
For all the strident populism, Dylan in this period is without a doubt a self-conscious, avant-garde artist" (משפטים1). And Marqusee observed that Dylan plundered the musical past as irreverently as an earlier conceptual innovator had plundered the history of poetry: "in reality, the breach between Dylan and the musical traditions he drew on was as qualitative as the breach that separated the modernists from their sources. . . . Recorded music enabled Dylan to ransack the American musical heritage like Ezra Pound at loose in a library of medieval manuscripts" (ibid.).6 In 1966, when Robert Shelton (1986, 344) asked Dylan if his songs were influential because he broke the rules, Dylan responded, "I don't break the rules, because I don't see any rules to break. As far as I'm concerned, there aren't any rules."
2 4.       Dylan has testified to his youthful ambition to create a revolution. In his autobiography, he recalled his admiration for an earlier artistic conceptual innovator: "Picasso had fractured the art world and cracked it wide open. He was revolutionary. I wanted to be like that" (Dylan 2004a, 55).7 Dylan went about creating revolutionary work in a distinctive way, intended to draw on his subconscious.
Hajdu (2001, 233-34) described Dylan's method of composing during his peak years:
"He laid out dozens of photographs torn from newspapers and magazines in a montage on the floor and sat down amidst them with his guitar. . . . [H]e would close his eyes-he would not draw from the pictures literally but would use the impression the faces left as a visual model for kaleidoscopic language. He appeared to sing whatever came to him, disconnected phrases with a poetic feeling. When something came out that he liked, he scrawled it down hurriedly, so as to stay in the moment, and he would do this until there were enough words written for a song." To stimulate his imagination, "he chain-smoked marijuana while he composed this work."
2 5.       Dylan had an enormous impact on the Beatles. John Lennon explained that Dylan's music caused him to change his attitude toward writing songs: "I think it was Dylan helped me realize that-not by any discussion or anything but just by hearing his work-I had a sort of professional songwriter's attitude to writing pop songs. . . . But to express myself I would write . . . the personal stories which were expressive of my personal emotions. I'd have a separate songwriting John Lennon who wrote songs for the sort of meat market, and I didn't consider them-the lyrics or anything-to have any depth at all. They were just a joke. Then I started being me about the songs, not writing them objectively, but subjectively" (Wenner 1971, 126). Lennon explained that he directly emulated Dylan's drug-induced lyrics as, for example, he recalled that in 1967, I was writing obscurely, à la Dylan, never saying what you mean, but giving the impression of something.
2 6. Irving Berlin and his fellow professional songwriters contemptuously dismissed Dylan and the Beatles as "unprofessional" (Rosen 2002, 182). Yet the very qualities that the skilled experimental songwriters of the Golden Era derided as amateurish were prized by the conceptual young singer -songwriters as the secret to their success. When an interviewer in 1986 referred to the epoch-making work he had done in the mid-1960s, Dylan responded, "I did that accidentally" (Cott 2006, 336). In 1991, when an interviewer asked how he wrote songs, Dylan remarked that he had never seriously considered it a profession: "It's been more confessional than professional" (384).
And in his autobiography, Dylan (2004a, 227) recalled that when he was first starting out in New York, "Nothing would have convinced me that I was actually a songwriter and I wasn't, not in the conventional songwriter sense of the word. Definitely not like the workhorses over in the Brill Building, the song chemistry factory. . . . They were the songwriting masters of the Western world, wrote all the popular songs, all the songs with crafty melodies and simple lyrics that came off as works of power over the airwaves." James Miller (1999, 19) argued that the unprofessional approach pioneered by Dylan and the Beatles became characteristic of the best rock music, which offers "the sound of surprise: not the surprise of virtuosos improvising new ways to play (the thrill of jazz), but rather the surprise of untrained amateurs, working within their limits, finding a voice of their own- and sometimes even elaborating new song forms unthinkable to more highly skilled musicians."