The folks at FiveThirtyEight commissioned a poll of Americans to determine what their biggest concerns were. The results are summarized in the chart above. The top five concerns expressed by Democrats were (in descending order): inflation, extremism/polarization, crime or gun violence, climate change, and race or racism. That’s actually pretty closely aligned with what independents and Americans overall.
But it’s not what the Democratic leadership seems to be concerned about. I honestly have no idea what they’re thinking.
A comment on what worries me. In music, voice is highly underrated. Dave is an opera lover. I like many genres. Opera can make you cry.
Male and female voice. There was a time before rap when black entertainers were fabulous. eg The Temptations. And this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3efpOXk1Qs&t=103s
What happened to our society?
What happened? Amplification, recording, dubbing, MTV, and autotune.
I agree with Drew that there is a problem with modern music, especially black music. I disagree that it has anything to do with technology, although the formulas for musical hits is a problem. The formulas greatly reduce the range of tempos, rhythms, dynamic range, instrumentality, vocabulary, and topics in modern pop.
As a child of the 50s and 60s, I was exposed to a very wide variety of popular music: gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, jazz, country-western, the standards, show tunes… I didn’t do opera then.
So what is on the radio now? Museum pieces from the 60s through 80s, fake country-western, and rap/hip-hop. There has been a collapse in music making, and it is especially severe in the black community. What happened to black culture that reduced the black cultural expression to rap/hip-hop? Why is that musical genre so violent, so racist, so misogynist… so utterly ugly and offensive? Is it ugly for the sake of ugliness?
American culture as a whole is degenerating, becoming unbearably coarse, obscenities plastered all over cars, violence glorified and even justified. Viz. antifa et al.
I’ll explain the relationships a bit. Sound recording reduced the demand for musicians and made it much harder to make a living as a musician than it had been before. Amplification meant you didn’t need to be able to sing to be a singer—it changed the styles of singing. MTV made dancing more important than singing. Dubbing meant that looks and the ability to dance were more important than singing. Autotune has lowered the bar even farther.
Bob,
You ought to expand your horizon’s a bit. The most creative and innovative music today is not on the radio. Sorry, but radio these days is made for old people, hence the domination of 60s through 80s music and a few narrow genres.
My kids get annoyed when I put the radio on. They have curated playlists, shared among friends, on Spotify and other streaming platforms, and also YouTube and Twitch for stuff that isn’t on Spotify.
It’s through them that I learned about sub and micro-genres I had no idea existed.
Dave,
I found this earlier this week, I think on Ann Althouse’s blog, regarding autotune:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVOLL–7bSg
“But it’s not what the Democratic leadership seems to be concerned about. I honestly have no idea what they’re thinking.”
That’s because the leadership doesn’t control the party. The party is more like a brand, and one that doesn’t have any central control or direction. For both the GoP and Democrats, the fringes punch way above their weight in terms of controlling the direction of the party and setting the agenda. That’s not something leadership has the power or political incentives to stop.
Voice? We are in a kind of golden age of a cappella music. Many good groups and they often have the full range of voices with truly outstanding bass singers and not just the lead tenor or soprano. Look at Home Free whose lead is really their bass even if they have one of the truly outstanding high tenors. Their version of How Great Thou Art is awesome. So are a bunch of their other songs. Tons of other groups and of course Pentatonix. Link goes to their version of First Noel since I am a sucker for good Christmas music but it does demonstrate amazing range and harmonies. If you arent finding good voices it just means you arent trying. There are tons of good covers of old show tunes, western swing, gospel, rock, rhythm and blues, bluegrass, old time music, etc. Go to youtube and under search put in the names of favorite old songs and you will find marvelous vocals. Start with Come Thou Fount of Every blessing, It Is Well With My Soul or any of those old classics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u5UvnKlCTA
Steve
Yep, there are lots of good voices around, especially if you avoid radio that plays modern music.
We saw Pentatonix in concert – they are very good and doing things with acapella that is pretty ground-breaking. This, for example:
https://youtu.be/3MteSlpxCpo