The Evolution of Music

Being a musician who plays jazz, a genre of music that is notably unpopular, particularly among the younger generations, I often consider the types of thing that make music 'popular.' While I am not a fan of the whole allegorical approach to deriving facts about a culture from its art, I think that there certainly some instances where such a method is appropriate, this being one of them.

Jazz was popular when music was not simply used as pretty noises to fill the silence. Music was not seen as something that happened everyday, and listening to it was an activity in and of itself. However, with the advent of technology like portable MP3 players (e.g., iPods), CDs, and iTunes, music has because much less of an 'activity,' and more of something to just take up a sonic emptiness that people are not comfortable with. Jazz, which is a music that is almost entirely about the intricacies of each solo, cannot fulfill this role, as enjoying it requires that one is listening actively to it. Pop on the other hand, especially more modern pop, is meant to be enjoyable in the sense that it does not intrude in on any other activities that you are doing. 

This is where the allegorical approach comes in. It seems to me that as music moves from more to less involved, society also moves from being more to less actively concerned with its well being. That is, people are taking less and less of an invested interest on how successful the communities that they are a part of, and tend to only do things that further this interest when it is convenient. For example, at http://elections.gmu.edu/voter_turnout.htm, the amount of people who actually vote is graphed as a percent of people who are eligible to vote. It shows quite clearly that voting frequency spikes only when there are huge issues that affect many individuals in the nation; for example, the recent economic downturn, caused voting percentages to go way up, while the economic boom in the late 90's and early 2000's showed lower voter turnouts.

I'm tempted to say that people are becoming lazier, but I don't necessarily think that this is the case; lazy implies that even if someone were to care about something, they would not work very hard at it, which is clearly not true of at least my generation. In class a little while ago, we talked about how the head of admissions at Harvard (I think, I can't quite remember which school it was) said that students are becoming better and better 'hoop jumpers.' I think this statement more accurately reflects the same change that causes pop to becomes more mainstream than jazz than does the description 'lazy'. Rather, people are becoming more focused on the end-result of a process; that is, they do not see the journey they take to get to an end as beneficial, but only the end itself. 

For example, 'hoop jumping' students do not concern themselves foremost with learning the material. Their focus is far more oriented towards getting as good of a grade as possible, with an even larger 'end' of getting a stable job. In this same way, jazz is more about enjoying the process of listening to music, whereas pop music just serves a function, in this case to break the silence, representing an 'end' goal.