"DO EVERYTHING WRONG: The First History of 20th Century Music" - Introduction

To paraphrase Elton John: I'm a blog, I'm a blog, and the blog is back!

But this time around, I'll be writing articles detailing what I've learned about 20th century music from a few decades of listening to whole lots of records across multiple genres. Revelations! Revolutions! Upsetting the apple cart of music history...Crucial moments in music's development that have (so far as I know) been left out of much music history and criticism volumes. Hence, the somewhat cheeky title "the FIRST history," as there are important aspects to recent music history that have scarcely been dealt with. Well, to my knowledge. I haven't read anywhere close to all music books/articles, so feel free to hep me to any that have in fact dealt with some of the topics I'll be exploring here. 

These articles could be a book, maybe, one day...But first, to quote The Jimmy Castor Bunch: What we're gonna do right here is go back...way back...back into time:

By the 1990s, record stores, thrift shops, and antique dealers were hit with a tsunami of vinyl. Compact disks supposedly made vinyl records obsolete, and so they were ditched by the masses in favor of the Space-Age Miracle of the compact-disk (cue: heavenly choir). Meanwhile, the 1950s/1960s generation was downsizing. They were now empty-nesters, transitioning into retirement mode, and were also unleashing their old records unto the world (along with their tiki mugs, Midcentury-Modern furniture, vintage Hawaiian shirts, etc) The result, to this young spud, was finally - at last! - being able to get the real history of 20th century music unfiltered, as it actually happened, from the people who made it, bought it, listened to it. And at dirt-cheap prices. 

This was mind-melting to someone who had only heard the official word from, so far as mass media was concerned, the 3 types of music critics: rock, classical, and jazz. There was nothing else. Other forms of music scarcely existed. And the Three Types of Critics did not talk to each other. There was very little cross-over. With this flood of vinyl at prices even a kid like me could afford ("for 5 bucks, you can take this whole crate of rekkids") it was possible to delve into forbidden realms of music that were ignored by these writers, even tho this music might have been hugely influential and commercially successful. (All of this was taking place, of course, in the pre-internet era. If you wanted to hear a record, you had to find the actual vinyl and play it on a record player.)

Much of the music criticism I was exposed to growing up seemed to focus on personalities/biographies, and the social scene in which the music existed. Which I get - that is indeed part of the story. But magazine interviews with Brian Eno, who discussed the actual sounds of music, made my teen self realize that the building-blocks of music - rhythms, timbre, technology - were nowhere to be found in a review by, say, Robert Hilburn. Also, listening to a wide variety of records led me to another discovery - that different genres of music lept thru time and space to influence each other. e.g.: The 1950s Cuban cha-cha-cha craze helped shape the template of modern rock'n'roll. (Latin music in general was, despite its absence from Boomer nostalgia, one of the biggest crazes of the 1950s/60s.) And the Black Power-inspired "free jazz" scene of the 1960s directly led to punk and alternative rock. And so forth. This type of cross-pollination was often overlooked when critics only stayed within their own proscribed genre. 

It's often said that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture," but that's not really true. There is a vocabulary to describe music, which I will attempt to use in a way that doesn't require a degree in music theory. After all, I don't have a degree in music, but I can link to examples that will hopefully connect the dots in an effort to illuminate various corners of the vast, explosive history of 20th century music.

I realize that this is all an absurdly enormous, hopelessly ambitious undertaking that can't possibly cover ALL 20th century music. But I can chip away at it, a little bit at a time. Hey ho, let's go...