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They heard the breeze through the trees
Singing weird melodies
And they named that just the start of the blues

— Sammy Davis Jr., “Birth of the Blues”

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One of my favorite antiquities that the internet has preserved is a series of reel-to-reel tapes from K-Mart stores that have been digitized. There is a great deal about the tapes that is endearingly quaint, including tacky jingles and transatlantic-tinged adulations of the store. But the K-Mart brand is not the only thing about them that has all but given up the ghost. The reels that used to play over the speakers in the defunct department store in the 1970s are filled with recordings of classic pop and jazz hits.

Now, I’m not referring just to the diminished cultural relevance of jazz, though it certainly would be unusual to hear anything not in the top 100 in the last several years playing over Walmart’s loudspeakers today — especially during the mind-numbing reign of terror of “Walmart Radio,” the company’s latest innovation in dystopian anti-culture. No, the more profound change I see is not just in the changes in musical style over the decades, but in how the very culture of popular music has shifted from the gilded days of jazz until now. 

In the modern landscape of music, a cover of a song is considered a different species than an original track. Even artists who contribute little or nothing to the writing and producing of the tracks they perform seem to latch on to a producer or group of producers and writers to maintain the appearance of consistent originality. A cover is usually done as a tribute or a one-off. Artist’s who exclusively cover others’ original compositions are generally relegated to a niche. I cannot think of a single wildly successful, culturally monolithic artist at the top of the charts today who performs more covers than original music. 

But this was not always the case. In the age of crooners, big bands, showtunes and standards, the landscape of financially successful music looked much different. Take a few tracks from the Billboard top tracks of 1950, for instance. Several of the tracks were written for film and stage, such as Bing and Gary Crosby’s cover of “Play a Simple Melody,” a piece that was nearly forty years old by the time the father-son duo took it to the top of the charts (It is also my favorite of these examples). “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” went on to receive renditions from Bing and the cultural touchstone himself, Frank Sinatra, among others. At the number one spot is “Goodnight, Irene,” a folk tune that was decades old by the time Gordon Jenkins’ version topped the Billboard list. Imagine a cover of “Shenandoah” reaching number one in 2024. As much as the difference in musical style has developed since 1950, it is truly the change in the culture of music production and consumption that seems unfathomable.

It appears to me the term “popular music” used to refer to more than just a metric of reach and market success. It encompassed music that was literally popular, belonging to the people. Once a song touched the collective ears of the culture, it ceased to be the sole property of the men and women who had created it in a sense that goes beyond the legal terminology of intellectual property rights with which we have lately become so obsessed. As art should, it took on a life of its own beyond that of just the intent of the author and was transformed by its interaction with the audience and their context, specifically since much of the audience would consist of other major artists who often felt no compunctions about (and were not legally hindered from) giving their own spins on the music. One of the great beauties of this kind of music is finding a composition one loves and listening to how each band or singer can give a new perspective on it. To draw on a recent favorite as an example, I recommend listening to as many renditions as one can find of the 1956 showtune “I Could Have Danced All Night” to see the interplay between the common composition and varied artistic angles. The Chubby Checker rendition, for instance, works as a fun example of the evolutionary link between jazz and rock ‘n’ roll.

I would posit that a large part of the shift away from this kind of culture is due to the specific trajectory of consumer capitalism in America. I think the same phenomenon which is more obvious in the landscape of film has taken place and is taking place in the realm of music. The currents of profit have carried the industry and its consumers downstream into the ever-growing and all-consuming whirlpool of brand identity. Branding has in the last half-century-or-so coalesced into perhaps the single most important concept for long-term success in the market and an increasingly significant factor in the personal lives of Westerners. We often define and express ourselves by our relationships to the brands we consume and promote, or avoid and denigrate. For a concise example in the music sphere, consider how graphic t-shirts enable consumers to pay to advertise their favorite band or artist, an act that is enthusiastically undertaken quite frequently.

A wildly popular musician today cannot be known by the way they inject their own artistry into an existing song because they are more easily understood through their original sound that coheres to a marketable brand identity, one that stands out enough to be distinct but is nonetheless conventional enough to be easily categorized, understood, and consumed. In the current artistic climate of America, an artist is increasingly fundamentally valued as a brand. Music is less and less a crystalization of writing, composition and performance and more and more a technical, industrial production.

As much good as has been wrought by capitalism, one of its weaknesses in my view is that it stifles artistic integrity through the perverse incentives of the market to innovate or not based largely on the financial realities of the end result rather than on the actual objective quality of the product. In cinema, it has created the swamp of superhero slop in which the industry is presently suffocating, and in music, it has created a Top 100 year after year filled with overproduced earworms calculatedly built around a hook and a brand. It is part of why lip-synced concerts are so prevalent. The same animus that built the institution of McDonald’s Hamburger University is at play here. Without consistency, the brand dies. This condition has gradually worsened in the past decades in both industries. 

There is a strong case to be made that technological innovation has contributed to this issue. Consider that, prior to modern innovations like the microphone, live music was the only music. With a few primitive, though impressive, exceptions, it has only been in the last century-and-a-half of human history that people could hear music without the musician present. That’s no mean feat. As the art of acting made the leap from stage to screen, the idea of a small theatre troupe putting their own flavor on an existing script failed to jump the gap. That kind of localization is entirely relegated to theatre, cinema knows of no such thing. As recording technology and radio made musicians more widely available, it is easy to imagine the decreased demand for local artists to give performances of the people’s favorite songs. The small indie performer still exists today, but has once again been somewhat left behind by that technological leap.

All these changes have been a not insignificant part of the death of a shared cultural language in America. Anyone who knows me even a little will find it unsurprising that I personally have a hard time keeping up with the musical trends of today, and that goes for more than just secular music. Christian worship has undergone the same transformation as churches ditch their hymnals for songs that require licensing and copyright disclaimers on the screen before the congregation can legally praise their God. Kirk Cameron never warned me that I would have been left behind by this transformation as well, yet here I am, still clinging quaintly and maybe a bit pathetically to The Baptist Hymnal. To the chagrin of the CCM apologists in my life, Chris Tomlin’s early work sounds just like Hillsong to me. But, as Abe Simpson once told his son Homer, “I used to be with ‘it,’ then they changed what ‘it’ was.” It can be hard to objectively analyze changes in culture since we are creatures that inevitably change with — or without — the times. Despite my old soul afflicting me with early onset fogeyness, I think the cultural change is nonetheless real and relevant, and capitalistic commercialism is not the only culprit.

Individualism in our culture is inextricable from our economic structures. As artists transform into brands, and brands transform into identities, individuals isolate themselves as unique constellations at the intersections of all that they consume. Dr. Jordan Cooper comments saliently on the construction of faux communities, especially accelerated by the internet, in his book In Defense of the Good, the True, and The Beautiful. Communities built solely around shared interests can in fact be real communities, Dr. Cooper has noted, but I would suggest that in the world of music, these sort of brand-defined cliques have come to replace the shared language of musical literacy that was once a binding fixture of culture. The endless cascade of subcultures that many levels down cater precisely to individuals is a contributing factor and a result of the decay of societal cohesion in America. 

Of course, too much common language makes us all robots who sound the same and say the same. I’m reminded of the “Jeeves and Wooster” episode adapting a story in which the ad nauseum repetition of an old standard, Al Jolson’s “Sonny Boy,” drives an audience mad. Extreme conformity is just as inhuman as extreme individualism. But culture must, by definition, have something about it that is shared across individuals. What’s the most recent song you can think of that if you hummed or sang a verse on the street, a person of any age, economic status, political persuasion, or personality might know it well enough to join in with you, even if they wanted to? I defy you to find an example post-1970. I think the difficulty of that thought experiment speaks to the severity of the problem. I wonder if the generation of iPad babies will know the same nursery rhymes I learned as a youngin, or if they are even being purposefully cultured by anyone at all. The danger in that is that if parents do not culture their children, someone else will, and at this rate, brands are evidently poised to take up the charge — brands which are oriented around generating material wealth rather than cultural, at only benefiting individuals with the aim of benefiting themselves.

I’ve recently enjoyed Vervaeke, Mastropietro and Miscevic’s work Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-first Century Crisis. Their analysis is helpful for its dissection of the genealogy of the profound cultural disintegration that has led to the personal isolation we experience in America today. The people in my town don’t know the same songs, we don’t eat the same food at home, we don’t wear the same clothes, we don’t live in houses of the same materials or styles, we don’t go to the same church. The men and women I live right next to I hardly know because all the fundamentals of culture are pulled out from under us like a bad attempt at that tablecloth trick that only two beers convinces anyone they can do, with all the trust and understanding we would otherwise share unceremoniously toppling and shattering. At this point, we might say speaking English barely counts as being able to communicate meaningfully with each other. We have language in common, but its referents and substance are gutted.

Stores like K-Mart, Sears, the music they used to play and other staples of a bygone age have largely been killed or transformed by the onset of internet-‘roided titans like Amazon that all at once unite the populace by their sheer presence and divide by their ability to cater from specific vendors to individuals right at the customer’s doorstep, cutting out the need to bump into your neighbor or walk down the isle hearing the same song as them. You and I can just keep our earbuds in at the few stores we still visit, anyway, and though we share physical space, we might as well be on other sides of the globe with regard to our shared understanding of each other. The problem, then, is that we aren’t on other sides of the globe. Globalization has ironically made us more distant because it makes us all live like one globe and not like many locales. By living in proximity, we inevitably partake in the same specific material facts of living, and our ability to interact with our environment cooperatively takes a massive blow because, for the sake of comfort, we pretend that we don’t have to cooperate. 

Maybe we ought to try taking our headphones off more often, because at least the birds still sing the same old standards they always have in the trees belonging to their same old locales, and nature always sings worship worth partaking in. Perhaps if we start there, by being grounded in our natural environments, we can rebuild our understanding of our human environments and truly share them with our neighbors. And perhaps when we all get under the umbrella of God’s grace and share in common the same divine love, we can distinguish ourselves by what we give rather than what we receive, by what comes out of us rather than what goes in, by what we produce rather than just what we consume. In light of so firm a foundation, how could we, though many parts, become anything other than one unified body?

Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man. — Matthew 15:11 (KJV)

Yet the LORD will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life. — Psalm 42:8 (KJV)

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. — Psalm 19:1-3 (KJV)