Thanks to the great karaoke experiment, I have been thinking a lot about the hidden workings of cover songs. You don't have to read that post before this one, but it might clarify a point or two.
In 2016, I was part of a loose ensemble that played tribute shows every so often. As November approached, we were rehearsing a set of TV theme songs. It was silly but fun; many of the songs represented fond memories from childhood and adolescence, even if we knew as adults that some of the shows weren't actually all that good.
The show was the Friday after the election. I went into it thinking I didn't want to do it at all. It was time for punk, the harder-edged art of outrage and resistance. But as we played, people began singing along, and it could not have been clearer that they were clinging to these familiar songs as to a lifeline.
Since then I've learned that people do in fact turn to familiar media in times of depression or fear. (I can't remember where I read about this study. Someone measured it, though.) This seems both wonderful and dangerous. On the one hand: what a testament to the power of art. On the other: well, it's not as though things have gotten any less depressing and scary, and we cannot spend the rest of our lives retreating into the comforts of childhood TV when the times call for new ideas and actions.
In her lovely and terrifying piece "The Great Unconformity" (s/o to Hope Rehak for reminding me to read it), Sarah Kendzior mentions that the current media landscape makes shared experiences more difficult. Various digital archives have been deleted; many people have chucked their physical media; the number of channels and stations has expanded, fragmenting audiences into smaller and smaller subgroups.
Kendzior's beat is fascism, but what she's describing matches my experience in the world of cover songs. Beyond a few obvious hits, finding music that a good chunk of the audience will recognize usually means reaching back twenty years or more. It makes me uneasy for the same reason that the TV gig did.
Media fragmentation is only part of the problem here. The new songs themselves are fragmented too, popular because they are shared in 90-second clips via TikTok or Reels or whatever. There are riffs and hooks I know solely because they're featured in ads. (I suspect some songs are even engineered to be optimal for these shorter clips—the full songs do not reward familiarity.) So the crowds continue to shout along to "Sweet Caroline," because there is so little to replace it.
Ted Gioia notes that sales of old music have been outstripping sales of new music for a while—not because the new music isn't there, but because the mechanisms of profit currently encourage the rights holders to exploit their existing properties. Anyway—and maybe obviously—the people profiting from the sales are often not the artists; they're the shareholders and private equity D-bags behind the consolidation of media companies. As the money flows to them, fewer artists can afford to make music at all. Eventually, more listeners may have to turn to the old stuff for meaning. If that's the only hard media you own, and the streaming landscape is so cluttered with AI and payola algorithms that you can't find new releases, where else can you go?
In effect, multiple engines of media are pushing us to nostalgia. Kurt Andersen, in Evil Geniuses, discusses nostalgia as a cultural touchstone of conservatism and fascist movements. It helps reinforce the myth of a bygone Golden Age: the era, in fact, of the bumbling white sitcom dad and his eternally patient, eternally hot stay-at-home spouse.
This is not to say that all nostalgia is bad. Familiarity is part of the pleasure of music, after all. But it can't be everything. If an American nostalgia evokes the music of the 1950s and early 1960s, then it presents a cultural landscape with very few women's voices, one in which the Race Records are safely segregated away from the impressionable ears of white kids. As listeners, as musicians, we owe it to ourselves to ask what familiarity omits.
Andersen credits the architects and executors of contemporary fascism with more intellect than I'm certain they all deserve. I don't believe the executives of Spotify give a shit about any cultural consequences when they engineer streaming royalties away from artists; they just want more money. But indifference and venality can enable fascism quite as easily as genius can. All they ask you to do is sing along.
In 2016, I was part of a loose ensemble that played tribute shows every so often. As November approached, we were rehearsing a set of TV theme songs. It was silly but fun; many of the songs represented fond memories from childhood and adolescence, even if we knew as adults that some of the shows weren't actually all that good.
The show was the Friday after the election. I went into it thinking I didn't want to do it at all. It was time for punk, the harder-edged art of outrage and resistance. But as we played, people began singing along, and it could not have been clearer that they were clinging to these familiar songs as to a lifeline.
Since then I've learned that people do in fact turn to familiar media in times of depression or fear. (I can't remember where I read about this study. Someone measured it, though.) This seems both wonderful and dangerous. On the one hand: what a testament to the power of art. On the other: well, it's not as though things have gotten any less depressing and scary, and we cannot spend the rest of our lives retreating into the comforts of childhood TV when the times call for new ideas and actions.
In her lovely and terrifying piece "The Great Unconformity" (s/o to Hope Rehak for reminding me to read it), Sarah Kendzior mentions that the current media landscape makes shared experiences more difficult. Various digital archives have been deleted; many people have chucked their physical media; the number of channels and stations has expanded, fragmenting audiences into smaller and smaller subgroups.
Kendzior's beat is fascism, but what she's describing matches my experience in the world of cover songs. Beyond a few obvious hits, finding music that a good chunk of the audience will recognize usually means reaching back twenty years or more. It makes me uneasy for the same reason that the TV gig did.
Media fragmentation is only part of the problem here. The new songs themselves are fragmented too, popular because they are shared in 90-second clips via TikTok or Reels or whatever. There are riffs and hooks I know solely because they're featured in ads. (I suspect some songs are even engineered to be optimal for these shorter clips—the full songs do not reward familiarity.) So the crowds continue to shout along to "Sweet Caroline," because there is so little to replace it.
Ted Gioia notes that sales of old music have been outstripping sales of new music for a while—not because the new music isn't there, but because the mechanisms of profit currently encourage the rights holders to exploit their existing properties. Anyway—and maybe obviously—the people profiting from the sales are often not the artists; they're the shareholders and private equity D-bags behind the consolidation of media companies. As the money flows to them, fewer artists can afford to make music at all. Eventually, more listeners may have to turn to the old stuff for meaning. If that's the only hard media you own, and the streaming landscape is so cluttered with AI and payola algorithms that you can't find new releases, where else can you go?
In effect, multiple engines of media are pushing us to nostalgia. Kurt Andersen, in Evil Geniuses, discusses nostalgia as a cultural touchstone of conservatism and fascist movements. It helps reinforce the myth of a bygone Golden Age: the era, in fact, of the bumbling white sitcom dad and his eternally patient, eternally hot stay-at-home spouse.
This is not to say that all nostalgia is bad. Familiarity is part of the pleasure of music, after all. But it can't be everything. If an American nostalgia evokes the music of the 1950s and early 1960s, then it presents a cultural landscape with very few women's voices, one in which the Race Records are safely segregated away from the impressionable ears of white kids. As listeners, as musicians, we owe it to ourselves to ask what familiarity omits.
Andersen credits the architects and executors of contemporary fascism with more intellect than I'm certain they all deserve. I don't believe the executives of Spotify give a shit about any cultural consequences when they engineer streaming royalties away from artists; they just want more money. But indifference and venality can enable fascism quite as easily as genius can. All they ask you to do is sing along.
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