I grew up in an era notable for its love of musical novelty. A new assertive youth culture had come to the fore and their desire to push back the boundaries and challenge middle class values was reflected in the sort of music they listened to. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who and other British invasion groups had gone back to the roots of American music, reinterpreted it, and fed it back to an eager audience. In the US, itself there was also regrouping and experimentation which led to an explosion of sounds – folk- rock, psychedelic rock, country rock, jazz-rock, progressive rock, Southern rock, hard rock and heavy metal.

Stuck in my remote corner of the former British Empire, I lapped it all up. In the stifling atmosphere of conservative Rhodesian boarding school life, it filled a void and opened up as a whole web of influences and reactions. It was my ticket into a more exciting world.

When I moved on to university I started to listen to even more kinds of things and one song led me to another. I loved nothing more than ducking into a record shop and spending hours browsing through album covers looking for new artists, as well as ones I was already a fan of.

Over the many years that have passed since then, rock music has continued to transform and evolve, not always for the better. Inevitably, it has been affected by changes in technology, media and demographics. More and more rock music has become a business. The old spirit of youthful rebellion has now mostly gone.

In American music folklore, it was, of course, the legendary Delta bluesman, Robert Johnson, who sold his soul at a crossroads to learn how to play the guitar. In his book, The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen and Springsteen and the Head-On Collision of Rock and Commerce, author Fred Goodman argues that a similar fate befell the entire rock n’ roll industry in the early seventies when the counter-culture movement allowed itself to be hijacked by the marketing men and bond dealers, losing, in the process, not only its old spirit of adventure but most of its more naïve illusions about itself as a force for social change.

As Goodman writes: “The underground scene started in earnest when rock assumed the mantle of meaning and intent from folk music, and it was founded on a search for authenticity and an explicit rejection of consumerism and mainstream values.” The man who played a pivotal role in this crossover of musical styles was a scrawny, young singer with a high nasal whine who passed by the name of Bob Dylan.

Dylan marked a turning point. Before him, most rock singers confined themselves to singing about such traditional adolescent concerns as “dancing or driving or teenage love lost and found”. Not only did Dylan bring a new thematic weight to his songs but he gave rock a sense of moral purpose and a direction it had never had before. The new music confounded all the old stereotypes with its sense of aesthetic urgency and pointed social comment.

Where Dylan led the way, others followed. In his book, Goodman focuses on a handful of the more influential of these – in particular Neil Young and, later, Bruce Springsteen – although there are a whole host of others one could easily add to the list.

In Goodman’s view, however, Springsteen marks a departure. Heralded as the keeper of the flame, “the Boss” – as he was nicknamed – was savvy enough to retain the air of rebelliousness that has always been such an ingrained part of rock’s appeal but he also benefited from having a very shrewd manager, in the intellectual Jon Landau, who knew just how to market him. “Colombia did not ‘make’ Dylan,’ Goodman writes. “His reputation owed everything to his artistic genius…Springsteen, the merits of his music notwithstanding, was quite a different story. By the ’70s the record companies had recognised the massive commercial rewards that the music had to offer, and they learned a great deal about how to sell it.”

These days it seems highly unlikely that anyone musician or band will ever again have the enormous influence of a Dylan or the Beatles or become so universally known as to be able to unite a generation. There are several reasons for this. The proliferation of dedicated TV channels and radio stations, as well as modern marketing techniques, has ensured that music is now divided into a whole series of sub-genres each with a specific audience that is ferociously targeted.

The internet has further changed the nature of celebrity. Like everything else, music has become fragmented in our social media-saturated society with a whole galaxy of stars vying for our attention. With music having become so niched, it is thus possible for a musician to have millions of followers on, say, the video-sharing YouTube but remain completely unknown to a large section of the population. With algorithms confining, defining and determining our tastes and “suggesting” what we should be listening to, there is even less chance of you hearing something you didn’t expect to hear or to cross over from one musical boundary into another.

The nature of fame has become more fleeting, illusory and superficial. Joni Mitchell, one of the ground-breaking singer-songwriters Goodman writes approvingly about in his book, expressed this well when she recently said: “I heard someone from the music business saying they are no longer looking for talent, they want people with a certain look and willingness to cooperate. I thought that’s interesting because I believe a total unwillingness to cooperate is what is necessary to be an artist – not for perverse reasons but to protect your vision. The considerations of a corporation, especially now, have nothing to do with art or music. That’s why I spend my time now painting.”

With the Covid-19 pandemic shutting down music venues and stadiums, the reliance on social media as a way of accessing and listening to music has grown even more pronounced. It has been estimated that lockdown has boosted streaming by 22% as more and more people resort to passive listening at home. Rather than bringing people together, as it once did, music now keeps them apart. As Duncan McLean sadly notes, in his otherwise highly entertaining, book, Lone Star Swing: “Music doesn’t change people’s lives today…it confirms the life you’ve already chosen, or had chosen for you.”

REFERENCES:

The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce by Fred Goodman (published by Jonathan Cape, London).

Lone Star Swing by Duncan McLean (published by Jonathan Cape, London)