Word: musication
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...thing I'm not at all sure would have happened without them is the racial split. American pop music has always been an interaction between black and white musicians - and it's often oversimplified into black musicians creating and white musicians stealing. But black musicians always kept up with what the white musicians were doing, just the way that white musicians tried to keep up with what the black musicians were doing. By 1963, the pop charts really were intensely integrated. Billboard magazine stopped having a separate pop and R&B chart because the two charts were virtually identical...
...think they never appealed to black Americans in the same way? It's about rhythm. In all of pop music up to the arrival of the Beatles, whenever we talk about a hot new trend - from ragtime to jazz to swing to R&B to rock 'n' roll - what we're talking about is new dance rhythm coming in. The British bands were modern in their harmonies and songwriting, their song forms were very interesting and they did new things with instruments. But their rhythms were steadily old-fashioned...
...talk a lot about the contrast between fans and critics: the people listening to popular music are the masses out on the dance floor, while critics are often holed up in their rooms writing. With the rise of music blogs and amateur reviews, do you think a truly comprehensive music history will be easier to write in the future? For the first time in history, nobody has the faintest idea of who is listening to what. There's so much illegal downloading. Radio has almost disappeared. Most people are just listening to playlists on their iPods that they've made...
...time. What appealed to you about that approach? I suppose it's a way of [avoiding] the great man or woman theory of history and [instead] looking at what was the norm. It's important to distinguish between what we like and what was important to people listening to music in the moment. When you think about the French paintings in the late 19th century, we all think about Impressionism. We all know that Van Gogh was ignored, that he only sold three paintings in his lifetime. But he's the person we learn about. Nobody cared about Van Gogh...
Your book ends with the 1960s. Where do you think music is headed in the future? I don't know where it is now, and neither does anybody else. Somebody just told me that he had been to a record store in Boston where they have a section of music records from video games. The way you find Aerosmith is by playing Rock Band. If that's the world we're living in right now, none of us can guess what's going to happen next...