Trinity College School - Record Yearbook (Port Hope, Ontario Canada)

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Dust In The ind SQ i usic forms the background in which my generation lives: music in airports, music in cars, music in supermarkets, music in Q bars, music in our dormitories. Music surrounds us. lt is like a fluid flowing all around us, as natural as the air we breathe or if the water we drink, The touch of a ten dollar radio can bring it into my room. And as long as l can remember there has been a stereo in my home, Our music, popular music - rock music, folk music, modern jazz, rock-a-billy, acid rock, punk rock, and disco - has become, as the Beatles once said of themselves, more popular than Jesus . But to argue that kids today are tone deaf because the music of the Rolling Stones sounds like nothing more than musical noise is folly. The difference between good composition and bad composition is too elusive. For example, a carping critic once wrote: All impartial connoisseurs are fully agreed that never has anything been written so ill-knit, so disagreeable, so confused, so revolting to the ear. The most acid modulations succeed each other in an abominable cacophony. lt might have been written of the Rolling Stones, during the early sixties by a righteously indignant Time Magazine. But when this was written the critic was not attacking the melodies of the Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones or even the Sex Pistols, but rather the unique opera by Ludwig von Beethoven, Leonora. Still the squawking of this long-dead critic might have been over the ill-knit qualities of punk rock, or the confused sounds of disco. A crashing din may seem to some, to be an excellent description of rock - but unfortunately it has already been used to describe the works of Gustav Mahler. To judge contemporary music as noise is to repeat the criticisms of Beethoven's or Mahler's music. Whether the rock group Kiss is good or bad is a wonderfully nebulous argument that can be debated endlessly, the outcome being relatively unimportant. lf and when the two debaters solve the riddle of musical quality, what becomes resolved will be that the two men have the same taste in music. The sentiments of this generation are not reflected in the music, in the driving beat of most modern music, but in the lyrics - in what the music is saying. The fact that contemporary music, with the exception of a very few instrumental cults, is exclusively lyrical, points to the importance of interpreting the words instead of the sound. Such a sweeping statement as rock is noise also passes over the drastic changes in religion and philosophy that modern composition is so keenly attuned to. The alienation of man from nature, from religion, from his fellow man is the central theme of modern music. It is most evident in Bob Dylan, the legacy of the Greenwich Village singers. As author of Hard Rain and Talking World War llI Blues his music railed against the futility of modern warfare. Undoubtedly his most famous song, released in l962, is BIowin' in the Wind : How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man? The answer, my friend, is blowin' inthe wind, The answer is blowin' in the wind. The slow realization that the answers were not forthcoming, and the sudden death of protest music by the termination of the Viet Nam War, left a hole in the music that followed. Cat Stevens' well known song mirrors that confusion and desperation: Well, you've cracked the sky, skyscrapers fill the air, I know we've come a Long way: we're changing day to day. But tell me, Where do the children play? This song, released in l970, is brimming with the anger of earlier protest songs of the sixties. But the apathy of the seventies replaced the anger of the sixties and man has become the faceless, cold creature of the Who's Behind Blue Eyes : No one knows what it's like to be the bad man, To be the sad man, behind blue eyes. No one bounces back as hard on their anger, None of my feelings can show through . . . The immensely popular Eagles tune of a couple of summers ago, Hotel California , is an even more serious expression of lost hopes and alienation. In that song we are all just prisoners here of our own device, and, you can check out any time you like but you can never leave. Man is trapped. The spirited protests have vanished and we are left trapped in an indifferent world. Rock groups in the limelight at 26

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