Once, Music Really Was Authentic

[words evade me]

What does this mean? I'm asking for real.

"I'm OLD now, you SEE? OLD, OLD! I HATE YOU YOUNG BASTARDS! FUCK YOU!"

Now if he had just come out and said that...

Also, here's the thing -- as is often the case with Crouch, a potentially good point is misinterpreted by him. There IS a problem with school funding for arts training, as endless amounts of teary eyed VH1 promos with Sarah McLachlan made clear. But his assumption that 'proper musical education = no love of this unmusical pop nonsense anymore' is ridiculous, as Dan Perry and JBR, both of whom are trained and working singers, can demonstrate just by their existence. He honestly can't understand that and it makes him look even more like the willfully blinkered fool he is, even while hitting on something worthy of discussion.

Berry Gordy to thread of course.

He also, like Crouch, gets a few facts wrong, like calling the subjects of the film "early Motown performers".

and talk about "illiterate doggerel":

"..all sorts of meanings were given to music that often was not at all good and was performed by people who did not have much talent."

With the emergence of rock and roll and the influence of Noel Coward, what had once been good-natured dance music or coded love calls for teenagers went down the dark path of minstrelsy disguised as uncensored social commentary and erotic honesty.

The rhythm and blues performers featured in "Only the Strong Survive" arrived at a time when neither black nor white America had become so debased in its taste that someone like Chuck Berry, the latest "authentic" street guy, could become popular. When featured performers in the film, such as Ella Fitzgerald, were paying their dues in the late '20s through the early '40s, things were quite different. Even when they were working in the substandard venues and staying in the substandard accommodations that, together, were called the chitlin circuit, they actually had to have talent. One had to be able to sing or dance, usually both.
One could not become a millionaire by chanting illiterate doggerel. A great deal of work was involved - far beyond the extravaganzas put together now to mask the lack of talent.

Some of that had to do with the fact that back then there was no political agenda attached to adolescent entertainment.

The standard was the popular entertainment that had preceded it, people like Bing Crosby and Glenn Miller, both of whom were models of musicianship. They, too, had followings of screaming adolescent girls, but girls who knew what real singing sounds like.
With the rise of the worst elements of rock, musicianship started to go into decline, and by the time the furies of the '50s rose up out of the earth, all sorts of meanings were given to music that often was not at all good and was performed by people who did not have much talent.

Jazz and swing largely avoided that, even though it was focused on the same adolescent audience. When the public schools ceased to offer musical education, Afro-American music and taste went into decline.
What replaced jazz and swing was genial and clever at the outset, but it changed as rock and roll emerged from Southern Tennessee. Then the "street" Negro became the popular music parallel to the stars of horror films in the '30s. Thug life and the celebration of alcohol, sex, going to the "hop", and hedonistic partying took center stage, all of it defended as commentary from the streets.

It is no such thing. It is the sound of a debased vision of life and an amoral opportunism on the part of those who produce the stuff. Where jazz and swing musicians recorded and traveled with actual bands, the most famous being the Chick Webb unit, these scowling thugs - real or false - neither record with musicians nor need any. They require only patchwork rehashes of previous recordings and machines that imitate instruments. We get the old-time minstrelsy with dirty words and high-tech creations of counterfeit environments.
"Only the Strong Survive" is not only a celebration of talent, it is an essential reminder of how good adolescent taste once was.

Sentences like this one DO lack subtlety and possibly substance b/c nowhere in the sentence or around it does Crouch define his terms "good" and "talent." But:

If we're gonna criticize him, let's choose "he doesn't define his terms enough" or "I hate his ideologies," and then let's interrogate him in those ways individually (1. he's not CLEAR enough; 2. He's not CONVINCING enough.) Many posts above conflate those criticisms and rest on the combo rather than interrogate him from one or the other position (b/c when we DON'T separate those criticisms--content v. clarity--we're guilty of doing what we're saying HE's doing.)

s'all i gotta say.

i disagree with him, and I wish he defined his terms more. But I could also post countless clips here from many local NYC music sections (but I won't, cuz that would get me hated) that warrant the same criticisms.

he still has his moments, but more and more often I wince anytime I read something of his (his 'let's deport all Arabs' editorial being an example)

I'm interested in Scott's question as well: what political agendas does Crouch see in operation these days? There's something either unclear or willfully contradictory in there -- he wants to take common rhetorical defenses of rap ("reports from the street") and pretend they're a political aim of the music itself. This explains a lot of his wrath: he seems to think rappers are actively propagandizing for their "amoral opportunism," which would understandably seem scary and worth lashing out at. But I'm not convinced that's actually the case, and he doesn't seem to be either -- he doesn't seem to think there's any meaning in the music at all, which makes it impossible for it to have any agenda beyond Dada.