What Happened To The Harmony and The Melody That Was R & B?
Today, when I hear the thunder that rattles sheet metal while blasting from the trunks of cars, I notice that it doesn’t contain tonal constructs of melody, harmonic progressions, bridges, vocal harmony or any of the qualities of tonal harmony. I often say to myself, “What happened to the melody?”
Oh, how I long for the rapture and feelings of love and happiness frequently generated by the tension of the (I-IV-V-I) progression and the sense of release evoked by the power of the (iii-vi-ii-V-I) turn-around at the end of the harmonic progressions. They were both artistically arranged in the melodic love ballads and dance songs written in (AABA) form, creating an American music genre that began and flourished in African-American urban communities known as, “rhythm and blues”.
The “urban music” that I hear today does not represent the solid melodic and harmonic structure created from the blues and jazz forms that made African-American music great. These same forms of music influenced every form of American music across genres and transformed the European popular music culture in the 1950's and 1960's. A few select genres of American music still feature a minute essence of melody and harmony structured by blues and jazz progressions but not to the extent that African-American rhythm and blues did at one time.
It seems that the pop genres of today still feature some melody on progressions, but I hear very little “virtuosity” in instrumental and vocal performance today. Instead, what I commonly hear is a computer- assisted and processed “beat” as they call it. Or, I hear “Auto-Tune,” which is a facsimile of what were once truly talented gifted displays of dynamic human vocal proficiency and extraordinary instrumental technical musical performance.
It was once said that, “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.”
In the middle ages, legends of the Pied Piper in the writings of Rattenfanger Von Hamelin, depict a 13th century piper playing melodies on a magical flute. The musical works of the piper, who was identified as a “rat catcher,” were believed to lead rats away from cities that were battling rat infestation. In one instance, his talent of mesmerizing through melody coincided with the disappearance of a large number of children in the town of Hamelin in Lower Saxony, Germany. During that time, common belief held that the piper led the children away with his spellbinding melodies and that the children disappeared forever.
Poems and songs for young children commonly referred to as lullabies and also known as nursery rhymes are often composed around the (I-IV-V-I) progression. They are found in every human culture and serve as a method to help children sleep. Research evidence suggest that nursery rhymes set to melodic music aids in the brain development of children and suggests that a child’s spatial reasoning is enhanced through melodic music and rhyme. This stimulation can result in increased mathematics and science performance in school.
The act of serenading a lover by melodically singing calmly, lightly, and suggestively in their honor is a hallmark of romance. During the Baroque period, Italians received much noted and revered acclaim for rendering this style of melodic vocal delivery to one that they admired or loved.
Later, in the Classical Romantic Era, the instrumentalists and their melodies on progressions prevailed, most notably with the music of Ammadeus Mozart.
While studying for my music degree at Jacksonville University, I recall hearing aspiring virtuoso orchestral music students say that, “Mozart’s melodies sound child-like in their simplicity and brilliance.”
The one constant and common thread binding the above historic references together is that they reflect an emphasis on melody and textures of tonal harmony delivered in various forms and styles called genres.
In the late 19th century, inventions like the cylinder phonograph by Thomas Edison and the RCA Victrola by Emile Berliner and Eldridge Johnson changed the face of music by making it possible for people to hear music in the privacy of their homes as opposed to having to go out in the public sphere to hear music. Additionally, new components of music presentation began to emerge like amplification and electronic musical instruments began to usher in a new era of American Popular Song. New songs created by some gifted melody-maker composers and delivered to us by very talented vocalists and instrumentalists, were published in the infamous “Tin Pan Alley” on West 28th Street in New York City.
African-Americans also contributed an African musical trait to American Popular Song known as “call and response”-much utilized on slave plantations during work in the fields to communicate covertly. It would prove to be an essential element of the American song form that eventually led to some of the most harmonic and melodic vocal and instrumental music ever created and composed in America- the blues, gospel, and jazz.
After the turn of the 20th century, early masters like Scott Joplin, W.C. Handy, Vernon Dalhart, Ester Walker, Mamie Smith, Vaughn De Leath, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Papa Charlie Jackson, and many others began making their mark on the American music art form that eventually crossed the Atlantic and influenced Western music in general. These artists laid the ground work and forged pathways into the era of the roaring 20’s. The 1920’s in America were a time when more people lived in cities than on farms, people from coast to coast bought the same goods, listened to the same music, and did the same dances. Some people might say that the 1920’s represented the jazz age.
By the end of World II in 1945, Americans began to refocus on America in an isolationist manner and a new era was taking over American popular music that manifested in the 1950’s. This new era offered many different genres of music: blues, jazz, rock & roll, rhythm and blues and love songs.
Along with the new styles of music came very exciting artists like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Nat “King” Cole, Patti Page, Buddy Holly, Peggy Lee, Bobby Darin, Elvis Presley and countless others. If you peel back the layers of that music’s composition you will find the blues form, its harmonic structure, and very pronounced melodies.
As American music became more and more popular around the world, the blues form began to shape the landscape of music composition of the 1960’s, 1970’s and the 1980’s. During that time great things were happening with melodic presentations and song composition like the Motown sound, rhythm and blues, soul music, the Sounds of Philadelphia, the rock and roll revolution, protest songs, and musicals.
Composers had great affinity for the aesthetics of beautiful arrangements of intervals, exquisite textures of harmony, predictable chord progressions, resolutions, and vamps. This attention to detail in music composition was prevalent in all American genres.
The music of great composers who created some of the most memorable lyrics and melodies ever written all contain a recognizable melody and harmonic structure. When you listened to music by James Brown, Smokey Robinson, John Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, and many others, it was memorable and you could sing along with it. This truly beautiful, tonal harmonic music would linger in your subconscious mind.
Once the music industry began to redefine musical art with the technical definition of art (the conscious use of skill and creative imagination of works so produced), tonal harmony became less relevant. This change in definition of musical art facilitated the journey away from the technical definition of music (the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity).
Acceptance of this blurring of lines and semantics in the definition of music led to the gradual abandonment of tonal harmony and the increase of exploitation. The oppressive realism of life (of some people living in America) helped establish a new less melodic product that was marketed as “urban music.”
When the purpose of redefining the definition of music is to make millions in the record industry by glorifying the oppression of urban inner city life as opposed to making millions from elevating tonal music genius, our communities began to get thunder blasting out of the trunks of cars coupled with negative degrading prose and nothing that resembles melody, harmony, hope, brotherhood, love or happiness. However, for whatever reason, most other genres of American popular music seem to have avoided the perils and ills that ravished the tonal harmonic construct of African-American rhythm and blues.
I have listened to pundits say “instead of complaining about the (so-called) music, don’t let your children listen to it and don’t allow them to buy the music”. That statement and posture in and of itself is indicative of a conundrum shared by concerned individuals who do not accept that the remedy is to simply forbid our individual children from the buying it when other children will buy it and eventually share it with our own children.
What is over looked by individuals making those statements and those who have controlled choice of musical art representative of their own culture and community is this fact: today the record industry and music industry power-brokers pretend that all African-American communities want and desire that type of degenerate decayed music. Hence, they will not market or allow any wholesome positive messaged secular music to African-Americans, except the genre of Urban Gospel music which is marketed to our communities.
Therefore, today there are very few options to choose new compositions based on the traditional (I-IV-V-I) progressions that formed the rhythm and blues songs and music of yesterday.
Over the last two or three decades a great deal of what I’ve heard presented and marketed as music of African- American artists, voraciously emphasizes degradation of women, glorified street-life, violence, poverty, urban hardship, and drugs. As I write this legitimate discontent, I have not lost sight of the fact that there are many people in this country who must live life every day in an environment where all of those things are realities of their world. Still, I do have real concern with the message content of the lyrics depicting inner city life and individualism in today’s urban music.
I realize that the absence of inspiration, hope, virtuoso musicians, melody, tonal harmony, harmonic progressions, and original music composition are complicit in the downgrade of R&B. All of those omissions combined with the politics of identity and division, the exploitation of women, overtly sexual messaging, and the record industry “Big Dogs,” facilitated a malignant assault upon African-American rhythm and blues.
I do not expect urban music lyricists to write about subjects regarding the time value of money, the risks discernible in a prospectus, quantitative easing, global economics, or a dissertation contrasting civil liberties vs. civil rights.
I realize that lyricists write about their real-life experiences, tribulations of people they know, the realities of how they are viewed and treated by other segments of our society, what they see in America, as well as the many imagined experiences and potential outcomes prevalent in images of America’s pop culture.
Have you ever lived in the inner cities of America where economic depravity is incubated in the form of political weapons of mass destruction wielded by people with power and influence that use lobbyists and the ballot box as instruments of exclusion? If the answer is no, then it is easy to view this dilemma from the perch upon the proverbial high horse. If the quality of life for people who must live within the inner cities of America is an after-thought for those who live in the surrounding suburbs, then the reality of what these recording artists write about will appear farfetched and self-deserving to suburbanites.
I have lived in the inner city and it is nothing less than difficult to write about my beloved music (African-American rhythm and blues) without the mention of politics and the silent, invisible role that politics played in the demise of traditional R&B.
The people in the upper echelons of power in this country would never tolerate any effort to defile the classical music genre in any manner. They would never tolerate the degradation of opera, ballet and chamber music to the extent that they have allowed African-American R&B music to be degenerated and bastardized by capitalist and profiteers.
The major record label executives, MTV, music and television producers, national symphony orchestras, classical ballets, musicologists, the editors of PollStar and Billboard, music critics and any other groups dedicated to the preservation European culture and arts would raise hell if any activity began to manifest itself in a way that would diminish the image of European arts and culture.
Here in America, the after- 6:00pm black tie and evening gown will continue to shield and protect the classical repertoire. The special interests and their lobbyists that influenced the FCC to allow virtually unrestricted obscenity in music targeted for the African- American youth music markets, would not agree with any marketing strategies that might tarnish the culture and image of classical music. Those power brokers would descend upon the music and entertainment industry and politicians with the veracity of an old- west gunslinger if that were to begin to happen.
When I hear the arguments of some music industry executives who declare that there is no market for R&B so they have to produce what the marketplace will buy to ensure that they recover production costs and that the shareholders get a return on their investment, I usually say, “okay.”
The fact is that a portion of the marketplace is segmented and supported by distribution channels structured for retail music sales of urban music, the artists that perform it, and people who consume it. They created a specialty market for financial profit and it is no coincidence that the positive messages of R&B have been exchanged for negative messages that are now for sale in the marketplace.
What I want to know is why the virtues of R&B composition were compromised and allowed to wither on the vine in favor of expressions of oppressive life conditions used as moneymaking instruments to ensure dividends on a statement of retained earnings.
What is the point of sending our gifted and talented young children to voice and instrument music lessons? Our colleges and universities teach music curriculum comprised of tonal harmony, the refinement of instrumental and vocal technique as well the history of music.
Today a young African-American musician aspiring to be a singer/composer or instrumentalist with the hope of fame and fortune in major music performance is finding that the recording industry is not interested in competent music virtuosity but rather, a new definition of urban music that is rancid, violent, degrading, and contains disparaging lyrical content devoid of civility, melody and harmony.
So, those aspiring music students who wish to make a living being totally supported by music had better desire a career in the classical music genre. If they desire to perform the urban music genre that we knew as rhythm and blues, they will find no distribution channels or audience because they (the wholesale and retail music industry) have undermined it for profit.
I am not yet ready to place a R.I.P. marker upon the virtues of the melodic and harmonic structure of urban R&B that so many gifted African-American composers and entertainers delivered to us in song. The nomenclature assigned to the magic of that art was soul music- created by artists who represented it and conveyed it as ideas for love and hope to a people who did not live life totally free in American society at that time.
Through it all, these artists were able to reach deep within themselves to create an invisible yet audible, soul- stirring musical therapy, parceled out in a relentless back-beat or a mellow ballad that was soul music. We were willing and able to believe the “God-Father of Soul,” James Brown, when he said, “I Got Soul and I’m Super Bad”.
Today, I do not know what the urban music trendsetters believe in or if they are even able to believe anything other than the images they see in music videos and what the music industry markets as the “new definition” of urban music.
Additionally, I do not know if they are willing to accept the truth that this soulful music is needed today now more than ever, to once again convey messages of love, happiness, hope, unity and brotherhood to our young people. It would be beneficial to all of us if once again our urban music would demonstrate the many ways to say, “I love you” and the many artful ways of “asking to be loved”.
The R & B composers and entertainers who knew and understood that they had soul and love in their hearts, used the eloquent virtues of language wrapped in the beautiful adornment of harmony and melody, and delivered to us beautiful and melodic rhythm & blues music.
Michael Scott | CEO
J Jams Entertainment LLC. Talent Agency, Jacksonville, FL
