"Read all about it. The word is out! Read all about it. The melody has been hijacked and in the 21 st century, things may never be the same again." Well is that really the case or are we all just waiting for the next big melodic and musical revolution?" Well in the 19th century the world first heard about the blues, jazz, rock n roll, soul, reggae, funk, punk, hip-hop and rap, not to mention those added ingredients; garage, house, acid and techno. However, as I place my Abbey Road vinyl on the turntable once again, the innocence of that green apple accentuated by the soft sheen of the label itself remains ever sweet. In 2015, I sit and wonder about the melody in music; a classic 50's and 1960's trademark that seems to have been nudged aside for the technological advances that has swept over contemporary music. Now with the emphasis on production in this X-Factor hemisphere, I m forced to ask the question again. "Where did our love go for the melody in music?" Hey, for that matter, what about the vocal sincerity in the performance that artists like Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam Cooke, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix and Aretha Franklin made so real? At this particular juncture, it is important to descend back into another time, and another place. When blues emerged in America during the 1890 s, the emphasis was firmly placed on the performer's hollering cry. The acoustic guitar served as the accompaniment and like the spiritual before it, first heard in the Sea Islands, the mood of the vocal aligned itself as the pen constructing the lyric. Artists like John Lee Hooker and Bessie Smith were nothing short of enigmatic performers that lived the sorrow in their song, and it was their call and many before and after that many just couldn t refuse. This was the sermon that a plethora of people just had to hear. Indeed, this was the reason why many dipped into their own souls for reason and understanding. When Little Richard sauntered his gyrating shoe across a shiny, black piano and Mr Chuck Berry headducked over 1950's Americana, the holler complete with the drum and base danced to the tune of a melody. Melody was soon to be joined by the acoustic guitar. Yes, that vocal holler was still prevalent and so too was all the dynamic emotion, but the lyrics told a heart wrenching story and so too did the physical energy of the performers themselves. Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry had all tapped into a rapidly thudding nerve gripping Middle America and suddenly, teen America didn t want to become corporate anymore. The security of family life didn t seem as appealing as dancing in the dark to songs like Shake Rattle and Roll and Hound Dog. The music had become rawer and the guitars more amplified. Studio technology was now lavishing in its day and all this while leaving room for melody. It seemed many a young kid wanted own a guitar and if you never had the money to buy one, an air guitar would just have to do. And then, the sixties happened. Need I really say more? I guess in its way the decade started with the sound of silence. At least that s where the charts were concerned. With tracks like; Tell Laura I Love Her by Ricky Valance topping the British charts and The Drifters Save the Last Dance for me doing the rounds in the U.S., nothing in terms of new, musical, loud revolution had emerged. This was of course since the mainstream profile of rock n roll in the 50 s. However, once 1962 kicked into touch, it became clear that something new was brewing at a club in Liverpool, England.
Now, I guess we could stop the article right here and someone would be able to continue writing the script. Yeah that s right. The Beatles had arrived; John, Paul George and Ringo, and with John Lennon emulating that vocal holler that was still the star affiliated trademark of the blues vocalist, John stretched and ripped into his vocal delivery with a sense of uncaring abandonment that pleased. Tracks like Love Me Do, Please Please Me and Can t Buy Me Love continued to write the sixties, however other people helping to put music to the times came in the shape of Berry Gordy, the owner of Motown Records. Motown was a black soul label that spawned what seemed like a thousand stars. During the early to mid-sixties Motown Records were promoting commercial black dance music, which later became known as soul music. The Atlantic and Stax label on the other hand accentuated the more rootsy rhythm and blues sound. The Upfront jangly guitars of musicians like Steve Cropper was woven around the sandpapery vocal cry of Carla Thomas, Otis Redding and Roberta Flack. These artists performed all that is good in real music immersed by emotion. At the end of the sixties though, studio sound experimentation had become the order of the day. The Beatles spearheaded this revolution with their eighth studio album Sgt Pepper s Lonely Hearts Club band. This album released on June 3rd 1967 had taken popular music into its next dimension and even The Beach Boys had discarded their Fun, Fun Fun California Surfer persona for something more cereal and complex. Yes everyone it seemed was on The Beach Boys Good Vibration and Hero s and Villains served as postcards for the new social sound gripping the new day. The Beach Boys as a name was still trapped in the innocence of 1962. Now, in the late sixties, major pop festivals celebrating all that was energy in a still young record buying public became a main feature of the tines. Now rock artists such as Ritchie Havens and Jimi Hendrix, two black guitar artists also in the tradition of melody and sheer animated vocals were making their presence known. One of my favourite albums of all time was released in 1969. The artist was West Indian born, Jimmy Cliff, and the album, a self-titled reggae long player Jimmy Cliff. I first heard this album as a youth and the grating, infectious groove of the skipping bass lines, and cutting drumbeats said it all. Tracks like Vietnam and Suffering in the Land stood out for me as I sat on a sofa miles bigger than myself swaying from side to side as the music swarms around my head. The album was released at the end of a decade where beautiful reggae music had evolved from ska, th, 1967, the first releases of a reggae label complete with logo entitled Trojan, graced rock steady to reggae and in Britain on July 28 the British shores. From this came a plethora of black, classic reggae chartbusting artists such as Desmond Dekker, The Pioneers, The Upsetters, Horace Faith, Bob & Marcia and Nicky Thomas. It was here at least for me the sixties closed. Now it was the turn of the 1970 s. Already the in itself had lost, at least in part, the melody while good rap music was making its presence known. At this point again it seemed popular music was waiting for its next big musical revolution.
As for vocal sincerity, well for some music enthusiasts powered on production, who needed that when studio technology was enough to sell records. In the early nineties, the real innovation behind popular music, which had made the sixties and midseventies so powerful had gone. The nostalgia of a Stax records recording studio that still prized local talent as the key to success had been replaced by mass studio spaces of technology. Subsidiaries of rock like grunge tried to make an impact on the world stage and although the genre did succeed in its aim, by 1995 rock music had ventured into Oasis territory keeping the jangling sounds of the sixties and seventies alive. Yes, with the advent of groups like Blur, Ocean Colour Scene and the ever present Paul Weller, it really seemed like melody had now returned to the popular music soundscape. In Britain from 1991 to 1997, Brit pop music heavily focused around melodic song structure and stripped down innovative song had come to the fore. This music free of over production briefly made a great impact on the British charts. The trophy album of this period seemed to be Oasis What s the Story Morning Glory released in 1995 and selling by the cartload. However, the impact of this genre never really resonated around the world and by 1998 the scene, so reminiscent to that of pop music between 1965 and 1967 was gone. Now it was back to luxury flats, the nauseating Friday night youth programs, and the art of talking loud and saying absolutely nothing. Hey, then it was back to the manufactured pop bands that have become popular icons of the nineties such as the Spice Girls, Steps, Take That, and Bewitched all masquerading as a statement in music. No, in truth, the innovation has gone, and been replaced by big bucks. Hey, I m not saying for one minute that the music industry had never been about money but it had also been about finding new and innovative talent. I love hip hop but don t like the profanity. I love soul music but need the honesty, I love reggae music but breathe the edge and scratch that itched into your soul when you listened to the likes of Bob Marley and The Wailers. Bob Marley was a legend but guess what, so was his melodies and at the end of this article I hear you asking what is melody? Well if you consult the Oxford dictionary it states; single notes arranged to make a distinctive recognisable pattern, tune. (554, Pocket Oxford Dictionary. 1996). Well Bob Marley wrote a string of songs using this method and his songs didn t need the mass of studio technology to be distinctive and neither did The Beatles. Rap is important and is still making a statement by word as well as vocal but the melody in music and I m talking about popular music, seems to have lost its way because it s not as distinctive as it used to be. What s really going on? Emptiness of silence in the music Industry had been left with the death of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the passing of a musical phenomenon, The Beatles. By 1970, folk music continued to evolve and somewhere on the musical, folk road, a young Joni Mitchell continued to paint life with introspective words where Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were still walking. These artists were drawing out the simplicity of the acoustic guitar and colouring the world between the chords with soft, heartfelt vocal delivery. James Taylor made us all cry with Fire and Rain and Joni made us laugh with Big Yellow Taxi, but rock, popular music had taken on a harder when groups like Deep Purple appeared on the scene.
Motown had become more revolutionary with the times as The Temptations talked about The Ball of Confusion and Marvin Gaye posed the question What s Going On? Hey! That natural image of Mr Gaye himself in thinking mode as the silver rain fell on what was to be the front cover of the What s Going On? Album will always ignite me to get introspective. Yes, this was 1971 and by 1973 Stevie had re-arrived. Stevie Wonder as far as I m concerned was and still is the greatest, all round, natural performer in popular music today. The pop star released one of the greatest albums of all time, Inner visions. Here the social protest of 1973 was given Stevie s vociferous emotion when he delivered Living for the City. We were also exposed to the Stevie s distain for politics gone wrong when he sang He s Mistra Know It All. Just listen to his intense energy on the ab-libs right at the end of the song and there we can hear this man is for real. There s no manufactured anger here. Just the menagerie of sadness that comes from a man always within soulful distance of his emotion. Roberta Flack was another artist at the top of her career during the early seventies. Her voice always evoked the depths of pain when she recorded the classic Joel Dorn production, Chapter Two, the 1970 classic. Oh this is what real music was about! Where melody prevailed in popular music with the beats holding its hand as an equal. On the British side of the music scene, The Jackson 5 and The Osmond s were making big waves. Little Michael Jackson had already stolen many hearts with honesty that engulfed his child-adult like vocal. All you had to do, folks was listen to the classic track; I ll be there, the Jackson 5 s American number one of 1970 and you d see this kid was destined to go places. Somehow I never saw the Osmond s quite hit the same high note in terms of vocal expertise, but they still accentuated the melody with tracks like Love Me for a Reason, a British number one in 1974. Speaking of Britain, well in the 70 s, Glam Rock bands like Slade and The Sweet were making an impact on the charts and also in America too, but by the mid 70 s, we were getting into the groove of Saturday Night Fever. The Atlantic label of the sixties that once accentuated everything raw and real in soul music now had become lush in its soul recordings. Yeah, in terms of its image, soul had now gone from sweat and tears to the material world and its artists now began to immerse themselves in the prizes that Harry Enfield s loads of money could and somehow great voices and melody began to be dislodged by everything expensive. However the beat in funk, a bass orientated sound the likes of James Brown made home, had just got that bit heavier and the production that hit more hard edged. Funk music in the seventies defined itself with artists like Johnny Guitar Watson and Funkadelic. But then again, music of the late seventies even with advent of new wave seemed to have run out of ideas, and the real beat seemed to have gone. Now the 1980 s were upon us and the reverberations of disco were still evident. The Whispers had us gyrating to musical titles like the classic And the Beat goes on. While The Detroit Spinners had reached number one in Britain with Working My Way Back to You. It wasn t long after this diet of hits helped to staple disco music into our psyche that Michael Jackson had emerged taking the invention of the video to a whole new dimension. This long player was to become the biggest selling album of all time. Complete with stylistic visual effects and mind-blowing dance skill that seemed to defy the laws of gravity, Michael and producer Quincy Jones had created what was to become the crescendo of the disco dance music scene.
On this album Michael and Quincy had merged disco with rock. The track Beat It from the album emphasised the rock ingredient and the vocal on the song Thriller just served to take dance music to another place that the genre had never before ventured. During the early eighties everything else in popular music just seemed to be a continuation of what had gone before. Even with the accepting of futurist music. Melody was not the music it used to be, but production and increasing technology wasn t either. Technology had increased and rock bands like U2, Tears for Fears and Simple Minds were to take full advantage of this development in their overall musical sound. If punk rock was to be the new music of the seventies eventually moving into a new wave of house next door, Hip-hop was to be the new mainstream revolution of the eighties though it had been around long before. All of a sudden black music had adjourned itself into a new style. Tracksuits, trainers and puffer jackets and revolutionary dance techniques. Body popping, break dancing was the new terms on the block and the artists raising the profile of hip-hop were outfits like Public Enemy, Run DMC and KRS1. Rap continued to make statements, although more direct where Marvin Gaye had left off in 1971. Suddenly black expression on anger and frustration had gone beyond mellow mood that soul had drifted into at the end of the seventies. Rap was now taking its vocal delivery to the streets raw and uncut. Hip-hop music placed a strong emphasis on the drum and bass but by the end of the eighties however, the smooth crooners of soul that were Alexander O Neal and Luther Vandross had begun to lose their popular appeal. It seemed that many people had got fed up of smooching on the sofa and wanted now to get up and do something. This spilled over into the early nineties where Hip Hop culture met Reggae. In 1972 D-Jay artists that used to rap on the mic from Jamaica were known as toasters. These artists included U Roy, I Roy and Dennis AL Capone. These poets were rapping on the mic from way back when before mainstream popular culture got to know rapping as rap. Now in the early nineties Jamaican rappers that were once known as Toasters were now known as simply d-jays and the Jamaican d-jays of the nineties were now mixing reggae with dance. Artists like Shabba Ranks who signed a big major record deal with Sony music led this mix but you know by the nineties it seemed that popular music in this form was on the way out.