The artists Graham Nash said wouldn’t stand the test of time: “Are you going to remember any?”
It’s always better to look at the legacy of artists with the benefit of hindsight. As much as people think that have their hands on one of the greatest artists of their generation, it’s anyone’s guess whether the new musical flavour of any particular decade is going to be one of the most talented musicians to walk the Earth or a flash in the pan that everyone gets to laugha bout years down the road. That’s what separates a Michael Jackson from a Milli Vanilli, but Graham Nash knew when he saw some legends in the wild.
Before he even got The Hollies off the ground, Nash already had a firsthand experience with some of the finest artists of his generation. He had casually rubbed elbows with The Beatles while they were about to go into the studio to record Please Please Me, and even to this day, he knew that no one with a pulse and an ear for melody could ever knock anything that The Rolling Stones had ever done. But when he reached the 1970s, music suddenly felt different.
Artists like Joni Mitchell had sprung up with a much different take on folk music, and while it might not have had any clear inspiration, it was wildly interesting for everyone to piggyback off of. Nash already had his own lane working with Crosby, Stills and Nash at that point, but once the hope and prosperity of the early 1970s faded, there was always going to be a tough transition into the next few decades.
There were a handful of legends that did a fine job getting through the changing times, like Neil Young and Pink Floyd, but listening to American Dream, it’s not like CSN was going through their most productive era or anything. Their socio-political music was absolutely fine for what it was, but even in the modern era, Nash had talked about artists who didn’t necessarily have a message to convey when they made their tunes.
Compared to every other pop artist out circa 1975, for instance, Nash felt that the biggest names in 2010s pop like Justin Bieber were far from the greatest that music had to offer, saying, “I often wonder, you know, these people—God bless them, they’re musicians and they’re trying their best—but people like Justin and Miley Cyrus… are they going to be around in five years? Are you going to remember any Justin Bieber song? Are you going to remember any Miley Cyrus song? Are you gonna be moved to action by any of those songs?”
Granted, that kind of assessment looks much different when looking at Bieber and Cyrus, respectively. Not all of them were interested in making a song as tender as ‘Teach Your Children’ or anything, but their twist on pop music has become classic for an entirely new generation of kids who only wanted to have music as an escape from their problems, like jamming to ‘Party in the USA’.
And it’s not like either of them didn’t know how to experiment, either. Bieber’s turns into new genres may have been a bit more ill-advised, but looking at where Cyrus has gone with her collaborations with The Flaming Lips and eventually making albums like Plastic Hearts and Something Beautiful, it’s clear that she never wanted to rest on her laurels as a country-adjacent pop artist.
So while Nash may have had a point about songs becoming less evocative than they were in the 1970s, it all comes down to artists having a different definition of what ‘evocative’ means. It’s one thing to make something that has people dissecting every word for days at a time afterwards, but sometimes all a great song needs is the right emotion behind it to get people coming back to relive the experience all over again.
