How to improve the history of music in three easy steps
“In the beginning, the Universe was created,” Douglas Adams writes in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. “This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” The joke is that existence itself seems to have been a tragic misstep. Similarly, when recently listening to UB-fucking-40, I couldn’t help but think that there are kinks in the chain in the glory of music that may well be bad moves, too.
Pop culture began brilliantly enough with the blues breathing coolness upon the proletariat tunes of choice. And much of that magnificence has continued. However, one of the great tragedies of human comedy is that perfection can never exist in nature. Thus, even art at its very best is besieged by simple, little flaws.
It is these misgivings that we are playing God with today—what a joy it is to leaf back through the pages of history and manicure some of mankind’s greatest works towards an even greater height. The shitshows of music go without saying, you can’t polish the annoyance of ‘My Humps’, but you just might be able to quickly edit the discography of a master in order to ensure that the future unfurls a little smoother.
With that in mind, we’ve airbrushed the odd blemish in these artists’ works to undo some of the faults these flaws created when played forward. Of course, we know these are masters of their craft. We’re just daring to break the old rule: ‘I wouldn’t have a bad word said about them’. (Obviously, it goes without saying that you could also improve the history of music by addressing the horrors of prejudice, inequality and everything else it is still besieged by today).
How to improve the history of music:
Take Bob Dylan’s harmonica away
Bob Dylan is perhaps the greatest artist of all time. That’s why it’s odd that John Hammond, the man who discovered him and championed him when nobody else would, said: “After all, he’s not a great harmonica player, and he’s not a great guitar player, and he’s not a great singer.” But he did go on to say: “He just happens to be an original.”
That originality soars on his breakthrough record, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. This sophomore masterpiece is one of the greatest albums of all time, but it’s tragically derided by piercing harps that sully the gold in your eardrums with a sudden dart of shite. This is a trait that has continued through most of his career, and it is, in part, because of a dental issue that means Dylan has to bite down while he plays his mouth organ, lending the resultant sound to a painful howl rather than anything subtle.
Dogs respond to Dylan’s music in a lively fashion. Thus, many owners have expressed pride regarding their tasteful pooches. But it’s not because his high-frequency harps appeal to their sensitive ears. They’re yelping in pain rather than pleasure, and many of us aren’t far behind. Tragically, this dissonance amid pretty songs has left a slew of subsequent musicians thinking if you’re going to make a point, then you have to do it piercingly.
Restrict Pink Floyd to four-minute songs
‘Time’: it’s a magnificent song about the importance of seizing every second, so why is it so determined to fritter away mine with an endless montage of ticking sounds? This is the nonsensical pomposity that arises when a band spends too much time in the studio, growing precious about every little invention they put to tape.
Played forward, this trend has mutated into certain bands thinking that in order to be progressive, you must somehow be entirely anti-pop, too—that if innovation is contained within four minutes with a chorus, then any inventiveness is actually null and void. A pivotal moment in this misconstruction arrived with Roger Waters spending six hours in a studio creating a montage of clocks and patting himself on the back firmly enough to ensure a great song was saddled with a salvo of tedious bullshit.
An epic 20-minute psychedelic journey is fine and dandy, but the issue with the ever-long-running time of Pink Floyd songs comes when the additional precious seconds of our dreary lives are spent with assortments of tinging tills and soap opera dialogue collages. I’ve barely got time for a lunch break, let alone listen to that.
Prevent David Bowie from ever hearing jungle music
When Far Out recently chatted with Bill Ryder-Jones, he mused that Nick Drake probably wouldn’t ever have made a bad album before quipping, “saying that, even David Bowie turned to jungle some nobody’s safe.” And never have truer words been spoken. It’s a fact that many of us Bowie fans don’t like to look in the eye, but there’s no getting away from the fact that for a good 15 years, he was absolutely woeful.
During that time, he became obsessed with the fact that music should somehow mimic the modernisation that was occurring in the world. But the results prove that he would’ve been better off contrasting them by returning to his old acoustic. ‘Letter to Hermione’ is perhaps his most underrated song—a filigreed thing of beauty bemoaning a lover lost to circumstance alone. But he never returned to this songwriting style after it was written.
The unfortunate legacy of this is that artists are constantly trying to evolve. They seem to think that the height of music is moving away from what made them beloved in the first place; sometimes this is indeed genius, and it shakes off any shackles, but it can also leave beauty like ‘Letter to Hermione’ as an untapped reserve in the past, while the folly of fucking jungle is disastrously embraced.
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