“It’s a different scale”: The band Linda Ronstadt called the future of music
Rock and roll cannot survive unless it’s in a constant state of change. The entire premise of bands living in the Summer of Love wasn’t meant to last forever, and the best examples of rock changing the world came from when people defied the status quo and splintered off into different subgenres like punk, grunge, progressive, and everything else in between. While Linda Ronstadt was comfortable in her own lane most of the time, she could tell when things were shifting beneath her feet.
Then again, Ronstadt’s taste was always fairly eclectic, going all the way back to when she first began singing. Everyone might know her as the country rocker who defined the California rock sound at the beginning of the 1970s, but going back through her record collection, she was also a connoisseur of the classics, loving everyone from crooners like Frank Sinatra to the old Rosemary Clooney records that everyone’s grandma seems to still have on file somewhere in their house these days.
She also wasn’t afraid to go down musical avenues that should have killed most artists. Any passive country fan would have been over the moon hearing her, Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton exchanging lines on the Trio album, but her decision to cut an album of standards or go on Broadway to perform made her believe that she could do anything as long as she had the passion for it.
But that didn’t exactly work around the turn of the 2000s. People were reeling from the end of grunge, and the majority of pop artists had taken a turn to the teenybopper, with everyone from NSYNC to Britney Spears having a major shot at primetime. As the modern age began, though, fans started to realise that some of the greatest pop songs of the time didn’t necessarily need to feature any English.
Aside from ‘Despacito’ becoming one of the biggest singles of the modern era, K-pop has been one of the biggest cultural forces in the world. Outside of having a pristine attention to detail in terms of production, bands like BTS have accumulated the kind of fanbase that few people are able to reach nowadays, almost like watching Beatlemania all over again. It might sound like teenybopper music to some people, but Ronstadt understood what was going on when listening to SsingSsing.
Known for experimenting in every genre under the sun, Ronstadt felt the South Korean band was one of the few pushing music forward, saying, “I found this Korean band that I thought was sort of interesting on Tiny Desk concerts. The Korean band I saw was called SsingSsing. It was kind of like David Bowie bass and drums, and then this really wild South Korean traditional singing. It’s polytonal. It’s a different scale than we use, with more notes in it. And a lot of gender-crossing. It looked like I was seeing the future.”
But listening to them in context tells the story a lot better. There are definitely traces of the past in the way that they phrase a lot of their songs, but listening to them in one setting could recontextualise the way that you see music, practically creating a musical smorgasbord every time they play.
So for any rock fan who claims that modern music is crap and that the classics were the last time that music was good, SsingSsing is one of the few that continue to push themselves creatively. Genres had become far too rigid back in the day, so listening to a band take bits and pieces from different styles and fuse them together is what makes the modern age so interesting.
