The Old Fogy

I must be an old fogy when it comes to music. I just don’t understand or appreciate the stuff young people celebrate today. I watch modern singers and bands performing their hits and I can’t understand what they’re singing. I saw Coldplay perform on The Ellen DeGeneris Show yesterday, the audience going simply wild as the lead singer cavorted around and through the audience, two electric guitars and a drummer behind him wailing and banging away, and I didn’t understand a word he was singing. The performance was good, the music and rhythm was intoxicating, but the lyrics got lost in the volume. Yet this group from England has sold over 50 million albums in the last seven years. That’s a bunch. My not understanding the lyrics is true of nearly everyone else performing now. It isn’t that they’re so metaphysically complicated; I see their lips move but I don’t catch the words. It’s like they’re singing in a foreign language. The emphasis is on visual performance and rhythm instead of lyrics and music. I miss the days when singers got on stage and sang the lyrics of a song, interpreting those lyrics from behind a stationary mike. I miss the clever words of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and Larry Hart. I miss singers like Sinatra, Jack Jones, Vic Damone, Sarah, Ella, and too many more to mention. Barabra is still around and still sounds remarkable, but she’s now old and no longer performing except on rare occasions. Michael Bublé is around and sounds like a modern Sinatra, but he’s consigned pretty much to tours and clubs, labeled a jazz singer and followed only by those of us who still want style and comprehensibility. I just read what I’ve written so far, and I do sound exactly like an old fogy. So be it. I chuckle to think that in forty or fifty years, today’s youth will be wrapped (and rapped) in old fogy garb, yearning for the good old days when their recording artists hipped and hopped and rapped and bedazzled them with outrageous outfits and body paint.