The Pop Rock Musical Tradition

The other day, while I was in a cab, the driver turned the radio on. Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence was playing. The cabbie, who must have been at least sixty, started to sing ever so quietly. I mouthed the words as well.

“Forty years this album’s been around”, he said.

“It’s great,” I replied.

“It was the soundtrack to a movie…what was it called?”

“The Graduate.”

“You know it?” He asked.

“Yes. I’m a big fan of Simon & Garfunkel.”

Later that day, I pondered about the unique continuity afforded by the pop rock & roll tradition, starting with Elvis, down through The Beatles and The Eagles and beyond. I think the Baby Boomers tuned out around the time Run DMC and Tone Loc arrived on the scene. But Gen Xers like me find themselves in a rare situation in the annals of pop: we can look back to the rockabilly crooners and doo-wop hits of the fifties and take our pick, mix it up with The Beach Boys, The Byrds and some Bowie, perhaps add a sprinkling of U2, Pixies and Nirvana and then end up with Outkast or The Killers. None of these choices implies a drastic break with the past, but rather a progression, sometimes sudden, often gradual, of the same musical tradition over decades.

The view, or the sound, we get by cramming all these elements together is the evolution of popular music and, at least for me, none of it is alienating or foreign. We grew up listening to sixties and seventies pop because of our parents or perhaps because of our own dabbling in boomer music during the late 80s flower children mini revival. The songs are entirely familiar. What came afterwards is the soundtrack of our youth and adulthood. Compare this uninterrupted flow with the Baby Boomers, whose parents belonged to the Cocktail nation used to Crosby and Sinatra and for whom rock & roll represented a tuneless, diabolical invention. The break between one generation and the next was drastic. Not so with us.

Which brings me to think that this uninterrupted chain in the pop rock musical tradition cannot last. Already my daughter will probably find Simon & Garfunkel hopelessly antiquated, if not unpleasant, the way I would react to the Cole Porter or Glenn Miller songs favoured by my grandparents.