The Endless Refrain: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Threat to New Music

by David Rowell

Overview

A veteran music journalist illustrates how culture has recycled music from the past

In The Endless Refrain, former Washington Post writer and editor David Rowell goes deep into the psychology of the average listener - as well as the algorithms that function as today’s tastemakers – to explore the devastating effects of technology run amok on musicians and fans alike.

Making an incisive analysis of the economic and technological forces behind the rise of streaming services like Spotify and iTunes, Rowell examines how contemporary currents of music consumption and production shut the doors on the organic creation of new music and trapped us in a whirlpool of repetition and stale nostalgia.

Combining personal memoir, interviews, industry research, and good old-fashioned critical passion, Rowell’s book is a pungent indictment of a music culture gone awry, crippled by nostalgia and subverted by the sinister hive minds of the internet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781685891398
Publisher:	Melville House Publishing
Publication date:	11/12/2024
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	102,850
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Rowell worked as an editor and writer at the Washington Post for nearly 25 years. He has taught literary journalism at American University and is currently a senior editor at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. He lives just outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The Endless Refrain is his third book.

Read an Excerpt

The Songs Remain the Same

Do we even want new music anymore?

OK, that might be rushing in a little too quickly. I opted for a “Hey Jude” approach, starting with the chorus from the opening note instead of easing in with more intricate fanfare, à la the Who’s “Baba O’Riley.” But there it is, a naked first sentence with no mystery but plenty of urgency, because, music lovers everywhere, the matter is urgent.

It’s hardly the first time I’ve posed the question. I once spent a month following one of my closest friends, Bob Funck, who managed to line up a string of performances at cafés and bars in the Northeast despite no one knowing who Bob was. Bob, who like me is from North Carolina, had landed a gig at a place called Andy’s Old Port Pub in Portland, Maine—it was his first time in New England—and he was playing all original music. He might have fared better, though, if he had recited nature-inspired haiku, because so few people were listening or giving him any kind of chance. Just to stretch out his set for the three hours he was booked, Bob threw in a cover of Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels.” I happened to be the only one in the establishment jotting notes about the irony of that as a selection—Bob hadn’t chosen it for that reason—but as soon as he began, the scant crowd reacted as if Tom Petty himself had stepped through the door. Because here was the rapture: hearing a song that they already knew.

When Bob brought it to a close and went back to his own songs, the small group of men and women there for dinner or drinks went right back to their practiced indifference, seemingly unaware that they’d been sucked into a hole in the space-time continuum for nearly four minutes. In trying to capture that moment there at the bar I wrote for the first time, “Do we even want new music anymore?” Later that night, at the hotel, I dashed off a few paragraphs riffing on that idea, and the next morning I went back to writing about Bob’s lonely crusade to play his music for a world that couldn’t hear it because, well, they didn’t already know it.

Ever since, I haven’t been able to shake that question. I’ve asked the question of friends, people I didn’t know at all, and also some famous musicians who could have been offended but weren’t, because, I’d like to believe, they recognized that their answers might have revealed some uncomfortable truths. I asked it of people who had a role in the music business and of people who made a living writing about music. Sometimes I asked it in my dreams.

I asked it of a woman at the Quail Creek Country Club in Naples, Florida, after watching a Tom Petty/Stevie Nicks tribute act. Janet Seidl had spent most of the evening dancing in a state of admirably unselfconscious joy—sometimes entirely by herself—in front of the stage, and now that the show was over she wanted to know why I had been scribbling in a notebook. I explained that I was writing a book about this central question, but this time, instead of posing the question like I had a million times before, I just said, “What I’m writing about and arguing in this book is that we don’t really want to hear new music anymore,” to which she quickly said, “Correct. I would fully agree with you on that.” And then her friend Jill Nilsen, standing next to her, added, “For a certain age group,” and I quickly said yes, she was right about that—I wasn’t talking about teenagers or people in their early twenties. But pretty much everyone older than that.

A note on narration: When I interviewed music critic Ben Ratliff to get his thoughts on all this, one of the first things he asked me was, “Well, who is we?” I had to laugh at that because when I speak about these matters, I did tend to speak as if I was standing in for all of humanity. Ben admitted he could be guilty of that himself in his writing. “I think that by ‘we,’ I mean a generalized ‘I’,” he said. That sounded right to me. I was talking about myself, no question, but I’d also convinced myself that the issues went well beyond what I thought.

Here’s a disclaimer that’s as important as Ringo’s drumming on “Come Together.” I am largely focusing on the hold rock and pop music from the past has on us. I am not including country music because while country has become an increasingly pop product—often the only difference being that the country tunes include two bars of pedal-steel guitar—the country charts aren’t the same as rock and pop charts. And if I were to write about country, then how could I leave out Polka, Memphis Blues, Zydeco, Bouncy Techno, Ranchera, Pirate Metal, Noisegrind, Ragga Jungle, Sufi Rock, Dark Cabaret, Anti-folk, Cold Wave (but not Dark Wave; Dark Wave, I owe you nothing and disavow you completely), Psychobilly, Diva House, Nintendocore, Mathcore, Easycore, Sadcore, Happy Hardcore, or any music associated, directly or indirectly, with the Earth’s inner core?

This book is the equivalent of a triple album featuring one studio record and two live recordings. Think of the first third as me hunkered in the studio for months, trying to fully conceive of and get down the opus in my head. Some featured musicians make appearances. The compositions are all mine and I’m playing most of the instruments, but these guests come in and lay down their parts beautifully, which makes it all so much better. Then, for the last two parts of the book, I hit the road as I explore and express these ideas, for reasons that will be clear when we get there, at a Journey tribute band’s sound checks, in their dressing rooms, and in the crowds of their various performances—to capture the manifestation of this obsession with music from our past. From there we go from analog to digital: on the trail of music holograms and the various ways we are not just hanging on to beloved songs, but the dead creators themselves.

Ultimately, this is a book about music and feeling. I’m not exploring the findings of scientific studies focused on the brain’s relationship to new music as we age, so there are exactly as many long passages about neural pathways becoming more fixed over time as there are digressions into the little nesting-bowl helmets Devo wear in their “Whip It” video.

 It’s also not data-driven, though there is data in these pages. Instead, this is a book about the landscape all around us as I see and hear it, and how a particular era of music has so fully permeated that landscape that it’s become a kind of reverse gentrification—the old music isn’t going anywhere, and the new music is in search of permanent residence. It’s about the music from our past, our present, and future. It’s also about the still-mysterious and inspiriting way a person or group of people we’ve never met and will never know once created something that lasts three to four minutes and, then and forever more, the emotional attachment we formed with it became as important to us as any memory, being, or entity in the world.

Table of Contents

The Endless Refrain: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Threat to New Music
David Rowell
 
Opening Act
The Songs Remain the Same – how public music became a loop of repetition and familiarity
Side One
All Things Must Pass. But When? The age of the golden oldie … and beyond
Side Two
How Old Music Became New Again – licensing, content, the Internet, and the weaponization of copyright
Side Three
It Goes On and On and On and On – how nostalgia propagates itself through recursion
Side Four
Journey, Tribute Bands, and the World They Made – on the road with the weirdest people in music 
Side Five
OK Computer? – the rise of the algorithm and digital curation
Side Six
On the Road with the Dead – the rise of hologram performers and the future of re-animated undead music
Coda
Where Do We Go? – how we can reclaim new music in its glory and rebelliousness for a new generation