Songs' emotional staying power.

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HITS, CLASSICS, & EMOTIONAL STAYING POWER

If you want to learn anything about songwriting, STAY AWAY FROM THE BILLBOARD CHARTS! And all other charts of current hit singles and albums. Nearly all of the songs you will find there will be long forgotten in 5, 10 or 15 years.

The Billboard charts have everything to do with commerce and fleeting fashion, precious little to do with art. Any songwriter who would call himself or herself an artist might wish to pause for a moment to listen to the great literary critic Northrop Frye. In a series of radio lectures called The Educated Imagination (CBC, 1963), Frye, speaking of literary art— although he could have been speaking of any kind of art—had this to say:

"Science learns more and more about the world as it goes on: it evolves and improves. A physicist today knows more physics than Newton did, even if he's not as great a scientist. But literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic. Literature doesn't evolve or improve or progress. We may have dramatists in the future who will write plays as good as King Lear, though they'll be very different ones, but drama as a whole will never get better than King Lear. King Lear is it, as far as drama is concerned. So is Oedipus Rex, written two thousand years earlier than that, and both will be models of dramatic writing as long as the human race endures."

In other words, gentle reader, it you're at all concerned with learning something about the art of songwriting, only classics matter—not current hits.

If you want to learn about great songwriting, don't even consider studying a song that hasn't endured in popular culture for at least 25 or 30 years—at least one full generation, preferably longer.

Think of all the people under the age of 30 who, today, hum and sing and buy zillions of recordings of songs that were written before they were born—the songs of Dylan, Hank Williams, the Gershwins, Jimi Hendrix, Lennon-McCartney, Hoagy Carmichael, Joni Mitchell. Those are the songs to pay attention to.

Anyone who tells you classic songs are "too old" to have any relevance to "today's generation" is either utterly clueless or a complete idiot. Classics, by definition, travel through time.

Every artist strives to create a classic, a work with such profound emotional resonance that it will endure as long as people have emotions.

We humans evolved our rich emotional sensitivities for very good reasons of biological survival. Emotional responses kick in before rational thought has a chance. Good thing, too. Your emotional responses serve a couple of vital purposes. First, negative emotions (fear, uneasiness, anger, loathing, sadness, grief, humiliation, shame, etc.) evolved to warn you and force you to action when your senses perceive something in your environment that could threaten your life. Second, positive emotions (affection, friendliness, excitement, amusement, enjoyment, elation, contentment, gratitude, etc.) evolved to reward you when your senses perceive something in your environment that could help you continue to survive. (There's no such thing as a "neutral" emotion.)

So, what does all this have to do with art?

Everything, actually. A work of art is to emotional life what a scientific paper is to intellectual life. A work of art, whatever form it takes, endeavors to illuminate the human condition using emotional torches. Just as science endeavors to illuminate the human condition using the light of reason. People understand that songs and paintings and novels function as "write-ups" of emotional laboratory demonstrations, so to speak.

A great work of art elicits a powerful emotional reaction in most people. In so doing, it shows us something terribly important, something that's ultimately either life-threatening or life-enhancing. A great work of art therefore provides society with benefits as valuable as those derived from the outcome of an important scientific study, such as a double-blind controlled clinical trial of a potentially life-saving drug.

However, while our intellectual understanding of the natural world certainly improves over time, and those improvements affect our everyday lives, our emotional capacities do not change.

We have exactly the same emotional responsiveness today as our ancestors had 10,000 years ago or 2,000 years ago or 400 years ago. That's why a great work of art is timeless. That's why Oedipus Rex and King Lear still grab us emotionally, the way they grabbed people emotionally centuries ago. Such is the power of a classic work of art.

People will be singing classic songs such as "Georgia On My Mind," "All Along the Watchtower," and "September Song" long after Billboard is a faded memory.

A work of art fails in the end if it does not connect with a lot of people emotionally, and if that emotional connection does not cross over from generation to generation. Billboard chart-topping singles and albums may sell millions of copies today, but that says nothing about the long-term artistic value of either the recordings or the songs.

People buy current records for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with the songs themselves.

D.J. So-and-So says you gotta get the record. So you buy it.
Advertising hype says you gotta get the record. So you buy it. (Yes, advertising alone sells tons of CDs.)
The artist has a cool image that you identify with, so you buy the artist's records in the expectation that you will absorb some of that coolness.
You saw the band play live and they jumped around a lot and set off tons of explosives, so their CD must be just as exciting, so you buy it.
You saw the video, and the artist makes you horny, so you buy the record.
Your friends all have the record so you have to buy it too.
Somebody's birthday is coming and you have to buy them a present.
Christmas is coming and you have to buy a bunch of presents, and CDs solve the problem relatively cheaply and easily.

Next thing you know, the hit CD has sold 8 million copies—95% of them to 15-to-19-year-olds. Five years later, nobody can remember a single song from the CD, not even many of the now 20-to-24-year-old owners of the CD, whose tastes have long since moved on, on to new fashionable artists and musical genres.

So . . . never mind the Billboard charts. Unless you're only interested in commerce and fashion, not art. In which case, you are not an artist. You are a hack. But hey! It ain't so bad, being a hack. Although Woody Allen's no hack, he recognizes the value of art to those who would seek immortality:

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying."

Mind you, look at Elvis, one of the world's truly great artists. He actually achieved immortality by not dying. Imagine that. Many people thought he was dead, when in fact he's been spotted thousands of times since 1977, everywhere from Peoria to Pluto. Recently, just for laughs, he entered an Elvis impersonator contest in Reno, Nevada. Did pretty well, too. Second runner up.

Thoreau gets the last word:

"Every generation laughs at the old fashions but religiously follows the new."