Ya know, in the old days before equal-temperament, it's just possible that keys really did engender emotional feelings . . . and even after old J.S. who reputedly wrote for equal temperament (doubtful at first certainly) there was Beethoven with moods for keys–check it out!
Yes, hence the interest in 432 Hz tuning, Just Intonation, etc. IMO the propensity for the pitch standard to rise (European orchestras are tuning to 444--62 mm clarinet barrels are big business now!) does no favors to the music either.
I gotta disagree...B minor is the saddest of all keys, or at least the one easiest to wrench sadness from. That may vary by instrument; I play the Irish harp and I could make a stone weep with my B minor arrangement of “Niel Gow’s Lament for the Death of His Second Wife.”
So-called mope-rock of the early 2000s had its roots in '80s bands like The Smiths and The Cure, who were preceeded by such glum groups as Velvet Underground, The Doors and Joy Division, who were preceeded by a whole list of sad teenage tragedy singles from the late '50s and early '60s -- Mark Dinning's "Teen Angel" (1959), Ray Peterson's "Tell Laura I Love Her" (1960), Wayne Cochran's "Last Kiss" and the Everley Brothers' "Ebony Eyes" (1961), the Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack" and Jan & Dean's "Dead Man's Curve" (1964). Teenagers are always going to be depressed.
@BillM: One can always go back further & further in time with the refrain "sad songs always existed" but let's not ignore the pro-suicide, pro-kill-your girlfriend/boyfriend, pro-cruel-edged nastiness that pervades in today's accompanying -pop- videos that would make the gangsta rap & heavy metal 80's anger anthems shrivel up & die. The main point here being is that there is SO MUCH MORE of this flat-out negative awfulness in just the -past few decades- then there ever was in the decades preceding it.
I can't see the association of VU and 'glum' particulalry. Musically, the Lou Reed tunes often followed raucus bluesy progressions or simplistic major-key four chorders with a nod to doo-wop. Clearly the lyrical depth ranged over darker subjects such as abused women or heroin addiction etc etc but rarely do they wallow - more often there is a rousing conclusion to the story. Hence why I still find most of it uplifting rather than glum.
Not to be a complete music nerd about this, but yeah going to be an insufferable music nerd about this or my head may explode if I don’t point out that:
Joy Division were contemporaries of The Cure and The Smiths, and although hugely influenced by VU and The Doors (as well as Kraftwerk and CAN), who predated them by more than a decade of output. The Cure and JD both began in 1976, JD first as “Stiff Kittens,” then “Warsaw, before settling on “Joy Division” in 1978.
...and the short-lived punk/goth/new wave 'depression bands' output back then just doesn't compare to the over 2 decade tidal wave of constant woe & vindictive nastiness that's dominates the airwaves & video screens now. The thing that should be most concerning is that this more toxic music vibe is now the mainstream. Folks that dismiss normalizing stripper dance moves, glamorizing self-cutting, self-abasement in a culture where the word 'sick' is the new 'cool' is quite frankly troubling in itself.
“Gen Z has brought a raw, authentic new reality to expressing their emotions,” Or maybe just a bunch of crybabies? Yeah, antisocial, angry, hostile, all of the above. We've become sadder because our country USA has become sadder . . .
"Happy" is seen as "weak and sentimental", and weakness and sentimenality increasingly are seen as contemptible in a world where there are ruthless, cynical winners and then there is everyone else.
Add in the fact that the middle class is picked clean and left to rot and there you go.
One of the defining aspects of a a healthy middle class is that the lower-mid or poor have real opportunities to become middle-class themselves.
But that being said, the middle-class has allowed itself to be turned against itself and succumbed to the fear of the other, greed, racialism, and self-interest the billionaire old/new money class has learned to exploit like a well-tuned violin in the hands of a master.
That’s the dream. There will always be and should be vast differences between humans, but having enough to eat, a home, and access to good education and a career shouldn’t be one of them IMHO.
It is very hard to compete with the doom and gloom, but the bigger underlying factor is the feeling of strength- look at how so many songs are about conquering negativity in relationships rather than the nuances of love.
Take Avril Lavigne, who has had a huge comeback in the last year, with a much more joyful and major-key heavy album… that still has a lot less subtlety than previous releases.
Also, the relative minor is a third LOWER than the major, isn’t it? (Although iii chords in major are also very pretty and sometimes very sad)
One very striking thing about Gen Z and the millennials before them is that their minds tend to go right to sexual abuse or worse. This means that songs perceived as perfectly innocent when they originally came out are viewed as being about something menacing. The song "I'm a Girl Watcher" by the O'Kaysions was originally perceived to be about boys appreciating pretty girls going by, but a millennial or zoomer is liable to perceive it as being about stalking. If a baby-boomer hears Ringo Starr singing "You're Sixteen", we'll just hear it as a remake of the happy Johnny Burnette song that's a teenage boy singing to his teenage girlfriend. Millennials and zoomers often perceive it as a middle-aged lecher openly lusting after a teenage girl. This tendency of millennials and zoomers to perceive something dark in things once deemed completely innocent may be the cause of the turn to sad songs, but what's the cause of the tendency that drives it?
I wonder if the sad music is also related to whatever's causing all the self-help memes one finds on social media, where people ballyhoo their mental illnesses or drug habits because they think having those problems makes them "strong". They even do this on sites that are for professional networking!
This is a really astute observation. I was disappointed to discover that ‘Catcher In The Rye’ is dismissed as the whining of a rich white cis hetero dude by many young readers today. But I was shocked to learn that the book has vocal young defenders who explain that Holden is to be forgiven because he is processing having been sexually abused.
Kinda confused by that related to Ted's article. From the graphs he presented it appears Boomers weren't particularly bummed, that Gen X started the sad, and it's gotten worse in the following generations.
Nope, we weren't sad. We were, if anything, angry with the status quo and ready to shake things up. You're right that things changed with Gen X. When they were teens, people began writing about the cynicism among them, and lots of ink was spilled trying to explain why. Hard to reject the idea that when Gen X were teens, that's exactly when the middle class began getting squeezed out and the gig economy began taking root. Hard to be upbeat and hopeful when you're saddled with student debt invested in a false promise of gainful employment with a decent salary and full benefits and you can't afford to buy a home much less start a family. Millennials and GenZ now face even worse outcomes. Is it any wonder their music is so sad?
You know what makes me sad? It's that today's young people have nothing decent to listen to. Those of us who came of age in the late '60.s and early to mid-70's were the last generation that could enjoy real music, played by real people (many or whom wrote their own songs) and who recorded with minimal studio trickery. Now, it's just junk performed mostly by people with no real talent who would be lost without recording "enhancements," Guess what? If I was a teenager now, I'd be sad and depressed as well.
You know what makes me sad? People who think nobody makes good music any more because ‘modern’ music doesn’t match the template(s) of their own favourite eras. There’s loads of amazing music being made these days if you know how to find it and open your mind a bit.
Joy Oladokun, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Ray LaMontagne, Kacey Musgraves, Trombone Shorty, Allen Stone, Rhiannon Giddens, Chris Stapleton, Jamey Johnson, Jason Isbell, Brittany Howard just to name a few!
There is always good music being created, but just as with good writing, it is much harder to find it. The artists and the writers also find it much harder to make a living creating it as well.
And I am not referring to music or writing that I might like. I loathe hip-hop, but some of it is quite good. How easy would it be for those first artists if it they were starting now?
Good stuff. These days that's the exception, not the rule. You might want to check out a couple of bands I saw on the same episode of PBS' "Austin City Limits" a few weeks ago... Japanese Breakfast and Arlo Parks. They're both quite good.
BINGO. I cannot find any relationship to any of the current garbage being promoted by the big producers.
Once again, it’s the independent labels, and established artists who are developing and curating the true talent that rarely finds air play. I search iTunes as a hobby looking for it.
This is a “Lost Generation” of valid ideals and morals. Everything and everyone are disposable. They don’t want any connection to the past and would have replaceable crap furniture than a family antique, and would sell great-grandmothers’s diamonds to fund a year living in a van.
God I hope I’m dead and gone before they’re running this country because the hell of a mess we have created because of an orange Cheeto had nearly destroyed us, and may eventually do so.
So why is the music sad? Apparently my generation did a shitty job of raising children and should look no further than their mirrors.
I disagree, there are plenty of music artists that write & sing their own songs & are quite good! Don’t fall into that old troupe that, “Music was better in my day” or “they don’t make music like they used to”
It shows a shortsightedness that can be exposed fairly easy!
"It shows a shortsightedness that can be exposed fairly easily."
Expose away and at your convenience. I'm not saying there's nothing worth listening to, but that, on the whole, what passes for popular music today can't hold a candle to the creativeness and the quality that defined the '60's and 70's.
Beware semantic inflation. There is a lot of it going round these days. Not so many years ago a lot of songs had, “yeah, yeah, yeah,” in the lyrics. It didn’t mean much then either.
On the contrary, in my opinion. I think an argument can be made that "Yeah, yeah, yeah" sung exuberantly, with a lilting, forward-propulsive rock 'n' roll beat, helped the shape the optimism of the '60s.
New pop I mostly for young people. Old usually have more money and are less inclined to change their idea about the world. People who haven’t suffered are less inclined to empathy. Societies are forgetful. (Fukushima happened 40 years after I read a popular scientific article about Japan’s deadly tsunamis!)
Young people have been either aware of the immense dangers of global warming, spelled out in detail to the US senate in 1985. Other young people are immensely angry for not being able to pursue capitalist ideal without the green Jeremiahs. Real Housewives shows that money really doesn’t make you happier and yet millions of people have no knowledge of other ways to pursue contentment and fulfilment.
The Doors sang a lot about death. Today people listen to music that deals with the unjust of not being counted and not heard. It’s gonna continue until some real series of ultimate catastrophes come along to teach us all the value of empathy.
I would LOVE to read more about how repressive societies have a fascination with lovers conjuring suicide. That's so weird and fascinating, but I feel like I "get it" on an intuitive level.
It is up to us to show the demoralized Zoomers what good music is. Perhaps Ted can start sharing Spotfiy playlists? Classical music, movie soundtracks, and 80s music are all uplifting.
Classical music is uplifting? Have you listened to the Mahler's "Kindertotenlieder" literally "Songs on the Death of Children"? It's great music, but uplifting probably isn't in the description.
“Music today is garbage, not like when I was young and we had great timeless classics like ‘Chevy Van’ and ‘Afternoon Delight,’ or going back a generation ‘How Much Is That Doggie In The Window.’ It doesn’t have any human connection, which means those millions of people who play today’s music billions of times are just pretending to like it.”
I’m not of the mindset that sad music = a depressed listener. Sad music of any genre holds the power to connect us to creativity, calm, healing, connection, and so much more. Susan Cain does a brilliant deep dive on this in her book Bittersweet.
This is also the basis for my own Substack, Shades of Blue, which features moments of melancholy music with the power to elicit calm and awe — two sensations we need much more of in this coarsening world.
this essay seems to have been written in D Minor,
“The Saddest of All Keys”
It's the "Lick My Love Pump" of essays.
LOL
Ya know, in the old days before equal-temperament, it's just possible that keys really did engender emotional feelings . . . and even after old J.S. who reputedly wrote for equal temperament (doubtful at first certainly) there was Beethoven with moods for keys–check it out!
Yes, hence the interest in 432 Hz tuning, Just Intonation, etc. IMO the propensity for the pitch standard to rise (European orchestras are tuning to 444--62 mm clarinet barrels are big business now!) does no favors to the music either.
I gotta disagree...B minor is the saddest of all keys, or at least the one easiest to wrench sadness from. That may vary by instrument; I play the Irish harp and I could make a stone weep with my B minor arrangement of “Niel Gow’s Lament for the Death of His Second Wife.”
Spot on, Nigel.
Hahaha
Perfection.
So-called mope-rock of the early 2000s had its roots in '80s bands like The Smiths and The Cure, who were preceeded by such glum groups as Velvet Underground, The Doors and Joy Division, who were preceeded by a whole list of sad teenage tragedy singles from the late '50s and early '60s -- Mark Dinning's "Teen Angel" (1959), Ray Peterson's "Tell Laura I Love Her" (1960), Wayne Cochran's "Last Kiss" and the Everley Brothers' "Ebony Eyes" (1961), the Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack" and Jan & Dean's "Dead Man's Curve" (1964). Teenagers are always going to be depressed.
Like Metal or pop or rock, Glum Groups needs to be made an official musical genre.
We always called it sad bastard music
I think the Simpson lalapalooza episode expressed that sentiment the best lol
I think Bart said making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel
Ah, the wisdom of a child. :))
@BillM: One can always go back further & further in time with the refrain "sad songs always existed" but let's not ignore the pro-suicide, pro-kill-your girlfriend/boyfriend, pro-cruel-edged nastiness that pervades in today's accompanying -pop- videos that would make the gangsta rap & heavy metal 80's anger anthems shrivel up & die. The main point here being is that there is SO MUCH MORE of this flat-out negative awfulness in just the -past few decades- then there ever was in the decades preceding it.
I can't see the association of VU and 'glum' particulalry. Musically, the Lou Reed tunes often followed raucus bluesy progressions or simplistic major-key four chorders with a nod to doo-wop. Clearly the lyrical depth ranged over darker subjects such as abused women or heroin addiction etc etc but rarely do they wallow - more often there is a rousing conclusion to the story. Hence why I still find most of it uplifting rather than glum.
I believe the point of the piece is that the depression factor is much bigger these days and the buoyancy factor is much smaller.
Not to be a complete music nerd about this, but yeah going to be an insufferable music nerd about this or my head may explode if I don’t point out that:
Joy Division were contemporaries of The Cure and The Smiths, and although hugely influenced by VU and The Doors (as well as Kraftwerk and CAN), who predated them by more than a decade of output. The Cure and JD both began in 1976, JD first as “Stiff Kittens,” then “Warsaw, before settling on “Joy Division” in 1978.
...and the short-lived punk/goth/new wave 'depression bands' output back then just doesn't compare to the over 2 decade tidal wave of constant woe & vindictive nastiness that's dominates the airwaves & video screens now. The thing that should be most concerning is that this more toxic music vibe is now the mainstream. Folks that dismiss normalizing stripper dance moves, glamorizing self-cutting, self-abasement in a culture where the word 'sick' is the new 'cool' is quite frankly troubling in itself.
Not bad
“Gen Z has brought a raw, authentic new reality to expressing their emotions,” Or maybe just a bunch of crybabies? Yeah, antisocial, angry, hostile, all of the above. We've become sadder because our country USA has become sadder . . .
It might help to limit texting and I stead call and meet face to face.
Yep. So much “connection” has never been so unconnected.
Start liking it.
"Happy" is seen as "weak and sentimental", and weakness and sentimenality increasingly are seen as contemptible in a world where there are ruthless, cynical winners and then there is everyone else.
Add in the fact that the middle class is picked clean and left to rot and there you go.
You mean left to rot with the poor whom the middle class has happily despised and left to rot for the last 100 years?
One of the defining aspects of a a healthy middle class is that the lower-mid or poor have real opportunities to become middle-class themselves.
But that being said, the middle-class has allowed itself to be turned against itself and succumbed to the fear of the other, greed, racialism, and self-interest the billionaire old/new money class has learned to exploit like a well-tuned violin in the hands of a master.
I"m looking forward to a (no doubt mythical) world where there are no class distinctions.
That’s the dream. There will always be and should be vast differences between humans, but having enough to eat, a home, and access to good education and a career shouldn’t be one of them IMHO.
sure
I’d have to agree!
It is very hard to compete with the doom and gloom, but the bigger underlying factor is the feeling of strength- look at how so many songs are about conquering negativity in relationships rather than the nuances of love.
Take Avril Lavigne, who has had a huge comeback in the last year, with a much more joyful and major-key heavy album… that still has a lot less subtlety than previous releases.
Also, the relative minor is a third LOWER than the major, isn’t it? (Although iii chords in major are also very pretty and sometimes very sad)
One very striking thing about Gen Z and the millennials before them is that their minds tend to go right to sexual abuse or worse. This means that songs perceived as perfectly innocent when they originally came out are viewed as being about something menacing. The song "I'm a Girl Watcher" by the O'Kaysions was originally perceived to be about boys appreciating pretty girls going by, but a millennial or zoomer is liable to perceive it as being about stalking. If a baby-boomer hears Ringo Starr singing "You're Sixteen", we'll just hear it as a remake of the happy Johnny Burnette song that's a teenage boy singing to his teenage girlfriend. Millennials and zoomers often perceive it as a middle-aged lecher openly lusting after a teenage girl. This tendency of millennials and zoomers to perceive something dark in things once deemed completely innocent may be the cause of the turn to sad songs, but what's the cause of the tendency that drives it?
I wonder if the sad music is also related to whatever's causing all the self-help memes one finds on social media, where people ballyhoo their mental illnesses or drug habits because they think having those problems makes them "strong". They even do this on sites that are for professional networking!
This is a really astute observation. I was disappointed to discover that ‘Catcher In The Rye’ is dismissed as the whining of a rich white cis hetero dude by many young readers today. But I was shocked to learn that the book has vocal young defenders who explain that Holden is to be forgiven because he is processing having been sexually abused.
"Hey Nineteen"?
"Every Breath You Take"
Lol...I don’t care which way you look at it, that’s a stalker song.
Yeah.
Or at least, obsessive.
“There's no love song finer, but how strange the change from major to minor”
From “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” by Cole Porter
(And yes, the song harmonic structure changes from major to minor... check out Ella’s version)
May I suggest that, rather than "Babyboomers" we could have "Babybummers!"
Kinda confused by that related to Ted's article. From the graphs he presented it appears Boomers weren't particularly bummed, that Gen X started the sad, and it's gotten worse in the following generations.
Nope, we weren't sad. We were, if anything, angry with the status quo and ready to shake things up. You're right that things changed with Gen X. When they were teens, people began writing about the cynicism among them, and lots of ink was spilled trying to explain why. Hard to reject the idea that when Gen X were teens, that's exactly when the middle class began getting squeezed out and the gig economy began taking root. Hard to be upbeat and hopeful when you're saddled with student debt invested in a false promise of gainful employment with a decent salary and full benefits and you can't afford to buy a home much less start a family. Millennials and GenZ now face even worse outcomes. Is it any wonder their music is so sad?
I can see the cartoon character now, you should copyright that Tom, that's funny
Nice!
I’d go with Bummerbabies.
You know what makes me sad? It's that today's young people have nothing decent to listen to. Those of us who came of age in the late '60.s and early to mid-70's were the last generation that could enjoy real music, played by real people (many or whom wrote their own songs) and who recorded with minimal studio trickery. Now, it's just junk performed mostly by people with no real talent who would be lost without recording "enhancements," Guess what? If I was a teenager now, I'd be sad and depressed as well.
You know what makes me sad? People who think nobody makes good music any more because ‘modern’ music doesn’t match the template(s) of their own favourite eras. There’s loads of amazing music being made these days if you know how to find it and open your mind a bit.
Recommenations please...
Joy Oladokun, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Ray LaMontagne, Kacey Musgraves, Trombone Shorty, Allen Stone, Rhiannon Giddens, Chris Stapleton, Jamey Johnson, Jason Isbell, Brittany Howard just to name a few!
I find some great stuff on Bandcamp. But it's a little like the bargain bin at Daffy's (NYC)--ya gotta sift through a lot of junk.
""show me how to live".......AudioSlave
I rest my case...
There is always good music being created, but just as with good writing, it is much harder to find it. The artists and the writers also find it much harder to make a living creating it as well.
And I am not referring to music or writing that I might like. I loathe hip-hop, but some of it is quite good. How easy would it be for those first artists if it they were starting now?
I’ve really enjoyed Thee Sacred Souls lately: https://open.spotify.com/track/34VDj911PQh8B1BXYoOMLq?si=MaEEHfCdRkGCf7xlLbeNSQ
Good stuff. These days that's the exception, not the rule. You might want to check out a couple of bands I saw on the same episode of PBS' "Austin City Limits" a few weeks ago... Japanese Breakfast and Arlo Parks. They're both quite good.
Moon Tooth- "Musketeers", "Nympheaceae", and "The Conduit"
Drab Majesty-
The album "Modern Mirror"
Brimstone Coven
- "Low", "Cosmic Communion"
The Lucid Furs-
"Another Page", "Right On My Level".
I have a boatload more, if those don't bust your "case" wide open.
Old man screams at cloud.
Only if the cloud is playing lousy music.
BINGO. I cannot find any relationship to any of the current garbage being promoted by the big producers.
Once again, it’s the independent labels, and established artists who are developing and curating the true talent that rarely finds air play. I search iTunes as a hobby looking for it.
This is a “Lost Generation” of valid ideals and morals. Everything and everyone are disposable. They don’t want any connection to the past and would have replaceable crap furniture than a family antique, and would sell great-grandmothers’s diamonds to fund a year living in a van.
God I hope I’m dead and gone before they’re running this country because the hell of a mess we have created because of an orange Cheeto had nearly destroyed us, and may eventually do so.
So why is the music sad? Apparently my generation did a shitty job of raising children and should look no further than their mirrors.
What music are YOU listening to?
I disagree, there are plenty of music artists that write & sing their own songs & are quite good! Don’t fall into that old troupe that, “Music was better in my day” or “they don’t make music like they used to”
It shows a shortsightedness that can be exposed fairly easy!
"It shows a shortsightedness that can be exposed fairly easily."
Expose away and at your convenience. I'm not saying there's nothing worth listening to, but that, on the whole, what passes for popular music today can't hold a candle to the creativeness and the quality that defined the '60's and 70's.
You kids get off my lawn!
Sad songs are a way of experimenting with pain - long live sad songs! Good article mate!
In Die Lorelei 1826, Heinrich Heine put the blame for unexplained sadness on old stories we just can’t get out of our minds.
Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten,
Dass ich so traurig bin;
Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten,
Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.
Beware semantic inflation. There is a lot of it going round these days. Not so many years ago a lot of songs had, “yeah, yeah, yeah,” in the lyrics. It didn’t mean much then either.
On the contrary, in my opinion. I think an argument can be made that "Yeah, yeah, yeah" sung exuberantly, with a lilting, forward-propulsive rock 'n' roll beat, helped the shape the optimism of the '60s.
New pop I mostly for young people. Old usually have more money and are less inclined to change their idea about the world. People who haven’t suffered are less inclined to empathy. Societies are forgetful. (Fukushima happened 40 years after I read a popular scientific article about Japan’s deadly tsunamis!)
Young people have been either aware of the immense dangers of global warming, spelled out in detail to the US senate in 1985. Other young people are immensely angry for not being able to pursue capitalist ideal without the green Jeremiahs. Real Housewives shows that money really doesn’t make you happier and yet millions of people have no knowledge of other ways to pursue contentment and fulfilment.
The Doors sang a lot about death. Today people listen to music that deals with the unjust of not being counted and not heard. It’s gonna continue until some real series of ultimate catastrophes come along to teach us all the value of empathy.
I would LOVE to read more about how repressive societies have a fascination with lovers conjuring suicide. That's so weird and fascinating, but I feel like I "get it" on an intuitive level.
It is up to us to show the demoralized Zoomers what good music is. Perhaps Ted can start sharing Spotfiy playlists? Classical music, movie soundtracks, and 80s music are all uplifting.
Here is a happy summer playlist full of cheerful music from not long ago: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/yuri-summer-mixtape-90s-2000s-millennial
Classical music is uplifting? Have you listened to the Mahler's "Kindertotenlieder" literally "Songs on the Death of Children"? It's great music, but uplifting probably isn't in the description.
Spotify, nnnnnoooooooo, we must boycott Spotify. Worst financial model for musicians ever. And now they're promoting their AI music playlists.
Lotta boomers on this comment thread.
“Music today is garbage, not like when I was young and we had great timeless classics like ‘Chevy Van’ and ‘Afternoon Delight,’ or going back a generation ‘How Much Is That Doggie In The Window.’ It doesn’t have any human connection, which means those millions of people who play today’s music billions of times are just pretending to like it.”
I’m not of the mindset that sad music = a depressed listener. Sad music of any genre holds the power to connect us to creativity, calm, healing, connection, and so much more. Susan Cain does a brilliant deep dive on this in her book Bittersweet.
This is also the basis for my own Substack, Shades of Blue, which features moments of melancholy music with the power to elicit calm and awe — two sensations we need much more of in this coarsening world.
https://michaelwriteswords.substack.com
All explained in "Infocracy" by Byung-Chul Han! (why the masses have given way to the swarm).