Redefining Music: How Artists Continually Change the Musical Landscape

By Jacob Pellegrino

What do legendary blues musician Robert Johnson, Black Sabbath, and Billie Eilish have in common? Much more than you might think.

Redefining Music: How Artists Continually Change the Musical Landscape will not only change how you view influential artists but reframe the way you view the evolution of music in general. T

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Apr 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637300909

Book preview

Redefining Music:

How Artists Continually Change the Musical Landscape

Jacob Pellegrino

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Jacob Pellegrino

All rights reserved.

Redefining Music

How Artists Continually Change the Musical Landscape

ISBN

978-1-63676-922-6 Paperback

978-1-63676-986-8 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63730-090-9 Ebook

Contents

Introduction

Robert Johnson

Frank Sinatra

The Supremes

Miles Davis

Nina Simone

Bob Dylan

Grateful Dead

The Velvet Underground

Black Sabbath

Patti Smith

Bob Marley and the Wailers

Nirvana

OutKast

Kanye West

Billie Eilish and FINNEAS

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Introduction

When I was younger, I consciously avoided newer music. I’m not entirely sure why, but I think it had something to do with a misplaced notion of musical purity. I had always loved music because both of my parents taught me about the music they listened to growing up. I was even partially named after Bob Dylan, my father’s favorite musician. My real passion for music and its rich history really developed when I noticed my dad had an old collection of records from when he was younger that he hadn’t played for a long time (vinyl was just making its comeback). I began digging through record crates in earnest and one of my biggest interests—and causes of spending—was solidified. Each record I bought held a story, and not just the one-dimensional one found in the simplified portrayal of an album seen on streaming services. I was immersed in the mastering, recording, album artwork, and story behind each work I listened to. Music became even more elevated with the effort that had to take place to procure and play each record. I cannot tell you how much I listened to worn copies of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Led Zeppelin IV the summer before I started high school.

Rock music was a constant element in my life. I knew the classics like the back of my hand and enjoyed other genres as diverse as jazz, reggae, and blues. Although I had moved past my idea of musical purity based on the time music was made, I still restricted the newer music I enjoyed to primarily alternative rock. My understanding of music and what I liked was shattered when a friend annoyed me into checking out the album 808s & Heartbreak by Kanye West. I was completely taken aback by what I heard and how much the lyrics and style spoke to me. As I continued to explore Kanye’s diverse discography, I also began to discover the immense world of musicians, old and new, that I had been missing out on. While this music was seemingly completely removed from what I had previously enjoyed, I began to notice deep similarities between the many genres I enjoyed and rap music. As I continued listening, I could trace direct lines of influence from people like Bob Dylan to Kanye West and Nina Simone to Jay-Z. Much of the music I found defied typical genre conventions, taking influence from a wide range of styles and emphasizing a new world of genre-less music that defies traditional categorization. My observations from discovering music I had previously been closed to also directly contradicted a commonly held belief about music: musical changes are primarily dictated by the consumer.

The simplest way to see changes in music is by looking at the prominence of different genres over time. In 1983, rock dominated the charts at 60.9 percent of Hot 100 spots. This was the peak of rock music’s commercial performance in the United States. At that same time, rap was virtually nonexistent commercially. It was music heard in clubs and loved in the underground of places like New York, but not heard on the radio. It had less than 1 percent of spots on the Hot 100. Now, the tables have turned.¹

While most people could name a current rock band, rock has diminished to just 1.4 percent of Hot 100 spots as of 2016. At the same time, rap is on the rise at 30 percent in 2016 despite explicit lyrics that would limit radio play.² Rap is continuing to gain dominance in the music industry. In 2018, Hip-Hop/Rap had the highest share of total music album consumption in the United States at 21.7 percent.³ In 2019, rapper Kendrick Lamar received the most nominations at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards. That same year, Childish Gambino won Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Rap/Sung Performance, and Best Music Video for his song This Is America. This Is America marked the first time a rapper and a rap song won Record of the Year and Song of the Year at the Grammys. Rap has also gained a larger prominence in culture with countless documentaries and shows like Donald Glover’s (a.k.a. Childish Gambino) Atlanta, 50 Cent’s Power, and RZA’s Wu-Tang: An American Saga.

Most people intuitively believe changes like this are driven by consumer preferences. People often assume generational gaps lead to new musical movements. These movements are often seen as the music of youth, a rebuke of older music. Those who believe this see the changes in music as a steady evolution based on new consumers’ preferences. This gradual change theory has some merits and is a useful model for people to begin to explain the changes they see in what they listen to. However, it can’t account for many of the most essential and influential changes in music. This mis-observation has been intensified as music has become more accessible than ever before with more of the population than ever before able to listen to and respond to new songs. This deeply ingrained change makes people think even more that they have control over the content they stream. This same phenomenon has been seen in movies and television as fans campaign to have things remade. Consumers now feel like artists are bound to create the music their audience wants rather than what they want.

After researching the evolution of music, what I saw presented a very different and more artist-centric image to me. Music hasn’t evolved steadily but has been transformed by innovators who went outside of what had previously been heard. The musicians who have the most wide-reaching ripple effects of influence across all of music have never been dictated by consumers. People, especially consumers, like what is comfortable to them. New types of music lead to contradictory actions from members of the audience such as the Parents Music Resource Center’s attempts to censor music toward a common denominator of children. If left up to the consumer, music would still be in its earliest state. More of the same music would be fine with most people until they hear something new that resonates with them because very few regular listeners ask for something isolated from what they already know and love. In a world of consumer art, musicians would do their best to avoid pushback, which would effectively stymie innovation. Music would be relegated to the position of a utility that is never updated like the design of a fork. If it works, why change it?

I feel the need to write this book to help people better understand how music has changed and what facilitates that change. I have always been passionate about music and enjoy a wide range of genres and time periods. I was inspired to delve deeper into the relations between diverse genres in the evolution of music when I began to see the parallels between Bob Dylan’s lyricism and rap music. I would also like to help readers discover music they have not heard before and might not think to listen to, like I did when my friend pushed me to listen to Kanye West. I have gained a vast knowledge of music’s history and present through extensive listening, record collecting, and reading countless other books about music. To help supplement my knowledge of many of the groups and movements I wrote about in this book, I have interviewed and read content from experts and people involved with changing the musical landscape.

I would like to propose a new way of thinking about music’s evolution, a sort of Musical Shock Evolution. Changes and evolutions in music are caused by the shockwaves created throughout the industry and among artists by key innovators. No matter how popular or well received by the public, these artists continue to innovate and influence the artists who follow them. A line can be drawn between music before and after these innovators’ influence was realized. This theory helps to account for more instantaneous changes in musical taste and how sometimes music seems to be static for a large period of time. Innovators revolutionize music as a whole with their unique influence and sound that attracts a following among casual listeners and other musicians. These innovators are able to constantly rejuvenate and revitalize music for new generations of artists and listeners.

This book is for anyone who enjoys or makes music, from the casual listener to the devoted audiophile and from the dilettante to the expert. If you’ve ever wondered why music is the way it is today, this book is for you. My intention is to showcase key innovators from a wide range of genres and backgrounds who have revolutionized and redefined music as we know it. Readers will gain a more intimate knowledge of many musicians whom they might not otherwise listen to along with a better understanding of those they enjoy.

Read on to learn how Nina Simone’s vocal jazz is essential to hip-hop, how Robert Johnson inspired rock with the devil’s music, and how Bob Dylan’s nasally voice helped to create rap. Of course, that’s not all that’s in the book (it’s too thick for that), and those observations are likely not what will pop out to you as a reader (there are definitely weirder and more profound things in here). But those are what I thought of when writing the introduction. Enjoy!

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1 Jack Beckwith, The Evolution of Music Genre Popularity, The DataFace, September 7, 2016.

2 Ibid.

3 Music Album Consumption US 2018, by Genre, Statista, accessed August 9, 2020.

1

Robert Johnson

One of the Presumed Burial Sites of Robert Johnson. 2015.

Said to have sold his soul to the devil, Robert Leroy Johnson is one of the true innovators who defined the future of music. Born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi in May of 1911, very little is known about Johnson’s personal life, with his immense influence stemming from only two low fidelity recording sessions and twenty-nine songs. It is said he made a deal with the devil to gain his ability as a blues master in exchange for his soul at the crossroads of Highways 49 and 61. This rumor came in part from his contemporary blues singer and guitarist, Eddie James Son House. House claimed Johnson had been a horrible guitar player before he left Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1929 for around a year after his wife’s death. Son House even said people would say get that guitar away from that boy because Johnson made such a racket you never heard.⁴

Robert Johnson is one of the masters of the Delta blues and of the blues in general. The Delta blues is one of the earliest forms of the blues and it originated in the Mississippi Delta. The prominence of guitar and harmonica in Delta blues compositions is notable. However, Johnson’s influence extends even further than the blues. British blues rock, for example, is indebted to Robert Johnson and builds on the musical style he established by adding electric instruments and a full band. Eric Clapton, one of the defining guitarists of the sixties and seventies, has even called Johnson the most important bluesman who ever lived. Modern and classic rock could not exist without the music of Robert Johnson. Very few confirmed photos exist of Johnson (three as of May 2020), but his influence is deeply ingrained in the DNA of music today.⁵

Robert Johnson was born in 1911 to Julia Major Dodds and Noah Johnson. Julia had previously been married to Charles Dodds, a relatively well-off landowner and furniture maker, but Charles was forced out of her life to escape a lynch mob after a dispute with white landowners. When Charles left, Julia turned to Noah Johnson, Robert’s biological father. Robert spent the first eight or nine years of his life living with Charles Dodds in Memphis and was able to receive a rudimentary education most other blues musicians had been denied due to race in the deeply divided American South. In 1919 or 1920, Robert went to live with his mother and her husband, an illiterate sharecropper named Will Willis, on the Abbay & Leatherman Plantation in Commerce, Mississippi. Growing up on a plantation, Robert wanted to avoid working in the fields and find another way to make a living, so he turned to the blues after enjoying the music and seeing the success of bluesmen in bigger cities.⁶

Johnson’s style of playing involved the usage of a slide and fingerpicking techniques that made it sound as if there were multiple guitars playing at once, combining driving rhythms on the lower strings with melodic figures on the higher strings.⁷ Robert Johnson’s style was unique, and he and his listeners knew it. If someone were to watch his playing too closely, Johnson would turn around or stop playing to prevent them from taking his sound. His unique style originated after Johnson’s departure from Clarksdale that Son House spoke about. Keith Richards once said Johnson’s guitar playing was almost like listening to Bach and how some of the rhythms he’s doing and playing and singing at the same time made him think this guy must have three brains.⁸ Although popular legend contends he sold his soul for his ability, there is a much more likely answer for how he improved so much.

In 1929, at the age of eighteen, Robert Johnson married Virginia Travis, a sixteen-year-old girl with whom he was deeply in love. He even put aside his music for her as Virginia’s family did not approve of him playing the devil’s music. Blues in general was associated with the devil by Protestant preachers. However, in many cases there was a much more mundane reason for this association because many preachers simply wanted to help get the men out of the juke joints so they would attend church services and, ultimately, donate money to the church. After his experience on the plantation, Johnson had always avoided farming and settling down, but he settled down for Virginia. When Virginia became pregnant, she decided to have her child in the care of her family in Penton, Virginia. Robert was set to meet her in Penton to see his new child and rejoin his wife but decided to spend some time playing the blues for people again after forsaking it for so long for his family. By the time Robert got to Penton, his wife had died in childbirth and was buried with their baby. Rather than grieve with their son-in-law, Virginia’s family blamed Robert for her death because of his evil music.⁹

After Virginia’s death, Johnson decided to fully commit himself to his music. When Robert Johnson left Clarksdale, he met blues guitarist Ike Zimmerman. Johnson sought out Zimmerman’s help to learn guitar and become the musical innovator he was. The myth of Robert Johnson is further expanded by the fact he and Ike would practice while sitting on gravestones at the Beauregard Cemetery at midnight. Although this evidence of learning and practicing with someone would intuitively seem to counter the myth of Johnson at the crossroads, the fact that they practiced on gravestones bolsters his connection with the devil for many people.¹⁰ Johnson’s distinctive style and ability were developed in his short time learning from and playing with Ike Zimmerman to the surprise of everyone in Clarksdale, especially Son House. When Robert returned to Clarksdale, he captivated his audience with his unprecedented musicianship.

The myth of Robert Johnson also helped to further the longstanding association of rock and other genres rooted in the blues with the devil. Perhaps Johnson’s most famous song, Cross Road Blues addresses the myth of how he attained virtuosic guitar skills. The song describes Johnson going to the crossroads and falling down on [his] knees in reference to the way in which he supposedly sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his guitar technique. Johnson also sings about his friend boy Willie Brown, one of his mentors when learning guitar, to emphasize his improvement after the supposed deal with the devil.¹¹ Johnson’s mythos also lends itself to the traditions of stories such as that of Goethe’s Faust, who sold his soul to the devil for knowledge, while crossroads such as where he was said to have done the deal are traditionally seen as symbolic of a place between worlds where spirits and demons could be summoned and met with. The combination of little historical record, especially for Black Americans at the time, conflicting information surrounding Johnson’s life, and his immeasurable influence on music has made Robert Johnson ascend to an almost mythical status in the musical pantheon.

Mentioning the devil in Cross Road Blues is not an isolated incident for Robert Johnson. Johnson’s song Me and the Devil Blues also addresses dealing with the devil. It begins with Johnson saying Hello Satan, I believe it’s time to go as he willingly accepts his fate. He additionally described himself as walkin’ side by side with the devil after selling his soul.¹² Clearly, Johnson’s myth was not for lack of embellishment on his own end. Me and the Devil Blues could also less supernaturally relate to his embracing of a lifestyle of womanizing and heavy drinking after the death of Virginia. Johnson also alludes to the devil with the song Hellhound on My Trail. The hellhound is often seen as a debt collector in pacts with the devil, although in the song it could also refer to bloodhounds such as those that would chase Black Americans during lynchings. Many blues songs around the time contained veiled references to the Black experience in the United States and the song’s dread could refer to the constant fear of lynching and violence for Black Americans in the South, especially when the man who raised Johnson in his early childhood had escaped a lynch mob. Johnson’s songs that expand on his legend and reference the devil often have a much more down to earth meaning that works in tandem with the supernatural. His songs also reference hoodoo, a religious practice similar to voodoo and rooted in magic developed by enslaved Black Americans. The hot foot powder referenced in Hellhound on My Trail is thought to keep away unwanted visitors.¹³ He also references the nation sack, a bag seen to serve as a spell to keep a man faithful in Come on in My Kitchen. Johnson takes the last nickel out of his woman’s nation sack to break her power over him and know that she is gone so he can invite a new woman into his house.¹⁴

On August 16, 1938, Johnson’s womanizing ways caught up with him. After flirting with a married woman and disrespecting her husband in a juke joint near Greenwood, Mississippi, Johnson was given a bottle of whiskey poisoned with strychnine. When his friend Sonny Boy Williamson saw the seal had been broken and knocked the bottle out of his hand, imploring him to never drink from an open container, Johnson replied that Williamson should never hit seven-dollar liquor from his hand again. Robert received another poisoned bottle of whiskey and drank it, falling ill from the strychnine and dying within three days.¹⁵ Johnson’s death at the young age of twenty-seven also seems to back up his legend of the deal with the devil, seemingly a side effect on his end of the deal. He is the first member of what is commonly called the 27 Club, popular musicians who have died at the age of twenty-seven. The deaths of people like Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Amy Winehouse at the same young age still capture people’s imaginations and fuel the idea of the tortured artist who burns brightly but only for a short period of time.

Contrary to what one might expect from someone with Johnson’s immense influence, Johnson only recorded twenty-nine songs and alternates in his lifetime. He was recorded by English producer Don Law in two sessions in San Antonio and Dallas, Texas, with the songs from these sessions released primarily onto 78 rpm records by the Vocalion record label. In 1938, producer John Hammond wanted Robert Johnson to play at his From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall where he wanted to show the evolution of jazz music. However, when he sent someone down to find Johnson, Robert had already died. At the concert, Hammond decided to put a phonograph in the center of the stage in a spotlight and played a Robert Johnson recording to an enthusiastic response from the crowd; even a recording could carry across Robert’s greatness.¹⁶

In 1961, Hammond compiled sixteen recordings from Johnson into the