The influence of music on society has always had a huge impact on the way people act in everyday life from where they eat and drink, to the way people dress. As music has evolved over the years and still is with ever expanding ideas throughout history, society seems to move along side, such as the emergence of Teddy Boys, Greasers, Punks, Skinheads, B-Boys/B-Girls and so on all emerged through music. Even down to one of the catwalks best designers of the world came from the emergence of punk music Vivienne Westwood.
Technology Today will concentrate on four different tracks that can back up the claim of “Landmarks of technology” we will also find four different historical technological changes that happened either through political/sociological or new inventions within music, that ultimately help music and society evolve and keep evolving towards a better future for all.
The use of hallucinogenic drugs
In the 1960’s with the hippie movement at the time was expanding all the time through the university campuses and popular music with bands such as, The Grateful dead, Jefferson Airplane, The Jimmi Hendrix Experience and The Beatles to name a few that experimented with the mix of ideologies that the hippies believed in such as: being experimental in the way they live life, peace and love and co-habiting as one, travelling, mind expanding drug use to explore different parts of the subconscious mind, love not war etc.
The hippies were often pacifists that didn’t miss a chance to take part in peaceful political demonstrations/events such as: anti-Vietnam War, civil rights marches, Woodstock music festival and the summer of love which consisted of live music, drug use and free love.
The psychedelic music era was born and one notable album is The Beatles Sgt Pepper’s lonely hearts club that embraced the psychedelic rock movement and set the standard for others to follow, in 2003 the album was voted the best album of all time in Billboard magazine nearly 40 years after the recording, this shows the standard in which the Beatles set during recording.
The album was recorded in Abbey road studios on a 4 track recorder, the technique known as bouncing was used for the first time in Abbey road studios called take 8 in the album sleeve, this opened up four more tracks to record on which enabled over-dubbing adding samples, more instruments such as orchestral instruments the cello and violin even Indian instruments such as the sitar and timpani. The album uses lots of different techniques to create the psychedelic feel; the vocals have delay, chorus and swirl about in the mix, the time signatures change between verses and choruses sometimes 3 times as in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” which is also said to be a reference towards LSD in the title and the lyric seem as though they were tripping on LSD when the song was wrote with lines such as “tangerine trees and marmalade skies” “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes” the song was banned by the BBC because they thought it was promoting drug use. The album art work was photographed with the Beatles in military costumes all in bright colours with a crazy montage of cardboard cut outs, of famous people all around them from Laurel and Hardy to Bob Dylan, John Lennon wanted a picture of Adolf Hitler but the band decided it was too political and could upset too many people and left it out of the photo shoot.
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
How music formats/charts have evolved
In 1940 before record sales began music popularity was evaluated over the number of copies of sheet music that was sold.
It was not until 1952 that music was measured on the number of LP sales, when a man called Percy Dickens owner of NME magazine rang 20 shops for the top 10 sales for the week, and then moved on to 52 stores in the UK that were willing to participate and give details on the sales for the week.
In 1969 that the first official chart were compiled by a music retailer and the BBC, the results of the chart positions were announced on the Jonny Walker in the afternoon show on BBC radio show.
In 1980 cassette tape singles were available to buy as well as 7-12 inch records, Kyle Minogue released a single titled “Hand on your heart” that sold more tape cassette copies than all other chart positions, but the singles were not counted in the charts because the tapes had been sold for £1.99 which was lower than the allowed price at the time.
1987 was the birth of CD format with its clearer sound and larger memory space was and still is a huge hit within popular music sales, some people still like to have a physical format with the book and lyrics etc that you find inside the CD box.
2004 the first music downloads were available started with mycokemusic being the first retailer selling 100,000 downloads in three months, five months later the i-tunes store was launched selling 450,000 downloads in the first week, Westlife’s “flying without wings” was the first number one. So far to date the best selling download is “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black eyed peas according to I-tunes the sold over 7 million copies in 2011, that’s why I have chosen this song to play.
I Gotta Feeling
The birth of the electric guitar/bass
Leo Fender known as Fender Musical Instruments Corporation USA, became the first company to release mass produced electric guitars and electric basses with their solid body’s and electrical components such as pick-ups, along with the Fender amplifiers the electric guitars were born and would go on to change the way music was played and was often related to being the devils instrument because of the emergence of rock and roll in the late 40’s and 50’s. Some notable guitarists that used Fender are Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, George Harrison, Eric Clapton and John Frusciante and bands such as Cream, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones to name a few all emerged/evolved from the invention that is the electric guitar. The British rock super group trio, Cream were fans of fender with Eric Clapton using fender Stratocaster guitar and a wah-wah pedal in which Clapton and Hendrix helped the wah-wah pedal break in to the popular music scene and set off a surge of guitarists using the new effect. Jack Bruce was also using Fender Precision bass. The band were playing progressive rock which is a mixture of blues and rock music taking influence from early blues by using same progressions i.e. 12 bar structures, adding lots of solo parts and taking influence from artists from the 50’s such as Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin Wolf etc. In a two year period in the 1960’s Cream sold over 35 million albums worldwide, writing classics such as sunshine of your love, I feel free, Crossroads and badge, they were inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame in 1993 making them one of the most important British prog rock bands ever.
Crossroads
“War” Edwin Starr (Reached number 3 in the singles charts in 1970)
The conflict that the song is aiming at is the Vietnam War that took place during 1955-1975 between North Vietnam and communist allies and South Vietnam who were supported by the USA over 3 million people were estimated to have died during these dark days.
The message of the song “War” is loud and clear when you listen to the track with the opening lyric very forcefully and passionately singing “war huh” “what is it good for” “absolutely nothing” which straight away tells you that this is a anti-war song, lyrics go on to say “war can’t give life, can only take it away” again getting straight to the point with the message of the song. Also there is the use of samples in the beginning of the song with sounds of planes, helicopters, guns, bombs and the screams of people suffering from the torment of war. The song is backed up with a video that would have shocked people to see, with images of the Vietnam War such as, injured people hurt by bombs and the gun shots, small children crying trying to run away with barley any clothes on or shoes on their feet from the guns and violence that is approaching them, all alone with no parents in sight, injured soldiers, planes bombing the forests. At the end of the video there are images of thousands of grave stones of the dead soldiers, it is full of very strong images that go hand in hand with the lyrics, and show the passion of the song and its unfulfilled passion for the needless deaths that were happening at the time to stop.
This song was one of the first songs to be released by any of the Motown artists with a political statement, which was a bold move for the record label for whom previously only released positive happy songs to create hit after hit.
The success of the song paved the way for other artists to release political songs such as: Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and the temptations all released songs with topics such as: War, civil rights and political issues. Marvin Gaye’s “What’s going on” the message was aimed at the police brutality that was going on at the time: the song enabled the issue to be brought to the public eye, and eventually help to stop it from happening.
War
Final thoughts
Over the existence of mankind there has always been music, whether the music was created by hitting wooden sticks together and creating a rhythmical pulse for people to sing and dance to referring to early tribal people. These people created music with barely anything such as: “Fiji tribal chant” that can be seen on Youtube, the rhythms created and harmony is fantastic with no use of technology? So this proves that you could create great music without the use of technology! But with the use of technology such as logic which creates a recording studio in your own home and the influence of the past masters of composing within classical (Mozart), jazz (Miles Davis), pop (ABBA) any type of music, ultimately should evolve into some of the best ever composers coming from this generation because more and more people can access the technology to be creative and express themselves with ease.
