Ms. Keys is a fantastic talent; there’s a good reason she’s a megastar. But I can’t say I vibed to the songs, nor could I hum even a part of one the next day. My cousin, on the other hand — a musically knowledgeable theater professional who accompanied me to the show — loved it.
Seeing her response helped me to understand mine. “I’m just not hearing it right,” I told her. I was listening for deftness of melody and harmonies that change every two seconds, tracing quirky pathways. At “Hell’s Kitchen,” that was like hollering for ketchup at a Japanese restaurant: I was missing the music’s essence and value, the snatch and rapture of the beats and the texture and dazzle of the vocal fireworks, including the melisma in Shoshana Bean’s roof-raising rendition of “Pawn It All.”
Art ever evolves: Artists typically do not want to do the same thing generation after generation, and it is natural to seek to break the old rules in search of new highs. In ancient Greece, music for public consumption was at first austere, rendered by pious ensembles rather than individual performers. But after the fifth century B.C.E., public music in Greece became more sensational, more about the solo star and lyrically concerned with profanity, love, sex and fame. It’s a typical life cycle in art that begins with constrained forms, such as representational painting and the often tidy rhythms of early classical music, but morphs into more subjective and even oppositional frameworks (the poet Paul Éluard’s “The Earth Is Blue Like an Orange”). In American pop, all of this takes us from “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “Just the Way You Are,” with their easily parsed melodies and pretty harmonies, to the more raffish, ragged realness of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Rehab.”
A study has shown that pop has gotten markedly less melodically and harmonically complex over the decades. Meanwhile, I doubt we need a study to teach us that modern pop is, for one thing, rhythmically richer overall. Styles change. So do tastes. Not everyone’s tastes change at the same pace, however, which is one reason we so often find ourselves bewildered by what other people like to listen to.
It can be fun to try imagining yourself into someone else’s head to hear music the way he does. There are opera fans who take in the music as a kind of extended reverie or psychedelic journey; some will recall Tom Hanks’s character in “Philadelphia” swooning to “Andrea Chénier.” I kind of get that if I try. Or “Teen Spirit”: It took me a bit to understand what everybody loved so much about it, but mentally squinting, I finally gleaned that the lyrics (“a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido, yeah”) are a kind of poetry with which Paul Verlaine would have felt a kinship. And the music grew on me — that guitar snarl after the “yeah,” the hypnotic power of the piece’s droning repetition.
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