Dan Schorr

"Beach Boys meets Philip Glass"; "PJ Harvey meets Emmylou Harris"; "Pink Floyd meets early Nick Drake".

You are probably familiar with the above shorthand for describing popular music.  This formula has the appearance of being concise; in fact, in a single, elemental sentence, " _____________ meets _____________ " would seem to offer the perfect answer to the problem of distinguishing an individual group or performer in an overpopulated world. Simply imagine an evocative theoretical musical cross-breeding, as in the examples above, and be assured that your interlocutor or audience will come away with a perfect understanding of where the artist in question falls in the spectrum of pop music styles.

In practice, however, the formula never really works.  The soloists or bands being described are almost always less original than the ones they are compared to.  Secondly, "This meets That" is overly dependent on one's prior familiarity with "This" as well as "That", as well as on one's willingness to see them theoretically cross-bred for the purposes of promoting a third-party.

The problem of pointing out the originality in contemporary pop music in a "post-historical" era (one in which the taste-making efforts of white males aged 25-65 have replaced the enthusiasm of teenagers as the arbiter of what is important), has gone unsolved.

Much as people experience the passage of time differently, depending on one's stage of life, type of occupation, exposure to novelty, etc., the significance of particular spans of time in pop music -- months, years, decades --  depends on the time period in question.  In the history of pop music, there are periods in which the passage of a month or two is as important as whole decades at other times.

I'm sure that the history of popular music during the 1920's, 30's, and 40's could be divided by experts into "early", "middle", and "late".  However, to most listeners, music from these decades has a definite general character.  For most of us, there is no reason a song composed in 1929 could not have, alternatively, appeared in 1927 or even earlier, or that a vocal performance from 1946 could not have, theoretically, been rendered in 1949. 

Again, I know that to the expert, there may well be significant differences between the years I have just mentioned.

Regardless, let us look at the period January 1966 through June 1967.  Many of the records that appeared around January of '66 would have been very unlikely by the end of that year, and vice-versa.  Each month, seemingly, during this 18-month segment of time brought stark changes to pop songwriting and production.

Some of these changes were conscious.  The appearance of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds in the Spring of '66 sparked a competition with the other great songwriters of the period. Sergeant Pepper brought about (mainly unsuccessful) efforts to match the Beatles' scope and ambition.

But there was also much "ferment in the air" in pop, as well as technical advances in recording; these in turn spurred musical experimentation.  Every month, it seemed, brought innovations in lyric writing, instrumentation, and studio effects.

By 1970, things had slowed back down to their traditional pace.  Since the '70's are close to us chronologically, we are more able to hear differences in style as we go through the music of that decade.  But these differences are much more gradual than the ones that occurred in the decade before. 

In our time, it now takes many years to begin to hear important departures from the past (in terms of songwriting style, production values, and so forth).