The music has died

Am I getting old when, watching the 51st Grammy Awards on television, I found myself loathing those black young men with names made of alphabet soup sauntering all over the stage, flailing their arms while mumbling disharmonious and incomprehensible sounds?

But how in heaven has the world come to this? How can you call this music when there is not the slightest melody to it, just a torrent of angry words uttered in monotonous succession, and complemented by hyper-animated hands that cannot seem to avoid grasping the crotch?

And to think this was the Grammys. How can the Oscars of the music industry become so devoid of real music? No wonder people in the industry are complaining of plummeting sales. You hear one mumbo-jumbo, you have heard of every mumbo-jumbo you don’t want to hear.

Am I really getting old when I suddenly jumped up to scream approval as Robert Plant, the former lead singer of Led Zeppelin, one of the greatest rock bands of my generation, reaped no less than five of the Grammys that were available?

Led Zep may have been one of the loudest rock bands of my generation, and one of the reasons why parents of boys my age at the time (forty-something years ago) concocted every conceivable warning against listening to the band — from busted eardrums to the fires of hell.

But loud as it may have been, as were the other bands of the time — Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Grand Funk, Edgar Winter Group, Black Oak Arkansas, and so many others — the loudness did not drown out the underlying music that kept the songs together.

And that is why I found it truly deserving for Robert Plant, now 40 years detached from all that screaming, to get Grammys for his collaboration with contemporary bluegrass artist Alison Krauss, especially for a song he co-wrote with Led Zep lead guitarist Jimmy Page.

This reinforces my view that the truly great music outside of the classics stopped with the music of my generation, that great explosion of talent and creativity first awakened by the incomparable Beatles and put to sleep just before people lost the beat and switched to disco.

From disco, which emphasized dance and hence the physical, everything went downhill for music, which ought to be an emotional experience one enjoys by feelings. It is not intellectual although some nuts tried analyzing lyrics. They were better off reading books.

Robert Plant may have been screaming his lungs off, in ways generations even older than I was at the time just found revolting, but there is no denying the melodious quality that complemented the relevance of the lyrics. Loud yes. But still music, and music that made sense.

Before, the Grammys used to be a much-anticipated event. But now it was almost torture watching it. And not just because I no longer knew most of those who graced the affair, even if some old never-say-die reliables like Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder did show up.

It was because most of the music just was no longer there. If not for teen star Miley Cyrus singing a truly great duet with the beautiful and talented Taylor Swift, and Plant and Krauss, and Paul and Stevie, the night would have been completely lost.

People in the music industry complaining about plummeting sales? There is your answer. If you want better sales, bring back the real music. Stop dignifying trash and hooligan or gang throw-ups mislabeled as music with undeserved contracts.

The state of health of the human race can be appropriately defined by the kind of music human society plays. So if you wonder why there is so much decay in values and everything else, just listen to the music and you will know why. And that is not getting old. Just getting real.