Between The Rock And A Hard Place

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Abhishek Raghunath, Forbes-Network18

 

You've lost your job. The wife has left you and the dog is dead. The house is under the hammer and your collection of art has been sold to pay legal fees. Damn the recession! You hit the bar and take a deep sip of the single malt. And then, you smile. A fragile Billie Holiday tune starts up on the jukebox. Music that reminds you of the first real dance you ever had. Holiday's done soothing your heart and you are on your second drink. Led Zeppelin are belting out The Song Remains The Same, it's 1973 again and you are seven years old just staring at your long-haired brother grooving away to Jimmy Page's Gibson Les Paul Standard.

 

Life was so much simpler then. You didn't have to worry about cracking the next big deal or how to pay off the mortgage on the house. Now, you don't know who will stand by you. Except maybe your collection of songs on the i-pod.

 

"With the recession taking a heavy toll on the whole world, people don't know whom to turn to. They need an outlet for their frustration. And music, obviously being entertainment that is escapist usually does very well from a playback perspective," says Michael Tchong, Ubercool founder and expert on trends. "Bad economic times bring out some of the best music ever. The Great Depression saw the rise of jazz music. After World War II, jazz music began to get even more popular. The word cool came out of the jazz world. It was literally opposite of what war-time was like. That was obviously not cool," he adds. 

 

The next big slowdown was the oil crisis of 1973. That was the year when Pink Floyd's marquee Dark Side of the Moon came out. Oil was at an all time high of $73 a barrel and the US auto industry was teetering on the brink of collapse. The irony of the sound of the cash registers and cash clinking in Money was unmistakeable.

 

Barely six years later, the 1979 energy crisis and stagflation had pushed unemployment to over 7% in the USA. And out of it grew the greatest music revolution in modern times: Hip-hop. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania torn apart by gang wars and drug violence in addition to the rising prices and unemployment, led the charge. For the whole of the 1970s only hip-hop from the 'City Of Brotherly Love' was recognised by the rest of the country. Rapper Schooly D from "Philly" was the pioneer of gangsta rap. In another first for the city, radio DJ Lady B was the first female solo hip-hop artist to record music ‑ To the Beat Y'All, 1980. A new culture, complete with a brand new lifestyle, came into existence. You had your Hos', you had your clothes and you had your guns.

 

However, after defining lives for more than 25 years, gangsta rap's time may be up now. Baggy low-waist jeans are not the in thing anymore.  "The cultural aspects fall on different levels. People are not going out dressed as gangsters any more," says Gerald Celente, editor and publisher of The Trends Journal. "You don't want to look stupid and show you are someone else when you don't have money. You want to look fine. Gangsta is out, uptown is in. You want to look good," he continues.

 

While hip-hop grew out of the poverty in Philadelphia, another movement a decade later provided an outlet for millions of disaffected youth from around the world to unleash their angst. This was 1991, the year in which oil prices spiked upwards and the Japanese economy collapsed. Kurt Cobain (Nirvana) and Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam) made slob a fashion statement as the Seattle grunge movement took the world by storm in 1991. Alternative rock entered mainstream as the great unwashed ran riot in Smells Like Teen Spirit and a young boy went on a shooting spree in Jeremy.   

 

"When thinking about economic factors, it reminds me of the Pacific Northwest in the early 80s where towns like Aberdeen, Washington saw their unemployment rates double due to a slow down in the timber industry," says Paige Newman, editor, Hot Sheet, the Zandl Group. "Out of this economically depressed area came the grunge movement-with bands like Nirvana bursting onto the scene during the early 90s recession, in all their post-punk, anti-glam, distorted glory," she says. The Seattle sound was an answer to the continued ignorance of mainstream America to the woes of a region.

 

One band, however, deserves a special mention when it comes to economic hardship and music. We go back to 1973 Down Under in Sydney, Australia, where two brothers form a band that keeps coming up with top class music every time the economy hits a rut. 

 

AC/DC and the recession have walked hand-in-hand since 1973. They released the iconic Back In Black in 1980 when inflation in the UK was at 20% and the band sold 30 million copies. The start of the Gulf War in 1991 saw Angus Young's hard blues induced guitar riffs resurrect the band with The Razor's Edge.

 

Welcome to hell and it's 2009! The mother of all recessions is upon us. It's no surprise that AC/DC's 16th studio album, Black Ice, released on October 20, 2008, sat pretty on top of the Billboard 200 within 10 days.

 

"There is a whole load of anger. People are trying to escape. Actually what AC/DC represents is music that never goes old," says Phil Alexander, editor of UK-based music magazine Mojo. "You might have been a teenager then and listened to them. And then 10 years later another generation of teenagers come in and they still like the music. And it doesn't feel old. It feels kind of mysterious and fresh whenever you listen to it," adds Alexander.

 

Now, with the sub-prime crisis spreading its tentacles to even remote corners of the world, experts say people will want to run away from their troubles. Celente says, "You'll see a lot of escapist music coming through. When people are hurting they will listen to 'I want to run, I don't want to die, I want better things in life,' music."

 

The last time we had happy music when the bottom fell out was during the Great Depression. You had jazz at one end while at the other end you had the happiest music of the time: Swing music. That was when people were dancing to beat the blues.

 

But Michael Tchong feels that distorted music will start making its presence felt. "You'll see a new kind of music, I believe it's called Atonal. It is dissonant music. It is still underground (not mainstream). And a lot of atonal bands are led by women singers. This music has a bigger range for falsettos," he says.

 

Atonal music, in general, "lacks a tonal centre". This means that it doesn't revolve around any distinguishable key or chord progression. This definition would point toward Noise Rock genre, wherein the aforementioned female singer is singing the correct pitch but the song wouldn't be "pleasing to the ears" because of its erratic form. Bjork and a group called The Liars are pretty good examples of this. 

 

This is the worst crisis in living memory for most of the world. "You will see a lot of over-the-top personalities coming through now. People will need to see something out of the ordinary and artists like Katy Perry and Ladty GaGa will rule the airwaves for some time now. It is sort of a way to escape what's going on in everyday life," says Newman.

 

Page hangs up his guitar and suddenly the world seems a much better place. You know that you are in good company. Jobs and wives and friends may come and go. But the song always remains the same.

 

Abhishek Raghunath is Features Writer at the new business magazine to be launched by Network18 in alliance with Forbes, USA.