Some popular songs (and under 'popular music' I include everything from Mississippi John Hurt to Justin Bieber) truly are, or even can be, performed by only one artist. But for the most part pop songs are iterations, or at least variations, of standards. This is a fact of which one could remain fairly ignorant, unless one was a true connoisseur, for most of the history of recorded music.
But the newly emerging way of experiencing a song, thanks to nothing more intentional than YouTube search algorithms, is to be presented with a mechanically generated list of iterations, from different decades and in different styles, offered up as if for comparison. I believe this changes the experience of popular music, returning to it a more fundamental, pre-recording-era aesthetic quality, one that reconncts it to other popular forms such as the folk tale, forms that we all know to have potentially infinite iterations. Pop songs are no longer signature works (even if there might be exemplary performances of them), but are rather authorless, beginingless folk reference points (or at least that is how we can now experience them).
When I was a teenager I believed that 'Muleskinner Blues' was, simply, a song by The Cramps. One late night, recently, I spent some time on YouTube, and watched at least a dozen iterations of the same song. To my mind the most basic version of it, and also the most elegant and probably my favorite, was Merle Haggard's:
I don't know what year this is from, though I would estimate it is around 1969, close to the same moment when he began antagonizing the hippies (though recent revisionist history now says that was all a misunderstanding; Merle was alway on the good side).
Next I moved on to Dolly Parton, from around the same era. She is singing in the same general genre, but the style and tone of it is very different. It is whimsical and full of personality, and far removed from the actual content of the lyrics (would there ever really be a 'lady mule-skinner'?).
But there is another, parallel legacy to this song, a split in its evolutionary path, that precedes both Dolly and Merle's interpretations, and goes back to the very beginnings of rock-and-roll. It portrays the mule-skinner character as insane, perhaps murderous, someone who has been depraved and bestialized by his line of work. Here are The Fendermen, from, I suppose, around 1957:
And finally we come to The Cramps (where it all started, for me). The Cramps take their cue more from The Fendermen than from Haggard, though there's a lot else going on there as well. The Cramps are hard to genealogize fully and with precision: the principal elements, anyway, are the celebration of '50s b-movie horror (already innovated long before by Screamin' Jay Hawkins); conscious or unconscious influence from New York Dolls-style drag that preceded them by a few years (hence Lux Interior's bra); and a deep and true love of the sort of authentic American roots music that gave us 'Muleskinner Blues' in the first place. Anyway here's their version:
At this stage of life I still find this iteration curious, but I confess it's the one that leaves me with the least desire to hit 'replay'.
But my point with these examples, and there are more, and I could go on and on, is that as YouTube increasingly becomes my principal source of finding and learning about new music, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to think of popular music as --as the aestheticians say-- autographic. I suspect blues and folk musicians never thought of it this way, and for this reason tended to put up resistance at being integrated into the star system maintained by the record companies in their golden age.
YouTube, I think, is helping to put popular music in proper perspective as the sort of art form it is.
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I'm jet-lagged after a sleepless night, waiting for a connecting flight at Charles de Gaulle. I may want to make some corrections or additions to this post soon. But the thought of it kept my mind active as I crossed over the wine-dark Atlantic, and I wanted to get it out before it faded.
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