As I have said before, I don't go around judging people's music publicly, in general. To each his own, if you're willing to pay money for it, I won't be standing in between.
Yet, of course, I have my own tastes. I believe it was Louis Armstrong who said "There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.". I tend to think along these lines.
So today I put on my professor's hat (even if only for a moment) to discuss one of the major elements that separates the good from the bad in terms of songwriting: I guess we'll call it "consistency".
I have written elsewhere that the making of music is a process of discrimination. The songwriter comes up with the idea and works it out. He works toward enhancing the good quality and minimizing or eliminating the bad. Hopefully, every step of the process follows this procedure right up until the finished product.
But every so often, there is one of those "rules of discrimination" that I see being ignored, and it is one of my pet peeves. It is the rule of "consistency". That is to say, that the melody, arrangement & concept of the tune should all be going in the same direction.
I see this very often in cover tunes. In the quest to come up with a novel arrangement for an already well-known song, the tempo, harmonies, etc. will get changed until they no longer match the original mood and intent of the lyrics and/or melody...The most egregious example of this that I've seen lately is "The Grascals" cover version of the Monkees "Last Train to Clarksville".
The original tune had an air of excitement of two lovers getting together tempered by the solemnity of the possibility of them never seeing each other again. The arrangement supported this mood as well as it could in the rock'n'roll genre so I pronounce it very nicely done all things considered.
(As a side note, I think it was the timing of the tune that propelled it to the top as many young men were leaving wives & lovers to go off to Viet Nam, the same force of public resonation that drove the Beatles "All My Loving".)
But the Grascals version is an up-tempo bluegrass performance, the video consisting of all kinds of silliness a la "Hard Day's Night". It's nothing short of ludicrous when they get to the line "And I don't know if I'm ever coming home."....No matter how you interpret that statement, it sounds like they don't care very much if they ever come home. So I cringe.
I see this more rarely in original work, since most artists are sensitive enough to follow the "consistency" rule, but some very big hits put out by some very famous writers have really blown it. Apparently the public can ignore this if the song is captivating, but I can't. Try singing a Shakespearean sonnet to a heavy metal melody,or try "Into the valley of death, rode the 600..." as though it were a love song & you'll see what I mean.
The only exception that I can remember to this rule was Neil Sedaka's "Breaking Up is Hard to Do." He actually made two versions; an up-tempo fun rock'n'roll version, and a slow ballad. The subject matter would dictate that a song about a painful break-up would be best served by the slow tender version, but in my opinion that isn't the case. The rockin' version seems to me to have far more to recommend it.
Which proves that in the end, there are no rules in music. Away with the professor's hat!! While it's always best to learn the rules before you play with breaking them, in the end my best suggestion is: DO WHAT WORKS!
