What is cool in music today? What is rebellious? What shocks people and make them frown? Is it Hip-Hop? Taylor Swift? Beyoncé?
Being a musician making a living can sometimes be attached to the Wow factor in the way you dress, or the behavior attached to your style of music.
When Hip-Hop came on the scene, it was displaying the heavy gold jewelry, the big black S.UVs, the baggy pants and the hand signs, among other things. All of that was outside the norm, the norm being the electric guitar, the jeans, the bandana, the muscle cars. The punk movement was displaying the extravagant haircut, the ripped T-shirt and jeans, the ears pierced in forty places. In the first half of the twentieth century the Jazz musicians dressed in well-cut suit and wore fedoras. Each of these style had their stars, their bands whether it was Frank Sinatra or The Clash.
But here is a question: what was before jazz? What was considered cool and rebellious?
One of them was the waltz. The waltz, you say? The waltz. People of the best society were regarding it as a disgrace. These dancers with their bodies glued to each other, not sharing their partners, turning wildly on the dance floor made some citizens faint with disgust.
Does music and musicians need to be outrageous to make a living. I would say yes. Bach himself said that boredom comes from uniformity. If it doesn’t have some element that rubs you the wrong way, music won’t retain your attention. Haydn made a Symphony where a timpani explodes after a long conventional passage, which earned it the name “The Surprise”. Vivaldi, in his music called “The spring” replicated dogs barking in the distance. Is it so far away from the sticker we saw on CDs and Vinyl warning of “Parental advisory”?
Musicians are a dime a dozen and, for better or worse, need to attract the crowd to their production. They use all sorts of ways to accomplish that. I’ll give you another ancient one. When Beethoven composed his Ninth Symphony he had a full choir of 60 people standing in the back of the room as the different movements were played. It is only on the last movement, the fourth one that they blast into action, bringing down the house. A genius to be sure!
