The Boy listens to country music. I try to be supportive of his problem, but, you know, there's only so much one can really do.
He loves Garth Brooks. While I'm willing to listen to Alison Kraus, and some of Brad Paisley and a few other artists, I cannot stand Garth Brooks.
When I was in first grade, everyone listened to Garth Brooks, New Kids on the Block, Michael Jackson and that guy that did Achy Breaky Heart. That was as far as music went when you were six years old in 1991. I did not. My parents listened to the Oldies and as far as I had a preferance for music I liked Christmas carols, songs from Reading Rainbow and Sesame Street and traditional songs.
So, I wasn't listening to that crap when it first came out. This is, apparently, the first thing I did wrong in developing a social base.
Anyway, all that aside, I'd never heard much of this stuff until The Boy. But I've come to the realisation that Garth Brooks has three, maybe four songs. Most of his songs are a variation of one of his other songs.
Now, were this on purpose, we could call him Mozart and evaluate how he's changed each song and think he's the greatest. But, obviously this isn't the case. If he knew all the songs sounded alike, well, he probably wouldn't have released them, right? Or at least he would've made an effort to make it a bit clearer. So, I don't think this was some master plan, and he's oblivious to what he's done.
I've said this about Andrew Lloyd Webber. I think you can trace most of his songs back to either "What's the Buzz?" or the score of Evita. It's a little less obvious, but if Webber doesn't have Tim Rice writing his lyrics, the songs are all really flat and dry. The only compelling thing about the musicals are the weird phrasings Rice uses to break up the rhythms and keep audiences listening. Note that any ALW musical without Tim Rice has either flopped or pretty much done nothing (excepting Cats, and the lyrics from THAT were all stolen from someone who knew what he was doing with words too).
But, people love Garth Brooks and Webber. Why? Is it because all the music is exactly the same? Are humans subconciously drawn to a certain tune, they're just not aware of it?
I know that I have a thing for arpeggio. If you look at a lot of the music I really like, you see a lot of arpeggio. My Name is Jonas is this way, and a lot of other songs (I can't think of names off-hand because The Boy's got Iron and Wine going, and it's hard for me to think of another song when I'm listening to one.)
I also like hemiola (Carol of the Bells), some ostinato (Rite of Spring, Revel's Bolero), and arch form. An example of the latter is Barber's Adagio for Strings- it's one of the few pieces I love that I've never had the opportunity to play. I was a freshman the year my high school orchestra director put together the double quartet to do it. I'm pretty sure it was a double quartet rather than an even smaller chamber orchestra. I was in the chamber orchestra, which was maybe half the full orchestra (there were about forty of us), and this was only eight or ten instruments, which is why I say double quartet.
Anyway, those are patterns that I recognise in music that I like, but they're still not the same. It's not all in the same key, not the same syncopation, they're just elements. It's not as though Adagio for Strings and Carol of the Bells are in any way identical, or related.
Listen to Plain White Tee's "Hey There Delilah" and TMBG's "Birdhouse in Your Soul." When I have people actually listen to the opening line melodies one after the other, they'll agree with me that they're close. Just to say that they're similar makes everyone tell me I'm full of crap, but when they listen, they can see what I'm saying.
The number of sounds we can make and hear and turn into music is really pretty limited, but there are an infinite number of permutations involved. But, I think that there are plenty of combinations that aren't being considered. So, what's the difference between the ones we pick and the ones we don't? What's the music we don't listen to sound like? Coud we go back several million years and see the cavemen hanging around purchasing insurance from Geico and humming "What's the Buzz?"
OK, probably not, but you see what I'm saying. We only know the music we've written down, recorded, the music that we haven't heard, it's lost. I just wonder if we could find it, if we could compare it to the music now and find some common trend.
Are there people out there comparing Mozart to The Beatles, looking for root similarities? There probably are, but if there aren't, there should be.
But, just, do me a favour, Garth Brooks, if you're going to write the same song three or four times with different lyrics, could you at least aknowledge it? Please?