Believe it or not (and I admit I had to check) Punk happened 40 years ago. Remember that the next time someone says ‘what we need is another Punk revolution to get sales moving again’. And yes, I have said it myself from time to time. You can debate the authenticity of the Punk movement till the cows come home but what I’d suggest matters far more for our purposes is how long it has been since Messrs Rotten, Vicious and the rest took to the stage and even more important still, that there has been no significant ‘yoof upheaval’ since – and no, rave culture doesn’t count as it was almost entirely a passive experience. And as for Rap…
Prior to Punk we’d had had a stream of youthquakes stretching back to the invention of the teenager after the Second World War. Each had had a strong musical component that had spawned a wave of wannabe musicians and, as my first boss in this industry used to illustrate with a sine wave drawn on his desk blotter (which shows you how long ago it was) instrument sales peaked each time. Teddy Boys, Skiffle, The Beatles and Stones, Jimmy Hendrix and Cream, Punk…
You could argue that the shredding thing sold a few pointy headstock Ibanez and Charvels in the 1980s but that was never a mass movement because mass movements depend on them being accessible and how many could even try to play like Steve Vai or Jason Becker?
Possibly the only thing that has come along in recent years has been the return of the acoustic guitar wielders who grace the cover of Acoustic most months, with their chin high tattoos, beards, Steinbeck era dungarees and soulful depression-era looks that don’t quite work on well-fed Millennials. That has probably sold a lot of acoustic guitars – but is it a real generational major musical upheaval? I’d suggest not.
At the same time something else weird has been going on. Someone somewhere has turned off the tap that supplies guitar heroes and today’s beginner is quite likely to cite Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page as their inspiration. And why that is weird is because their heyday was 50 years ago. That’s a bit like you, circa 1980, citing Max Jaffa as your inspiration.
Count back. If in the 1970s you had been listening to music that was 40 years old. That would have made your inspirations Rudy Vallee, Bing Crosby or perhaps Ivor Novello – all very worthy but not what I bet readers who were around then were actually listening to. Drop back another ten years and it would have meant the audience that were emulating the Stones, the Beatles and the Kinks would instead have been rocking out to an extended soundtrack from The Great Gatsby.
I’m no sociologist but what I am suggesting is that something has changed. We have had no major musical or social upheavals for a very long while and there is no obvious prospect of one. It’s true that, like a dodgy pizza, when they arrive no one could remember having sent out for it, but even so…
What this says to me is that the entry level of our market is not likely to see the sort of huge influxes that have grown the MI industry at intervals ever since the 1950s. Also that the nostalgia business, (which is, some argue, where the profit is anyway – the 40 year and older returnees for whom it’s either a Harley or a Les Paul) is what we are going to be living with for the foreseeable future.
‘The foreseeable future’ is, I admit, the nub of this. No one saw Bill Haley coming any more than they predicted the Beatles and it’s true something could break out tomorrow that makes everything I have written above about as helpful as a YouGov election prediction.
If I am right, though, it means the sort of industry boosting movements of the past might be a long time coming to our rescue. The painfully true Pink Floyd observation ‘You bought a guitar to punish your Ma’ doesn’t ring so true today, nor does Roll Over Beethoven – and until there is something fresh in music to get excited about, what we have in the way of business now is likely to be all we are going to get for the foreseeable future.