By the way, for those like Tonawanda who tend to think pop music pretty much died 20 or 30 years ago: there are still people out there who can craft beautiful songs. They just don’t make it to big-time commercial radio, so you never hear them if you don’t look for them. An example that comes to mind right away is “White Winter Hymnal,” by Fleet Foxes. The lyric leaves a little to be desired, but then so did a lot of the ’60s and ’70s music (e.g. the song under discussion here).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrQRS40OKNE

As to understanding? Don’t… try to logic it, just let it flow. It makes a sort of sense. Whether it is what the writer intended matters little to me. I don’t trust writers, always, to understand what they themselves mean either, or anyway. Songs, especially since the 60’s, though before and long before to a lesser degree, are end user items.

I know, like writers of books, coded stuff was often put into songs. The thing is, if a code is so tight that no one understands… is it still code or just… nothing. Between those ‘in the know’ and the author – forgetting, or those same folk purposefully forgetting because they have since learned better (commy support perhaps, then after reading a bit of history losing all interest and cutting their traces back to the support of it at one time, for example), I have to wonder how many notions are just lost.

I had an earworm for it off and on all day yesterday, too, if it makes you any happier.

One problem is that very likely the singer’s voice was run through a device called a “sound-level compressor” (often just “compressor” for short). A sound-level compressor attempts to limit the dynamic range, by making the quieter parts louder and the louder parts quieter, so that everything is at the same sound level. Then the recording engineer has a consistent level for the vocals, making for a better mix.

The problem is that a sound-level compressor uses power as an approximation for loudness and the two are not the same. Because of the way human hearing works, broad-spectrum sounds will have higher loudness than narrow-band sounds of similar power. In other words, if you play a CD that has a single pure tone, then play random noise (“white noise”), the noise will sound louder even if they measure exactly the same power.

Why does the above matter? Because sibilants are broad-spectrum (they sound more like white noise than the rest of speech) so sound-level compressors overemphasize them. The compressor equalizes the power, but sibilants are then over-emphasized. Recording engineers call this problem “essing”.

Once I started paying attention, I found essing everywhere. It’s hard to un-learn to hear it. And the essing often happens before the reverb, so the sibilants get overemphasized and then reverbed!

If you really want a clear example, listen to “No Mercy” by The Tubes (off the Remote Control album). “But down on the shop floor, they showed me no mercy” becomes “But down on the SSShop floor, they SSShowed me no merCCCy”.

For a detailed discussion of why power is not the same thing as loudness, read this: http://audioskeptic.blogspot.com/2012/04/loudness-and-intensity-whats-difference.html

Does anyone play anything at 2014 weddings, birthday parties, celebrations, anniversaries, manufactured in the past 25 years?

I truly do not know, being an old guy. I am a clueless oldster, just making contact in a peripheral way, wondering about the dynamic of contemporary music.

If one listens to the 60’s channel on Sirius, one of the most amazing things is the clarity and subtlety of both the lyric and melody, although they are significantly and culturally different from the 40’s music.

The 70’s music is intriguing in its own way.

In the 80’s and beyond, popular music became absurd, not in an intentional way.

Electronic music and tech is not popular but is alluring and may produce great things. As a normal human, I do not have the experience to have an intelligent opinion, just a sense of things.

Younger people can immerse. Even Beethoven is remote in the immediacy though not the quality. Such is the affect of time.

It doesn’t matter. My heart wants younger people to see what they are giving up. Roger Simon, an amazing man, recently (implicitly) counseled for folks not to speak about what they are giving up.

He is probably right and I am probably wrong. I hope I am wrong.

Eric who posts is a person I admire and encourage. I want his activist approach to be practical.

My experience with non-Leftists (as am I), is that they do not even get close to understanding how things actually are, to their objective credit.