Is Music’s Romantic Vocabulary Silenced?

They walk the streets and malls with a mini-CD player tightly clutched in their hands, headphones bridging their ears, a glazed look in their eyes. More likely than not, they are teenagers, alone or in groups, listening to Eminem or some other rapper infusing and inflaming their fantasies with ugly images of rage, violence and brutal sex.

They are the latest generation in the thrall of MTV, now celebrating its 20th anniversary of shaping the hearts, the minds and the behavior of teenagers with surrealistic sensory assaults.

Popular music was not always this way.

How did it get from where it once was to where it is today? By now, two or three generations have grown up without any idea of what popular music once meant to predecessors of their own age.

Most people who attended high school or college during the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s learned how to express the intense youthful emotions of love and romance mostly by listening to the love songs of those decades. They were rendered by a number of gifted vocalists, the most notable of whom perhaps was Frank Sinatra. Sinatra’s exquisite interpretation of the words and music, often written by some of the most celebrated songwriters and composers of the first half of this century, defined love and romance in an idealized emotional vocabulary.

Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin and Johnny Mercer were but a few of the legendary creators of an almost poetic style of love song and imagery that inspired the romanticism of that era.

The cheek-to-cheek, close-quarters dancing styles that evolved during those years further reinforced the tender and loving emotions that suffused young relationships. The soft and mellow musical arrangements featured by the big bands exemplified by Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey encouraged that type of dancing, and served to further enhance the misty aura. Such music set the romantic mood for nearly every senior prom held during those years.

The hormonal rushes of those decades were no less intense than they are today. But it was certainly more elevating to ascribe them to “a trip to the moon on gossamer wings” rather than “I want your sex,” as one of the best-selling songs of a more recent vintage bluntly put it.

Judged by contemporary standards, this might all seem hopelessly old-fashioned. Teenagers brought up under the influence of MTV today would no doubt scoff at what moved people then, without realizing how impoverished their own generation is, completely lacking a truly romantic vocabulary without even knowing it.

There are those who might argue that the starry-eyed visions of those bygone years contributed to a certain degree of unrealistic expectation. But on balance, most would agree the positive influences outweighed the negative.

The end of that era began in the early 1950s when some truly awful records, written at a teeny-bopper level or lower, began popping up at the top of the best-seller charts. Record companies suddenly awoke to the fact that vast numbers of younger teenagers were not only willing to buy records, but more important, also had the wherewithal to do so. It also became quickly apparent that their numbers were growing, and that they were purchasing many more records than older buyers.

The music industry was quick to respond, and the target-audience level of popular music was lowered and changed forever. The songs written by the Porters, Mercers, Berlins and Gershwins, et al. disappeared from the charts, and the so-called “bubble gum” genre took over.

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As the tastes of teeny-boppers became more dominant, the artistic devolution accelerated. The lush orchestral instrumentation, the complex harmonies and the sophisticated arrangements of the big band era gave way to repetitive, hard-driving rhythms and far fewer instruments. Reeds, strings and even much of the brass virtually vanished, replaced by a proliferation of booming big drums and electronically amplified guitars and keyboards.

The beat became the driving force. Even the most simplistic lyrics were often unintelligible, drowned out in a tidal wave of primitive pound and sound. Words were almost completely lost. In a constant raucous assault of shrieks, screams and shouts, the base level to which lyrics ultimately descended defies description. The competition to push the envelope for shock value knew no limits. Soon the very foulest of once-taboo words were set to music, describing every form of degrading and aberrant sexual behavior imaginable.

Instead of the romantic ballads that once sublimated the earliest emergence of boy-girl attraction at its most formative stage, these new horrors offered far different models for young relationships in the worst possible way. The long-term effects have yet to be fully measured.

The changes in dancing style that accompanied this upheaval were equally flagrant. The close-quarters dancing styles of the big band era were replaced by couples mostly standing apart, engaging in explicitly all-out sexual twisting, shimmying, bumping and grinding pelvic contortions. There was nothing subtle about it, and more than a little unsettling when watching middle-school preteens and younger high schoolers performing entirely uninhibitedly in that fashion without a trace of self-consciousness.

As time has gone on, there has been a stream of higher-caliber romantic songs that appealed to a more mature audience and also managed to penetrate the more thoughtful of the younger set. But the percentage has been woefully small.

To the generations that have come along since the ‘50s and never knew what was being left behind, it is probably impossible to fully describe. But to those who were there, the sense of loss is deeply felt.

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Stan Cohen is a commercial real estate developer and occasional writer who lives in Newport Beach.