It's not as easy as it sounds for a middle-aged person (middle age is after youth, right?) to watch the music that teenagers and twenty-somethings listen to, the music that young people make. I guess it was never easy.
Where is the difficulty in this day and age? I believe in its almost complete abandonment melody by young people as a means of mainly emotional, but also hidden mathematical, enjoyment and by extension a positive effect on the psychosomatic state of a person.
The simplest definition of melody is a succession of notes of different pitch. This can range from the succession of a few notes in a short space that a musical recitation (recitativo) has, to the fullness that gives us a melody of the great classics or a traditional song, etc. The recitativo has always served the utterance of speech while at the same time creating an "atmosphere ” in the rituals, therefore also in the theater as a development of rituals. But almost always in art it was also combined with the complete melodies within a work. He was rarely alone.
What has happened in youth music in Greece after the crisis, is the complete prevalence of recitation on a phthongo with a background of a rhythmic and motivic loop. Of course, it started from American rap music, but it has been combined with many other genres: readings over heavy metal, reggae, electronica, etc. motifs. The main goal is the direct expression of the problems of young people on a rhythmic minimal melodic repetitive pattern, which creates the appropriate atmosphere (this has been helped by the experience and history of minimalism in music).
"I want to say" is a well-known song by Akis Panos in the style of an amane. But he didn't say them, he made them into songs. The youth of our time they call them. And there is so much that they have to say that is piled up within the measures of a four-minute loop, thus helping their ecstatic reception by the listeners. They don't care if what they say is nice, but true for them, they care. Honesty is their great quality.
What is completely out of season is the lyricism. This strange invention of the 6th BC. century which was the expression of the personal view with the help of poetry and melody, and which since then has not stopped reappearing in different places and times, in the Elizabethan song of 1600, in the Lied of 1820, in the songs of Theodorakis. Gradually from 1955 the melody begins to lose ground from the mainstream music, although there were also glimpses such as the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Johny Mitchell and several others at that time, but they cannot negate the big picture.
So I see the generation gap, the one before mine and the next. Artistically I take the part of the previous, generation of melody, not so much emotionally because of nostalgia, but consciously, recognizing its value more and more each time. Especially in the Greek song, which with the word chosen by the language to replace the chant, shows the effort of the songwriters to fit the entirety of a tragedy in 3-4 minutes.
*Cover photo: Illustration by Julia Hasting, The ambient Walkman. / Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company