Wall Street Journal columnist writes that she had a pretty good ear for all kinds of music all through her life, right up until about 2005 or 2010. At that point, she "stopped absorbing new music." In discussing this with a musician in his 40s, she wondered if her experience might be chalked up to aging or something of the like, but he quickly rejected the idea. "He said the reason I am not absorbing and holding music now is that at the time I stopped listening, popular musicians stopped doing melody," she writes. "They stopped doing the tune. They did other things, they kept the rhythm, the beat, but they started shunting aside melody." Upon reflection, Noonan has come to agree, and her column explores a bigger picture.
"Rhythm is felt, the beat is felt," she writes, "but melody is both thought and felt, so it has two ways to enter you." And it might go beyond music:
- "The past two years it became a thought of broader application—that maybe as a nation we've kept the beat, we've still got the rhythm, but the melody, the tune—this century hasn't been about those gentle things. We haven't been about them."
Read the
full column, in which Noonan suggests a yearning for melody—and perhaps "for a connection with something beyond that only a well crafted, fully felt song can provide"—is why younger generations seem to like songs from the past so much. Whatever the reasons, the shift away from melody is worth exploring, she writes.
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