Music (?) Has Turned to Noise

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the editorial/opinion page staff
published by the StarTribune
June 19, 1966


   WE'VE BEEN warned by the World Health Organization that it's time to worry about something besides air and water pollution. Mental pollution is an even more pressing concern.
   Mental pollution, says a WHO report, is associated with urban living and is caused by noise--honking horns, screaming jets, blatting radio and TV sets, loudspeakers, jackhammers, and the guy in the next apartment hanging pictures.
   Another cause of mental pollution is crowding. Dr. Arie Querido, president of the National Federation for Mental Health of The Netherlands, says that when too many people are massed in too little space, acts of violence occur and there also is a drop in the birth rate.

   HOWEVER, it is the debilitating effects of noise--a type of noise generated by youth--with which we deal here, noise from which there is no easy escape unless your house is big as a livery barn and you can isolate yourself from the racket.

Jimmy Smith running amuck

   Today's teenager seems unable to tolerate quiet. He is a different and mysterious breed. A phonograph is as important as his right arm. Far from being distracted by records or radio, he cannot study without their discipline, particularly if the music is rock 'n' roll or some long-haired folksinger is muttering in his whiskers or a jazz organist is running amuck.
   That celebrated folk rocker, composer and balladeer, Bob Dylan, no doubt pays his bills on time and is good to friends and relatives, but he is my sworn enemy. The author of a recent magazine piece was charitable enough to call him a poet, which I dispute. Poetry should make a scintilla of sense but I doubt if I could detect any in Dylan's even if I could understand him. His flat, blurred and weary monotone makes one wonder if he is trying to sing and simultaneously eat hash.
   I agree with Allen Tate, poet and professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Tate says that Dylan and others like him "flatter people who want to believe that, without knowledge and discipline, they may paint pictures, make sculptures, and write music or poetry."

   THE NORMAL ADULT, on hearing for the first time one of the new breed's instrumental numbers, swears that the needle is stuck, so persistently are identical cacophonies repeated. I used to hear better than this at charivaris.
   "I define nothing," Dylan is quoted as saying, "not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be."
   This I can believe--and Tate's judgment seems confirmed. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby say that today's composers aren't writing songs fit to sing. The latter declares that had he come on the scene with only today's rock 'n' roll tunes to choose from, he'd have abandoned singing and been a lawyer.
   I have hopes that melody will return, but the quiet of yesterday probably won't. We are engulfed by cars,  people, television and radio, and there's no hint that the kids will turn the volume knobs down.
   My father used to make derogatory cracks about Ada Jones and Billy Murray, singing stars of the Victrola era. And when "Yes, We Have No Bananas" was a hit, he sighed and shook his head. But the Beatles and the Rolling Stones would have been too much. They'd have shortened his life by 10 years.

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