When great bands go bad

How many musicians or songwriters in ANY genre have continued producing quality work for long periods of time? Even before the rock era, the answer was "not many." Even the most talented of composers only has so many ideas, and he's bound either to run dry or start repeating himself after a while. MOST composers have only a few fertile years.

So, the real question isn't "how did REM sink so low." It's "How
did they stay good as long as they did?" From "Murmur" to "Monster"
was a very good 14 year run. Not many classical or jazz composers have had similarly long periods of productivity.

"Not many classical or jazz composers have had similarly long periods of productivity."

I don't know much about jazz, but I know a lot about classical music (my brother is a classical musician, and I grew up with a music-loving family). To say that not many classical composers have had something similar to a 14-year good run is nonsensical. Most of the "greats" had very long periods of productivity. Even those who died young (like Mozart and Mendelssohn) started early and produced masterpieces for a very long time.

If you even want to feel depressed by comparing yourself to a genious, listen to Mendelssohn's Overture to Midsummer Night's Dream. He wrote it at 17.

But most of the great composers lived at least into their 40's or 50's, and some had long lives. Most remained productive throughout. Some went through very obvious stages (Stravinsky, Copland, etc.), so they actually had more than one "good run."

I liked the closing paragraphs of Barry Gewen's fine review in Dissent of The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross, a pathbreaking work of cultural history from last year:

"GLOBALIZATION IS a process that’s taking place culturally as well as economically. Alex Ross has his own vision of cultural globalization, which involves the spread of modern classical music into countries and cultures beyond the West. He even hopes that new audiences in 'far-flung places' will make up for the West’s lack of interest in its own modern music. Again, one can’t say with certainty that he’s wrong. But one can harbor suspicions that modern classical music is a kind of Esperanto, universal precisely because it has roots nowhere.

"The American pop aesthetic is exactly the opposite. It is rooted first in the many traditions of American music, then in Western tonality, and finally in the universality of the pentatonic scale. It reaches out to other cultures not from above, as a superior force majeure intent on wiping out local traditions, but in a spirit of commonality and shared human experience. It steps onto the world’s cultural stage bringing with it Bach cantatas, Mozart operas, Beethoven string quartets, as well as the songs of Gershwin, Dylan, and the Beatles, saying, 'Look at what these guys do. Isn’t this stuff terrific?' Then it falls silent and listens. Because other cultures have created music that they think is terrific too, and the West is largely ignorant and unappreciative of it. Rather than a clash of civilizations, the pop aesthetic introduces the impulse to mix and blend, much as it did in creating America’s musical synthesis in the fifties and sixties. This blending will take time, though, because it occurs slowly, not out of some preconceived expectation about the musical future but, as with the rock explosion, because the music will sound right, feel good. You can’t hurry love, either through some overarching plan or by force. Nor, it should be added, can force prevent the blending from happening. That was tried in many places during the twentieth century, and the only lasting result was massive destruction and wholesale slaughter. It’s natural for people who learn about others different from themselves to want to mingle with them (as natural as it is to be suspicious of them). Sex and music are both excellent integrators.

"Not long ago, I was talking to a friend who had recently given birth. We were discussing breast-feeding. She said that when she nurses her child, she is aware that she is engaged in an activity that goes back to the very beginnings of our species, and that she feels she is part of the great stream of life. Music goes back too, not to humanity’s biological origins, but almost—to the origins of human culture. History sent humanity spinning off in different directions. Today, we stand poised for a momentous reunion. That is why Haydn wasn’t exactly wrong when he said 'my language is understood in the whole world.' He was ahead of his time. Music is not yet a single language, but now we can see a time when it might be. Making music or listening to it or dancing to it brings everyone together with everyone else, like black and white teenagers in the apartheid South in 1950s America—as long as people are permitted to mix. For, as Haydn did know, music is both universal and elemental. It overcomes differences. Like breast-feeding, it plunges us into the great stream of life."

dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=991