Hmmm…
Well, I quite like some of Emer Mayock’s tunes. Eoin Duignan has written a few nice ones as well. He’s probably better known for his original tunes and he doesn’t have fingers of quicksilver or anything, but I’ve been fortunate to play with Eoin a number of times and when he plays trad., he has a great gift for variations.
But enough on matters of taste. I think that the primary concern here is that (younger) musicians are mimicking the playing of popular bands/musicians rather than attempting to put their own stamp on the tunes they play. Frankly, I’m not too worried about it because something tells me that when these musicians are in their thirties and forties, I seriously doubt they’ll still be trying to sound like Lunasa or Flook or whoever note for note. When kids are thrashing away in garage bands, usually their goal is not to put some kind of unique stamp on the three chord wonder they’re playing, but to closely approximate what they heard on a CD. Much of the time, any originality that comes of it probably has more to do with an improper processing of influences than anything else. As musicians grow older, the desire to do one’s own thing usually increases.
I’m also not particularly concerned about the Irish tradition being swamped with syncopated, breakbeat-driven reels. Naive though it may sound, the invisible hand we call “the tradition” will in all likelyhood sweep a lot of this stuff into a dustbin over the coming decades. It’s the same with pop music, really. Irish music was (for Irish people anyways) pop music until relatively recently and the stuff that was both good and poplular survived while the stuff that was disposeable was, well, disposed of. Sometimes melodies that were really good didn’t make it and sometimes ones that weren’t so good miraculously dodged the bullet of evolution, but all in all, I think the above model works. Do you think anybody is going to care about a lot of the songs that are in this week’s Billboard Top Forty ten or twenty years down the road? Probably not. They’re disposeable. They’re not meant to last. They get people’s attention briefly, and then the vast majority of the time, they disappear into obscurity.
Okay, now apologies for going a bit off the deep end here and digressing, but bear with me. The other night I was watching the film “Donnie Darko” (which, to blunder even further off topic is a great movie, by the way), the soundtrack of which is loaded with '80s pop music. Some of this music was by bands that I really, really like (Echo and the Bunnymen, Joy Division, etc) and in my opinion, I think such music has stood the test of time pretty well. Some of the music was stuff that I hadn’t heard at all since the '80s. The point of all this is that with any musical tradtion, the rotten/boring/faddish stuff usually gets rooted out. Bands like “Moving Hearts” are already slipping from our collective memory and likely, a lot of the bands/musicians who are selling a lot of CDs right now and getting a fair bit of press will suffer the same fate. There’s some new tunes being played now that we’ll probably still hear twenty years down the road and a whole lot more that we’re not likely to hear ever again.
So next time you hear some young thing blasting through some fast, flashy, newly-penned tune, don’t worry about it. That musician probably won’t be playing it for very long.
