Twilight Of the Gods

You knew it was going to happen eventually.

Elton John, Paul Simon, and Neil Diamond, three of the biggest pop stars of the seventies,  are getting ready to leave the stage now that they're in their own seventies.  Elton John, who turns 71 this month, and Paul Simon, 75, have announced that their current tours will likely be their last.  Neil Diamond, 77, has announced he has Parkinson's disease, and so he's not going to be performing any more either.

Diverse though they seem to be on the surface, they all have one thing in common.  They're rooted in the singer-songwriter pop tradition, first developed by Neil Sedaka and his songwriting partner Howard Greenfield in the early sixties and expanded upon through the acoustic-based sound typified by Carole King (who started out writing songs for others with her husband Gerry Goffin), Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Jim Croce, Randy Newman, and of course, Crosby, Stills, and Nash.  Some singer-songwriter music rocked, and some of it was mellow, but all of it took songwriting to a more intimate and personal level, allowing its practitioners to tell stories, share their feelings, and even come up with some brilliant satire (Croce was especially adept at this, as is Newman).

Elton John, Paul Simon and Neil Diamond have all demonstrated the versatility of the singer-songwriter movement.  Elton and his lyrics-writing partner Bernie Taupin leaned toward pop-rock and made rock and roll more eclectic and more fun.  Simon, a folk singer who helped create folk-rock in the mid-sixties while working with Art Garfunkel, melded the personal with the socially conscious in his solo work and expanded farther beyond his coffeehouse roots, incorporating reggae, gospel, Andean folk, salsa, South African mbaqanga, and Brazilian sounds into his music.  Diamond was unapologetically in the vein of Tin Pan Alley, though even Cole Porter wouldn't have come up with something as sly as "Cracklin' Rosie" or as moody as "Song Sung Blue."  They helped make the 1970s a diverse decade musically.

I note all this about the singer-songwriters of the past because, if you've had the misfortune of hearing hit radio lately, you know you're not going to find the same variety and quality in today's singer-songwriters . . . largely because there aren't that many around to begin with.  Most songs today are written by two or three hacks and given to the top stars to record, and the songs have carefully calculated hooks and standardized words so that they sound familiar . . that is, like the most recent song to hit number one.  And what few pop singer-songwriters are around aren't exactly inspiring. Taylor Swift, despite being known for her personal style of songwriting, still relies a lot of outside hack material herself, and on the other side of the Atlantic, we have Ed Sheeran, who can't think of much better to sing about than the shape of his girlfriend's body.  True, there are younger singer-songwriters worth mentioning, like Nicole Atkins, Brandi Carlile, Jason Isbell, and Josh Ritter, but unless you live in a metropolitan area with a college-indie radio station on the low end of the FM dial, you're not likely to hear them on the radio much.

The music business hasn't been interested in developing another Elton, Simon, or Neil - Diamond or Young - because it wants to economize in this changing music environment where entertainment companies are bigger and return on investment in new music acts is smaller. Cultivating lightweight, cookie-cutter pop stars offers a guaranteed profit.  So, while people talk about the diversity of today's performers - meaning, a lot fewer white men like the septuagenarians I've just been talking about - there's no diversity of musical style or content.  In fact, today's pop has little of either.

So, no, we're never going to see or hear the likes of Elton John, Paul Simon, or Neil Diamond ever again, but we still have the records, and - as long as 70s on 7 still keeps broadcasting on Sirius XM - the radio play.