RIP Burt Bacharach

 

In his 90s, Burt Bacharach lived over four generations. In terms of pop music, that's anomalous because pop music didn't become pop as we (pre-Millennial generations) know it until the 1950s. There are very few people from the Silent Generation still alive so they don't inhabit our sphere of influence as artists. He was in his 20s in the 1950s so he was very contemporary in that time. He was already in his 40s in the late 1960s and changed his style accordingly--but he wasn't directly influenced by the Beatles. Had he been born in 1948 he would have--as many musicians were born in the late 40s. 

His old-school style of songwriting with a lyricist was still alive through the 1980s, and certainly in the 70s by Steely Dan. (Donald Fagan shadowed Bacharach's style in many ways). What is particularly interesting about his sound is that the music that he was writing in the 1960s was harmonically different and used more extended chords, probably as a jazz influence. (If instruments are containers of music, keyboards contain more harmonic possibilities and have the ease of playing in a wider range of keys--as opposed to using a guitar, where you might play in only a few keys). 

I did a riff a while back where I was talking about jazz and blues being the "training set" for rock and roll and that's still the case. But the rock and roll is different now and the training sets are different, and in many cases, actual training sets used in machine learning. In terms of Bacharach being in the training sets, he has lots of stuff on the internet, the source where data gets "scraped''.

Last night I watched quite a few videos, not just of him but all the artists that did his music. So there's another another level of influence incorporated by new technologies and new ways of understanding music history. 

See my RIP Playlist.