Why do rock songwriters lose their touch as such an early age when classical composers didn't?

So you move on to other things -- self-indulgent skiffle albums, free-jazz noodling in your home studio, producing U2...

Please list your exceptions!

Like poets, say, classical composers work in an extremely rich formal tradition that lays out new challenges and gives their work a lot of retrospective referential ability; they have an extremely wide expressive and instrumental range; they work in an entirely different, more cerebral idiom; the quality of their compositions has no relation to their ability as performers. And at the most fundamental level classical composers are trying to produce Great Art, while pop musicians are not.

Also, there's about 700 years of classical compositional history, and only about 70 years of pop music history; so maybe we just haven't seen the people working in that idioim who are capable of producing new and exciting work into old age. But still, I think that, to put it bluntly, since classical composition is more complicated than songwriting, it calls upon entirely different capabilities that aren't related to the ability to be a songwriter.

That and the image thing.

IMO that would make them better. The only example I can think of who has actually become more complex and better is Elvis Costello though (and I know a lot of people will disagree with me when I claim he has gotten better throughout the years)

Now take Beethoven and Bach: they wrote religious music, piano exercises, fugues and canons, symphonies, quartets, trios, concertos, variations, etc., of variable length and of completely different structures and compositions. Plus, they were truly transcendent geniuses of the kind that stretch the limits of what human beings can possibly do with their brains. Even though I love rock music, I just don't think you can compare the two genres. Even Elvis Costello is not improvising five-part fugues at the keyboard, for example.

Just a speculation, but: typically, songwriters are expressing something about their lives, bouncing off of personal experience. With fame and success comes paranoia, careerist desires to protect a kingdom, fear/anxiety at the idea of one's own work being interpreted/dissected by journalists, narcissism, self reflexive tidbits about celebrity and fame taking center stage etc. i.e. the very conditions of musical success produce an environment in which the topics one is then tempted to write songs about are either:

a) alienating to joe blow consumers who can't relate
b) obnoxious
c) cliché, not specific to them, just a rise/fall fame arc speaking through the songwriter

There are however plenty of exceptions. Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Bjork, and Dylan all come to mind immediately. I think it's more a function of how curious the songwriter was all along about other people, and of how capacious their aesthetic is in the first place.

Generally speaking, I think it's safe to say that rock musicians, athletes and super-duper-genius scientists do their best work in their twenties. Certainly Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton fit that description. So do the Beatles, Dylan, and Rolling Stones.

But then you look at other disciplines and that gets thrown out the window. For example, Philip Roth, who is doing his best work in his late sixties/seventies.

Classical music consumers don't care as much about the age of the writer or performer. Older composers can still control the principal trends in their field. However, trends in today's popular music are driven by younger consumers. 16-year olds don't want to listen to pop-punk songs that are written and performed by 50-year olds, they want to listen to pop-punk songs that are written and performed by 20-year olds. So, the 50-year olds don't even bother trying to write the same songs they wrote in their twenties, because they're no longer marketable to the people who are buying that genre of music.

Of course without stats I could just be wrong.

xpost x 2

Also, so many jazz musicians who started out in a aggressive vein can still rip in their 70s... Insane.

Those rediscovered Delta blues guys sounded pretty great in the 60s, too. Son House? Mississippi John Hurt?

I think the more interesting question is why they lose the ability to denote a decent tune.

People who started in punk are challenging the youth thing, which is interesting to me, since it's often regarded as the most fly-by-night, disposeable, youth-oriented music. I think that the recent Mission of Burma record is really good. I think that The Fall are still great. I think that two recent Mekons records ("Journey to the End of the Night" and "OOOH") are absolutely incredible--two of their best. In fact, I think that if those records appeared as though they were by a new and young group, they would have had the potential of being better-regarded.

Walter Schreifels, who started in 1987 in Gorilla Biscuits, is writing his best songs now, in Walking Concert. Ian MacKaye is going strong, and Shellac now is better than any Albini band at any time before. The latest Social Distortion record is arguably their best.

Did you see that Clash documentary? When Joe Strummer is talking about his father, he said that one thing he learned from him was, "You study."

I think that some artists, punk and beyond, are way more self-reflective, aware of career arcs, and historically minded, than rock artists prior to that. Those Strummer solo records are so good because, as he said, he studied.

An interesting analogy that does indeed work for a lot of science. I mean, medicine, obviously.

Can we look at other forms of popular music besides rock please?

I did in my original post, but it seems it is generally the same thing for other genres. Electronica is possibly even more extreme than rock. Pop songwriters may last a bit longer, but not singer/songwriters. In the soul and blues genres, performers may last a lifetime, but they will usually not perform material by the same songwriters throughout their entire careers (and if they do... I mean..... "That's What Friends Are For" is hardly up there with "Walk On By", "Don't Make Me Over" or "Alfie" anyway....)

They learn by assimilating the styles of the past, or the current style, taking from it what they like and then breaking the rules to create something individual to themselves. This gives them a much larger vocabulary to work with. They then need to use this large vocabulary to create something individual to themselves, often constantly striving for a new sounds, this can take a long time, a lifetime.

I'd argue that a large majority of rock composers don't think in this same way. They have a smaller vocabulary, they tend to have a strong idea of what they want their music to sound like. They have less to work with, they tend to reach their peak earlier, exhausting all they can do within their limited vocabulary. Many move on, learn new tricks and continue to grow, many don't and are content with sticking with the same sounds. Lots of rock bands stick with exactly the same style of harmony throughout their entire career just alternating arrangements and progressions. Lots of hip hop keeps the same structures and arrangements and just alternates the sounds used etc.

Hence the dominance of certain chord progressions, certain timbres, certain arrangements in pop and rock music (interestingly linked to nature and phi and stuff). Many rock and pop composers and content to work within these limits, they are proven to work. But I'd argue that it takes someone special to be able to work within these limits over a long period of time without exhausting what they can do, especially with all the bullshit that comes with being famous.

You could relate all this to the rise of the importance of sounds/noises in 20th Century music, how personality overcomes limitations in hip-hop, how technology influences new music

Hmm, I might have just repeated what's up-thread in a more complicated way, oh well...

So you liked "The Plot Against America"? hmmm

And John Darnielle; the new Mountain Goats album may be the pinnacle of his 12-odd year songwriting career.