Infernal Music

It is never a big surprise when a member of one generation doesn’t care much for music popular with the next – or, in my case, the one after the next. (I actually liked a lot of GenX material.) What is surprising, however, is how many young people agree that popular music has gotten worse. There are countless magazine/e-zine articles on the subject and even scientific studies trying to quantify the badness. (See Why is Modern Music so Awful?) None of that slows down the consumption of it.

In many ways, this assessment is unfair as such broad judgments usually are. De gustibus, and all that. Current day popular recording artists must be speaking to their audience on some level or they wouldn’t be dominating the charts. I just don’t happen to be that audience. Besides, there are contemporary artists and bands that do I like, many of them playing basic blues-based rock (Dorothy, the Black Keys, Samantha Fish, et al.). These do quite well with a sizable (overwhelmingly non-gray-haired) niche audience. It’s just not sizable enough to lift these bands to the top ten chart. Pop and rap rule. (No unabashed rock band has charted a top ten single in a decade.) Nonetheless, the pop music genre – heavy on glitz and stagecraft but otherwise lightweight – that became so dominant at and since the turn of the millennium simply doesn’t appeal much to me, and not just because of its repetitive rhythms. It seems to lack heart. Despite all the bikini clad twerking going on in so many of the acts, it even lacks heat. 1940s big band singers attired in tuxedos and evening gowns were fundamentally far more sensual.

One act (with both heart and heat) that did appeal to me in the first decade of the 21^st century was the band Devil Doll fronted by Colleen Duffy. Her music is very hard to categorize: part rockabilly-punk, part torch songs, part blues, and part something else. (Like the bands mentioned above, Devil Doll won a sizable niche audience but no more than that – its biggest exposure was probably on the soundtrack of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode.) Devil Doll turned out two remarkable albums in this century’s first decade, both of which I seriously recommend: Queen of Pain (the album to have if you get only one) in 2002 and The Return of Eve in 2007. (The latter is now hard to find on CD but is easy to stream.) Regrettably, Colleen Duffy soon afterward faced a batch of debilitating health problems (lupus among them) and her performing career screeched to a halt. She always had a return in mind, however, and in May 2020, she at last is back with a third Devil Doll album, Lover and a Fighter. She has lost none of her sultriness, but there is a discernible difference. She sounds less raw, more soulful. A brush with mortality is likely to inspire that, especially when paired with the normal passage of years. (Colleen doesn’t advertise her age, but she had a radio show in the early 1990s before forming her band… so, well, math.)

Several years back I wrote this preface to comments about a self-reflective album (Unvarnished) released by then 55-y.o rocker Joan Jett: “Usually the transition to an integrated sense of mortality occurs in middle age sometime. The change often is audible in the recordings of musicians. When young artists write or sing about death, they typically do so playfully (Jim Morrison) or indulgently (Jagger/Richards). In middle age the references become retrospective and thoughtful, not playful. Frank Sinatra released the album September of My Years (a blatant title if there ever was one) in 1965, the year he turned 50. Among the tracks on the album were “How Old Am I,” “Last Night When We Were Young,” and “It Was a Very Good Year.” In 1969 at age 49, Peggy Lee had her last big hit with "Is That All There Is?" At age 56, Bob Dylan, though perpetually irked at being called ‘the voice of a generation,’ voiced that generation’s aging pains with the album Time Out of Mind.”

The same preface applies to Lover and a Fighter. There is wistfulness in every track, whether the rollicking eponymous “Lover and a Fighter,” the lyrical “One Night Stand,” or the cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man.” Though Colleen’s health challenges are not behind her, she has managed to give us another solid album. If the reader is looking for something different from the standard pop output, all three albums are worth a listen.

The most wistful track on a wistful album

Devil Doll – To All Our Friends