The Timeless Power of Melody

I am at a Grand Canyon University (GCU) basketball game. It’s during a time-out, and the place is rocking — as usual. The cheer team has wrapped up its routine and is trotting off the floor when, coming over the sound system — cranked up to 11, maybe even 12 — is music. The tune is “Dancing Queen,” by ABBA.

I look over, across the floor, to the student section, the Havocs. The entire east bank of the arena, which seats over 7,000, is taken up by the GCU student section, which is equal to, in energy and passion, and arguably superior to, the Cameron Crazies (Duke), the Izzone (Michigan State), or the Kennel Club (Gonzaga), to name just three great student sections.

And every mouth of every Havoc is open wide and singing. Three thousand 17-, 18-, and 19-year-olds know the words to a song by … ABBA.

And it’s not just ABBA. It might be Bon Jovi (“Livin’ on a Prayer”) or Survivor (“Eye of the Tiger”) or Journey (“Don’t Stop Believin’”) — every golden oldie that booms out of the speakers has the Havocs in full throat.

These songs are from the ’80s or earlier. The kids aping the lyrics to these numbers weren’t even born then. Their parents weren’t even born then.

What is going on? Why do they know these songs?

There are theories. Take a cruise through Reddit and you’ll run into a gamut of reasons why young people are locking onto these great old songs — onto our songs, if I may be proprietary.

Some say it’s normal for kids to be into nostalgia — they recycle hair fashions and clothes, so why not music too? Others say kids listen to what their parents listen to, and all those trips to and from elementary school and Little League games with the Doobies and Fleetwood Mac and Creedence blasting out of the car speakers hooked the kids too. Others that with all genres of all periods so accessible now via streaming services, kids can call up the old stuff with a touch of the finger, and once they hear it, they fall in love.

And still others say that oldies are ubiquitous in media; they constitute background songs on commercials and on movie soundtracks, and that’s how they enter youthful brains. And then there are all the biopics of rock stars hitting the big screen — Jim Morrison, Freddie Mercury, Elvis, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Elton John, and Bob Dylan have all been memorialized in recent years. Those movies are filled with old songs.

But there may be a bigger reason. Kids nowadays, like kids in all eras, and indeed, like all people of all generations, like melody. They like a song that sounds like a song. A song they can hum or sing in the shower. A song they can let rip to the great outdoors with the windows rolled down while cruising a country highway. A song with a melody. And a lot of what passes for pop music today lacks that very thing.

Rhythm is in ascendance in modern pop music; melody is trending downward.

In a recent Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan complained to a musician that she wasn’t remembering new pop songs. She could call up lyrics to everything from the early eras — from the 1880s to the turn of the twenty-first century — but, she wrote, “around 2005 or 2010 I stopped absorbing new music. My memory didn’t hold new songs anymore.”

Her interlocutor told her why:

He said the reason I am not absorbing and holding music now is that at the time I stopped listening, popular musicians stopped doing melody. They stopped doing the tune. They did other things, they kept the rhythm, the beat, but they started shunting aside melody. That, he said, is why you stopped keeping it.

And we remember melody because, Noonan writes, “it has two ways to enter you” — “it is both thought and felt.”

Beat is merely felt. And you can’t hum beat, or sing it in the shower, or blare it to the countryside.

The reaction to Noonan’s column, if the published comments are any indication, range from great appreciation to dismissal to angry rebuttal. The agonists claim she either hit the nail on the head or missed the nail entirely.

Great melodies are still being fashioned by great artists, some said; moving songs written and performed by talented singers. You can find them if you look: in Christian music, in country, in gospel, in niche categories performed by niche artists.

I have no doubt this is true. Not everything in the pop music world is beat-dominated discordance.

But that an arena full of college kids can raise up in one voice and belt out a melodic pop song nearly 50 years old attests to more than the generation-transcending brilliance of ABBA’s music — as cringe-making as it was to write that phrase — it says that a good melody is still the most powerful part of popular music.

And we need more of them.

READ MORE from Tom Raabe:

Desperately Seeking $20 Million

The Altogether Predictable Sports Gambling Scandal

Reduce the Importance of the Foot in Football

Tom Raabe is a writer and editor living in Arizona. He has published a novel, Call of the Prophet, which, he says, is “religious humor with a punch.” It is available on Amazon.