Shock the Monkey

This week I bought a CD copy of a classic record, Security by Peter Gabriel. It cost 10 bucks, cheap at twice the price. I plugged it into the CD player in the van and punched the track button until it stopped at track 6 – Shock the Monkey. It’s the song that sparked my appreciation for Gabriel.

An interesting thing happened. 

As soon as the song kicked in, the video started playing in my head. It occurred to me, I will never hear that song without the images that go with it. 

Of course that doesn’t happen with songs that predate the days of rock videos. When I hear Beatles songs or Stones, they recall past events, people, places and things. For example I remember where I was and what I was doing when I first heard (I can’t get no) Satisfaction. In the car with my cousin David driving and hearing him tap along to the rhythm with his ring on the steering wheel. He was a drummer in a rock band in Calgary in the 60s. He’s in PR in Toronto these days and his son is this jazz drummer guy.

But I digress.

Listening to Shock the Monkey and having one of the best videos ever playing in my head at the time got me thinking how technology helps define how we experience music.  In the days of the famous classical composers, their music was heard in the royal court and in the public concert halls. Of course their printed music lives on but no one alive today has ever heard Beethoven or Mozart perform their own music, and no one ever will.

We have cylinders and vinyl to hear old scratchy performance. We even have computer software to “clean them up” although, as the experts will tell you, you can never truly restore sound to its original form, only approximate it. Of course we also have early film and video performances of many artists dating back to the early part of the 20^th Century, but not much before that.

In the early days of video, some traditionalists suggested it spoiled songs for the audience because it replaced the personal image of the music with a contrived one. While that’s true, I don’t fully agree. One only has to look at the video for Gabriel’s song, in fact many of his songs, to see that, when it’s done well, video advances the art. (Yes I know, a lot of cliché-filled videos suck. So do many songs.)  

It’s interesting to see how more and different technologies are changing the way we consume music: iTunes, Youtube, HD flat-screen TVs; and even more interesting to think about how future technology will define my 10 year-old daughter’s musical experiences.