In a 'working paper' just issued, University of Chicago's David Galenson argues that the shift in songwriting style from the Tin Pan Alley era to the music of Bob Dylan and John Lennon brought a drastic change to the general songwriting approach and hence the songwriting labor market (Galenson is an economist, thus the labor market viewpoint).
I found the paper very interesting and it coincides with my longtime belief in the approach Dylan and Lennon took in much of their writing. It also tackles the subject of age vs. creativity. Galenson makes an intriguing, and I believe accurate, distinction between 'experimental creators' and ' conceptual creators'.
"Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and other songwriters of the Golden Era wrote popular songs that treated common topics clearly and simply. During the mid-1960s Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney created a new kind of popular music that was personal and often obscure. This shift, which transformed popular music from an experimental into a conceptual art, produced a distinct change in the creative life cycles of songwriters. Golden Era songwriters were generally at their best during their 30s and 40s, whereas since the mid-'60s popular songwriters have consistently done their best work during their 20s. The revolution in popular music occurred at a time when young innovators were making similar transformations in other arts: Jean-Luc Godard and his fellow New Wave directors created a conceptual revolution in film in the early '60s, just as Andy Warhol and other Pop artists made painting a conceptual activity."
Galenson's entire paper is here.
