I’m in a more serious mode today. Because, while I wasn’t paying attention, someone broke music.

I’ve actually known for a little while that music was going somewhere I couldn’t follow, but for a long time I’ve ignored it. After all, it’s mostly affecting only one form of music – mainstream popular music – which isn’t my main music of choice. But now this effect has invaded my beloved space of film, and now I’m angry. Because I’ve now seen the film Rocketman – a film with a lead actor I respect and with music I enjoy – and felt no glimmer of joy at any point. Not at the showstopping numbers, not at the ballads. And now I need to understand why.

In the world of popular music, there seems to have been a gradual exchange of values: away from music as a means of expressing talent or emotion, and towards an aesthetic that’s much more visual and artificial. I’m going to resist the easy pot-shots at the visual side of this argument – at reality TV musicians or at the increasingly explicit sexualisation of pop stars – as it’s the other side that’s more subtle and therefore more interesting.

We live in an age of artifice, where something must not only be highly crafted but be seen to be highly crafted. And this is true of popular music now in a way that perhaps it has never been in the past (note in particular that in the 19th century virtuosity was not seen as craft – it was a gift from the devil rather than the result of actual hard work). Music is now highly crafted through music processing: I saw a Youtube video recently where a talented musician recorded some vocals and then put those vocals through 9 separate processing stages to produce a vocal sound that sounded distant but not especially artificial. And this extreme level of crafting is also introduced through use of electronic instruments, where drums are replaced by drum machines, and guitars – a very human, emotional sound, for all the fact they’re often electric; we talk about guitars weeping, or screaming – are entirely missing.

And whether this is the intent or a side effect, music released in 2021 makes the listener feel cold and hard. Musicians think rather than feel, appear rather than be. The music casts a light on the musician’s externality rather than their internal life. And I have theories why this could be so (of course I do – I always have theories!)

The music business is a multi-billion industry, with a deep understanding of the psychological factors that make a song successful. And it’s not unreasonable to think that a high level of processing equals a high level of control over these psychological factors; that this processing allows the producer to specify exactly which of our internal switches to flip.

I also wonder: is this a decade where our need to believe in the American Dream is vital? With increasing unemployment and increasing inequality, are we investing heavily in the idea that hard work is more important that innate talent or money? Do we need to be convinced that those who are successful worked hard to be there? Perhaps in this age we need to see their sweat rather than their talent – their perspiration rather than their inspiration.

Music produced in this way is also fundamentally democratic and therefore fundamentally relatable: it allows access to top-grade production software to those who were previously unable to afford to hire a studio. And it also means that those who want a musical career don’t need to spend thousands of hours in learning a instrument – a skill that is only of financial value to the few. It’s a shortcut to a marketable talent – just buy the right program and spend some time learning how to use it.

But this is where I start to skirt dangerously near elitism, because my conception of true musicality is an old-fashioned one: there are no shortcuts to true musical ability. It’s something that by its very nature requires you spend thousands of hours honing. And I believe very deeply that you don’t just spend those thousands of hours honing your technique, but also your artistic sense – your ability to express complex abstract emotions with fine precision. And the current state of music hands the technical ability to anyone, in a world that doesn’t even acknowledge that artistic sense exists.

And so back to Rocketman. I believe that the lead actor is in fact a good singer, but his voice has been overprocessed to such a degree that it’s impossible to tell. His talent has been entirely erased to the point where he never needed to be a good singer at all. And what kind of world are we in that has no need for good singers?

Musicals have been a source of great joy to me: Fred and Ginger, Gene Kelly, Hairspray. Cabaret. Everyone in the Blues Brothers. And in a time with a resurgence of musicals, in a world that is falling apart, I resent being denied that joy.