Did You Ever Hear a Wailin' Sax?

I missed this article when it first came out and only found it because of the random assortment of suggested reads that pops up when I open a new browser tab.

In 2017, writer Kelsey McKinney published a piece in The Outline that asks, "Where did all the saxophones go?" in pop music. The thesis is that the sax was a pretty common feature of Top 40 music up to and into the 1980s but has fallen into disfavor, to the point that the Top 40 songs the week she wrote had nary a hint of a honk.

Now, the article's premise is not untrue, as far as I could tell. I had to look up close to three-quarters of the modern songs that McKinney mentions, but that's not bad for a middle-aged guy considering top 40 music. And when I sampled them, she is indeed correct that they didn't have saxophones playing. As to why, McKinney aims higher than she hits, muddling around until eventually deciding that computer-generated sounds provide the tone that older bands used the saxophone to add. The extensive audio processing that affects every aspect of a top pop song leaves acoustic-based instruments like the sax flattened into unrecognizability. That could be true, but it doesn't necessarily follow from the sketchy history of the instrument she gives in the article. A lot more likely explanation comes from a music professor she talks to, who thinks that it may simply be the way that musical fads run these days.

I also have trouble taking this treatment of the situation seriously when it names "Rockin' Robin" and "The Pink Panther" as "two of America's biggest songs." The former peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and held the top slot of the Billboard R&B chart for only a week. The latter managed three weeks on Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart back when it was released in 1964 and although it's certainly easily recognizable it would have to go a long way to become one "of America's biggest songs."

Even more fatal to the article's credibility is this: McKinney wrote an entire article about the saxophone being everywhere in 1980s pop music and never...mentioned...Clarence...Clemons. The Big Man may not be among the ranks of the top saxophone players in recorded music -- the average jazz reed man has to be at least twice as fluid for dozens of measures at a time. But omitting the E Street Band's prime blower from a story of the saxophone in popular music means inserting so many caveats in the article that it becomes mostly useless. It's hard to trust conclusions derived from a fatally flawed presentation of the problem.