How can this music, so often conceived and executed in haste, have survived so well? Being so at odds with every precept of modern music, how can it have survived at all?
Perhaps the answer revolves around the primacy of the human voice over technology; perhaps in the need to believe that love songs will triumph over urban frenzy; and perhaps in the blessed, enduring virtue of simplicity. Perhaps, in short, doo wop has survived because it is so determinedly at odds with today's music, today's everything.
Today no one cares if a group member doesn't show; he or she can add their part later. No one cares if someone is off-pitch; the engineer can fix it. Multitrack tape and studio gizmos that bring a tuneless voice into pitch have destroyed the notion of what constitutes a performance. In sharp contrast, most of these recordings were done "live" in the studio. The tension that came from knowing that the studio clock was ticking inexorably away and that this was your only shot accounts for the tautness and urgency in every one of these recordings.
Doo wop is harmony, but not just harmony, otherwise The Beach Boys and The Everly Brothers, good as they were, would qualify. Doo wop is usually amateurish on some level (composition, arrangement, recording), but if it's so amateurish, why is it so fiendishly hard to replicate?
Doo wop is the '50s incarnate (assuming now that the '50s lasted until around, oh, 1964). It is innocence and simplicity. Perhaps that yearning for the simplicity of earlier times made a recent doo wop television special one of the top-rated shows during any PBS fund-raising drive. Perhaps it helped Rhino's first Doo Wop Box go gold. Music can evoke a time and place as precisely as a family snapshot. The era that gave birth to doo wop was a flawed Eden, but in these disarmingly uncomplicated songs, which you could learn in an afternoon, we at least find a land where "school" and "shooting" were never conjoined.
And let's not forget that doo wop extended a democratic ideal: you and your friends could produce a reasonable facsimile in the school washroom. It might take years to master all the subtle nuances, if indeed you could master them at all, but the songs implanted themselves effortlessly in your memory, where they still remain.
--From The Doo Wop Box III
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