Languages do not become simpler over time, but literature can. The more languages are used, the more elaborate their grammar and vocabulary become. The further a style develops, however, the greater the obviousness of its principles and effects becomes. The more obvious they become, the greater the possibility of clarification, simplification, and ultimately abstraction. Ezra Pound’s injunction to "Make it new" becomes "Keep it short and simple."
The same can be said for music. The musical grammar and vocabulary of today’s pop hits are inarguably simpler than those of the mid-1960s, and the songs of Lennon and McCartney or Bacharach and David are simpler than those the Gershwin brothers or Jerome Kern and P.G. Wodehouse wrote in the 1930s.
"Keep it short and simple" is first attested in print on December 2, 1938, in the Minneapolis Star. Robert Johnson died just over three months before that, after being poisoned while performing at a "party house" on the Star of the West plantation, across the Tallahatchie Bridge from Greenwood, Mississippi. He was 27 years old and had recorded 29 songs, with alternative takes on 13 of them.
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