In the latest issue of The Wire, David Keenan takes a turn at one of the magazine’s periodic attempts at playing genre taxonomist (see also: post-rock and hauntology). His new genre, “hypnagogic pop,” doesn’t interest me in its particulars all that much, but it does tie into this blog’s unofficial theme: nostalgia. The kids in the bands Keenan writes about were all born in the 1980s, and, according to the article, the pop music of the era seeped into their DNA—even though they’re making weird and noisy music that doesn’t have anywhere near the mainstream appeal of the massively popular MTV hits they’re claiming as influences.
The thing that most caught my attention in the article was the bizarre fact that Don Henley’s 1984 hit “Boys of Summer” is a touchstone for these bands. “Boys” is the kind of incessant radio staple that is less a musical composition and more a grim signifier of the cultural stagnation I was alluding to in this post. If you’d asked me five minutes before reading the article what I thought of the song, without hesitating—or really thinking about it much—I would have told you I hated it. But the incongruity of a bunch of early twenty-something weirdoes taking the song as an important sonic blueprint made me look it up on YouTube.
“Boys” has a cinematic lushness that is emotionally appealing; like a lot of ’80s hits it sounds like it was designed to play over a bittersweet movie’s closing credits. Twenty-five years after the fact, the song’s primitive digital gloss has managed to accrue a patina of strangeness and a naivete it actively avoided at the time of its creation. There’s something about the production that is on the one hand alienating and slickly machine-like and on the other melancholy and haunting.
But what’s most striking to me is that here we have a bunch of young musicians taking a song as a nostalgic key to their youth that is itself about nostalgia for one’s youth. But not just anyone’s youth; Henley’s lyrics are about aging and they’re fairly specific about who is growing older: baby boomers. Henley sings, “out on the road today, I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac / A little voice inside my head said, ‘don’t look back. You can never look back.’”
Anxiety and guilt over ’60s radicals turned ’80s sell-outs was a common cultural trope back then, but more to the point, I wonder if this little feedback loop of nostalgia is symptomatic of why our current moment is so suffused with nostalgia. Anyone who grew up in the ’80s grew up in a climate of constant reminiscence over The Sixties (don’t worry: this isn’t going to be a tiresome rant about boomer cultural dominance, I promise). In other words, anyone born after 1975 or so, grew up in a profoundly nostalgic time, and therefore indulging in nostalgia for your youth can lead to nostalgia for nostalgia, as is the case with “Boys”. Perhaps we’ve also been conditioned for nostalgia—programmed into a preciosity about the past, especially our own, through repeated exposure to things like “Boys of Summer”, A Christmas Story, The Wonder Years, Happy Days, etc.
I think I mentioned in a comment to an earlier post that when I was a kid I didn’t realize Happy Days was made in the ’70s—I thought it was an authentic document of the ’50s much like all the other shows I was watching on Nick at Nite (Donna Reed, et al). I think as we go forward, and as the internet transports almost all cultural production to an eternal now, that kind of temporal blurring will become characteristic of our time.
I don’t think I’ve answered the question posed in the post title, but as I’ve mentioned to a couple of people off-blog, nostalgia is emerging as the guiding concern of Elephant Rock, so this won’t be the last word on it. Whether it can be chalked up to a generational accident of birth, the internet, the cultural decay of late empire, or me entering my curmudgeonly old man phase rather early, how people process, think about, and use the past defines my perspective on the present.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Go Bang
(or: White Riot, continued.)
I was reminded of those officers and their obstinate refusal to feel ashamed of braining protesters with billy clubs by a recent flurry of media attention for the thirtieth anniversary of Disco Demolition Night. Notorious within the mostly non-overlapping worlds of sports fans and disco historians, Disco Demolition Night was a promotional stunt that took place at Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, on July 12, 1979. Attendees were allowed in for only 98 cents provided they brought a disco record to add to a large pile of them set to be detonated between the two games of the night’s double-header. As people in the stands flung records at the players on the field, the crowd’s mood turned ugly. After the records were blown up, chaos erupted and eventually riot police on horseback shut the thing down (there are many more details in the linked articles below).
Articles in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Chicago Reader all retell the event in warmly nostalgic terms, positioning it mostly as a wacky story from sports history or an amusing time capsule from the outrageously unfashionable late ’70s. These articles are all written from a perspective where the idea that “disco sucks” and therefore deserved to die—and indeed, as everyone notes, DDN proved to be a turning point in the genre's fortunes; this public execution actually worked—doesn’t warrant a second thought. Despite DDN’s similarity to Christians burning Beatles records after John Lennon’s infamous “bigger than Jesus” comment—an event I assume most rock fans don’t sit around chuckling over—no one in these articles seems the slightest bit disturbed by the event’s original purpose.
Which is odd, since thinking about the various tensions that made the event so explosive is much more interesting than simply reminiscing over it or engaging in a mild bit of revisionist history—as in the Reader piece’s subheadline “the kids were alright.” That headline attributes this supposedly new take on DDN to Diane Alexander White whose recently displayed photographs from the night serve as the impetus for the article. Her perspective on DDN is much more thoughtful than any of the journalists’:
While she’s referring specifically to disco, White’s use of the word “backlash” is telling. The cultural backlash against the increased social freedoms (or moral failings, depending on your perspective) brought about by the revolutions of the late ’60s was about to help elect Ronald Reagan. And throughout the ’80s and ’90s, the Right would master the art of using irrelevant, but charged signifiers—e.g. that blow-dried hair; accusations of shallowness and vanity have been thrown against every Democratic candidate for president in my lifetime—to distract people from the real reasons steel mills were closing. White’s statement hints at that misdirected anger and also points up the sloppiness of backlash logic: whatever you think about Saturday Night Fever, you can’t pretend John Travolta’s character isn’t young, poor, and from Brooklyn—not a world away from Bridgeport, the neighborhood outside of Comiskey.
So what were these kids lashing back at? Class resentment was certainly justifiable; the Studio 54 version of disco culture was glamorous, coked-up, and sexy—totally out of reach for most people in 1979. One also can’t understate the sheer ubiquity of disco at its peak. Peter Shapiro’s history of the music, Turn the Beat Around, catalogs the way disco acted as a virus in American culture in 1979, infecting breakfast cereals, Sesame Street, and a long list of musicians, including Kiss, the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, and even Frank Sinatra. Okay, “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” is vile, granted, but why would disco kids wearing “white suits” or “gold chains” bother your average Van Halen* fan?
*1979 is a fascinating year for music, a genuine watershed, but I'm guessing that the kids at DDN weren’t listening to “Rapper’s Delight” or the Raincoats.
There aren’t a lot of photos accompanying that Reader piece, but in all of the samples, the subjects are overwhelmingly white and male. Disco is the opposite: gay, black, Latino, female. As Shapiro puts it:
I was reminded of those officers and their obstinate refusal to feel ashamed of braining protesters with billy clubs by a recent flurry of media attention for the thirtieth anniversary of Disco Demolition Night. Notorious within the mostly non-overlapping worlds of sports fans and disco historians, Disco Demolition Night was a promotional stunt that took place at Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, on July 12, 1979. Attendees were allowed in for only 98 cents provided they brought a disco record to add to a large pile of them set to be detonated between the two games of the night’s double-header. As people in the stands flung records at the players on the field, the crowd’s mood turned ugly. After the records were blown up, chaos erupted and eventually riot police on horseback shut the thing down (there are many more details in the linked articles below).
Articles in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Chicago Reader all retell the event in warmly nostalgic terms, positioning it mostly as a wacky story from sports history or an amusing time capsule from the outrageously unfashionable late ’70s. These articles are all written from a perspective where the idea that “disco sucks” and therefore deserved to die—and indeed, as everyone notes, DDN proved to be a turning point in the genre's fortunes; this public execution actually worked—doesn’t warrant a second thought. Despite DDN’s similarity to Christians burning Beatles records after John Lennon’s infamous “bigger than Jesus” comment—an event I assume most rock fans don’t sit around chuckling over—no one in these articles seems the slightest bit disturbed by the event’s original purpose.
Which is odd, since thinking about the various tensions that made the event so explosive is much more interesting than simply reminiscing over it or engaging in a mild bit of revisionist history—as in the Reader piece’s subheadline “the kids were alright.” That headline attributes this supposedly new take on DDN to Diane Alexander White whose recently displayed photographs from the night serve as the impetus for the article. Her perspective on DDN is much more thoughtful than any of the journalists’:
What her shots end up capturing is a moment in time—the south-side rock ’n’ roll youth culture of 1979 on the verge of pandemonium. “This was a backlash,” she says today, looking over her pictures. “[Disco] was so stylized, with pressed pants, white suits, collars outside of jackets, gold chains. The girls are blow-drying their hair to death. A lot of these kids identified it as very shallow, in the dress, in the repetitive beats in the music, crystallized in Saturday Night Fever.”
“To me, it wasn’t about the disco records being blown up,” White says. “It was everything leading up to it, which is what a lot of these pictures are.” It’s the kids themselves, “blue collar kids, kids whose parents were Sox fans. We were still churning out products in this town. You could still get a job at the steel mill.”
While she’s referring specifically to disco, White’s use of the word “backlash” is telling. The cultural backlash against the increased social freedoms (or moral failings, depending on your perspective) brought about by the revolutions of the late ’60s was about to help elect Ronald Reagan. And throughout the ’80s and ’90s, the Right would master the art of using irrelevant, but charged signifiers—e.g. that blow-dried hair; accusations of shallowness and vanity have been thrown against every Democratic candidate for president in my lifetime—to distract people from the real reasons steel mills were closing. White’s statement hints at that misdirected anger and also points up the sloppiness of backlash logic: whatever you think about Saturday Night Fever, you can’t pretend John Travolta’s character isn’t young, poor, and from Brooklyn—not a world away from Bridgeport, the neighborhood outside of Comiskey.
So what were these kids lashing back at? Class resentment was certainly justifiable; the Studio 54 version of disco culture was glamorous, coked-up, and sexy—totally out of reach for most people in 1979. One also can’t understate the sheer ubiquity of disco at its peak. Peter Shapiro’s history of the music, Turn the Beat Around, catalogs the way disco acted as a virus in American culture in 1979, infecting breakfast cereals, Sesame Street, and a long list of musicians, including Kiss, the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, and even Frank Sinatra. Okay, “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” is vile, granted, but why would disco kids wearing “white suits” or “gold chains” bother your average Van Halen* fan?
*1979 is a fascinating year for music, a genuine watershed, but I'm guessing that the kids at DDN weren’t listening to “Rapper’s Delight” or the Raincoats.
There aren’t a lot of photos accompanying that Reader piece, but in all of the samples, the subjects are overwhelmingly white and male. Disco is the opposite: gay, black, Latino, female. As Shapiro puts it:
Even when it was purveyed by chancers and formulaic followers of fashion, disco was a remarkable moment in American cultural history, a time when female voices (even if they were singing the words of mostly male songwriters and producers) temporarily drowned out the beefy bluster that usually characterizes America’s discourse. Not since Noel Coward’s reinvention of Tin Pan Alley had articulations of gay pleasure and style been so popular.Disco’s status as supremely lame cultural punching bag hasn’t improved much since 1979. Meanwhile rock maintains its role as the bastion of authenticity in music, despite that notion being thoroughly, repeatedly debunked by music critics. Nonetheless, I take comfort in knowing that while disco was mortally wounded on July 13, 1979, it beat out rock for cultural influence. Rock over the last thirty years isn’t a complete wasteland, but disco’s children (rap and house, especially) took over, giving birth to constantly evolving forms of electronic music and decisively shaping the glossy, digital sound of pop music over three decades. Those forms and sounds made in disco’s wake have defined the new in music, while rock has mostly offered variations on the old.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Intermission
Following up on the end of that last post, it occurs to me that some of my out-of-state readers may not be familiar with Illinois’s disgraceful history of police brutality, prosecutorial misconduct, and wrongful imprisonment. Here is the relatively happy ending to the sadly typical story of Ronald Kitchen, recently freed from jail after spending twenty-one years there (he is 43), including thirteen on death row. To summarize: Chicago police detectives tortured Kitchen until he confessed, and then Illinois prosecutors used that confession and other, remarkably flimsy evidence to convict him.
Two genuinely heroic groups at Northwestern University work to oppose these kinds of injustices: the Medill Innocence Project and the Center on Wrongful Convictions. From the Center’s website: “Of 314 men and women sentenced to death under the current Illinois death penalty law, which was enacted in 1977, 20 have now been exonerated and released—an error rate of more than six percent.” Former Governor George Ryan (currently in prison for corruption) famously declared a moratorium on the death penalty in 2000 and commuted the sentences of all current death row inmates (including Ronald Kitchen) to life imprisonment on his way out of office in 2003.
That moratorium is still in place—with good reason, obviously—but the death penalty has not been abolished and the state still seeks it in certain cases. I’m at a loss to explain what argument you could make in favor of keeping it or lifting the moratorium in the face of that +6% error rate, much less when you factor in its inevitable rise due to the Capital Litigation Trust Fund, which assists public defenders in mounting a proper defense in death penalty cases, being bankrupt.
Two genuinely heroic groups at Northwestern University work to oppose these kinds of injustices: the Medill Innocence Project and the Center on Wrongful Convictions. From the Center’s website: “Of 314 men and women sentenced to death under the current Illinois death penalty law, which was enacted in 1977, 20 have now been exonerated and released—an error rate of more than six percent.” Former Governor George Ryan (currently in prison for corruption) famously declared a moratorium on the death penalty in 2000 and commuted the sentences of all current death row inmates (including Ronald Kitchen) to life imprisonment on his way out of office in 2003.
That moratorium is still in place—with good reason, obviously—but the death penalty has not been abolished and the state still seeks it in certain cases. I’m at a loss to explain what argument you could make in favor of keeping it or lifting the moratorium in the face of that +6% error rate, much less when you factor in its inevitable rise due to the Capital Litigation Trust Fund, which assists public defenders in mounting a proper defense in death penalty cases, being bankrupt.
Friday, July 10, 2009
White Riot: Prologue
This is going to be another two-parter—hooray!
One of the pleasures of being a Chicago resident is living in the midst of a long* and fascinating history. On my daily commute I walk by a building that used to be Essanay studios; I wait for the bus across the street from the Chicago Theatre; and the building I work in was built on the property that once housed the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s practice space. I haven’t yet seen Public Enemies, but I’d like to—in addition to the history, I’m kind of a sucker for films shot locally (ultimately that was about the only thing I liked about The Dark Knight), and it would be thrilling to see Johnny Depp strolling around the Aragon Ballroom, a venue built in 1926 where I saw my first concert.
*You know, for an American city at least.
Of course not all Chicago history is Charlie Chaplin, gangsters, and free jazz. My friend Stephen sent me this New York Times article about a reunion of police officers who were in the 1968 Democratic convention riots with a simple “really?” The Chicago Police Department has a lengthy history of abuse and an equally lengthy history of getting away with it, so I wasn’t that surprised. In fact, I was almost more dismayed by the protesters—what could they possibly hope to achieve by picketing a bunch of retired police officers eating pizza? Protesting an historical event; it sounds like a sad postmodern performance piece. Besides, at least in terms of the CPD’s behavior during the 1960s, I believe there’s a consensus that they were out of control. Partisans can argue over what happened during the riots, but I can’t see anyone claiming they “feel fine about” murdering Fred Hampton.
More to come.
One of the pleasures of being a Chicago resident is living in the midst of a long* and fascinating history. On my daily commute I walk by a building that used to be Essanay studios; I wait for the bus across the street from the Chicago Theatre; and the building I work in was built on the property that once housed the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s practice space. I haven’t yet seen Public Enemies, but I’d like to—in addition to the history, I’m kind of a sucker for films shot locally (ultimately that was about the only thing I liked about The Dark Knight), and it would be thrilling to see Johnny Depp strolling around the Aragon Ballroom, a venue built in 1926 where I saw my first concert.
*You know, for an American city at least.
Of course not all Chicago history is Charlie Chaplin, gangsters, and free jazz. My friend Stephen sent me this New York Times article about a reunion of police officers who were in the 1968 Democratic convention riots with a simple “really?” The Chicago Police Department has a lengthy history of abuse and an equally lengthy history of getting away with it, so I wasn’t that surprised. In fact, I was almost more dismayed by the protesters—what could they possibly hope to achieve by picketing a bunch of retired police officers eating pizza? Protesting an historical event; it sounds like a sad postmodern performance piece. Besides, at least in terms of the CPD’s behavior during the 1960s, I believe there’s a consensus that they were out of control. Partisans can argue over what happened during the riots, but I can’t see anyone claiming they “feel fine about” murdering Fred Hampton.
More to come.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Summertime
“Gomorrah is a nursery rhyme
You won’t find it in a book
It’s written on your city’s face
Just stop and take a look”
—Sixto Diaz Rodriguez
Summer is often a bleak time for me. I tend to blame the decades of conditioning that made summer’s vast free time feel like a right promised by natural law. Whiling away those same lengthy hours in a windowless office with my eyes on a screen all day tends to darken my thinking. Perhaps spending six summers in Georgia added to the effect; the heat of summer there tended to have an undercurrent of madness to it.
Or maybe it’s just my current reading material: Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces. I’m also rereading Calvin and Hobbes again, and both have a lot to say about the pointless drudgery of adult life. This morning I was reading the Marcus on the bus as we took an alternate route to avoid the traffic snarls caused by the annual tourist bacchanal, Taste of Chicago, an event that lives in my memory chiefly for the time my younger sister was burned on the cheek by an asshole smoking a cigarette in a thick crowd of people.
Anyway, the new route took us through the South Loop, once a commercial dead zone and now newly built or rehabbed into a weird sort of Alphaville of a neighborhood (impressively sycophantic piece from the Chicago Tribune here). I lost count of how many high-end dental salons we passed, and I’d conservatively estimate that there are forty million condos for sale there.
Romantically, superpowers/empires/civilizations are thought to end precipitously—they fall with hordes of barbarians at the gates. Or they’re stricken by environmental catastrophes or diseases so swift and lethal they verge on the allegorical. Hubris and moral decadence—orgies literal and figurative—bring down that old divine wrath. The Bush years felt like the middle stage of just such a spectacular flameout. A country with a national death wish, led by the political equivalent of Columbine’s trench coat mafia: armed to the teeth and pissed off at the world for reasons that never really added up but could apparently be solved with mass murder. But the eschatological nightmares of liberals (and their flipside: the end-times fantasies of evangelicals) have more or less faded with Obama’s election, and now a putrefying kind of stagnation—political, economic, and cultural—seems more likely to me.
Allow me to maintain my habit of making sweeping political statements and then sidestepping the issue by talking about music. I’m too lazy to come up with a list of linkable support for this statement, but I believe there’s nearly a critical consensus that this decade has been one of the worst ever for music. And this morning I was struck by the horrifyingly cyclical implications of this passage from Lipstick Traces. Here’s Marcus writing about the mid-70s in 1989:
“Rock ‘n’ roll became an ordinary social fact, like a commute or a highway construction project. It became a habit, a structure, an invisible oppression. . . . There was no need for change; ‘change’ began to seem like an old-fashioned, sixties word. The chaos in society at large called for a music of permanence and reassurance; in the pop world, time stood still. For years that seemed like decades, you could turn on the radio with the assurance that you would hear James Taylor’s ‘Fire and Rain,’ Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ the Who’s ‘Behind Blue Eyes,’ Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May.’ It was all right; they were good songs.”
A few pages before that, Marcus quotes a list of slogans from the May 1968 uprisings in Paris, including:
Under the paving stones, the beach!
A good motto for summer.
You won’t find it in a book
It’s written on your city’s face
Just stop and take a look”
—Sixto Diaz Rodriguez
Summer is often a bleak time for me. I tend to blame the decades of conditioning that made summer’s vast free time feel like a right promised by natural law. Whiling away those same lengthy hours in a windowless office with my eyes on a screen all day tends to darken my thinking. Perhaps spending six summers in Georgia added to the effect; the heat of summer there tended to have an undercurrent of madness to it.
Or maybe it’s just my current reading material: Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces. I’m also rereading Calvin and Hobbes again, and both have a lot to say about the pointless drudgery of adult life. This morning I was reading the Marcus on the bus as we took an alternate route to avoid the traffic snarls caused by the annual tourist bacchanal, Taste of Chicago, an event that lives in my memory chiefly for the time my younger sister was burned on the cheek by an asshole smoking a cigarette in a thick crowd of people.
Anyway, the new route took us through the South Loop, once a commercial dead zone and now newly built or rehabbed into a weird sort of Alphaville of a neighborhood (impressively sycophantic piece from the Chicago Tribune here). I lost count of how many high-end dental salons we passed, and I’d conservatively estimate that there are forty million condos for sale there.
Romantically, superpowers/empires/civilizations are thought to end precipitously—they fall with hordes of barbarians at the gates. Or they’re stricken by environmental catastrophes or diseases so swift and lethal they verge on the allegorical. Hubris and moral decadence—orgies literal and figurative—bring down that old divine wrath. The Bush years felt like the middle stage of just such a spectacular flameout. A country with a national death wish, led by the political equivalent of Columbine’s trench coat mafia: armed to the teeth and pissed off at the world for reasons that never really added up but could apparently be solved with mass murder. But the eschatological nightmares of liberals (and their flipside: the end-times fantasies of evangelicals) have more or less faded with Obama’s election, and now a putrefying kind of stagnation—political, economic, and cultural—seems more likely to me.
Allow me to maintain my habit of making sweeping political statements and then sidestepping the issue by talking about music. I’m too lazy to come up with a list of linkable support for this statement, but I believe there’s nearly a critical consensus that this decade has been one of the worst ever for music. And this morning I was struck by the horrifyingly cyclical implications of this passage from Lipstick Traces. Here’s Marcus writing about the mid-70s in 1989:
“Rock ‘n’ roll became an ordinary social fact, like a commute or a highway construction project. It became a habit, a structure, an invisible oppression. . . . There was no need for change; ‘change’ began to seem like an old-fashioned, sixties word. The chaos in society at large called for a music of permanence and reassurance; in the pop world, time stood still. For years that seemed like decades, you could turn on the radio with the assurance that you would hear James Taylor’s ‘Fire and Rain,’ Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ the Who’s ‘Behind Blue Eyes,’ Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May.’ It was all right; they were good songs.”
A few pages before that, Marcus quotes a list of slogans from the May 1968 uprisings in Paris, including:
Under the paving stones, the beach!
A good motto for summer.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Artifacts
In anticipation of the promised nostalgia post, here’s some links to the past from the collective memory machine.
This NY Times collection of readers’ Polaroids is spectacular. Polaroid fans should definitely read the linked article about a group of Dutch men trying to re-start the company’s film production process (which ceased last year), if for no other reason than that it has this quote in it: “‘So we stopped drinking beer—which is a pity because Dutch beer is good—and started talking business,’ Mr. Kaps said.”
And Hard Format, which I just discovered via Gutterbreakz (who has quite a few books I want) and will probably spend the rest of the day looking through. I quite liked this reggae collection, of course, and I’m excited to look through the collections grouped by designer.
This NY Times collection of readers’ Polaroids is spectacular. Polaroid fans should definitely read the linked article about a group of Dutch men trying to re-start the company’s film production process (which ceased last year), if for no other reason than that it has this quote in it: “‘So we stopped drinking beer—which is a pity because Dutch beer is good—and started talking business,’ Mr. Kaps said.”
And Hard Format, which I just discovered via Gutterbreakz (who has quite a few books I want) and will probably spend the rest of the day looking through. I quite liked this reggae collection, of course, and I’m excited to look through the collections grouped by designer.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Conservatives and Music, Part Two: Preserving the Old Ways
Clearly modern movement conservatism is a kind of bizarre brain fever, a malfunctioning program corrupted by a nasty virus called free market capitalism (well, amongst other nastier things). By being wedded to a messianic belief in the power of the market, conservatives end up with a mindset where something as fundamentally unconservative as global megacorporation Wal Mart is actually a hallowed signifier of the small-town folkways of Real-Americans, rather than one of the more obvious culprits behind their destruction. Attempting to graft libertarian free market dogma* onto conservative reverence for tradition and the past simply doesn’t make any sense: nothing provokes radical change like unfettered capitalism. So I hope it’s abundantly clear that what “conservative” means or could mean to me is completely unrelated to lattes or NASCAR or demonizing gay people—hell, I should probably have just chosen a less loaded word and skipped this screed (sort of; there is a point buried somewhere down there about how a conservative politics could act as a brake on liberals championing war and imperialism).
*Not that right-wingers’ belief in the free market is ever enacted, but that’s a whole other post.
Let’s return to music since I already had to go back and delete an earlier sentence where I said I didn’t “feel like talking about politics.” How could we go about uncovering “a much more stimulating tradition of conservative thought in popular music?” One important strand would be the work of musical archivists and preservationists: Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, field recordings of old folk songs made by people like John Lomax, and ethnomusicological recordings on labels like Nonesuch Explorer or Ocora would all be important and influential examples. With the globalizing forces of capitalism and technology erasing centuries of tradition in local cultures—even while, of course, new technologies like sound recording, record manufacturing, and air travel, as well as the possibility that people might pay for these recordings, made the sounds available to a new audience—the people behind these projects sought to collect and preserve rapidly vanishing ways of life.
Smith and Lomax’s active approach to musical conservation decisively influenced the folk revival of the 1960s: the Greenwich Village scene that Bob Dylan exploded out of—and essentially destroyed in the process—and its longer-lasting and (to my ears) more interesting corollary in the UK. Much has been made of the purism of these revivalists, crystallized in notorious incidents like Dylan’s appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and the infamous “Judas” heckler at his 1966 concert in Manchester. It is just this kind of dogmatic insistence against seemingly inevitable change that makes the folk scene look (ironically of course; their politics being anything but at the time) a whole lot like modern conservatism.
This kind of mini-culture-war within a musical scene ended relatively quickly in folk, but in the jazz world it began in the 1980s and hasn’t ended yet. In the polarizing figure of Wynton Marsalis we can see the ramifications of the purist urge to police, to exclude, to define, and to delineate narratives where they don’t necessarily exist. In his role as artistic director for Jazz at Lincoln Center and as a consultant for Ken Burns' Jazz documentary, Marsalis has written off both the avant-garde and fusion, promoting a frozen-in-amber classicist view of “jazz” that is intellectually arid and has had real financial consequences for artists who fall outside the mainstream.
Nonetheless one could argue that something was lost in Dylan’s pied-piper effect on folk fans—luring them away from their budding interest in gospel, bluegrass, and a kaleidoscope of world music toward the banal prospect of yet another kid picking up an electric guitar—and that jazz in the 1980s was in a sorry state when Marsalis came along to restore its dignity and remind everyone that Charlie Parker didn't make music to perform data entry to. Sometimes resisting change is resisting the corruption of something valuable. You tend to see “nostalgia” characterized as an always-wrong weakness of the mind these days, as if the idea that progress is constant had achieved consensus, but sometimes nostalgia exists because the past was better.
Which is a perfect way to segue into The Kinks, but this topic expanded the more I thought about it, so that will have to be another post or maybe this will just be an ongoing concern. I certainly find the way people conceptualize and talk about nostalgia fascinating.
*Not that right-wingers’ belief in the free market is ever enacted, but that’s a whole other post.
Let’s return to music since I already had to go back and delete an earlier sentence where I said I didn’t “feel like talking about politics.” How could we go about uncovering “a much more stimulating tradition of conservative thought in popular music?” One important strand would be the work of musical archivists and preservationists: Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, field recordings of old folk songs made by people like John Lomax, and ethnomusicological recordings on labels like Nonesuch Explorer or Ocora would all be important and influential examples. With the globalizing forces of capitalism and technology erasing centuries of tradition in local cultures—even while, of course, new technologies like sound recording, record manufacturing, and air travel, as well as the possibility that people might pay for these recordings, made the sounds available to a new audience—the people behind these projects sought to collect and preserve rapidly vanishing ways of life.
Smith and Lomax’s active approach to musical conservation decisively influenced the folk revival of the 1960s: the Greenwich Village scene that Bob Dylan exploded out of—and essentially destroyed in the process—and its longer-lasting and (to my ears) more interesting corollary in the UK. Much has been made of the purism of these revivalists, crystallized in notorious incidents like Dylan’s appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and the infamous “Judas” heckler at his 1966 concert in Manchester. It is just this kind of dogmatic insistence against seemingly inevitable change that makes the folk scene look (ironically of course; their politics being anything but at the time) a whole lot like modern conservatism.
This kind of mini-culture-war within a musical scene ended relatively quickly in folk, but in the jazz world it began in the 1980s and hasn’t ended yet. In the polarizing figure of Wynton Marsalis we can see the ramifications of the purist urge to police, to exclude, to define, and to delineate narratives where they don’t necessarily exist. In his role as artistic director for Jazz at Lincoln Center and as a consultant for Ken Burns' Jazz documentary, Marsalis has written off both the avant-garde and fusion, promoting a frozen-in-amber classicist view of “jazz” that is intellectually arid and has had real financial consequences for artists who fall outside the mainstream.
Nonetheless one could argue that something was lost in Dylan’s pied-piper effect on folk fans—luring them away from their budding interest in gospel, bluegrass, and a kaleidoscope of world music toward the banal prospect of yet another kid picking up an electric guitar—and that jazz in the 1980s was in a sorry state when Marsalis came along to restore its dignity and remind everyone that Charlie Parker didn't make music to perform data entry to. Sometimes resisting change is resisting the corruption of something valuable. You tend to see “nostalgia” characterized as an always-wrong weakness of the mind these days, as if the idea that progress is constant had achieved consensus, but sometimes nostalgia exists because the past was better.
Which is a perfect way to segue into The Kinks, but this topic expanded the more I thought about it, so that will have to be another post or maybe this will just be an ongoing concern. I certainly find the way people conceptualize and talk about nostalgia fascinating.
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