| |
|
Can we talk about pop nostalgia, how people try and paint the past as a golden age, in some more detail?
I've been thinking about this. "Youth" is an interesting factor here- how the whole point of pop music was and is it's youth and energy, it's body and not it's thinky, but someone like (say) Bob Dylan, or even Mick Jagger, is revered now in 2006 for being not young, not energetic, being clever, wise- intellectualised in a way totally out of sync with the original Dylan from the 60s- because let's face it, he was a sex bomb, that's why he sold records- and something like Girls Aloud are lambasted for being young, physical, unintellectual (they don't write their own songs*!)- for being about just wanting to dance and get off with people- for being, in other words, the whole point.
If we look at Hendrix, who died in his prime, even he gets this treatment- he was important, the nostalgists would have us beleive, because he invented this or that guitar thing- this is bollocks, isn't it? Again, he was a sex bomb: the point wasn't that he fiddled with his guitar, the point was that at the time it sounded hott. Whereas GA in this case would get lambasted for not playing any isntruments, for not having learned "craftsmanship**".
So is that a fair model of how it works: young, sexualised, physical performer is gradually turned into intellectual figure?
*Even though Dylan et al are all famous for their covers.
**Even though the singing and dance routines they perform require near-constant rehearsal and input.
_______
I also think I've found something that proves Flyboy's point where he noted the tendency that many music fans develop over time to idealize music of the past. As each generation grows that little bit older, so the goalposts of where ant particular golden age began, or ended, shift, but never enough so that people believe that they are living in a golden age. Ladeez and Gents, I give you Phillip Larkin on Jazz, circa 1970:
"I felt I was in some nightmare, in which I had confidently gone into an examination hall only to find I couldn't make head or tail of the questions. It wasn't like listening to a kind of jazz I didn't care for-Art Tatum, shall I say, or Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers. It wasn't like listening to jazz at all. Nearly every characteristic of the music had been neatly inverted: for instance, the jazz tone, distinguished from 'straight' practice by an almost-human vibrato, had entirely disapperaed, giving way to utter flaccidity. Had the most original feature of jazz been its use of collective improvisation? Banish it: let the first and last choruses be identical excercises in low-temperature unison. Was jazz instrumentation based on the hock-shop trumpets, trombones, clarinets of returned Civil War regiments? Brace yourself for flutes, harpsichords, electronically-amplified bassoons. Had jazz been essentially a popular art, full of tunes you could whistle? Something fundamentally awful had taken place to ensure there should be no more tunes. Had the wonderful thing about it been its happy, cake-walky syncopation that set feet tapping and shoulders jerking? Any such feelings were now regularly dispelled by random explosions from the drummer ('dropping bombs') and the use of non-jazz tempos, 3/4, 5/8, 11/4. Above all, was jazz the music of the American Negro? Then fill it full of conga drums and sambas and all the tawdry trappings of South America, the racket of Middle East bazaars, the cobra-coaxing caphonies of Calcutta".(From "All What Jazz, Faber and Faber, London, 1970) |
|
|
