R.I.P. Little Richard (On Generations)

R.I.P. Little Richard (On Generations)

Little Richard is one of the last pop artists from the Silent Generation, 1925-1945. In his case, he defined the zeitgeist of a generation. He represented the feeling we wanted to express but couldn't, and then many did. 

My Dynaxioms with the word "generation", "cool" and "nostalgia" in them, 1990-present.:

(For an excellent analysis of the effect of "cool", I highly recommend the book The Origins of Cool in Postwar America)

After decades of repression younger generations get apoplectic with freedom and defining it. It's "going wrong" as had happened in the art world with abstraction in the 19-teens.

0056. On the 1979 'Disco Demolition' in Chicago: It is interesting that people had such strong opinions about a genre that ultimately exerted a big influence on pop music. You can't really exclude any genre from the American musical pantheon, because over time it becomes embedded, and feelings of nostalgia have a way of bringing it back in--and we become endeared to it again.

0120. You can't have a true democracy without a Muddy Waters, Elvis, and The Beatles. Hopefully all the nations that the U.S. wants to 'build' will experience these phenomena as well.

0378(05). There will always be some kind of sea change in technology, where a younger generation finds another variation of 'cool'. Facebook is long over its cool phase and it's simply waiting for the rebel of the next generation to be old enough to change it.

0544. If history is in fact symmetrical, we can assume that generations can be eponymously described. But that's turning out to be a false assumption. Media changes so quickly that one generation can now have a multiplicity of mediums and platforms. (8/2012)

0601. The humanities are always bequeathed to the next generation as stewards of humanity.

0666. When you look at ancient art and artifacts you realize that there may have been a point in time when people stopped caring about it and perhaps even discarded it in favor of The New. Later generations didn't necessarily have detailed histories that explained their intention or purpose beyond the art itself. As anthropologist Edward Hall posited, they were 'high context' societies that didn't require explanations, as opposed to modern cultures that compile encyclopedic understanding. It is ironic now in the 21st century that we are actually becoming more high-context, as encyclopedic information does not have to be methodically codified, and now grows a mind of its own in cyberspace, accessed at will without any commitment to organic memory. Caring about the past is now easier because of this, but at the same time is always being reinterpreted.

0726. Things continually devolve out of fashion, yet people continue to do what they think is still fashionable when it's so twenty years ago. At some point no one will ever care about it, because new generations have their own vanguard that will be dead in 20 years.

0898. We think we forget things or move on from old styles, but it is all still bedrock that lots of generations can build on top of.

0926. Music theory as we have known it has tarnished. Younger generations prefer loose structures--things that are more parametric that have biology metaphors (like Frank Gehry and his affinity for the piscine), and glitchy music with no meter. Some older books I've perused on music and linguistics have become somewhat irrelevant--alas because we seem to care less about those reptilian connections in our brain, now supplanted by the cortex, big data, algorithms, and cybernetics. There's nothing wrong with that, as contemporary art is often all about making it 'wrong.'

1023. Music is really mimicking what happens in the art world, but with a long lag time. (1997)

1024. When an existing technology is old enough to cross the generational boundary, that's when things change. Children will always rebel against the current state of the technology, and create its replacement.

1099. A part of the spirit of a generation dies with its artists. (David Bowie, now Prince) (4/2016)

1152. Music is not inherently about the idealization of beauty (or the pop variants of the word, e.g. 'cool'). We might want it to be, but it does not defend itself against other interpretations of music and/or beauty, or for that matter 'cool').

1263. There had been a general abandonment of traditional music education in favor of a DIY ethic, beginning in about 1980, when pop supergroups were splintering off into solo acts. It continues to evolve in interesting ways in parallel with technology. In the haste to move on to whatever is new, we are discarding what has been enriching to us thus far. Nostalgia can revive it somewhat in younger generations, but the original essences are lost, as no one has a direct memory of them, and consequently get subsumed into whatever the new technology is.

1330. It's cooler to be good at being cool than the cool that used to come from playing an instrument, even at the simplest levels. That's why nostalgia now prevails because the Cool was a 'readymade.'

1361. Shared memories are largely defined by generational boundaries, and define New Normals.

1388. Old genres of music always come back if there is enough interest by younger generations. Some may have just discovered Weather Report and Return to Forever, and some older generations as well. What was interesting once can be interesting again.

1422. When some people of the same generation were deeply involved in the moment (for example, 1968), everyone else just went on with their lives as if nothing had changed. There is a persistent hope in democracy that things will ultimately get worked out in the next election cycle. But the species is on auto-pilot with an unchangeable route (root)--and the polar opposite, a political landscape that is constantly changing. Artists and writers are more observant of it. (11/2017)

1470. The definition of 'quaint' is always changing and never fully reverts to what it was generations ago. We live in a world of permanently shifted baselines.

1535. Many memories are still in black and white, but not for long. All generations live with a technology that fades or is 'colorized' in some way. It is ironic that we still love black and white photography as much as we do, and sometimes even more when color is added back. Nostalgia works in both directions.

1544. The 1960s rewired a generation for free creative thinking, which persists to this day. (5/2018)

1590. People appreciate skill in art, more so than in music, which is why I still think skill in either art or music is optional, as long as it has some degree of 'cool'. 20th century paintings are extraordinary, but so is a performance of Beethoven's 7th Symphony. We desire the contemporary because we live in a rapidly-changing society biased towards things of the time.

1641. Eighty years from now people won't be rewatching films from 2019 with warm feelings of nostalgia as one might watching films from the 1940s. (1/2019)

1662. Early adult life (age 20-40) provides the primary cultural relevance (shared affinities or "center of the society") for a generation. The 60s-80s was the culturally relevant period for Silents, 70s-90s for Boomers, 80s-00s for GenX, 90s-10s for Millennials. We are now entering the period of relevance for GenY, 10s-20s. By 2070, we won't have much reverence for the 20-teens. If they have any reverence for any previous generations it will be mostly a reconstruction or reinterpretation. Many of Shakespeare's works were obscure because the then center of the society didn't value it. To take full advantage of what the arts have to contribute to an epoch involves an intentional and continuous research into the past and understanding it for what it was in its own time, and not how we want to interpret it. (2/2019)

1687. With the advent of the internet in the late 1990s there was a surge in interest in documenting history. Many of us became highly motivated amateur archivists. This becomes clearer now a full generation into the future. (4/2019)

1718. Kids go wrong because parents didn't bother nurturing innate spiritual alignments--even for themselves. This can go on for centuries of generations.

1747. Always take advantage of opportunities to divine wisdom directly from older generations because once you don't have the opportunities, the future is only a painting made from memory. It is best if it is autobiographical.

1777. Art is created in the zone between initial idea and vision and its construction in the real world. Sometimes they meet perfectly with no space between them; That's when things are popular. Over time they can move apart, then move back into place; That's when it becomes nostalgia.

1814. The task for younger generations is what Sting said: "When the world is running down, you make the best of what's still around." (9/2019)

1865. Art is always inherently 'cool' regardless of how the world is changing around it.