The Sound of History

 

Nostalgia seems to be getting more compressed as we move into the future. Young people now have access to the same histories as everyone now living. This is one of the wonders of the Internet and streaming media. Before the Internet people used to have to spend lots of time in libraries or had many subscriptions to newspapers and periodicals. I certainly had many of them, in addition to the parts I photocopied and scanned. Few feel the need to do that now because they know they can easily find it on the Internet.

All of pop culture is now more ubiquitous and accessible and is continually remixed on YouTube channels for example. I loved all the early Tori Amos records, but in the early 1990s, all one had was the music itself and the rock press. But you had to subscribe to magazines or flip through them at magazine stands, which I did. Now people make hour-long documentaries about musical artists with information gleaned from the Net. I think this is a great thing as it expands your appreciation of an artist you already like. This works in the art world as well: the more you know about a piece of art and the state of the world in which it was created the better. Pre-internet, absorption in pop culture was like any other fetishized hobby like collecting baseball cards or baseball memorabilia. Now it's YouTube channels devoted to those things, sometimes replacing the activity itself. In music, it now matters more to make a video about making the music. In some ways, music doesn't really exist until you made a video about the scales you used and made the perfect thumbnail to attract views.

People seem to want to be involved in creating something--even documentaries or movies, instead of passive consumption of them. That's how it was for me in music: instead of just passive listening, I wanted to play and write music. Radio and records were the technology that allowed that process to begin. Before then, you'd play from sheet music and scores, which also inspired people to compose music. All of this is still available to all generations. In the 1970s all I had readily available was music on the AM and FM stations, which was mostly 60s music, so a range of only 15 years. Now a 15-year- old has access to any decade in which there was some type of recorded media migrated to the Internet. To the extent that a 20-year-old would like the music of the 1920s it's there for inspiration, including archived memories of people talking about being inspired by the 1920s, for example, 1960s musicians who then were in their 60s, born 1900-1910. To the extent that there are no oral histories in the form of audio or film, the history is only in texts, which are less readily available and consequently not included in a YouTube documentary. So even while more information is accessible, it won't mean it will be thoroughly represented. History is more of a rolling stone and you catch what you can as it rolls by.

Young people seem to have a curious fascination with the music of the 1980s. For me, that would have been going back to the late 50s. I never went that far back and wasn't an Elvis fan in the mid-70s. Not many of the people I knew liked Elvis, but he was certainly still in mainstream pop culture, even though he went "Vegas" at that point.

All generations have "set points" to how far into the past they'll go. In the 70s my set-point was 1966 with the Beatles, but during music school, the set-point went back to the 17th century up through the 1950s, but not in rock 'n' roll, rather the be-bop period in jazz. So a widening of horizons was necessary, which I think came from higher education. But people seem to be fine making documentaries by using the Internet alone and is all DIY but still might be constrained to a narrow view of history, like it was for me in the late 70s when my set-point was mid-60s.

The question becomes why is it that we set these thresholds--to the 80s but not the 70s or 60s, and how do we interpret those decades without direct experience of them or having done more extensive research? Values change as well: what someone in their 30s today sees in Brian May's guitar playing is different from what I valued at the time. Recently there was a YouTube video titled "Brian May Isn't Really a Guitarist". What they meant was he's a melodist and uses phrasing in his playing--he's a total musician as opposed to just a wanker. But these things were well known in 1975 because many guitar players were influenced by jazz sax players. Some are just learning that and passing on the information to peers. This has the function of expanding one's set-points--in this case to jazz. It also cherry-picks part of that era for use in the present, as those into punk use its angst as a model for political angst. The idea that pop music could be a Revolution in itself started with punk in the late 70s just when I was leaving rock and prog for the baroque and be-bop, so I had abandoned it at that point. But some followed that path onward, which I think began to meld into political views, and here we are today with lots of those people in politics. (I'd like to see what records Steve Bannon was buying in 1978).

Uses of history are probably always a cherry-picking process to support moral set-points: One is that the recent past is all bad and it's a moral lesson not to do the things that young people used to do after the 50s, and the other side of that is young people embracing the spirit of rebellion in general: doing bad things as justification for a return of the good, however ill-defined it might be. "Just do it" is all that counts, and is something that has pervaded the American spirit since the 1950s. The idea of revolution is woven into the fabric of everything, amplified by all the new technologies that arose in then 20th century, then further amplified by the paradigm shifts in advertising in the 1960s. "The Dodge Rebellion" campaign is a good example of this, and is still used in advertising as a way to signal what the idea of being American is or should be. The way the Sex Pistols rebelled against prog was the way we rebelled against the British Crown. The essence of revolution as a "human universal" has been subsumed into pop culture wholesale and we don't even know we're using it, like cowboy mythology

(As we know, cowboy mythology began with Teddy Roosevelt. But he was from the East Coast, not Cheyenne. See: Echt American)

Take 50s pop icons like James Dean or Elvis: What can a 20-year-old glean from their lives? They might not even know who they are, but again, the web is brimming with content. It seems consistent in today's culture to want to reflexively make a YouTube video, or even feature films, about them. The recent Elvis movie is an example, as is Last Night in Soho whose soundtrack was based on the director's parents' record collection--not necessarily what we collectively understand about 60s pop.I had thought that Got My Mind Set On You was a remake of the George Harrison song, when in fact it was the James Ray that he covered. It was a mistaken recollection. This happened because when I was growing up such factoids weren't widely known. All you knew was based what you were able to read in magazines. (A little pond of knowledge compared to all the water on the surface of the earth that the Internet is). This goes back to the idea of human universals and the use of parts of pop culture even without knowing the full history. But there's a pre-existing container for archetypes and mythologies that have truthiness without all the details. It's a "morphic field" or "morphic resonance" in some ways: the more people are doing or knowing certain things the more people gain a pre-knowledge of them. There are certain species of birds who had learned how to find the milk bottles that people had on their porches. Once a few birds started to figure that out then other birds learned it, even in different locations. Or that people completing crossword puzzles in a London newspaper made them easier to complete in the New York Times six or seven hours later. That James Dean was a pop icon is all that is necessary to know, and all the other elements fall into their places, perhaps through such "fields". Some preconceptions may be wrong, but lots of them will be right, even without a fact check. They are metaphorical truths, which is sufficient without footnoting everything. So everything is essentially a derivation of some small pond within oceans of information, and seems true enough to sound like History.
 

3/17/2021

 

 The Threshold 1966

In 1965 we were approaching the boundary, in 1966 we crossed it, and by 1967 we had established a new “sovereignty” of American (and world) culture. By 1970, the psychedelic period was over, but its after-effects are still felt to this day. The mid-1960s period has parallels with other milestones of world history (albeit not as revolutionary) such as the conquest of Alexander the Great and the rise of Hellenism, the Renaissance, and the internet boom of the late 20th century--where­by the world experiences a spike of intense cultural upheaval--dies out abruptly--and has a lasting influence on world culture. Alexander the Great conquered much of Asia Minor and North Africa in only seventeen years, and introduced a completely different cultural blueprint; with completely new directions in art and architecture. Revolutions of this kind are seldom a sudden event and can take many years to reach full fruition. The mid-1960s were a time of profound shift in world culture, and on many fronts, 1966 seems to be a key year. 

Full essay from the Exforma book: