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The Persistence of Sentiment. Mitchell Morris
Читать онлайн.Название The Persistence of Sentiment
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520955059
Автор произведения Mitchell Morris
Жанр Музыка, балет
Издательство Ingram
In each of these cases, the generational object in question entails elaborate, sometimes elusive issues of politics, aesthetics, and most importantly, morality, insofar as these things can be disentangled from one another. Put another way, a generational object helps define a space of values understood as characteristic of a temporal cohort. A particular object is susceptible by its very structure to carrying some values more easily than others, of course, but it is never a simple matter of deciding whether the object can have been prior to the values it is held to carry. What matters most, I think, is how we attempt to unpack the generational objects—our own as well as those of others—so that we can be clear not only about the values they hold but also about the location from which our interests proceed.17
This never exhausts the meaning of a piece of music, of course. Music’s evasive relationship to words allows it to be reinflected in the minds of multiple social worlds and time periods, not to mention individual listeners. Bollas’s account sees generational objects as consolidated in early adulthood, when their working through of historical raw material creates a more or less coherent sense of temporal affiliation between contemporaries. We all have these objects, and when we are young and wrapped in “generational narcissism” we are apt to think of them as permanent; but the approach of midlife finds our objects displaced by those of our successors. We become history along with the things we have chosen to love. We are lucky when we have the chance to get old in this way before we die; we can see the objects of our (former) choice metamorphosed so that they fit into other fields of passion, serving other interests. When we encounter them thus, they show us more about the objects themselves as well as the nature of desire in self and other.
It may seem as if thinking about generational objects has taken us rather far from Rhino Records and its canny rehabilitations of what might have been (and might still be) ephemera. But the Have a Nice Decade box set is interesting precisely to the degree that it appears so “undigested.” Historical narrative and canon making are among the activities that translate generational objects out of their temporally bound constituencies and allow them to circulate in altered forms in our meta-generational culture. Those of us for whom the 1970s were crucial with respect to generational identity want to find a set of commonly agreed-upon songs along with a story into which they will fit. Rhino’s collection does not serve this purpose. It is too random. The problem of licensing may have been partly at fault: anyone who teaches surveys of rock and soul, for instance, is aware of the difficulty of gaining permissions to include music by an assortment of groups in pop music surveys. But I think that the commercial inaccessibility of major groups is less widespread with respect to music of the 1970s than is the case with the music of any other decade in pop music history. The problem is more one of historiography. Any survey of standard rock music texts will show that when the 1970s are considered, the customary narratives fall apart. This is a musical narrative that is, a decade after Rhino’s box set, still up for negotiation and construction.
As long as they are unnarratable, the popular songs of the 1970s are trapped. They cannot pass beyond the state of generational objects until they begin to lose their power to identify for listeners a particular temporal location connected with individual memory, until they can be fitted into more general stories. This does not mean that the songs float free of their surroundings; if anything, the cultural contexts of the songs become more important for discussion because so much that was tacitly assumed as interpretive background is no longer shared by other audiences. The songs must begin to die to generational use so that they can live as other kinds of objects.18 The Rhino box set may signal the need for this, but at most it provides raw material. The stories into which the songs may fit remain to be told. What goes for the music also goes for other aspects of the culture of the time. The Have a Nice Decade collection points to a persistent difficulty with making sense of the period as a historical narrative.
THE “PROBLEM” OF THE 1970s
The decade of the 1970s invariably seems historically opaque and confusing. Our techniques of representing the recent past as well as the media we choose to do so encourage us to assume that the 1970s have a distinctive identity. We can allow the eight-year success of the popular television sitcom That Seventies Show (1998–2006) to stand in for the assortment of books, articles, and other kinds of commentary that combined with personal reminiscences from the end of the 1990s into the present to create our shorthand image of the decade. With excesses of material style, dopey New Age ideas and practices, weak politicians, and the omnipresence of drugs and sex (both approached with little fear)—the 1970s seem innocent or witless, depending on our point of view.
But when we look at all closely, the appearance of unity in the decade shatters. This is not news—it is close to a commonplace for some time to note the difficulties of maintaining a decade-based scheme of periodization for a time bounded by the social shifts that marked “the long 1960s” and the 1980s. On one end, there are any number of mythologized events—potential generational objects—filling out the year 1970 that we might treat as “the end of the 1960s.” The Beatles broke up, the trial of the Chicago Seven ended in a guilty verdict, students were shot by the National Guard at Kent State, Midnight Cowboy won a Best Picture Oscar despite its X rating, the Manson family murdered Sharon Tate and her guests, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died . . . and so on. Just past the end of the decade, the events of 1980 include John Lennon’s murder; the collapse of disco as a mainstream interest; the U. S. boycott of the Olympic Games in Moscow because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the resolution of the Iranian hostage crisis; and, above all, the landslide electoral victory of Ronald Reagan, which brought in its wake a number of traditional-values attempts to “just say no” to the social changes of the previous years. Although it may seem that most of these symbolically resonant events mattered primarily with respect to social and aesthetic values, many of them had significant political and economic consequences as well. But there are just as many objects and occasions that we could cite to prove that the 1960s lingered far into the 1970s, to such an extent that we could argue that the two decades form a microhistorical whole; and at the same time, we could show that fundamental aspects of the 1980s began to appear as nascent critiques of the doubled decade it would eventually try to replace.19 The 1970s can be regarded as the period in which crucial cultural ideals formulated in the 1960s were amplified and extended throughout American society. At the same time, however, the decade contained a strenuous impulse toward cultural retrospectivism (bolstering the significant appearance of the conservative cultural movements that marked the 1980s), inasmuch as the materials of earlier moments in popular culture either persisted at the margins or were deliberately revived.
In television, for instance, Norman Lear’s epochal sitcom All in the Family premiered opposite the classic 1960s domestic fantasy Bewitched in January 1972. Instead of a camp parody of witches in the suburbs (a mainstreamed and thinly disguised allegory about the place of women and queer folk in Cold War America), Lear offered a lower-middle-class family fighting uninhibitedly about vexing current social issues. It is worth noting that before the first episode of All in the Family, CBS attached a warning notice for potential family audiences: this new show was for mature audiences only. The 1971–72 season proved to be the final one for Bewitched. It was the last of the great surreal sitcoms that had dotted the television screen during the 1960s, only to be replaced by shows that wanted to manufacture a style of realism. In place of jinn in bottles, pigs who painted, hapless castaways who never could get off that tropical island, the successful sitcoms of the 1970s presented vociferous arguments about pressing political issues such as the Vietnam War, abortion, changes in gender roles, or the position of sexual minorities.
The history of the 1970s sitcom points to the value of realism on television. Politics and history were especially prized during prime-time hours, often at the expense of frank entertainment. Another major occurrence in prime-time programming might be described as “The Great Variety Show Die-Off.” In 1971, a given week of prime-time programming would have offered no less than ten variety shows, most of them lasting an hour. Four years later, the number available was only five.20 By 1980, there were only two, and those were short-lived. In 1982, there were no prime-time variety shows at all on the three major networks. Of the variety