LITMIR.BIZ

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about categories such as “imitation, forgery, counterfeit, and what we may call the aesthetics of deception and self-deception.”²⁸

      An example from pop music of the sort of relationship that might fall under the label of kitsch comes from a concert review of a performance by Barry Manilow in 1980: “Basically, Manilow offered his audience music with absolutely safe feelings. When he sang about heartbreak, there was no pain, only a sadness that one could safely wallow in. When he sang about excitement, there was no danger that things would get out of hand. When he sang about the past, there was no sense of aging or loss, only safe nostalgia.”²⁹

      The reviewer is devoted to pop music ideals of high seriousness, so he cannot entertain the possibility that “safe” might be a worthwhile musical quality in some situations, for some audiences. Manilow’s audience is filled with lazy listeners, it seems, who want only stunted art that isolates them from emotional truth. Though the reviewer does not use the term, the implication is obvious: Manilow’s listeners want kitsch. It is to Manilow’s discredit, we are to believe, that he offers kitsch to them. We will take up the question of who these listeners are, and what Manilow knows about their desires, in chapter 4; for now, I want only to note that although “safety” and “challenge” might have reasonable claims to our attention as significant musical values, they are likely to be irreconcilable.

      I return to the problem of kitsch-attribution: if we encounter a kitsch-vulnerable object with an austere morality of art firmly in place, we will be likely to judge that it fails; the structural and expressive faults that we find will be continuous with our ethical disgust. Furthermore, as I have suggested, the kitsch object brings its audience and performers alike into disrepute. Either the badness of the object reveals the aesthetic and moral inadequacies of its creators/appreciators, or it actively infects them with its own inferior qualities. It is worth noting that the frameworks within which these notions of kitsch can function are profoundly structured by the specific problems of modernity, especially the troublesome centrality of mass production and conventionality. If we suppose that “high art” is that which is one-of-a-kind and embodies some kind of extraordinary labor (such as talent) that is to be apprehended in an aesthetically fastidious manner, then the proliferation of inexpensive copies of such high art is kitsch. Michelangelo’s David is not kitsch (we hope)—but all of its copies are because they negate the work required to produce the object and make its experience commonplace and potentially undiscriminating.

      Why would someone buy a copy, though? The blindingly obvious answer would be that they like the object but cannot afford the original. The modernist detestation of kitsch depends upon an enormous investment in the concepts of originality, difficulty, and truth, to be sure. But since not everyone can afford the same kinds or degrees of investment, questions of class cannot be disentangled from these values. Those tourists in Munich were probably upper-middle-class visitors, loathed by aristocrats and bohemians alike; with the advent of mass production, however, kitsch is affordable by the lower strata of the middle class and even by the upward-aspiring proletariat. Critiques of kitsch aimed at a presumably hegemonic social group thus take on a different trajectory in later historical moments. (We might think of Adolf Loos’s fascinating 1910 essay “Ornament and Crime”—its complicated critique of mass production, however productive with respect to fin de siècle Vienna, later seems to be compromised by its reliance on racist concepts of primitivism and hereditary criminality, not to mention its potential for misogyny and class hostility.)³⁰

      With music, the problem of original versus copy is also articulated through technological developments of modernism. Obviously, there are important differences between the effect of mechanical reproduction on statues and the effect on songs. But in both cases, a significant aspect of the threat comes from the possibility of a relentlessly leveling super-abundance. Not only does such proliferation unsettle the relationship between a thing and its imitations, it also obliterates the distinction between ones-of-a-kind that have been reproduced and things meant for reproduction from their point of origin. Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper can saturate the visual field in innumerable guises: prints, lithographs, paint-by-numbers renditions, silk screens, and so on. The same may be said of those paintings of poker-playing dogs.³¹ We may find ourselves surrounded by innumerable versions of Beethoven’s Fifth, not just the whole symphony as rendered by whomever, but in excerpts, arrangements, and takeoffs from Muzak to disco. The same may be said of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” or of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally).”

      This threat has meant that in everyday criticism and the discussions between ordinary listeners, oppositions such as live versus recorded, complex versus simple (a notable unstable opposition), and especially “authentic” versus “commercial” have had tremendous disputatory power. Though the term kitsch entered English through intellectual circles, it rapidly became domesticated for widespread use by writers who were less interested in condemning popular culture wholesale than in making qualitative distinctions among its materials. In these demotic contexts, the term’s connotations of emotional sloth and self-deception remained more important than its parasitic relationship to “high culture,” which can easily be replaced by an adherence either to “the folk” or to a romanticist notion of individual artistic autonomy—the “vision thing.”

      Perhaps this set of values works well enough when dealing with rock musicians and their audiences. But what of artists and audiences for whom music serves other purposes? Most of the artists I discuss came from or performed on behalf of audiences who occupied marginal social positions before the 1970s: African Americans; women; gay men and lesbians; poor, mostly rural (and especially Southern) white people. The rock paradigm has rarely served such groups well because they historically have found authenticity too expensive to maintain and, in any case, lived lives in which there was perhaps greater need of consolation.³² But it is the peculiar property of the 1970s as a historical decade that such groups began to think of themselves as able to insist that their social positions be renegotiated. The readjustments of the 1970s were legal, economic, political, and those more vaguely defined as “cultural.” Musical style mattered to these audiences not least because its power to represent them allegorized (and more than allegorized) their self-constitution as well as their relocation partially out of the margins.

      The transformation of these groups succeeded to different extents, of course. African Americans ultimately fared least well—the gains in prosperity and increased social dignity were most notable at the beginning of the decade but were immediately undermined by economic downturns and policies of (only occasionally) benign neglect. (An assortment of negative responses, often federally sponsored as if a cruel parody of the civil rights movement, continue to the present day.) For gay men and lesbians as well as women, the changes of the 1970s, while at times costly, were genuinely revolutionary. The retrenchments of the 1980s and 1990s have never completely turned back the clock. Poor Southern white folks perhaps saw the greatest cultural benefits, but at the cost of a significant number of their original communitarian virtues. (All of these historical vicissitudes make a mark in this book because they affected the shape of the 1970s revival.) What matters in the context of kitsch is that all these groups favored music that was not a part of rock. They liked older styles. Softer styles. More sentimental styles. And in the 1970s, their tastes were suddenly much more visible in the landscape of popular music.

      Because of this historical position, the modest songs I discuss in this book find themselves implicated in social position of the arriviste.³³ That is, they are unquestionably demotic products, but they palpably yearn to be more. The social worlds they represent most fully are those of the working classes (proletarians or peasants) or at best the lower middle class as seeking to move on up to a place of wealth, luxury, and by extension, imaginative freedom. The songs and their listeners are thus caught between the authenticity of “the folk” or its stand-ins and the technical and aesthetic prowess of the high cultivated traditions. Before the invention of recording and radio, these songs might have circulated primarily by means of sheet music. Even after the airwaves have become saturated, many of them still appear in sheet music format. As sheet music, these songs typically offer themselves as occasions for rumination, if performed in solitude; or they might support atmospheres of domestic conviviality (“play a song for grandma, dear”); or again they could serve as the object realized in one of

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