Blogging Blogging The Beatles

As I mentioned here before, my dissertation research paid particular attention to the marking of anniversaries of events in popular music. My fieldwork years coincided with quite a few 40th anniversaries of events (such as concerts or the release of albums) that are now seen as historically important events: History-with-a-capital-H. My argument was that this "historical consciousness" marks a profound shift in the way that popular music (and popular culture more generally speaking) have been viewed. What was previously something trivial and ephemeral was now being treated as something with historical weight, something worthy of being honored, remembered, and--in the case of tribute bands--re-created as "authentically" as possible.

Anyway, such was the case in the late years of the first decade of the 2000s, when 40th anniversaries marking the release of albums like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or concerts like The Beatles' rooftop concert at Abbey Road studio were celebrated.

Well, a few years later, and now we're beginning to celebrate 50th anniversaries. The Rolling Stones are embarking on a tour to mark their 50th anniversary as a band. And just yesterday, the online news magazine Slate started a new feature called "Blogging the Beatles" to follow, 50 years later, the events of The Beatles' career.

The first entry focuses on the November 26, 1962 recording of their first #1 single, "Please Please Me." I won't say much about the content, other than to say that it seems accurate and well-informed. (Much of its information comes from Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties--a good choice.)

But again, what interests me the most about this is the sheer fact that something like this would exist. The New York Times has a blog called "Disunion" following the American Civil War, exactly 150 years after it took place. The Civil War was obviously a major historical event, with ramifications that can be still be felt. Even concerts marking the 40th anniversaries of the release of "concept" albums make a certain amount of sense; by the time these albums were released in the late 1960s, rock music had already appropriated a certain amount of "artistic" prestige--though I think contemporary observers would have been surprised to see how durable this prestige has been. But the events of early 1960s rock were emphatically NOT viewed as either aesthetically- or historically-important at the time. They really were seen as trivial, ephemeral popular culture. 

So a blog marking the 50th anniversary of these events is really retrospectively giving the prestige and historical importance to events that were not seen as so important at the time. Why are these events seen as important in retrospect? Well, the first answer is because of what the actors involved would go on to do later. The birth of Martin Luther King, Jr. on January 15, 1929 wasn't historically significant at the time, but it became significant (and something we celebrate with a holiday every year) because of what he would later accomplish. Another possible answer is that, in fact, these earlier events were historically significant at the time, that they contain seeds of the greatness that was to come which observers at the time missed. Certainly, this is a popular explanation offered by classic rock fans.

As for myself, I subscribe in part to both those explanations, but I prefer a third idea: that these events have been treated as historically significant because of power. In the case of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, the events of the early 1960s are treated as significant because the baby boomer generation has succeeded in canonizing the popular culture of their youth. They've done this through sheer demographic might, through purchasing power, and through being in positions of influence as writers, DJs, and record company executives. Nothing nefarious about this. But while we're still trying to understand the music and culture of the 1960s fifty years later, we will understand it better when we realize that its enduring popularity and "historical" nature isn't an accident or a feature of the music itself.

Things Have Changed

I wrote a long post talking about the new Bob Dylan album that was released this past Tuesday, Tempest. The release of a new Dylan record is a big occasion for me under any circumstances, but this particular release carried special interest. Tuesday (when new recordings go on sale in the United States) was September 11th, the 11th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York, the Pentagon, and the foiled attack that crash-landed in western Pennsylvania, about 80 miles from where I currently live in Pittsburgh. This was strange in that Dylan had, in fact, also released an album on that fateful day, "Love and Theft." I went to sleep this past Tuesday after listening to Tempest a few times and being thankful that the anniversary of 9/11 (coinciding with the release of another Dylan album) had passed without incident. So it was a rude shock to wake up on Wednesday morning to the news of the violent protests and attacks in Cairo and Benghazi.

These attacks put my thoughts on Tempest in a new perspective. As did the the release of a few excerpts of an interview that Dylan gave to Rolling Stone magazine. The excerpts contain Dylan's harsh response to critics who have charged him with plagiarism for his quotation of the poet Henry Timrod and the Japanese writer Junichi Saga--as well as his copying of the melody of "Red Sails in the Sunset" for "Beyond the Horizon," a track which appears on 2006's Modern Times. (I should point out here that it was my wife Catharine who noticed this borrowing immediately and brought it to my attention.) Anyway, Dylan says that only "wussies and pussies complain about that stuff"--a sentiment I don't necessarily agree with, but find hilarious nonetheless.

Unfortunately, Rolling Stone decided not to put the entire interview online (and it's long: 10 pages in the magazine). So I actually went out today and bought a hard copy of Rolling Stone magazine, something I haven't done in years, so that I could read the thing. As usual, Dylan ends up raising more questions than he ever answers in this interview. Perhaps the interview's most head-scratching discussion is Dylan's suggestion that he experienced some sort of transfiguration, a realization he comes to after reading a book that mentions that Robert Zimmerman, a former president of the San Bernadino Hell's Angels, died in a motorcycle crash in 1964. (In fact, the book, Sonny Barger's Hell's Angel got the date wrong; the fatal accident actually happened in 1961.) Dylan himself--whose given name is, of course, also Robert Zimmerman--also experienced a serious motorcycle crash a few years later. I'm certain that I don't really understand what Dylan is getting at with this, but I'm in good company: the interviewer Mikal Gilmore also seems not to understand the significance, and Dylan himself may only be vaguely aware of what he means by transfiguration and the bizarre coincidence between these two events. Certainly he doesn't explain it very clearly, despite Gilmore's repeated exhortations to do so.

But then again, bizarre coincidences seem to be what Dylan traffics in these days. How else to explain how the two records he happens to release on September 11th, exactly 11 years apart, coincide with terrorist attacks against the United States?

I'll tell you what. If you're interested in these things, you should definitely plunk down the $4.99 to get a copy of this issue of Rolling Stone with the Dylan interview. I'm going to spend some more time with it, try to figure it out, and then I'll post my thoughts on Tempest here when I've sorted them out.

Hegel and Kanye

When Hegel talks about freedom and slavery in one of philosophy’s most celebrated passages, he isn’t just pulling this stuff out of the air. Or, rather, that’s exactly what he’s doing: he’s talking about things that were in the air at the time he was writing Phenomenology of  Spirit in 1805-1806. Specifically, as Susan Buck-Morss argues in her article “Hegel and Haiti” (later expanded into the book Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History), the Haitian slave revolt was very much on his mind and provided the obvious inspiration for his thoughts on this subject. That no one has made this argument in the two centuries of commentary on Hegel strikes Buck-Morss as ridiculous, a kind of huge elephant in the room that has gone unremarked upon by generations of scholars. It's a reminder that philosophy, for all pretensions to exist in the rarefied world of pure thought is inevitably a product of time.

It’s this same kind “real talk” that I hear in one of Kanye West’s verses on “Diamonds from Sierra Leone.” The song is about the consequences of so-called “blood” or “conflict diamonds”—diamonds from Africa (including, as the song’s title suggests, from Sierra Leone) the sale of which finances sectarian civil war. But rather than issue platitudes about the evils of the diamond trade, Kanye comes clean:

When I speak of diamonds in this song
I ain't talkin’ ‘bout the ones that be glowin’
I'm talkin’ ‘bout Rocafella, my home, my chain.

Part of what I’ve found so compelling about Kanye over the years (but particularly in his earlier material) is that he’s a materialistic, misogynist brat—and he knows he’s a materialistic misogynist brat, and he feels guilty about being a materialistic misogynist brat, but he’s still a materialistic, misogynist brat. It’s a kind of honesty I find, well, compelling.

Money and Currency

I have to admit that I’m not really a fan of Mad Men.  When the show first began in 2007, I was a graduate student in exile from New York.  I wasn’t one of those insufferable types who brags about not owning a television, but I also saw little reason for possessing one.  (Even now that we have one, we use it exclusively for watching Steelers games or Netflix streaming on our Roku box.)  Over the first few years of its existence, I was aware that Mad Men was becoming a huge critical favorite, talked about in glowing tones by people I generally respected, but it was generally off my radar.  When I lived in Argentina, the American television shows people were interested in were House and something they knew as Ley y Orden:  Unidad de Víctimas Especiales.  

This summer, in search of things to watch on Netflix streaming, Catharine and I watched every episode of the first four seasons of Mad Men.  The show certainly meets a basic level of what I'll call "entertainingness," but I have to admit that I’m puzzled by how seriously so many people seem to take it.  To me, it seems like an impeccably artful soap opera.  And I have to think that a big part of the reason people watch this show is its surface veneer of cool; I’ll admit, I like the slicked-back hair, pressed white shirts, and slim ties as well.  None of the characters, however, are compelling or sympathetic, least of all its main character, Don Draper.  Will someone please explain to me why I am supposed to care about this man’s existential crisis and what, exactly, is so devastating about drinking Canadian Club all afternoon, having women throw themselves at you, and then coming home to your wife, played by the stunning January Jones? (Admittedly, Draper gets divorced from Jones' character, Betty, at the end of the third season.  He then has dalliances with several women before shacking up with Megan, played by Jessica Paré:  a woman attractive enough that the show's writers have found several excuses to show her in her underwear or a bathing suit during the current season.)  Anyway, the takeaway about Draper is this:  just because an actor is wearing a perfectly-tailored suit does not mean the character he or she is portraying is interesting.

Don and Betty Draper, played by Jon Hamm and January Jones.

I believe, along with Liz Lemon, that we are in a golden age of scripted television.  But I wouldn’t count Mad Men as part of it.  For me, the brilliance of a show like The Wire was that every one of its characters was complex, rich, and therefore sympathetic.  I have a fairly strong moral disapproval of those on both sides of the drug war, but I could understand characters like Stringer Bell or McNulty as possessing recognizable human aspirations.  The characters in Mad Men are all over the place, and the wild swings in plot strike me as ham-fisted and amateurish.  I keep watching it, though, because I do find it entertaining; I also watch Law and Order:  Special Victims Unit, but I wouldn’t make an argument for SVU as “great television,” either.  I also keep watching Mad Men because, like it or not, it’s become an important part of the cultural landscape.  It’s a text that people are talking about, and I’d like to be able to understand their conversations. For one thing, I notice that my Twitter timeline on Sunday evenings is full of discussions on that night's episode. 

And Mad Men has brought up some issues that are pretty central to my interests.  For starters, I am of course pretty interested in the mythology of the 1960s, in the way this decade is endlessly re-used and re-cycled in the present.  In the United States, "the 1960s" seems to be something like World War II or the Civil War:  a well-known drama that everyone knows a little about and which can be selectively mined, apparently, to reveal something about our national character.  I have written more about the late 1960s and the early 1970s; the action of Mad Men begins in 1960, but with each passing season has moved chronologically forward, closer to my era of interest.  In the episode "Tea Leaves" of the current season, Draper and an associate attempt go backstage at a Rolling Stones concert in Forest Hills, Queens (a concert which actually took place on July 2, 1966) in order to convince the Stones to do a jingle for the Heinz company.  In a season 4 episode, Draper had arranged for his young daughter Sally to see The Beatles when they played their famous August 15, 1965 concert at Shea Stadium.  (Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, has a penchant for sticking the fictional characters of Mad Men into well-known historical events of the 1960s.)

The Beatles made an appearance again in last week’s episode.  Or, at least, they had an audible presence, and certainly a quite rare one, at that.  Draper’s young, second wife Megan (who we’re told is supposed to be 26 years old, to Draper’s 40) suggests that he listen to “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the experimental final track on The Beatles’ 1966 album Revolver.  I was interested in this because of its similarity to something that I wrote about in the conclusion to my dissertation:  the usage of the Beatles song “Baby You’re a Rich Man” at the end of the 2010 film The Social Network.  (Unfortunately, this video below cuts out just as the screen fades to black for the end credits and the chorus comes thundering in--which I thought was definitely one of the most effective moments in the movie.  But you'll get an idea of how it works in the scene leading up to the end credits.)

 

As I wrote:

The Beatles—or, rather, the estate of The Beatles, run in a tenuous partnership by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison—are also notoriously reluctant to allow their songs to be licensed for usage in advertisements, television shows, or films.  Director David Fincher must have somehow convinced them to allow him to use the song, almost certainly by negotiating a deal that added significantly to the budget of the film

Much of the coverage that has followed—as I’ve mentioned, Mad Men episodes are heavily discussed online and in the print media—has focused on the expense of licensing this song, with Ben Sisario and Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times reporting that the cost was likely around $250,000, no small sum of money for a show which has a per-episode budget of about $2 million. 

In an interview with Sisario and Itzkoff, Weiner says that he wanted to include a Beatles song on the show because The Beatles are, “the band of the 20^th century.”  I’m willing to grant this, but that isn’t actually the point that is most important.  Weiner, for all of his genuflections toward historical accuracy and authenticity isn’t actually making a show “about” the 1960s, or at least, he’s not making a show that is only about the 1960s.  Mad Men’s appeal has to be that it also speaks to themes and issues that are still relevant in these first years of the 21^st century.  The themes of patriarchy, sexism, privilege, commerce, race, and class that Mad Men explores—rather ineptly, I would argue—are still things that contemporary viewers find compelling.  As far as I can tell, most people are not antiquarians.  We don’t like things just because they’re old or they’re “faithful” or they’re “accurate.”  We like things because, despite the intervening decades or centuries, they speak to us somehow.

So Weiner’s usage of The Beatles song wasn’t, I don’t believe, primarily about fidelity to an accurate representation of life in 1966.  Instead, it was a kind of a guess—or better yet, given the amount of money involved, a bet:  a bet that the music would not only be "authentic" to what people in 1966 were listening to, but also attention-grabbing and, dare I say, important to viewers watching in 2012.  And whatever you think of Mad Men (or The Beatles, for that matter), it seems pretty likely that Weiner bet correctly.  

Here's what I wrote about Fincher's choice to use The Beatles in his film. 

What interests me most about the appearance of “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” at the end of The Social Network is that Fincher must have believed that this song from 43 years before would still be relevant to the film’s wide audience and that it would function as some sort of meaningful commentary on the lives of the Millennial Generation characters the film chronicles. 

 I'll leave you with one last thing from my dissertation.  

Perhaps it is more productive to understand the music of The Beatles—and more broadly, rock music from the 1960s and 1970s—as belonging both to the past and to the present.  “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” then, becomes not a song from a foreign past, but a song that still has currency, meaning, and intelligibility in the present. 

Thoughts on the Pittsburgh Marathon

I ran the Pittsburgh Marathon this past Sunday.  

In the movie Office Space, there’s an early scene in which the main character, Peter, is in the office of a hypnotherapist.  Peter explains to him:  “So I'm sitting in my cubicle today and I realized that ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So it means that every single day you see me, that's on the worst day of my life.”  That’s sort of how I felt the last 8 miles or so of the marathon on Sunday.  Every single step hurt worse than the step before it, so every step that I took was the most painful step I had ever taken in my life.  My hamstrings started hurting, then my calves, then my feet.  Oww, my feet!  It was like someone was taking a sledgehammer to my feet with every step.  My shins were the last to start hurting, but when both your shins and your calves are hurting, there’s really no way you can take a step that isn’t excruciating.  So this is how I spent the last hour and a half of the marathon:  alternating walking and running, mouthing obscenities most of the time, cursing the downhill trajectory of Liberty Avenue as it goes from Bloomfield to the Strip District.

The first part of the race went pretty well.  I kept right on my goal pace up to the 10K mark—not letting adrenaline take over and push myself too hard or at the beginning nor falling behind.  I saw members of my band Timbeleza playing around mile marker 8, and I was able to smile and wave at them; I felt strong. 

Trouble starts about mile 12 when you cross the Birmingham Bridge from the Southside into Oakland.  It’s a long hill into Oakland, without much of a crowd, in the full sun.  I also started to get a really painful side stitch at that point, something I had managed to avoid throughout all of my training.  I managed to make a recovery around the halfway mark, with a time of 2:04—pretty good, I thought, given that I had already conquered the largest hill in the course.  Catharine came out to see me around Mile 15 when the course came fairly close to our house.  It was good to see her, and I was in reasonable shape at that point.  I knew I was going to make it to the finish. 

Passing through Homewood, I was happy to see that there were spectators out on the street, people grilling and sitting out on lawnchairs, along with a lot of kids giving high fives.  This is probably the least “nice” section of the course.  It’s a poor, black neighborhood, with its share of abandoned buildings and boarded-up houses.  For my training, I ran through this part of the course a lot, since it’s only a few miles from my house.  It certainly boasts the best smell that I encountered during my runs:  there are a few barbecue joints here that have smokers out on the street, and the smell is incredible at about 10:30 a.m. on a cold Saturday morning. 

From Homewood on, though, the wheels really fell off for me.  And I really like that metaphor, because when the wheels fall off, it doesn’t mean that you can’t go anymore.  It just means that “going” is no longer a smooth process; it now involves a lot of pushing and scraping and friction.  Which is basically how the last 8 miles went. 

But anyway, I managed a sort of Frankensteinian shuffle to the finish.  You reach a certain point where it’s like, even if you quit, you still have to walk back to your car and drive home before you can get some Advil, an ice pack, and crawl into bed.  So you may as well head towards the finish line and get your medal first.  And so I did.    

Adventures in the Life of Lady Soul

First of all, let me extend my congratulations to Ms. Aretha Franklin on her recent engagement to William Wilkerson.  I understand the couple is planning a wedding this summer in Florida with a reception to be held on a private yacht.  Catharine and I will be very pleased to attend.

But wait, there's more Aretha-related news!  As you may have also heard, Franklin is starting a kind of singing contest in order to find an opera singer worthy of being signed to her record label (and, presumably, mentored by Franklin herself).  In a bizarre justification given to NPR, Franklin says, "Some of the older classical singers like Jessye Norman, Leotyne Price, and Barbara Hendricks are retiring, they're not singing anymore, and I'd like to see some younger singers come along and take their place."

Indeed, Price has been retired since 1985.  But even weirder is this idea that, unless Aretha finds some new singers, there won't be anyone around to sing opera.  As imperfect as it is, Franklin is aware of the fact that there is an extensive vocal training infrastructure in this country, right?  That the streets of New York are awash in trained young sopranos eager to sing the classical repertory instead of working as waitresses and nannies?

So maybe Aretha is unsatisfied with this system and is going to use her money and influence to give attention to young singers in ways that the more conventional structures haven't been able to do.  But I actually like the idea better that she, in fact, lives in her kind of celebrity bubble and actually has no idea that thousands of students are enrolled in vocal performance degree programs.  It's kind of like when Prince released a song a few years ago called "Cinnamon Girl."

Obviously, "Cinnamon Girl" is a bizarre and racially problematic title.  It was also used as the title for a iconic rock song written by Neil Young, which features Young's droning one-note guitar solo (which I actually kind of love).  Surely Prince was aware of this song, right? 

The other explanation is that both Prince and Aretha are fully aware of the antecedents their work is engaging with, but they feel they don't even need to acknowledge these things whatsoever, that whatever they are doing is so obviously superior that whatever came before is just irrelevant.  Certainly that's an attitude of arrogance, but why else do we have pop stars? 

Happy Anniversary

I promised a few dissertation excerpts, and this seemed like a particularly appropriate one today. Here's a passage from my chapter on historical consciousness, after I talked about attending a concert in 2008 which re-created The Beatles' White Album to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its release in 1968. 

"In fact, the period of my fieldwork found me in the midst of quite a few 40th anniversaries for some of the iconic events of the 1960s and 1970s.  In 2009, the 40th anniversary of the release of the album Abbey Road was marked by a similar concert at the festival.  Several Beatles tribute bands around the world also took the opportunity to recreate the Beatles’ final concert on the occasion of its 40th anniversary, in January of 2009.  And the 40th anniversary of the release of the rock opera Tommy by The Who was also marked by several tribute bands playing the album in its entirety.  This historical consciousness that these anniversary concerts seem to be both partaking in and helping to construct is unlikely to go away once the current spate of anniversaries passes, however.  It seems all but certain that the early years of the 2010s will feature many '45th anniversary' performances of events from the late 1960s before ramping up for '50th anniversary' celebrations at the end of the decade."

The festival in question here is Abbey Road on the River, a Beatles tribute band festival held every year over Memorial Day weekend in Louisville, KY--now with a sister festival held over Labor Day weekend in the Washington, D.C. area.  AROTR has a strong presence on Facebook.  Here was an announcement they posted on their status today about this year's festival: 

Sometimes it's nice to know that I'm not making this stuff up.  Anyway, Abbey Road Live! is a phenomenal band, and they're also very nice guys--I interviewed them for my fieldwork.  Sounds like it should be a great show.