>
>Well, I've held off burdening the whole list with this for a couple of
>years now, although I have sent to a few folks I thought would enjoy it.
>But since Dave Purcell brought it up, I'll post this behemoth against my
>better judgment. I do think it's germane. And I also think that when Fulks
>covers "Jet" he takes part in the tradition I talk about in the piece. At
>some level, it's part of what puts the "alt" in his alt country
>categorization (imho). Actually, I'd argue that it's a big part of what
>puts the "alt" in alt-country generally. But I won't belabor that here. I
>think it will make more sense if you read the thing.
>
>As you'll see, I'd argue that at this point, it's impossible for Fulks'
>actions not to be viewed as somewhat ironic by the audience. Nevertheless,
>I view irony primarily as a shield in this context anyway (although it may
>not be a shield Fulks himself needs anymore). A good pop song has the
>power to touch us at the deepest emotional level, especially one from our
>childhood before we knew all about hipness, etc. Unfortunately, many of us
>from the post baby-boom generation forgot or have been too insecure to
>admit this truth, especially in our late teens and twenties. So irony
>helps create a space for us to safely be nostalgic about some rather
>absurd times.
>
>Anyway, sorry in advance for the length. I also hope the formatting isn't
>too screwed up. I'm afraid I write in pretty long paragraphs sometimes.
>This thing has never been published anywhere. Indeed, I'm not even sure
>why I wrote it. I guess I just think about this stuff too much sometimes.
>
>That's why I love this list. It's one of the few places where I've found
>some kindred spirits.
>
>Enjoy or delete.
>
>JL
>
>
>Sucking in the Seventies: Paul Westerberg, the Replacements,
>and the Onset of the Ironic Cover Aesthetic in Rock and Roll
>(It's Only Rock and Roll But I Like It)
>
>By Jacob London, Copyright 1996 All Rights Reserved
>
> A while back, my local "alternative" radio station began playing a
>cover version of the Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night" by the U.K. band
>Ned's Atomic Dustbin. The first time I heard it, I didn't even think about
>changing the station, even though the Rollers were one of the most
>critically unhip bands of the 1970s. I just sat back and listened,
>slightly amused, but mostly taking the whole experience for granted. Such
>is the state of things now that the practice of "alternative" bands
>covering "bad" songs from the 1970s has become so commonplace. If it isn't
>Ned's Atomic Dustbin, it's Seaweed or Smashing Pumpkins doing some
>Fleetwood Mac song like "Go Your Own Way" or "Landslide."
>
> Few question the full-on embrace of 1970s popular culture anymore.
>It's even got it's own "American Grafitti" film in Richard Linklater's
>"Dazed and Confused." Linklater's take on the past is a little more
>self-conscious and cynical than George Lucas's vision of the early 1960s
>in "American Grafitti." But Linklater's remembrance of teen life in 1976
>remains a warm one, especially in its unself-consciously reverant use of
>the period's music. It pushes all the same buttons as Lucas's film,
>although neither Linklater nor his audience would ever completely admit
>it. For even as the residue of 1970s has reasserted itself in the American
>cultural life of the 1990s, a lingering tinge of reticence remains, as
>people continue to adjust to the idea that openly embracing the mainstream
>culture of the 1970s no longer entails being instantly labeled a loser or
>a philistine.
>
> Back in the early 1980s, when I was starting college in Ann Arbor,
>Michigan, things were a lot different. There was plenty of risk involved
>in embracing the mainstream music of the 1970s, at least among the
>community of rock and roll hipsters I hung out with. A friend later
>summarized the stakes very well in a different context: "There's a lot on
>the line when you tell other people what kind of music you like; people
>know they'll be judged based on what they say. If they give the right
>answer they'll be accepted. If they don't, people may look down on them."
>
> This was true in Ann Arbor during that time as it has been
>everywhere I've lived since. The rules determining inside and outside were
>generally unwritten, but they weren't hard to figure out. Punk rock was
>cool. Some New Wave was cool. David Bowie, he was pretty cool (his glam
>rock was sort of New Wave and Punk before they were invented). Dylan, the
>Beatles, the Byrds, the Stones, the Who, Motown, and the other classics of
>1960s rock, that was cool too, as long as you weren't too much of a hippie
>about it. But the mainstream music of the 1970s was not cool. Disco
>sucked, including George Clinton and his P-Funk allies. Foreigner was not
>cool. Lynyrd Skynyrd was not cool. Neither were Black Sabbath, Led
>Zepplin, Peter Frampton, Foghat, Bad Company, Thin Lizzy, or Alice Cooper.
>Black Oak Arkansas was not cool. Neither were Head East, R.E.O.
>Speedwagon, the Michael Stanley Band, the Eagles, Kansas, Styx, nor any of
>the other music Richard Linklater put in his movie.
>
> In this environment, it is no surprise that my good friend Larry
>felt compelled to show his allegiance to the clan of the rock and roll
>hipster by throwing his copy of Led Zepplin IV against the wall of the
>University of Illinois dorm room where he was staying during the summer of
>1983. I seem to remember trying half-heartedly to convince him not to do
>it as he raised the record to hurl it.
>
> "You sure you want to do that man," I said. "A record is a record.
>You might regret it later."
>
> "No way man, I'm gonna throw it," he said, cocking it behind his
>ear. "I'm ashamed I own this; it sucks. If I hear 'Stairway to Heaven'
>one more time I'm gonna lose my shit. It sucks. 'Black Dog' sucks too. It
>all sucks." And with that, he whipped the thing at the wall and it
>shattered into numerous pieces around the room (he told me recently he
>bought it again on CD a few years ago). We put something like "Armed
>Forces" by Elvis Costello on the turntable, opened up some cans of Strohs
>beer, and cracked up for a while, completely confident that justice had
>been done.
>
> Then in the fall of 1984 something happened in Ann Arbor that
>turned the well ordered world of our little sub- culture upside-down. The
>Replacements came to town and played "Black Diamond" by Kiss. Undoubtedly,
>it was not the first such incident nationwide. Nor were the Replacements
>necessarily the only band at that time playing covers like "Black
>Diamond." Nonetheless, in hindsight Paul Westerberg and his cohorts were
>perhaps the most important purveyors of this practice.
>
>Among the rock and roll hipeoise, the band's influence was comparable to
>that of the Velvet Underground, who sold very few records during its
>tenure, but as many have jokingly observed, seems to have influenced every
>person who bought one of those albums to go out and start up a band of his
>or her own. In the case of the Replacements, a similar phenomenon occurred
>across the country in 1984-85: almost every person in a band who saw the
>Replacements cover songs like "Black Diamond" went back to practice with
>their own band determined to find their own "Black Diamond" to cover.
>
> For my part, I'm just glad I made it to the show. I came really
>close to staying home. I had seen the band once before in the summer of
>1983, about three weeks after Larry hurled Led Zepplin IV at the wall.
>They had opened for REM, my reigning favorites at the time, and I had not
>really enjoyed their set very much. In the band's defense, the sound was
>bad for their set that night. But the truth is, I didn't get what they
>were doing. I was simply unprepared to assimilate the broad range of
>styles they brought to their music. Was it punk? Was it straight hard
>rock? It certainly had guitar solos. Was it country?
>
> Whatever it was, I figured it out in Joe's Star Lounge that fall
>night in 1984. Or maybe the band had figured it out a little better by
>then too. It was certainly a more cohesive unit that came into Ann Arbor
>that night. By this time, the band's two LPs and one EP had been well
>received critically and they had just begun to tour on their as yet
>unreleased third LP, "Let It Be." A buzz was building.
>
> The band opened its set with "Color Me Impressed" from the
>"Hootenany" LP. About twenty seconds into the song, my body began to
>tingle, as it occassionally does when I hear something really special for
>the the first time. Maybe I'd heard the song before at the 1983 show, but
>as the two guitars interacted, simultaneously supporting and playing off
>of each other, it finally registered.
>
> The tingling feeling in my body continued for quite a while,
>because it seemed that every original song the band played was great, a
>part of this wonderful all-you-can-eat buffet for the rock and roll
>hipster, loud and fast like punk rock, but with a melodic pop sensibility,
>great guitar solos, well crafted lyrics, and wonderful stylistic nods to
>country music and rockabilly. Everything about it followed our unwritten
>rules of rock music hipsterdom to a "T." Indeed, for many of us in the
>crowd, these guys had instantly become the coolest band in the land of the
>hipoeise.
>
> Then boom!! The Kiss cover.
>
> Immediately, I felt confused and self-conscious about how to
>respond. Everything in my rigidly disciplined rock music snob brain said
>that a Kiss cover was wrong. This was Kiss. A joke band. A pimple on the
>ass of good rock and roll, at least as good rock and roll was defined by
>my peers and the pop cultural elite to whom I owed my very sense of good
>and bad. But everything in my emotional experience and that of the rest of
>the audience simultaneously said the opposite. We all seemed to be loving
>it. Although as I looked around the room, I saw looks of guilt or
>confusion on more than one faceno doubt owing to the knowledge that
>however good the whole thing felt, one's rigidly codified sense of cool
>and uncool was rapidly being turned inside out.
>
> This cognitive dissonance was too problematic to endure for very
>long. So almost instantaneously we came upon a strategy for resolving our
>aesthetic quandary: We could overcome our weird feelings and enjoy this
>moment to the fullest extent, as long as we made fun of it at the same
>time. So we shrugged off our confusion, reclaimed a little bit of our
>white suburban past, and basked in the heretofore forgotten pleasures of
>"Black Diamond," shaking our fists and really getting into the spirit of
>Kiss and hard rock cartoonishness in general. But on another level we
>were all knowing participants in a gag. We all looked at each other with
>this expression that said "I can't quite believe I'm doing this, but it
>sure feels good. And by the way, isn't this really a funny joke?" Thus,
>when the moment was over, we had no problem minimizing the significance of
>the whole experience, self-consciously laughing it off as some sort of
>weird anomaly.
>
> But reflecting upon the "Black Diamond" experience over a decade
>later, it is clear that those of us in attendance dismissed its cultural
>significance far too uncritically. In hindsight, the "Black Diamond"
>experience is particularlly emblematic of the cultural relationship
>between my demographic cohort group what I call the tailbust generation,
>the end of the baby boom and the beginning of Generation Xand the core
>baby boomers who have preceded us.
>
>Born between 1958 and 1970, we are a transitionary group, who came of age
>in the blurry and uneven terrain which separated the previously hegemonic
>baby boom culture from the now emergent post-boomer culture. Those of us
>in the tail group, my closest cohorts, now in our late twenties or early
>thirties, were old enough to experience many of the pivotal baby boomer
>events first hand through the eyes of a four to nine year old child. But
>despite this first hand knowledge, most of us at the tail end of the baby
>boom share a lot more with the members of Generation X (e.g., an
>encyclopedic knowledge of Brady Bunch, Partridge Family, and Gilligan's
>Island episodes). For in the final analysis, our popular culture framework
>has been almost entirely shaped by the core baby boomers of 1946- 1953.
>They are the ones who were out in the streets in the 1960s, they were the
>ones at Woodstock, and theirs is the large and loud voice which has so
>dominated the popular culture in which we latecomers came of age.
>
> Nowhere has the core baby boomer voice been more powerful than in
>establishing and shaping a rock and roll canon. To the extent that rock
>had a moment in which distinctions between "highbrow" rock and "lowbrow"
>rock had validity and were seriously debated, the parameters of this
>moment were set out by the rock critics who are members of the core baby
>boom generation (e.g., Christgau, Marcus, Marsh, Landau, Loder, Bangs,
>DeCurtis, etc.). In fact, it is the ongoing existence and
>institutionalization of this rock critic cultural elite in publications
>such as Rolling Stone Magazine that has made the notion of a rock and roll
>canon a viable one (Rolling Stone glories in its role as a sacrilizing
>force, releasing issues dedicated to subjects like the 100 best rock
>records of all time). The core boomer critics are the people who did the
>initial periodizing of rock and roll history. And in doing so, they
>effectively structured, and in many respects, continue to control the
>discourse surrounding popular music.
>
> The core boomer rock music canon and the core boomer periodization
>of its history are very neatly represented and summarized in the Rolling
>Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll. It begins with the cannonized
>antecedents of rock and roll: blues from the delta, the urban blues, and
>country music (including western swing). After that it establishes the
>rock pioneers: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bill Haley, Elvis and the
>lesser Rockabillies. Next it moves into the core of the canon: the
>Beatles, Dylan, the Stones, the Who, Hendrix, Joplin, the Jefferson
>Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Byrds, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the
>whole of the Motown sound, and the Stax/Volt tradition. Following this
>material, there is some movement into the 1970s and 1980s by the authors.
>For example, Dave Marsh discusses Bruce Springsteen, there is a piece on
>Neil Young's solo career, and punk and new wave get small mentions. But
>for the most part these discussions continue themes whose roots are in the
>sixties.
>
> For it is in the '60s, we learn at least implicitly from this
>book, that the sacred texts were fully developed and most fully realized.
>And it was in the '70s that rock music got out of hand and began to be
>crushed under the excess of its own pretension. Whether it was art rock or
>the slick studio music of California, on balance the whole affair was
>nothing if not bloated and flatulent. Elvis, it seems, embraced Vegas and
>its kitsch, and in the eyes of the canon keepers, so did much of '70s
>popular music. Thus when punk came along to save the day, it did so
>through its reaffirmation of the basic values of rock and roll articulated
>first in the fifties by the rock pioneers and then more comprehensively by
>such "highbrow" rock artists as the Beatles and the Stones. Punk was a
>cleansing moment which washed away all of the excess which had obscured
>the true essence of rock and roll, but it was devoid of any value unto
>itself. It's almost as if the canon keepers had said that the 1970s
>(meaning roughly 1972-1977) were a big aesthetic mistake from which
>nothing of value could be learned.
>
> But while the rhetorical force of this story of rock and roll is
>seemingly undeniable, it presents one serious problem for the tailbust
>generation: By pillorying the pop culture of the 1970s, it leaves little
>room for those of us whose formative cultural experiences occurred during
>this period. As a result, the self- conscious, internal conflict,
>exemplified by the "Black Diamond" experience, is ever present in the
>tailbuster psyche whenever aesthetic judgments are required. On the one
>hand, we know we liked bands like Kiss, at least until we learned we
>weren't supposed to. We know that liking bands like Kiss is a part of who
>we are; we have the positive associations and memories to prove it. We
>feel that the music of bands like Kiss has cultural value and that we
>should not be ashamed that we like it. We also know, at some level, that
>we must reject the story of rock according to the core boomers, because
>until we do, we cannot claim the part of our experience that makes us
>distinct from them. But on the other hand, we can't escape their
>narrative, because it has shaped us. It is always lurking in the
>background, an indelible benchmark of perception against which all of our
>aesthetic evaluations must be measured. And we are realists. We've known
>almost intuitively since we were conscious that directly asserting our
>autonomy from the core boomer narrative is not really an option. The core
>boomers have us outnumbered, they're far more righteous than we could ever
>be, and they'll do whatever it takes to insure that their story is the one
>that everyone hears and remembers. Consequently, we've developed a more
>covert, guerilla war approach to cultural assertion.
>
> In the arena of rock and roll, the most important tool of
>subversion is a sneaky strategy that has been called "preemptive irony."
>Preemptive irony is a process of mocking one's self or one's art before
>anyone else gets a chance to do it. This is accomplished by acknowledging
>explicitly in advance a self-consciousness of the pre-existing critical
>categories in which a given work might be placed. It's calling one's own
>song a "silly, neo-psychedelic ditty" before the critic has a chance to do
>it. It's a way of saying "I already know what you're going to say, because
>I know what box I'm working in, and besides, what I'm doing is kind of
>silly anyway, so how can you criticize it seriously when I don't take it
>seriously myself? You'll look silly." Which is the whole goal of
>preemptive irony to begin with: to disarm the critic by calling the
>novelty of his or her enterprise into question before the critic has a
>chance to call the artist's enterprise into question.
>
> The Replacements' practice of performing covers like "Black
>Diamond" is a text book example of the subversive power of preemptive
>irony and the terms and conditions of its legitimate deployment. Just any
>performance wouldn't do. It was better if the underlying intent of the
>performer remained ambiguous. The Replacements seemed to understand this
>intuitively. Thus while the guys seemed to enjoy playing "Black Diamond,"
>it was hard to gauge their sincerity. Was it an act of reverence from the
>heart? Or was it just a bit of satirical play acting? Would the band stop
>playing at any moment and start humiliating those members of the crowd who
>seemed to be enjoying themselves a little bit too unselfconsciously? Did
>the band think songs like "Black Diamond" sucked and deserved ridicule? Or
>did the band like them, no matter what everyone else said? It was never
>completely clear. And this was probably the way the band wanted it,
>because it always provided its members and the audience with a means of
>escape. If someone tried to make fun of the band for performing a cover
>like "Black Diamond," the members could always just say it was a joke, the
>same way those of us in the audience did at Joe's Star Lounge that night
>in 1984.
>
> But the covers were definitely more than just a joke. Whether
>consciously or unconsciously, there was a full-on revisionist attack on
>the core boomer rock and roll canon lurking inside that fog of ambiguity.
>At the time of the "Black Diamond" icident, the Replacements were already
>a respected band in the "Indy" Scene. A respected band has cultural power,
>whether the band itself realizes it or not. The audience looks to the band
>for clues as to what constitute the unwritten rules and boundaries of a
>given culture or sub-culture. So by including songs like "Black Diamond"
>and "Hitchin a Ride" in their set, along with its own excellent original
>material and the other covers the band played by critically hip English
>punk bands like Sham 69 ("Borstal Breakout") and obscure American New Wave
>bands like the Vertabrats from Champaign, Ill, the band encouraged those
>of us in the audience to see all of these songs as an interconnected unit.
>It was as if the band was saying, "The value of our original songs is
>indistiguishable from the value of these other songs we're playing. Maybe
>they all suck, but if you like 'Color me Impressed,' why shouldn't you
>also like 'Hitchin A Ride?' Fuck those old guys. Lets make our own canon.
>" And in its own half joking, uncertain, insecure way, this allowed, and
>maybe even encouraged us to entertain the notion that the pop music of our
>childhood, our guilty pleasure, the music we heard on the radio in between
>heavy doses of the Big Chill sound track, wasn't pure fluff, but music
>which merited inclusion in our own personal canons, even if it did not
>comport with the established codes of hipness. It was a subtle approach,
>self- effacing where the core boomers were self-righteous. But it was
>nevertheless one of the means by which the "indy rock" subculture
>established a cultural space, at least partially autonomous of the
>hegemonic boomer culture. And it was here, at least in part, that the work
>of establishing a post-boomer culture could be undertaken.
>
> Even more than the rest of the audience, the musicians who
>witnessed incidents like the one at Joe's Star Lounge were profoundly
>effected by them. Not only did them encourage them to rethink the boomer
>canon, they pointed to a means by which musicians could participate in the
>revision process, while simultaneously marking themselves as fellow
>traveling cohorts of bands like the Replacements. This is undoubtedly why
>so many bands began covering critically unappreciated songs of the 1970s
>in the years followed. For after "Black Diamond," the practice of covering
>such songs took on a new rhetorical significance. When bands like Soul
>Asylum and Camper Van Beethoveen covered Foreigner's "Juke Box Hero,"or
>Ringo Starr's "Photograph," they reiteratedat least implicitlythe same
>questions the Replacements had asked. At the same time, they also asserted
>their common membership in the "indy rock" scene.
>
> And over the years, the practice of playing ironic covers has
>become such an institutionalized way for a band to assert its
>"alternativeness" that a self-consciously applied ironic cover aesthetic
>has developed amongst musicians in the scene to separate the wheat from
>the chafe. The specific contours of this ironic cover aesthetic are
>difficult to articulate. Nevertheless, while the whole thing might have
>begun as a drunken happy accident up in Minneapolis, the cover aesthetic
>has developed a high level of sophistication over the last decade. Just
>about every "underground" musician I know has a profound intuitive
>awareness of its boundaries. I admit that this is probably not empirically
>verifiable. But I have had enough conversations with enough different
>musicians in enough different places across the United States to be
>confident that such an aesthetic sensibility does exist as a fairly
>unified entity nationwide.
>
> Generally, discussions of the ironic cover aesthetic boil down to
>a single binary opposition that Beavis and Butthead would certainly be
>comfortable with: "cool" vs. "lame." In a band setting, the discussion
>might go like this:
>
>Band Member #1: Lets cover "Whiskey Rock n' Roller" by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
>That would be really cool.
>
>Band Member #2: No way, that would be lame. Everybody always does
>Skynyrd covers. That whole southern rock "Freebird" thing is played out.
>It wouldn't be funny. People would think we really like that stuff.
>
>Band Member #1: But I do like that stuff. "Whiskey Rock n' Roller" is a
>great song and I've always liked it. It rocks. I think people would
>really dig it.
>
>Band Member #2: Maybe, but I don't think we can pull it off. It's too
>close to what we do already. We're not the Butthole Surfers, you know.
>They could cover any song and it would probably be cool. It just doesn't
>feel right to me. We need something more obscure like "Hot Child in the
>City" by Nick Gilder. "Whiskey Rock n' Roller" is too obvious. People will
>think it's lame.
>
> As the above example illustrates, not all "bad" songs of the 1970s
>are created equal. Nor are all "underground" bands created equal. For most
>bands, the risks are high. The wrong cover choice will be perceived by the
>audience as lame, reinforcing the impression that the band is lame. But
>certain bands (e.g., Sonic Youth) could probably cover any song, no matter
>how lame or obvious it seems on the surface, and through pure will or
>attitude transform it into something that is accepted as really cool (see
>e.g., the Butthole Surfers' almost mimetic re-reading of Donovan's "Hurdy
>Gurdy Man"). Nevertheless, the goal remains the same for all bands: you
>want to be on the "inside" of the joke not the "outside," because a
>successful cover legimates your claim to membership in the "alternative
>rock" subculture.
>
> In the decade since the "Black Diamond" incident, the gradual
>embrace of the ironic cover aesthetic by musicians and fans in the "indy"
>scene has reconfigured the cultural power relations of rock and roll
>discourse. Increasingly, a new set of post-boomer cultural standards and
>sensibilities have emerged, and the keepers of the core boomer canon have
>either had to respond to them or ignore them at their peril. While it is
>not that difficult to learn the parameters of coolness implicit within the
>cover aesthetic and its cognates, leaping into this fray is not for the
>faint at heart. The poor boomer critic who foolishly believes that she can
>confront the post-boomer culture with her pre-ironic analytical framework
>is ripe for ridicule and embarrassment. For the practice of preemptive
>irony transmutes established critical categories: up is down, bad is good,
>stupid is smart. Consequently, the critic is all but required to retool
>her critical categories to successfully evaluate the ironic cover and its
>relations, because failure would mean having to admit that one's criticism
>is no longer culturally relevant. Then the critic would be forced to
>abdicate her most powerful role, that of the taste maker who discovers the
>newest and most cutting edge music. Because like all practitioners within
>the popular culture apparatus, critics risk extinction if they don't keep
>up with the times.
>
> In the face of these realities, more and more Boomer critics have
>re-tooled. They've assimilated the aesthetic categories wrought by
>preemptive irony, and in the process, hastened the collapse of the core
>baby boomer cultural hegemony. In truth, though, "erosion" may be a better
>term than "collapse," for the process has been more like termites eating
>away at the frame of a house than a bulldozer leveling it. The house of
>1960s rock isn't razed, it just finally caves in one day and lo and
>behold, 1970s album rock is back in the hipster fold, after years of
>languishing on the margins of the serious rock critic discourse. This
>process is no more evident than in the critical establishment's
>unqualified embrace of the Seattle "grunge" sound of bands like
>Soundgradren and Pearl Jam as a form of "alternative rock," somehow
>aesthetically distinguishable from the critically disfavored heavy
>metal/hard rock of the 1970s.
>
>Apparently, it is their enthusiastic yet self- conscious and ironically
>detatched posture towards hard rock that has allowed the Seattle grunge
>musicians to unabashedly borrow from 1970s rock, recycle its musical
>content and yet make fun of the whole process in such a way that the end
>result comes off as an act of aesthetic sophistication comporting with
>canonized definitions of musical hipness. Through some fantastic process,
>the magical transmogrifying machine of preemptive irony has taken the
>supposed cheese of the 1970s, seasoned it with a little critically
>favored, earnest and authentic punk rock, and turned it into the pure
>"alternative" gold of the 1990s.
>
> One man's trash is another man's treasure, I suppose. And so as
>we at the front of the tailbust generation settle into our thirties, get
>fat, grey, and some among us lose our hair, preemptive irony has somehow
>allowed us to make a strange peace with the whole notion of nostalgia for
>our cultural roots. Over the decade since the "Black Diamond" experience,
>our past has been gradually reinscribed into the present in a form that
>doesn't cause us too much discomfort. In our case, we embrace it gingerly
>with a sort of self-effacing, satirical pride. Sure, the 1970s weren't the
>glory years. We were late to that big party our elders threw in the decade
>before. Nothing really "important" happened when we were growing up. It
>was all old hat by then, at least for all the elite college kids who'd
>already outgrown pot, acid, and the counter-culture. Now it was the
>philistine masses turn to enjoy it. But we kids still had to get through
>it and deal with the dislocations wrought by the counter-cultural
>experiments of our philistine parents.
>
> Now we're all here. Grown up. But everyone still has to be from
>someplace. Some people get to be from supposedly cool places like San
>Francisco or New York. And some people, like me, did time in places like
>the Cleveland area, which, Pere Ubu to the contrary, has never been viewed
>as a very cool place. But over time, with some work, you make your peace
>with your past. Whether it's Cleveland, the 1970s, or Cleveland in the
>1970s, one way or another, you find an approach that works. Maybe you do
>poke a little fun at it now and again. But when you go back to visit and
>you see those ugly decaying steelmills in the flats or you think about
>those ugly elephant bell-bottoms of the 1970s, you find beauty in them and
>you take a strange pride in having done your time there. Maybe you don't
>really want to have to live there full time. San Francisco and New York
>are actually pretty cool. But some smart-ass cultural snob from the coast
>better not make fun of Cleveland, because if they do, you won't hesitate
>to tell them to fuck-off. What the hell do they know? They weren't there
>living it the way you did. So they'll never know the beauty of being
>sixteen in Cleveland or Spokane or Des Moines or Milwaukee or somewhere
>out in New Jersey, and driving down some back road late at night with some
>friends, Bad Company or Zepplin or the Eagles on the car radio, maybe
>drinking a few beers and feeling pretty damn good indeed. Maybe those
>snobs have got their own memories. But this one's your's. Perhaps you are
>a little embarrassed about it now. But it still feels good to think about
>it sometimes, even if it is with some humor. Whatever works.
>
> And then one day, you hear a Bay City Rollers song on the
>alternative station in between the Cult and Soundgarden and you don't even
>think about it anymore. You're not embarrassed or outraged. It's not even
>really that novel. It just takes you back and it's ok. It's kind of
>liberating in a way. You push all of the air out of your lungs, take a big
>deep breathe, and let it all flow into you without a lick of shame. The
>hard, ambiguous, insecure edge of irony has vanished. And it's ok, because
>you don't need it anymore. It's work is done. You're basking in the
>comforting warmth of reverent nostalgia now, your own reverent nostalgia.
>Not the heavy, self-serious nostalgia of those 1960s baby boomers, people
>who really believed that they were going to "change the world," and that
>their experience was somehow unique in the annals of history, not just one
>more stop in a never ending process of cultural creation, disposal and
>reclamation. No, this nostalgia is pretty free of those sorts of
>pretenses. It's more like "I remember this fondly. I'm not embarrassed to
>say it. No really, I'm not embarrassed. And that's ok. Isn't it?"
>
>Jake London
