I want to make a few more comments on a couple of points raised by Carl
and Barry about my covers piece. I started this a week or so ago, and just
now kind of finished it off. Hope it's not too stale by now. This'll
probably be my last words on the subject (but I'm always psyched to hear
what other folks think). I think we've covered some of this ground in
other posts, but I don't have the energy to weed that stuff out of here.
Sorry. This is long, but hopefully it'll be interesting if you take the
time with it (I guess this is starting to be a theme--I'm sorry I didn't
have time to make it shorter).
first Carl:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
"I also have some thread-sparking questions (what was the first known
instance of the half-ironic cover - is he right in naming the 'Mats's
Kiss cover as Patient Zero - and also how to relate this web of
analysis to the various levels of irony in alt-country covers of both
rock and country so-called cheeze). "
Jake:
Well, I'm not sure if the Kiss Cover is "Patient Zero" or not. I suspect
not. It's a question I've asked myself. But in the end, I'm not sure it
really matters. Instead, I prefer to jump off from some ideas I first saw
in Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism or the Logic of Late Capitalism" In
the intro, he says the following. Indulge me, it's a little long and
dense:
"In periodizing a phenonomenon of this kind [here he's talking about the
phenonomenon of Postmodernism and Late Capitalism], we have to complicate
the model with all kinds of supplementary epicycles. It is necessary to
distinguish between the gradual setting in place of the various (often
unrelated) preconditions for the new structure and the "moment" (not
exactly chronological) when they all jell and combine into a functional
system. This moment is itself less a matter of chronology than it is of a
well-nigh Freudian Nachstraglichkeit, or retroactivity: people become
aware of the dynamics of some new system, in which they are themselves
seized, only later on and gradually. Nor is that dawning collective
consciousness of a new system (deduced itself intermittently in a
fragmentary way from various unrelated crisis symptoms such as factory
closings or higher interest rates) exactly the same as the coming into
being of fresh cultural forms of expression (Raymond Williams" "structures
of feeling" do finally strike one as a very odd way to have to
characterize postmodernism culturally). That the pre-conditions for a new
"structure of feeling" also preexist their moment of combination and
crystallization into a relatively hegemonic style everyone acknowledges;
but that pre-history is not in synch with the economic one. Thus Mandel
suggests that the basic new technological prerequisites of the new "long
wave" of capitalism's third stage (here called "late capitalism") were
available by the end of Wolrd War II, which also had the effect of
reorganzing international relations, decolonizing the colonies and laying
the groundwork for the emergence of a new economic world system.
Culturally, however, the precondition is to be found (apart the wide
variety of aberrant modernist "experiments" which are then restructured in
the form of predecessors) in the enormous social and psychological
transformations of the 1960s, which swept so much tradition away on the
level of metalites. Thus the economic prepartion of postmodernism began in
the 1950s, after wartime shortages of consumer goods and spare parts had
been made up and new products and new technologies (not least those of the
media) could be pioneered. On the other hand, the psychic habitus of the
new age demands the absolute break, strengthened by a generational
rapture, achieved more properly in the 1960s (it being understood that
economic development does not then pause for that, but very much continues
along its own level and according to its own logic). If you prefer a now
somewhat antiquated language, the distiction is very much the one
Althusser used to harp on between a Hegelian "essential cross section of
the present" (or coup d'essence), where a culture critique wants to find a
single principle of the "postmodern" inherent in the most varied and
ramified features of social life, and the Althusserian "structure in
dominance" in which the various levels entertain a semiautonomy over and
against each other, run at different rates of speed, develop unevenly, and
yet conspire to produce a totality."
Then in Chapter one Jameson says the following:
"One of the concerns aroused by periodizing hypotheses is that these tend
to obliterate difference and to project the idea of the historical period
as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by inexplicable
chronological metamorphoses and punctuation marks). This is, however,
precisely why it seems to me essential to grasp postmodernism not as a
style but rather a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the
presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate
features.
Consider, for example, the powerful alternative position that
post-modernism is itself little more than one more stage of modernism
proper (if not, indeed, of the even older romanticism); it may indeed be
conceded that all the features of postmodernism I am about to enumerate
can be detected, full-blown, in this or that preceding modernism
(including such astonishing genealogical precursors as Gertrude Stein,
Raymond Roussel, or Marcel Duchamp, who may be considered outright
postmodernists, avant la lettre). What has not been taken into account by
this view, however, is the social position of the older modernism, or
better still, its passionate repudiation by an older Victorian and
post-Victorian bourgeoisie for whom its forms and ethos are received as
being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive,
and generally "antisocial". It will be argued here, however, that a
mutation in the sphere of culture has rendered such attitudes archaic. Not
only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly; they now strike us, on the
whole, as rather "realistic," and this is the result of a canonization and
academic institutionalization of the modern movement generally that can be
traced to the late 1950s. This is surely one of the most plausible
explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the younger
generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional modern
movement as a set of dead classics, which weigh like a nightmare on the
brains of the living" as Marx once put it in a differnet context."
Jake folows Jameson Quotes:
I want to take the last quote first and relate it back Carl's comments.
First, I don't think it really matters who did the first ironic cover. I
struggled with this idea a lot as I was writing this thing. Was my
argument even worth anything if I could go back and point to other
examples of this phenomenon throughout the history of pop music, because
obviously they were all over the place (especially in Jazz, where irony
and referentiality predominated long before they were adopted in rock and
roll)?
Ultimately, I decided that the argument was still useful, because as
Jameson at least implies, the act of performing an ironic cover, while
important, is less important than the context in which the practice takes
place. It's the difference between an idea and a hegemonic idea. Or to
put it another way, I think Jameson injects the idea of power into the
discussion of ideas and cultural practices. Which is another way of saying
that one person thinking something is cool or important or expressing him
or herself in a particular way is not the same, in societal terms, as the
same idea or cultural practice predominating in a whole culture or
sub-culture. So while I am talking about origins to a certain extent,
ultimately I think I'm talking more about the process and context in which
a particular cultural practice is diffused throughout a system.
That's why I think the Replacements are important. Not because they were
first to have the idea, but because the band and its approach seems to
best embody the moment where the context shifted, and the practice of the
ironic cover was imbued with cultural power and increasing resonance,
first at the level of a sub-culture and then to a broader and broader
extent in the culture at large (this also acknowledges that one could
probably do a similar things in other cultural contexts, because
following Althusser, I'd argue that it isn't just the economic and the
cultural that are semi-autonomous and yet locked together. I think
different cultural contexts also have a similar relationship, but that
this still eventually adds up to a whole. Therefore, while the Mats may
be emblematic of a particular moment in Rock, someone like Letterman may
be a more useful example in TV. And it may be useful to acknowledge that,
while Letterman and the Mats may have been doing their thing
concurrently, they weren't necessarily synched up in lock step, instead
evolving at their own rates).
Having said this, I don't want to take anything away from the Mats here.
They were special and perhaps uniquely suited to do what they did. But the
times were also suited to them, although not so well suited that they were
able to break through to the mass rock megastardom they undoubtedly
deserved. No, it was Nirvana's good luck to come along a little later
after the Mats and some of the other bands of their cohort had cleared the
really hard underbrush.
To follow Althusser all the way and call this whole process the evolution
of a structure of dominance may be too extreme. But as I tried to argue in
the piece, this process certainly did spawn a set of unwritten rules that
in many ways increasingly defined the boundaries of a certain pop music
culture in the period from 1985-1995, and still holds sway today although
perhaps to a lesser extent as we move into what you call the post-ironic
age (which by the way I think is a useful idea to consider).
Of course, as Jameson alludes, this isn't something I felt or understood
at the moment it was happening (1984). I just thought the Replacements
were a great band. It's only in hindsight, as Jameson argues, that one
sees that this is the period of time when the whole thing came together
and cohered into a cultural sensibilty distinct from the previous one.
Now lets go back further into the first Jameson quote. To me, the
particular moment I describe in the piece is primarily a cultural one
involving a rock band. Nevertheless, I think that his notion of
semi-autonomous evolving economic strata is also useful to think about,
even though I only really alluded to it in my piece, because that's part
of what defines the overall context in which the Mats were going to be
received. In particular, I would argue that the conjuction of mass
cultural and advanced capitalism created an environment in which the kids
needed irony like never before and preemptive irony in particular.
(and also as Jim Cox has pointed out to me privately, this was a period
where the masses may have shared enough mass culture experience to make
the sort of irony I'm talking about possible--good point Jim).
For in this period, the mainstream music industry was rapidly being
consolodated into a larger corporate media apparatus and losing touch with
its more innovative grass roots as this happened (a process that really
took place slowly through the whole 1970s and was probably made complete
when the majors were unable to break the '77 punk bands and generally
turned away from innovation as a growth strategy and fell back unto the
tried and true--arena rock, etc.). But perhaps paradoxically, this same
process simultaneously consolidated the industry's ability to absorb and
coopt almost any nascent cultural movement it might shine it's light on
(even though it took a while for these folks to figure out how to use this
power). And then finally flowing along on a separate but interelated track
is the rise, legitimation, and institutionalization of the rock mass media
(rolling stone, etc), now fortified with the technological ability and
cultural license to map the totality of pop music production,
categorize it into neatly disciplinized, genre specific boxes, and deliver
it's judgments anywhere in the world almost instantaneously.
Or to put it another way, by 1983 there weren't many little mountain
hamlets or mississippi deltas escaping the media web. And so it was almost
impossible to find a space outside of the survellence of the mass media.
The distance separating the margin from the center was paper thin. And
that doesn't leave much unjudgmental space for people to develop their
ideas, musial or otherwise.
(but getting back to Jim Cox private comments--this period of relative
homogeniety has actually been relatively short lived, because the mass
media, etc, has now evolved to a new stage, which is characterized by
increasing cultural fragmentation and niche marketing).
Now onto Barry Mazor who states:
"Now, I'll wager (hope!) you won't feel generationally pressured or doubt
my word if I say that, tho born in 1950, right dab in the middle of those
years you corrcetly identify as core "boomer" -I think I was always enough
of an ironic type not to fall into the sorts of traps you note many of
about my age have. (At least, I've done a reasonable job of resisting the
impulse.)"
Jake:
Not at all. I think if you read the quotes above you can see that I am
talking at a pretty high level of abstraction about systemic things. I
have no doubt that there were ironic covers during the "core boomer"
period I lay out. I also have no doubt that many people are no different
than you and resisted that certain self-righteous smugness I point to.
Indeed, the ideas I talk about that now hold sway had to come from
somewhere. And the first wave of punks are all core boomers. But I'm
more concerned with the process of diffusion and the moment when a certain
set of approaches attained critical mass and acheived at least some
measure of acceptance or even hegemony in the collective consciousness of
the culture.
I mean the flipside of this is just to say that not every Gen X person is
enamored of irony and everything I describe in my piece. But a lot of them
sure seem to be.
Barry continues:
" I also happen to despise the word boomer--even moreso when used all
smiley cuddley beaming with daisies by somebody who is of that post-war
generation themselves BTW --and just want to note that damn few people my
age have ever felt or had reason to feel that we're arrived at power let
alone hegemony over much of anything. As many of us as there are, and as
intimidating and annoying as the sheer fact of us must often seem, those
sheer numbers have largely reduced the power of most of us as
individuals--and even opportunities."
Jake:
I don't doubt this either. My basic understanding of the term baby boomer
is that it refers to people born between 1945-1963 (although I've seen it
extended up to 1965). Under this definition, I too am a baby boomer (born
in 1963). But part of my goal in splitting the boom in half (tail-boom)
was to try to point out that culture moves in a fluid way and that for
those of us at the end of the boom, we didn't experience things the same
way you folks did (or the same way gen x does either). We're kind of stuck
in the middle, which is an interesting but complicated place to be.
Nevertheless, I also hear what your saying: not all Core Boomers
experienced things the same way either. Point taken.
"But enough of that morose stuff. Part of the beauty of all this is that
none of us at all have to abide by the reductive, too dismissive, and
often media-constructed notions of who we're supposed to be based ond when
(or where, BTW) we were born and raised. In many ways--a lot of us around
here seem to avoid falling into sociological stereotypes--one of the
charms of P2--with members from--what did that report just say--18 to 65?
Thanks for some original thinking and unusually potent writing. This sort
of stuff is what made Postcard2 BTW, even if it's almost forgotten now.
Somehow iIt figures that Mr. Cantweell was one of those who got to see
this stuff early. He's no opponent of "Really Long". Fortunately.
Yet Sometimes I also just want to say about our "generations"--"to hell
with all of 'em."There are real differences in experiences, of course--bu
tas for these capital G Generations monumentalized in stone. sometimes,
for the individual, I think they mean about as much as decadesdo --not so
much in the larger scheme of things.."
Jake:
Yes, I agree with you. Nevertheless, for better or for worse, I think that
we also risk something if we don't try to examine things at a systemic
level. I know there are risks. It's like making a map. The more ground it
covers, the less detail there is, but it's still useful to see the whole
country or the world sometimes, even if it leaves out some details. I do
believe that we all are individuals and that we all have agency. But we
also all live in a particular socio-economic context, which imho plays a
pretty large role in who each of us is and how our lives go.
Here's pretty personal example of what I mean. My dad is a college
professor who had the good fortune to get his Ph.D. in 1959 right as
Sputnik happened and not long before the Core Boomers started going to
college. He's a jewish guy who played french horn in the Air Force band
from 1946-48, caught the tale end of the GI Bill, and went to College on
it at Oberlin Conservatory. Then he got a Ph.D in music composition from
University of Iowa. He's a bright guy and his first job was at Smith
college. I wager you he was the first guy with a music Ph.D from
University of Iowa to ever get hired at Smith College. He's very talented
and I don't want to take anything away from him. He's worked really hard.
But he also had the good fortune to finish his Ph.D right as the Higher
Education system in this country was experiencing its biggest expansion in
history. Or to put it in cold hard terms, demand may well have been
outstripping supply.
Now I don't want to take anything away from my dad or the many other hard
working intellegent children of immigrants from his generation who
contributed to perhaps the most powerful wave of upward mobility in this
country's history. But at the same time, you really lose a bit of the
nuance if you just chock that up to hard work and talent and you don't
simulataneouly acknowledge that these people came of age in the most
prosperous period in the history of the U.S. and maybe the world.
Another couple of examples. Mississippi John Hurt made a few recordings in
the 1920s or thereabouts. He was perceived as talented, yet after that he
went 35-40 years without recording, because no one was interested. 1960s
come and context shifts, all of a sudden he's a genius of the folk blues.
By all accounts his style had changed very little. But the context had
changed. Same with Bob Pollard from Guided by Voices. Crazy 5th grade
teacher and basement recordist or musical genius? Maybe both. But we do
know that apparently the context somehow shifted enough to allow the GBVs
of the world to disseminate their ideas out into the culture. Once again
we have a lot of different forces, both cultural and economic coverging.
No cheap multi-track tape machines. No cheap CD manufacturing. No
nostalgic fetish about 45rpms. No hipster interest in "Low Fi," a concept
that could only take hold in a time when "Hi Fi" has become the norm (kind
of like self-consciously primativist movements in art) . No Bob Pollard on
the mass scale. Were there Bob Pollards in the 50s and 60s? My guess is
yes. But the times didn't allow them to break through. Lo-Fi wouldn't have
meant anything back then. I doubt even the VU were consciously going for
the sound they went for. More likely they were just working with people
who didn't really know how to record rock very well. Now everyone views it
as classic. It serves as a model for people who have followed (or as
Jameson put it, it's an "aberrant...'experiment[]' which [is] then
restructured in the form of [a] predecessor[]" to that which came after
it. )
It's the above processes of change and how they effect people that
interests me. And that's what I was trying to get at, however
impressionistically in my piece.
Anyway, thanks for your comments and sorry for the delay getting back to
you folks. This has been a really fun thread for me. It's great when
something's been in your head for a really long time and then you let it
out and other folks start grinding on it and sending it back to you.
There's always a lot to be learned from that.
Jake
Jake London
