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Jewish World Review August 26, 2005 / 21 Av, 5765 Timeless music remains that way for a good reason By Tony Snow
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
EASTON, Md. — Music critic Mikal Gilmore is a brave man. He has
decided to write a book about a topic that arouses more passion than the
president, the economy, global relations and perhaps even the war in Iraq
itself: He wishes to write a definitive tome about The Beatles.
He field-tested a critical thesis in a recent New York Times
piece, arguing that the Fab Four remains popular after all these years
because John, Paul, George and Ringo served as the Pied Pipers of the '60s.
He says they led a generation from naiveté to disillusionment, while
conveying a seemingly "imminent and irrefutable ... sense of political and
generational transformation."
This is nostalgia masquerading as analysis. Gilmore gets giddy
talking about "youth power" and a "youth mandate," and grouses that today's
"infantilized adolescents" no longer have the moxie required to "dispute
mores and intimidate hegemony." In other words, he thinks the Woodstock
Generation deserves a special place in cultural history for having set off a
Big Bang of pure and uncontaminated idealism.
Alas, the wisdom of '60s kids was as vacuous as one would expect
of kids — and may have been inane beyond historical norms. Many key players
in the protest generation were raised by parents who themselves grew up
rapidly — too rapidly — thanks to a brutal and withering world war, and
who began raising kids before they fully had completed their own childhoods.
Confusion and indulgence defined the age, as kids presumed wisdom they did
not possess, and parents balked at claiming authority they had a duty to
exercise.
Worse, many causes for which '60s kids agitated, such as global
socialist uprisings, not only turned sour, but murderous. The chants about
Ho Chi Minh are to serious political discourse what Amos 'n' Andy were to
thoughtful racial outreach. Many of us, looking back on those days, ask: How
could we have been so stupid? — and this is before we
even get to tie-dyed shirts, vast wads of unkempt hair and idiotic
relationships with the other sex.
In any event, if strident activism were the ticket to
immortality, the truly intense acts of the age — Country Joe McDonald,
Richie Havens or Fugs — would be revered as gods. Instead, they have been
forgotten for the good and noble reason that their music stank.
This gets us back to the central question: Why do kids still
listen to tunes recorded nearly 40 years ago in the cement-walled caverns of
the Abbey Road Studios? The answer is simple: The boys from Liverpool wrote
good music with clever lyrics, catchy melodies, arresting harmonies and
surprising chordal changes. They wrote tunes that stick in your mind —
sometimes maddeningly so.
They also had a shockingly good grasp of human nature. Rather
than writing dopey tunes about steamed-up car windows and drive-in shows,
they crafted songs about people who had names, undergoing trials and
tribulations familiar to all. They mentioned churches, schools, living
rooms, circuses, buses and even graveyards, and they spun vignettes about
life's essential moments, from the faltering and nervous request, "Do you
want to dance?" to sprinkling dirt on Eleanor Rigby's grave.
They wrote with passion and sweetness, and something almost
totally absent from contemporary music: humor. You can't listen to campy
songs like "When I'm Sixty-Four," with its nice little clarinet solo,
without thinking back to a time of innocence and comfort, just as you can't
listen to "I Want to Hold Your Hand" without feeling 13 again.
It is a common mistake these days to politicize anything and
everything, including music. But the fact is, politics is the great
despoiler of all things chaste and delicate and pure. Musicians who hurl
themselves into the grime of electioneering look at best like oafs and at
worst, meretricious saps.
One naturally assumes musicians will sound like imbeciles when
they talk about, say, nuclear proliferation, just as politicians sound like
rutting musk oxen when they attempt to commit music. It would be
irresponsible and cruel to judge either group by their avocations.
Yet, it ought to be obvious that good music generally occupies a
higher plane that mere politics. Great writers can express moods through
melody and capture experiences we share most powerfully — love, lust,
longing; joy, rage, fear; triumph, yearning and confusion. The Beatles knew
how to do these things, which is why people hum their tunes today — and why
nobody bothers to recite the Greatest Political Orations of Joan Baez.
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Comment on JWR contributor, and syndicated talk show host, Tony Snow's column by clicking here. © 2005, Creators Syndicate, Inc |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
