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| The Time-Life "Flower Power" collection by Zseni 07/31/2007, 10:00pm PDT | ||||
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| These are aimed squarely at aging Boomers eager to relive their storied youths. The word "remember," like the term "memory lane," comes up a lot in the infomercial (hosted by Peter Fonda and a blonde.) But nobody says anything about the echo of the music as it imposes on Boomer Spawn.
Full disclosure: I was raised by a mother who wrote Beatles fanfic when she was a teenager and who filled my childhood with Simon & Garfunkle before a kind of intellectual Holocaust stole her forever away from me and drove her to a land of Counting Crows and Dave Matthews. My father was an irrelevant romantic who has never recovered from Zep and Pink Floyd, and whose old age is now spent in permanent frustration as he searches for softer easier forms of Zep and Pink Floyd. I was obliged to listen to every song in these Flower Power collections, these Hits Of The 60's compilations, over and over again - like death rites in a culture of filial piety, one is forced to revisit the ghosts of one's parents as children almost daily. I can't help but see the face of this hippie bullshit strongly imprinted on Adult Contemporary music. The Coldplays and KT Tunstalls of the world are at least half revisionist history as they dial us back to the pre-Zappa world of unironic three-and-a-half-minute love songs, but they also contain the same intellectual vagueness celebrated in Flower Power and the same self-centered world view. (I hurry to say: not "self-centered" as the deprecation, but "self-centered" as in the non-moral-judgment factual observation.) Most of all they capture the stagnancy of their consumers: soft, full of hooks, often awkwardly unmusical, they pose no challenge to epic reminiscence. What about the children! They made me participate in Super 60's Makeovers in junior high, you know. I had to sing "Born To Be Wild" karaoke for my English teacher. My parents never bored me with Woodstock stories but neither did they have music in the house which moved far from that sphere. AND IT WASN'T JUST ME EITHER. The oppressive gaze of the Summer Of Love has permeated 40 years of music. The kids of Boomers have the full experience of Summer Of Love music, but they have it in kitsch form. For them, it's percolated through these same morbid revisitations, every year more twee and desperate, but also: repeated every year. Robbed by time and marketing of their original energy, importance, context, the songs become "hits." Hits are products. The revisitation becomes a Irish wake instead of a rite. Outsized clownish figures from a shadowy past step forward in ridiculous velvet suits and urge us to take them seriously (giant mop-tops blowing in the wind.) To the 60's-victimized student, it comes off like Poop Dog, The Gangsta Spectre Of Defeat, and less like the splendid sodadic emblemage of a beautiful past (I hope that's how it's meant. I always wonder if it isn't just Poop Dog all the way down.) How old does the music have to be before it can be examined as music instead of as a cemetery and a carnival? When will I be able to listen to Nights In White Satin as a wonderful song instead of considering it (unmusically to the hilt) a particularly tasteful bouquet sent to an expensive funeral? |
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