Less modern all the time
My interest in the latest that humankind is up to is seriously on the wane
I’m trying to identify the moment at which my desire to be informed about current cultural developments pretty much ground to a halt.
It may have been during my several-years’ stint as a record reviewer for Indie-music.com, a site that, I think, may still exist in some form, but for a period from the late 1990s until about 2010, was a major player in the do-it-yourself sector of the music business.
I started my work for the site wading through literal grocery bags full of CDs from musical acts from throughout the United States and occasionally other countries. It became a less space-consuming undertaking when most acts switched to the MP3 format, but the volume of submissions didn’t abate.
A few genres, or approaches, if you will, seemed to dominate. For all those years, there was never any shortage of singer-songwriter aspirants, hearts brimming with sensitivity and minds devoted to introspection. Snot-nosed post-punk ensembles, oozing with irony and abrasiveness, were also plentiful. Entertainer types, whose promo kits were brimming with verbiage about high-energy stage presence, also supplied a steady steam of content for my consideration.
After a few years, I was able to conclude something I was also noting in other areas of life: these acts were unmoored from any kind of sense of heritage. Many were fond of talking about influences, but those were generally of pretty recent vintage.
Around this time, I also began my gig as a rock and roll history teacher at the local campus of our largest state university. For the most part, I’ve been “left alone” to structure my courses as I see fit. Clearly, I’m grateful that there’s been no real pressure to incorporate identity politics as a driver of narrative into what I’m doing.
A couple of times several years ago, however, I was asked to teach courses the premises of which had me privately balking. In particular, one semester I was tasked with teaching rock of the 1970s and 80s.
I did it, but it came out as quite nearly what I’d been doing in the overall rock-history course. You can’t, it seems to me, set up arbitrary parameters and expect to make any sense of the music in question beyond a succession of consumer products with superficial similarities and distinctions. The table must be set. So I spent the first three or four weeks doing what I’d always done: walking students through the 200 years of American music prior to rock - the Bay Psalm Book, minstrelsy, string bands, the Broadway musical, ragtime, blues, society orchestras, jazz. And then I spent a class session or so laying the post-rock groundwork: the advent of BMI and Top 40 radio, the rise of the independent record labels in the late 1940s, Johnny Otis, the cities essential to the story such as New Orleans, Memphis, Philadelphia and New York, the Brill Building, Brian Wilson, the British Invasion, Motown. I sensed a bit of confusion among some of the students, but it was the only way I knew to approach the matter.
The notion of filing music by decades has only become more entrenched. Social media is always good for an informal survey of which decade’s music has proved superior and lasting. Answers in the comment threads often fiercely defend one such period or another, but one notices that none of the decades being debated are older than the last five.
What disturbs me about this way of considering music is that it reduces it to the output of an industry peopled by faceless players serving up gratification and validation to a populace too uninterruptedly stimulated to reflect on any kind of significance a piece of music might have beyond its personal impact.
For fun, I occasionally chime in, usually with something from my early youth or before I was born. If the social-media question at hand is, say, the greatest female vocalist of all time, and most of the answers are of the Whitney Houston-Nora Jones variety, I might offer Billie Holiday, Anita O’Day or Patsy Cline. I’m usually ignored, which is why I don’t often participate.
One sees this with other types of popular-culture output. There’s a pretty wide recognition that Hollywood has run out of creative gas, churning out as it does psychological examinations of comic-book characters or reworkings, driven by identity-politics crusading, of previous fare .
Food is no exception. Consider pizza. Let’s bet honest: there is no reason to stuff the crust of a pie with yet more cheese. The additional cheese could be slathered on top, but the point, from the purveyor’s perspective, is to get the consumer to think he or she is really getting a bonus. And isn’t there something a little vulgar about using the number of pepperoni slices on a pie as a sign of its quality?
Again, any kind of linkage back to what was coming out of the ovens of Naples circa 1500 becomes less discernible by the day.
But the point can - and should - be made about weightier matters than music, films or food.
Consider rights.
A current news item effectively illustrates how that concept, about as basic to the question of what human existence is all bout as any, has been stripped of its historical grounding:
The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily allowed an Orthodox Jewish university in New York to deny official recognition to an LGBTQ student group, the latest in a series of decisions in favor of religious rights.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a brief order granted an emergency request made by Yeshiva University, which claims that recognizing the group would be contrary to its sincere religious beliefs. Sotomayor has responsibility for emergency applications arising from New York.
The dispute is the latest clash between religious rights and LGBTQ rights to reach the high court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority.
The juxtaposition of the term “LGBTQ rights” with “religious rights” conveys a categorical equivalence that I’m not sure is really there.
How are a LGBTQ person’s rights any different from anyone else’s? Do not the rights first alluded to in official American documents in the Declaration’s specification of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and then enumerated with great thoughtfulness by the crafters of the Bill of Rights pretty much cover what makes for a free human existence?
As to the argument that people couldn’t marry others of the same sex prior to a few years ago, let’s be clear that no culture anywhere in the world at any time had remotely considered that marriage meant anything other than the uniting of a man and woman.
Again, regard for what has come before in the story of our species is fading by the day.
The founders and framers were steeped in the history of what they were undertaking. They were certainly well-versed in the thought of Locke and Montesquieu, but also understood what the Magna Carta had ushered in in terms of clarifying the relationship between individual sovereignty and a transcendent order.
Plummeting numbers for pursuit of a history degree may be the best indicator of what I’m getting at here.
We have reached the point at which we have no interest in what those who came before had to contribute to our understanding of what makes existence worthwhile. We’ve permitted ourselves to make it up as we go along.
I don’t think it’s adding to the sum total of our happiness.