"Pop music is tricky..."

"...because we've been trained not to expect much meaning in it. I love big melodies, but I also love songs with a strong, lasting message. The truly great songs somehow marry the two. Lennon was great at it. Marvin Gaye, Paul Westerberg, Burt Bacharach. They all wrote super catchy songs with lyrics that struck a nerve. Those songs make you want to dance but also make you think."
- Val Emmich

I used to feel guilty listening to pop music sometimes. I'd sit there listening to these terrible songs I'd heard a million times already and think, "This is ridiculous. I should be listening to something good. Something new. Something different." Yet I have to remind myself: you like what you like, and like your feelings, it's pretty much not something to be ashamed of. It's not like I'm walking around pretending BBMak is brilliant or that Jesse McCartney is comparable to Paul McCartney or something blasphemous like that. But a decent pop song is a decent pop song. Sometimes something light, shallow, sugary, and disposable suits your mood exactly.

Plus, like Val Emmich says, not all pop music is dispensable bubblegum crap. If you wanna get technical, the Beatles early stuff was pop music. John Mayer, Kelly Clarkson, Gavin DeGraw--they all put out great music, much of which definitely has a pop feel. Fall Out Boy, Dashboard--yeah, almost all their stuff sounds trite and unoriginal, like everything else they've done, but they don't pretend it's anything more than what it is. Alanis Morissette, the Goo Goo Dolls, Counting Crows, U2, Maroon 5--solid stuff. Sarah Bareilles, Anna Nalick, recent Mandy Moore, Missy Higgins, Ingrid Michaelson--kind of alternative, kind of pop, kind of folksy, even, and it's all mostly great. There are some fabulous women singer/songwriters circulating these days with strong piano or guitar-driven melodies and stronger lyrics.

I was reading a Q&A with the men of Keane today. They were discussing their new album Perfect Symmetry with EW.

EW: Much of Symmetry has an '80s feel. One fan even called it a Top Gun sound. Compliment or insult?
Tom Chaplin, vocals: Top Gun was actually the first record I ever bought, so I'm okay with that. But the funky, upbeat, flamboyant '80s vibe of Thriller may have been an indirect influence. I worshipped Michael Jackson as a kid.
Tim Rice-Oxley, keyboards: Our decision not to restrict ourselves by good taste was liberating.

It kind of goes along with the Marc Jacobs art-world-intimidation thing: when you stop thinking about what is "good" and what is "bad", and just like what you like and feel what you feel, it can work out just fine, and produce something that may not be a masterpiece, but still something meaningful.

On a side note, I love that EW doesn't put an apostrophe between the decade and the "s", and I love that they spell "worshipped" with two P's. They know what they're doin'.

On another separate note, I made a playlist of songs that just kind of hit a nerve, and I've been listening to it a lot lately, just for the hell of it. James Taylor's "Fire and Rain" is on it, Ingrid Michaelson's "Glass," Billy Joel's "This is the Time," Ryan Adams and the Cardinals' "Come Pick Me Up," Remy Zero's "Fair," Howie Day's "Standing in the Sun." Also is the Carole King song I'm listening to right now, "It's Too Late."

Every time I listen to it, I'm struck by how wonderful a song it is. She's a great songwriter in general, but this particular song--the intonation of her voice, combined with the lyrics, make for this beautiful song that starts out melancholy and doleful and ends...well, melancholy and doleful, but also more...brave. Soulful. So intense yet mellow. Gets me every time. I highly recommend it.

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Now playing: Carole King - It's Too Late

Jack Kerouac: "the originator of blue-collar cool"

First. Follow-up to that last post:

Check this out. Look at the photo caption, and the second paragraph. That's the Civic vs. the 13er. Right there.

On a completely separate note, I was leafing through an old GQ from last year - GQ's 50 Most Stylish Men of the Last 50 Years, I believe it was. Lots of great pictures in that - so classy. I pulled two pages from it and stuck them on my bulletin board. The first was a series of photos of Cary Grant, arguably the most stylish of them all. The other featured a wonderful picture and bit on Paul Newman, praising the simplicity of his wardrobe choices, and on the other half, Jack Kerouac. This is what they said about him:

Flower power was all well and good, but Jack Kerouac often wondered aloud how the Beats could’ve given birth to such Technicolor bravura. Kerouac’s look was broken but unbowed—as he once said: “ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.” And yet his aesthetic is everywhere today: That Brooklyn hipster rocking overalls under his Carhartt jacket while reading Hart Crane? That kid in San Francisco sporting scuffed oxfords and a frayed collar, with Madame Bovary stuffed in his back pocket? They’re paying unwitting tribute to the man who exploded the 1950s world of straight-white pretensions, rejecting the notion that class was synonymous with value. An uneven artist perhaps, and a troubled one to be sure, but unequivocally a man: the originator of blue-collar cool.

Kerouac and his fellow Beats floated around the cusp of the G.I. Generation and the Silent Generation, by Strauss and Howe's definitions. Though technically a G.I., Kerouac belongs with Ginsberg and Cassidy in the Silent Generation of artists that came of age in the G.I.'s "get it done" world.

I love that description of Kerouac. It's so true. That description, in particular, reminds me of a particular turn of phrase in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. Dick Diver is talking to Rosemary about a WWI trench and battlefield they are exploring.

'All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love,' Dick mourned persistently. 'Isn't that true, Rosemary?'
'I don't know,' she answered with a grave face. 'You know everything.'

In my mind, that is what Kerouac did: he blew up the beautiful lovely safe world with a great gust of high explosive love--in the best way possible. He was only one of many to do so, but still. He coined the term "Beat" in reference to Neal Cassady, but people today remember him as the frontman of that generation.

Kerouac was utterly brilliant. Born to Canadian parents, he grew up speaking French, became fluent in English, and I believe was well versed in German as well. He spent his school years reading every American, British, French, German, Russian, and Sanskrit classic he could get his hands on, reading translations only of the latter two. He went to Columbia University on a football scholarship, only to break his leg during the first game his freshman year. He ended up dropping out, I think, and then came his first of two stints in the Navy. It was after that that he met Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the others. Cassidy was his real inspiration, though; Dean in On the Road (which, I'll admit, I haven't read) is fashioned after him. It was for him that Kerouac came up with his 30 Essentials for the Belief and Technique of Spontaneous Prose, which he employs in some of his later works. Even just his journals are amazing. He changed the way people thought about writing. The scope of his influence in general--I can't even begin to imagine how many people, how many artists of all kinds he and his work have affected over the years.

Kerouac's poetry drips with the sounds of jazz and blues, and his fascination with Buddhism comes out often. Much of his work is informed by his travels around the country, and all of it was essentially taboo when he was writing in the 1950s and '60s. That was a period when most post-war G.I.'s and Silents were trying to raise straight-laced Boomer babies. It was that era I mentioned in a previous post when men were trying to maintain their wartime masculinity yet succeed in the corporate world, and women were trying desperately hard to fit the model of the perfect, feminine wife. Sloan Wilson, Betty Friedan--they both wrote in opposition, but Kerouac and the Beats--they lived it. They rejected the values society chose for them, taking a darker, seedier route instead. Even though the lifestyle and culture they chose is not one I'd chose for myself, I can't help admire the way they did their own thing when conformity was a demand that, seemingly, most Americans surrendered to.

That's the other thing that's great about that GQ piece--at the end of each section, they include a style tip related to the person they wrote about. At the end of the Kerouac segment, they wrote:

Personal style isn't about buying the trendiest labels or most expensive suits. It's about establishing a look that's all yours and sticking with it.

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Now playing: She & Him - Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?

"Just doing my civic duty, sir."

So last week for American Government, I read two passages. One was by a man named Robert Putnam, who proposes that there is a direct link between "social capital" and "civic engagement," and government performance. Social capital is "features of social organizations such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit." Basically, it's all the good stuff that comes out of actively participating in social communities, whether it's a church group, a labor union, the PTA, the League of Women Voters, bowling leagues, the Elks, Boy Scouts, or the Red Cross. Being involved with one of these groups is "civic engagement," and according to Putnam, the more "civic engagement," the higher the voter turnout, and the better the performance of the government.

The other part of Putnam's theory is that civic engagement and thus social capital has been in decline since the 1960s and '70s. Membership in organizations like those mentioned has decreased significantly, and though membership in other new organizations, like the Sierra Club or AARP, is high, membership does not require direct activity. "Their ties, in short, are to common symbols, common leaders, and perhaps common ideals, but not to one another." There is no social trust, and there is little sense of community or connectedness.

Putnam attributes this decline to changes in women's roles in the community, changes in the economy, changes in residential stability, and changes in technology and entertainment. There is less "neighborliness" among Americans, and they are less trusting in general. Women are now a substantial part of the labor force, people move around a lot, the economy has increased in scale and community-based businesses have largely been replaced by franchises and corporations, and people spend their leisure time in isolated activities. People play on computers, watch television shows and movies, play video games - all of these things are so simple to do alone. Even listening to music is now a personal activity - instead of gathering around a record player to listen to the latest single, people listen to their MP3 players and iPods.

I found this interesting because of a book I read a few years ago by two men, William Strauss and Neil Howe. They suggest that American history can be seen as a series of generations, and each generation fits one of four types. American history, then, is a repetition of cycles that consist of these four types: Idealist, Reactive, Civic, and Adaptive. Each generation of a particular type shares characteristics and traits. Each life stage of a generation is about 22 years: youth, rising adulthood, midlife, and elder life. Idealist and Civic generations are dominant, while Reactive and Adaptive generations are recessive. Each generation lives through social moments: secular crises and spiritual awakenings. Dominant generations come of age and enter rising adulthood during a social moment, exerting greater influence on the public world, while recessive generations' first social moment is as a child, influencing the private world more.

It makes a lot more sense when put in practice. The whole thing seems like it tailors history to fit the pattern, rather than history happening to fit the pattern. Example: the most recent cycle to be completed fully was the Great Power cycle: the Missionary Generation, the Lost Generation, the G.I. Generation, and the Silent Generation. They lived through the Missionary Awakening (the "3rd Great Awakening" that prompted agrarian and labor protests, muckraking journalists, and progressive and socialist movements in the early 20th century) and the Great Depression/WWII Crisis. After them came the Millennial Cycle, which we're in now.

First came the Boomers (1943-1960). They were rising adults during the Boom Awakening, 1967-1980. Woodstock, Kent State, Vietnam, Age of Aquarius, Earth Day - radical cultural change going on here. Lots of self-interest here. There's a funny bit in this movie, I Could Never Be Your Woman, in which Mother Nature rants about how humans were grateful to be at the top of the food chain until the Baby Boomers, who "thought they could just breeze through life doing whatever the hell they wanted" - the men didn't go to war when they were supposed to, the women didn't have kids when they were supposed to, they became materialistic and didn't care about the environment at all. Hehe. So anyway, after them is the 13ers, 1961-1981, who grew up seeing the adults screw up the country (Vietnam, Iran, all that). They're The Breakfast Club and the Brat Pack in general - adults are against them and life doesn't hold much for them. Pessimistic and realistic by turns. Adults call them disappointing; 13ers themselves say they are what they have to be to get by.

Then, 1982 to about 2000 or so are the Millennials - us. We're predicted to be a Civic generation that comes of age during what is still an unknown crisis and is in elderhood during the next spiritual awakening. The book I have was written in '91. It predicts that 1991-2003 sees more regulation, "public intrusions into what others will consider matters of personal and business privacy," anti-drug and pro-environment lobbying, more pro-life movements, disdain for political party allegiances, increased materialism and attention to style and advertising, clean-cut and overprotected kids, and revitalized civic organizations for youth. 2004-2025 sees failure of Social Security and economic and social hardship. Depending on if the secular crisis turns out well or not, the Millennials could produce strong leaders and a greater sense of unity and solidarity than any other generation in recent history. If the crisis comes too early or unfolds poorly, then the Millennials will be a crippled generation, unable to do what the Idealist Boomers set for them. So say Howe and Strauss.

The whole theory really stretches the whole generation cycle deal to work. One cycle actually doesn't have an adaptive generation, which they explain away somehow, I forget exactly how. But if they're right, then our generation now is a civic, and we're going to reverse the trend of low civic engagement.

The other article I read for American Government is by Scott Keeter, who says that the youngest cohort of voters is currently showing signs of being more politically active and aware, much like their Boomer parents were in the '60s and '70s. Keeter calls us the "DotNets," though, and says we are active in community work and attempt to make our voices heard - we're not hesitant in expressing ourselves. If the voting trend continues in the direction it was headed from last election, there should be a higher turnout of 18-29 year-olds: in 2004, the percentage of voter turnout for that cohort increased 9 percentage points.

I know that that was a really roundabout way of making my point, but I wonder if Keeter's research shows that Howe and Strauss's theory is correct in this case. And if it is, what's our secular crisis going to be? Or, did it come early with 9/11 and the Iraq War and now the economic crisis and everything else that we're screwing up?

Something else that they said: the Boomers will be most influential and productive in their later years. They won't relinquish control early. Bush is a Boomer. But, Obama just misses being a Boomer by one year: he was born in 1961. And if McCain is elected...he'll be the first of the Silent Generation to be president. The G.I.'s produced 7 Presidents. The Silents, 0. The Boomers, just 1 so far. Obama would mean a 13er in office 12 years before the 13ers are projected to take over the White House.

Sarah Palin is a 13er too.

Somehow, I feel like no matter who's elected, things are not going to turn out well. Just a feeling.

I spent way too much time writing this instead of doing homework. Rawr.

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Now playing: Counting Crows f. Sheryl Crow - American Girls

There's a distinct difference between "gracefulness" and "grace."

At least, to me there is.

Being able to move through the world with gracefulness is nice. But being able to live with grace - that's truly admirable.

God: What you did up there was true. You found your voice.
Joan: Great. Great. Thanks for the lesson. It cost me my friend.
God: What, because you two don't agree about things?
Joan:I don't have a lot of friends, okay?
God: Do you know what Grace is, Joan?
Joan:Yeah. Pissed off.
God: Do you know the meaning of grace? It's a touch of truth that lets you see the world in a new way. It's a gift that can only be felt when you're open enough to accept it.

Grace was in all her steps,
Heaven in her eye,
In every gesture, dignity and love.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost

Now that is something to strive for.


Original Post 7/21/08, 3:16 AM
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Now playing: John Mayer - Something's Missing

'The Bridge of San Luis Rey' again

I posted two excerpts from the novel a while ago but never got around to writing about them. Well, now I finally am. In reverse order.

The second passage talks about death, memory, and love. Through Madre Maria, Wilder presents the idea that when a person dies, all that remains is the living's memories of him, but love transcends this to exist even when all memories of a person cease. I think that's such a difficult concept to embrace.

In that way, I can understand why someone might want to be famous. I can understand why someone would want to change the world dramatically, would want to do something that people will remember. It's easy to feel that once you die, if no one remembers you, it's almost as though you never existed. Frank Capra counters that with It's a Wonderful Life, showing how a person's life has probably influenced countless people and consequently has shaped the way things are, and without him, nothing would be the same. Still, though, we really have become a society that practically requires instant gratification - we like things to be tangible, we like to be able to see the fruits of our labors. I guess that's one of the many difficulties of love - it's not often present in such a physical sense.

And that leads me to the first passage, which talks about how passionate love is love in self-interest. Wilder pulls the Our Town trick - Our Town is surprising and unusual in that it paints a picture of mundane, unextraordinary life, and then shows how it's extraordinary and how you shouldn't take a moment of it for granted. Likewise, I found it unusual that a man of literary talent - genius, even - was arguing against passion. A writer. Giving a negative connotation to passion. To passion - the inspiration of so much great art. Except, he's right. To me, at least.

I was reading a pleasant novel by one Stephen King the other day, in which he writes that,

"True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring--once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresome . . . except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners.

"And, as is true of any other strong and addicting drug, true first love is dangerous."

I'm inclined to agree with Sai King. (And apparently I'm inclined to pick up his phrases and dialect.) And having heard Sai Wilder's argument, I'm inclined to agree with him as well. Like King says, true love and especially true first love is a strong and addicting drug, and those bound by it are its prisoners. (Whether or not it feels like that while you're in it, that's something else. Either way, it's true, and it's impossible to know how difficult it is to not let it take over everything you are until you're in it. It sweeps you away. "Ka like a wind." But I digress.) True first love is also, like Wilder says, love as passion - and therefore, it's an expression of self-interest. It's fleeting and impermanent and unstable and exists for itself - not for others. To become what Wilder hints at is lasting, mature love, he say sit must pass "through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts" before it can "take its place among the loyalties."

I Corinthians 13:4 sounds almost cliche to me by now, but I still like it. "Love is always patient and kind. It is never jealous. Love is never boastful or conceited. It is never rude or selfish. It does not take offense and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people's sins, but delights in the truth. It is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes." If that's so, then love as passion - love in self-interest - cannot be pure love.

The wonderful Mrs. Smith taught us the three words the Greeks used for love: eros, agape, and philia - love as passion and attraction, a more general and mature love, and a sort of virtuous and platonic love. If I remember right, ideally, it is thought that a marriage should comprise all three. Eros is in self-interest, but I like what Wilder says - it can transform itself through a series of arduous motions to become agape.

In that passage, Wilder is describing a character named Camila, who was a beautiful and talented actress who suddenly abandoned her art and then fell ill and faded from public view. As he said, "she had never realized any love save love as passion." This reminded me of a book I read about the making of Rebel Without a Cause. It was a long, tumultuous process involving all sorts of problems and difficulties from before the script was even penned. Many of these were due to the director, Nick Ray. Near the end of the book, the writers talked about how much of Ray comes out in the film:

"In some ways, Ray was the Melville hero that actress Betsy Blair saw in him back in the days of her great Hollywood parties. He became his own Romantic figure, flinging himself recklessly through time, creating and destroying all along the way. He maintained an intense, self-dramatizing regard and respect for his feelings. If Rebel aches like kids ache, that's because Ray ached that way. He worked off his pain, struggled against authority and refused to 'mature' if that meant feeling less."

I love that. One one level, I pity him for never knowing mature love, but in some ways, I can't help but respect him for actually succeeding in that. "Refused to mature if that meant feeling less." Part of me would want that. I don't want to "mature" if it means growing numb. At the same time, I'd kind of welcome it. Feeling things intensely is exhausting. But what does it mean, to "mature" and grow numb and stop feeling so much? I feel like you lose something if you let yourself grow numb enough that you don't feel any more. Lester Burnham in American Beauty-style. You become more capable of getting through life without growing weary and cynical, but still. In theory, I'd rather be cynical and angry than indifferent. Indifference is poison to me. If that's what it means to mature, I think I'd rather not.

Don't hold me to that, though.

Counting Crows lyrics:

I don't want to feel so different

But I don't want to be insignificant and

I don't know how to see the same things different

Now...

Haha. Adam Duritz, the epitome of self-interest. I can sympathize mostly though, if not empathize. Reconciling the desire to not feel alienated and alone and all that angst-y teenage-y stuff, with the desire to not be the same as everyone else = not easy. (Excuse the split infinitives, please.)

I guess that's all. I gotta finish up my work for class in the a.m. anyway.

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Now playing: Jason Mraz - I'm Yours

It's official.

I am now fully convinced that getting older has not made me any smarter. Really, I just keep getting dumber.

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Now playing: Rilo Kiley - Portions for Foxes