As powerful - and as political - as Spacemen 3's "Revolution"
(Don't be too quick to understand that sentence)
The Monkees perplex - when the results are as a pleasing and potent as the "real thing", does intent / content / context matter?
And how "real" is the real thing anyway?
"Street Fighting Man" had completely different words up until almost the last minute, you know.
When I was an adolescent, I spake as an adolescent, I understood as an adolescent, I thought as an adolescent: but when I became a man, I put away adolescent things.
ReplyDeleteI suppose the "real thing" is people who really mean it, no matter how misguided or redundant. Spacemen 3 really meant "Revolution", there was no irony there whatsoever. The most ludicrous example of this is dear old Bobby Gillespie, who is still fighting with every fibre of his being against long-dead 1950's social conservatism. Wearing his hair long and sticking it to The Man for all our collective benefit.
ReplyDeleteThey might have really meant it, but it's not clear what they meant. If you read my book, Sonic Boom's ideas about politics are pretty woolly. I think the really meaning of the song is "I would love to make an insurrectionary record, like MC5".
DeleteAnd what were the MC5’s politics? “Rock’n’roll, dope, and fucking in the streets”. Not a massively detailed programme for government. It’s all posturing, all the way down. Not that there is anything wrong with that!
DeleteWell, define 'real'? Something I've thought about for years is how the increasing mega-conglomeration and algorithmically precise hyperanalysis of modern corporate culture, recently reaching its absurd apex with genAI, means that the 'prefab' culture of the past is now comparitively artisan.
ReplyDeleteJust going with the Monkees as an example: if you wanted to nail down the two non-musical visionaries responsible for constructing it, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schnieder, you would have to mention that they built on it by bankrolling Easy Rider and The Last Picture Show, and that the former became a misanthropic auteur while the latter became a producer of anti-Vietnam documentaries and the at-times-primary benefactor of the Black Panthers. That's where they went, immedately.
And even if we shift focus to the musical hired hands like Boyce and Hart, Goffin and King, Neil Diamond, Harry Nilsson, etc., all of them are distinctive songwriters in the Tin Pan Alley tradition, rather than assembly personnel adding needless bulk to a publishing credit.
That's the crazy thing, when you want to talk about this subject in broad terms. The prefab of the past is very often the freak of the present. Everything was smaller and looser then in this respect, even in the most then-contemporaneous 'restrictive' situations, which is why if you want to make an argument about 'the genius of the system' when it comes to something like the Golden Age Of Hollywood and why we should look at modern movies the same way, those aren't apples to apples at all