LIVE MUSIC IS BETTER
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Artist:
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Album:Live ---Quebec 20 july 2008
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Track:
The music of The Beatles is such a powerful touchstone in the RocknRoll culture. Their canon is the standard for all that has come since in pop music. Artists cover Beatle songs at their own risk, knowing the bar has already been set impossibly high. and yet.......any populist band that wants to engage their audience need only pull a Beatle song out of their hat & if they do it reasonably well.....they get the instant gratification of a rapt audience.
I think the Beatle era was the final full flowering of a united music culture. Indeed the dissolution of the Fab Four is such a sublime metaphor for the crumbling culture of benign innocense in the west that books and scholarly papers on just that theme abound.
Comments (9)
crumbling culture of benign innocense
Great description,DMDM
Like for instance another event around their break up- Curt Flood's challenge of baseball's reserve clause ushering in that sport's modern era as the Beatles reign wrought the modern, ultra-corporate music biz.
Thanks Cody.
I'd never connected the dots before, but yeah, you're right, an excellent observation. Correlations can me made in the Movie industry as well, I believe.
Old ways were crumbling, unmourned by a self-obsessed wave of narcissistic boomers intent on getting their share. The hip cynicism of the Beatles soon infected a generation , morphing into an ugly destructive nihilism. Or an equaly destructive moral relativism, a spiritual emptiness.
But I ramble
yeah, i agree with you. the beatles were the best.
p.s. great live track
Thanks Charley
Ramble on DMDM, it gives me a chance to do the same.
I wouldn't blame the artists or ball players though..it seems to me that there was an innocence lost when players and artists found out that they had been getting ripped off for so many years and asserted that they were the folks who were creating what was rapidly becoming known as "product."
The initial shock to folks when they found their sacred things (baseball for some,music for others) were part of a larger business model, could be pretty crushing.
Yeah, the studio system for movies, the regional distro system for music, and the reserve clause for baseball all had their hand in some great moments...(creating the benign innocense you mention)...but it seems like only the capital providers were reaping the benefits (while generally screwing artists/ball players) and shackling their ventures to mediocrity.
In movies, talented actors,directors, and writers were able to rise above the barriers of studio prisons and create lasting art, while the money folks only cared about profitability.
In music, we all know the artists got royally screwed in the beginning..happy just to have a record out and a few dollars, while owners made serious bank and routinely dismissed the cultural significance of anything the artists were laying down.
In baseball, by simply drafting a player, a team prior to 1969 owned the rights to that players services in perpetuity (not very American). Then there was the inferior product of the supposed glory days (prior to 1948), when African Americans were not permitted to play in the major leagues, an unspoken policy that didn't really end until the 1960's.
For the fans, I think there was a benign innocence..I mean we didn't know that talented contract players at studios lived like paupers, unable to practice their craft because they were threatened with the loss of their contract and blacklisting, we just loved the movies. We didn't know that 11/12ths of the bluesmen that inspired us were penniless for their efforts, we just dug the music. We didn't know ball players were bound to their teams for life, but we loved baseball and the fact that our team pretty much stayed the same from year to year.
After finding out that the things that fire your dreams are businesses, like any other, driven by money,subject to greed and all the other transgressions money begets, it is a little off putting.
When Hunter S. Thompson described the 60's as a wave, he put it in perspective for me..the wave of change rose up, threatening and questioning the staus quo. There was hope that it would sweep across the country. Hunter said the wave came inland from the Pacific and that he saw it crash down in the desert and sink into the sand outside of Las Vegas.
So yeah, I could see folks getting a little cynical in the 70's as the united music culture crumbled into a bunch of targeted demographics and marketing segments..a brief glimpse of freedom swallowed up whole by the modern world.
Do I wanna go back to the "age of innocence"..no, unless maybe you are talking about the Pliocene age. There's still plenty of great music, movies, and baseball to experience. When the lights go dark in the theatre, when the grass turns green and the lines are drawn, and when I push play on a new sound for the first time, there is still a thrill, despite what I know from age and experience. Most days its these things that provide the most spiritual fullness I get.
well said my friend....kudos
I appreciate it DM..clearly there must've been some benzadrine in my ovaltine today. Cheers brother.
Great read, guys.