http://peterspencer.com/news.html Peter Spencer: Pete's Blog Jannis' PHPRss class - http://www.jannis.to/ Fri, 18 May 2012 01:08:53 -0700 http://peterspencer.com/news.html#180
All that aside - a great, truly profound drummer and he was always gracious and kind (in *every* way) the few times we met. The first time we met face-to-face (I'd interviewed him a few weeks before) he shook my hand and said in that ravaged voice, "Welcome aboard."

And say what you will about the Band Reunion, it produced some memorable shows. I remember a hot September night at a minor-league ballpark in Trenton, down by the River. There had been a barbecue taste-off all day and the outfield running track was lined with pits. Big yellow moon over left field, the smell of woodsmoke in the air, people dancing on the infield. It was a mythic small-town rock and roll jamboree.]]> http://peterspencer.com/news.html#180 Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700 peterspencer.com - Peter Spencer - Pete's Blog http://peterspencer.com/news.html#179 Why we should let Kurt Cobain rest in peace.
By Simon Reynolds
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2011, at 3:20 PM ET

Nostalgia for the '90s—and Kurt Cobain—is in full force
For the final night of Britain's Reading Festival on Aug. 28, the promoters have something unusual lined up to entertain the 80,000-plus rock fans who congregate there annually. On the alternative stage there will be a screening of Nirvana's legendary performance at Reading in 1992, when Cobain and his bandmates triumphantly headlined a bill of grunge and alternative rock groups they'd personally selected. In an interview earlier this summer, festival booker Tania Harrison declared, "It was such a legendary performance that so many people haven't seen ... one of those seminal moments that changed everything, which is what Reading's all about."


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This decision is perplexing on a number of levels. First, there's the obvious oddness of interrupting the schedule of live groups in favor of a dead group. Then there's the curious fact that Reading's promoters, aiming to capitalize on 2011's status as the Official Anniversary of Grunge, are showing the footage of the gig on its 19th anniversary, a year ahead of customary schedule. (Nirvana did actually appear at Reading in August 1991 but were still relatively unknown and played midway through the bill.) Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about this exercise in time travel, though, is how it isn't really that surprising. It's exactly the sort of thing that you'd kinda expect from a pop culture increasingly characterized by a compulsion to revisit and reconsume its own past.
One of the primary aims of my book Retromania is to defamiliarize an attitude that has gradually, insidiously installed itself as normal. To do so requires memory exercises and techniques of retro-speculation: in this case, asking yourself whether the promoters of Woodstock, or the first Lollapalooza in 1991, would have lowered a giant screen onstage and projected footage of a gig from two decades earlier? The answer is no: They were too busy confidently making history to bother with referring back to it.
Nirvana's ghostly reappearance at Reading is the first course of a banquet of grunge retrospection this fall. Early September sees the publication of Everybody Loves Our Town, a 555-page oral history of the Seattle grunge scene by Mark Yarm (a name freakily close to Mark Arm, Mudhoney's singer). On Sept. 20, Pearl Jam Twenty, Cameron Crowe's documentary about the band's career, is released to theaters in tandem with the PJ20 soundtrack, a double CD of rare and unreleased tracks plus a 36-page hardcover book written by the director. A week later Geffen will roll out the deluxe expanded reissue of Nevermind, which in its most extravagant form presents four CDs and one DVD and gathers up every last alternative mix, B-side, demo version, and boombox-recorded rehearsal take of the songs. More laudably, Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic is staging a "whole album" rendition of Nevermind at Seattle's rock museum, Experience Music Project, to raise money for the band's former publicist, who is battling cancer.
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All this grunge retro-action takes place amid chatter about a '90s revival already in full swing and encompassing everything from tours by alt-rock stalwarts like Pavement, Soundgarden, and the Lemonheads, the return of Beavis and Butt-Head and 120 Minutes to MTV, and Nickelodeon's recent bout of '90s-nostalgia programming. The latter garnered good viewing figures, but what is striking about the recent "9ties R Back!" blather is the absence of any real sense of "by popular demand." The retrospection feels rote, the predictable upshot of the way that commemorative cycles have become a structural, in-built component of the media and entertainment industry. This revival is largely top-down, not grass-roots. Everybody benefits: Magazines generate content to fill their pages, record companies can bolster their ailing bottom line by rereleasing archival material (guaranteed profits, since the original recordings were already paid for long ago) in spiffy, bulked-up form, and the commentariat gets something to reassess and pontificate about. Yet the intervals—always measured in decades, the 10th or 20th birthday of whatever-it-may-be—are arbitrary, governed by a calendrical metric that has little to do with whether there's any actual yearning out there to relive the event/artist/era in question.
Not strictly '90s but closely related to this wave of pseudo-nostalgia is the forthcoming oral history I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum. The book ends in 1992, when The Real World debuted, prefiguring MTV's abandonment of music in favor of reality TV. As a Brit who in 1990-92 was spending something like 50 percent of my time in New York and therefore witnessed grunge's MTV breakthrough, it struck me that the music channel had become what America had always lacked before: a nationwide forum for pop music that played the same role that the state-owned pop station Radio One and BBC's weekly chart show Top of the Pops had done in the United Kingdom.
American radio had always been vastly more diverse and regionally scattered than the near-monopoly that was Radio One, while American Bandstand never loomed as large as Top of the Pops, a program watched by one-fifth of the British population. MTV was what made grunge's rapid crossover possible. At the same time, grunge confirmed MTV's gatekeeping power while giving it a dose of credibility sorely needed after the hair-metal years of Poison and Warrant. The channel's combination of flexing its power while also being musically and stylistically rejuvenated went to MTV's head: Remember the slogan "the revolution will be televised," the "Rock the Vote" campaign, and MTV's somewhat unseemly pride in supposedly having rallied the youth vote behind Bill Clinton?
What I'm suggesting is that an undercurrent to grunge retrospection is the music media's and record industry's own nostalgia for the heyday of the rock monoculture. It was already crumbling in the early '90s, thanks to rap (the rebel music of black youth, obviously, but a lot of white kids had defected to hip-hop, too) and to the emergence of rave and electronic dance culture (in America destined always to be a minority subculture, but in Europe the dominant form of '90s pop). Grunge was the last blast of rock as a force at once central in popular culture yet also running counter to mainstream show biz values.
Not only did grunge give MTV a timely Botox session but it underwrote the heyday of Spin magazine, which this year noticeably jumped the gun on everybody else with its "What Nevermind Means Now" cover story (Kurt in a swimming pool recreating the album's iconic baby-swimming-underwater image) and accompanying tribute LP Newermind (covers of the LP's tracks by Kurt's heroes the Vaselines and Meat Puppets, among others). The Spin website's own staff-written blurb for August's "Special Issue: the 20th Anniversary of the Album That Changed Everything" wryly notes the "symbiotic, borderline codependent" relationship between the magazine and grunge, and admits that "back in 2001, when we published a tenth anniversary Nevermind issue, one letter-writing wag remarked, 'So, still pickin' those bones, huh?'"
If grunge was a last blast, the aftershocks carried on deep into the '90s. Spin and MTV both tried to repeat the grunge effect (an underground sound going overground, overnight) with electronica. By the time nu-metal hit at the turn of the millennium, MTV had shrewdly shed the M in its name and moved decisively toward round-the-clock reality. The heavily edited and contrived quasi-vérité version of young life offered by these programs eclipsed the gritty authenticity that grunge had represented.
Along with reality TV, something else had risen up during the '90s that was all set to radically transform music consumption, music fandom, and music industry alike. In my mind, if nobody else's, the death of Kurt Cobain is freakily intertwined with the rise of the Web. During 1994, I was back living in the United Kingdom and—here's where you really have to do a memory exercise, mentally re-create a sense of what life was like then in terms of access to information and news—the remarkable thing was how little coverage there was in the British media of Cobain's suicide. So that grim weekend, my wife—an early adopter of everything to do with computers—went online, where we found teeming communities of grief, speculation, rumor, and memorialization. It was mindblowing, actually: the moment at which I woke up to the potential of the Internet, from its leveling effects (in one forum, Buzzcock Pete Shelley, who'd toured with Nirvana, chatted with distraught Kurt fans) to the threat it posed to traditional media.
Cobain, arguably the last rebel-rocker-as-star, had owed his rise to the centralizing power of the old media; now in his death, he was entangled with the emerging new media disorder. The old media and entertainment channels (what I think of as the analog system) constructed the mainstream while simultaneously creating the possibility of that mainstream being breached and reinvigorated by forces "outside." In grunge's case, that meant the flannel-wearing, slacker-minded alt-rock underground that had developed during the '80s, fostered by a network of independent labels. This curious process of inversion—the underground becoming the overground—was how the analog system had worked repeatedly in the past. ('50s rock'n'roll came initially from the regional independent labels.) And with Nirvana and their fellow travelers, that's how it worked one last time.
But what is also true is that that the media organs of the analog system generated what you might call the "Epochal Self-Image": a sense of a particular stretch of years as constituting an era, a period with a distinct "feel" and spirit. That sense is always constructed, always entails the suppression of the countless disparate other things going on in any given stretch of time, through the focus on a select bunch of artists, styles, recordings, events, deemed to "define the times." If we date the takeoff point of the Internet as a dominant force in music culture to the turn of the millennium (the point at which broadband enabled the explosive growth of filesharing, blogging, et al.), it is striking that the decade that followed is characterized by the absence of epochal character. It's not that nothing happened ... it's that so many little things happened, a bustle of microtrends and niche scenes that all got documented and debated, with the result that nothing was ever able to dominant and define the era.
The failure is bound-up with the erosion of the filtering function of the media and its increasing inability to marshal and synchronize popular taste around particular artists or phenomena. The Internet works against convergence and consensus: the profusion of narrowcast media (blogs, netradio, innumerable outlets of analysis and opinion) and the accelerated way that news and buzz get disseminated, mean that it is harder and harder for a cultural phenomenon to achieve full-spectrum dominance of the attention economy. Now triumphant, the digital system has interfered with our very sense of culture-time.
That is why it is so hard to see what, from the last dozen years or so of rock, could be the focus for future commemorative or revivalist impulses. Can you envisage the 20th anniversary of the Strokes' debut album, or the White Stripes's breakthrough LP, White Blood Cells, being celebrated? Spin will not be able to put either group on the cover under the legend "The Album That Changed Everything," because neither record came close to Nevermind's paradigm-shift. (Remember the droves of grunge-lite copyists like Silverchair and Bush? The undignified way that even superestablished bands like Metallica tried to de-metallicize their sound and image? How Axl Rose disappeared into a bunker of botched self-reinvention for 15 years?) Even less epoch-defining clout could be claimed for those Pitchfork-anointed bands who've codified the post-indie sound of the 2000s such as Arcade Fire and Animal Collective.
When people—fans, critics, industry, whoever—look back to grunge, then, what they feel wistful for is not just the particulars of that moment (flannel, shaggy hair, down-tuned guitar sounds, Tabitha Soren) or even qualities that music seemed to have then and since lost (anger, rebellion, spontaneity, anti-gloss realness, etc). It is for the concept of period vibe in itself, for "aura of era" in the abstract. It is a nostalgia for a time when the Zeit actually possessed a Geist.
***
"Geist" means spirit or ghost. Which brings us back to this year's Reading Festival and the spectral reappearance of Nirvana on its stage, in the form of that one-year-premature showing of the 1992 performance. A show that British rockmag Kerrang! ranked at No. 1 in their list of 100 Gigs That Shook The World ... and that turned out to be Nirvana's last-ever U.K. concert.
The Nirvana "repeat" derives its meaning and value from something historic that happened two decades earlier. But its presence in the present—its re-present-ation—works against anything equally world-shaking happening again. For sure, the chances are remote that something as momentous as the Nirvana show would have occurred during the hour or so that the old concert footage takes up in the schedule, should some contemporary band have played during that precise time slot instead. But we'll never know, and the more that the present is taken up with reunion tours, re-enactments, and contemporary revivalist groups umbilically bound by ties of reference and deference to rock's glory days, the smaller the chances are that history will be made today.
One thing we can definitively say is that the screening of the classic Nirvana gig is an anti-event, a black hole in history. That hour in which young and old alike gawp at a world-shaking performance from 1992, is dead time: the time of repetition and simulation. Another, harsher way of putting it: The dead man on that screen is more alive than the people watching him.]]> http://peterspencer.com/news.html#179 Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700 peterspencer.com - Peter Spencer - Pete's Blog http://peterspencer.com/news.html#178
But still.

The Wikipedia page for the Byrds has evidently been edited by one of his partisans, or by Crosby himself, to include the anecdote he tells in TV interviews, about his being fired from the Byrds in 1967. "They said they could do better without me," he says with a wry face and a sardonic shake of his head. After all, he went on to Crosby, Stills, and Nash and they made all kinds of money, right?

Well, ya know what, Dave? (May I call you Dave?) They did do better. The Byrds got rid of a (granted) very good harmony singer who was also the most pretentious, self-congratulatory songwriter of that pretentious, self-congratulatory era and they got Clarence White, a brilliantly innovative guitarist, who with Roger McGuinn crafted a two-guitar interplay people use to make great records to this day. In the meantime, who in folk, rock, or country tries to sound like CS&N? Nobody, that's who, because the records Crosby, Stills, and Nash were making when McGuinn and White were reinventing the guitar are today embarrassingly dated.

They did do better without you, Dave, a lot better. They became one of the most influential groups of all time while you became a nostalgia act. So, to summarize: David Crosby is a pompous ass.]]> http://peterspencer.com/news.html#178 Sat, 11 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700 peterspencer.com - Peter Spencer - Pete's Blog http://peterspencer.com/news.html#177
I took some pride in my ability to ride no-hands when I was a boy - uphill, downhill, gravel roads, you name it - and the personal detachment expressed in the action came back to me when I read "On the Road" a few years later: speeding through a landscape I was relaxed enough to appreciate, without really being part of it, or of the world at all. Leaning forward to take the handlebars again, that inevitable reluctant gesture, always seemed like a surrender to the material. I saw that guy a few minutes later, bending forward and pumping up a long hill. He zipped right along, but it looked like work.]]> http://peterspencer.com/news.html#177 Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700 peterspencer.com - Peter Spencer - Pete's Blog http://peterspencer.com/news.html#176
This involves some strategy, of which last night's concert was an interesting example. The program opened with Ravel's "Le Tombeau de Couperin," then continued with Messiaen's "Exotic Birds," with Serkin, followed by Mozart's Rondo in D Major, K.382, also with Serkin, the Fourth Symphony of Brahms coming after intermission. At first glance it seemed that the Ravel (French but not too French, modern but not too modern) was intended to prepare the audience for the rigours of "Exotic Birds," with Mozart offered as a reward afterwards, and the Brahms ensuring that nobody left before the end. But it turned out there was more to it than that.

The Messiaen was bracing, full of color and verve, and certainly benefitted from its placement after Ravel's pretty pastels. Serkin was plainly exhilarated afterwards, racing around the orchestra to shake hands with various section leaders, reveling in applause that was, if not exactly tepid, certainly no more than polite.

Then came the Mozart. The Rondo in D, according to the program notes, was written to substitute for the last movement of an existing concerto before its Vienna debut. It is not part of the concerto's standard score but is sometimes played by itself, as it was on this occasion.

It is, it turns out (I had not heard it before), a simple, not to say simple-minded, copybook theme and variations, with little of Mozart's trademark emotional depth or Olympian powers of invention. It seems to me that Serkin (who, one assumes, was responsible for programming his part of the concert) wanted to show the piece in an unflattering light compared to what had gone before, as a way of making his case for a favorite composer by playing a second-rate work by everyone else's favorite composer. Of course, the Mozart received loud cheers, as did the Brahms, which was glossy and forgettable.

The concert was promoted with the banner legend "Serkin plays Mozart!" Closer to the truth (and certainly more interesting for this listener) might be the phrase "Serkin trashes Mozart to boost Messiaen!" And good for him.]]> http://peterspencer.com/news.html#176 Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800 peterspencer.com - Peter Spencer - Pete's Blog http://peterspencer.com/news.html#175
Anyway, here's a great column, slighly edited, by Hamilton Nolan from the usually super-snarky gossip site Gawker:

"There's a very good reason that our culture's most enduring artistic and moral icons all died young: because if they'd stuck around long enough, they'd have ended up shilling for sugary beverages during the Super Bowl. So long, Eminem. You were fun while you lasted.

"Last night's Super Bowl featured not one, but two commercials starring Eminem, the great battle rapper, the perpetual underdog, the guy who made himself the biggest-selling artist on the planet by appealing to the downtrodden, to the unpopular, to the spat-upon, whose glorious appeal was based on his sly ability to say "Fuck the man" in oh so many new and different ways.

"So let's get all of the objections out of the way up front: "This will be great for Eminem's career. He needed to do something to stay in the spotlight. This is a way for him to promote his music. You have to do ads to stay relevant in the music industry today. Lots of rappers have done commercials. Some of these ads really respect hip hop. That commercial was funny and knowing. And the Chrysler commercial was amazing. He did it for Detroit. He did it for his fans. He did it for his career, and I love him, so I love it. Everybody knows this is just how things are now."

"All of those perspectives are perfectly valid—if you consider Eminem to be just another pop star, and you consider pop stars to be just another extension of the vast commercial consumption-encouragement apparatus that powers America. In that case, of course, who cares? The problem with that view is that it assumes, and requires you to assume, that nothing the musician in question says is real, or should be treated as real, or taken seriously, or felt in an honest way; it's all just so much space-filler for drive-time radio shows, feel-good background muzak for retail stores, aesthetically pleasing warbling that complements the gleaming lines of whichever auto it's supposed to be hyping up in the ad of the day. In this formulation, any music that's popular automatically sacrifices its claim to art, to unbounded expression, in favor of its claim to popularity—because popularity, the ability to command an audience, is monetizable, and must be maximized and exploited at the expense of art, which is just some weird selfish flight of fancy.

"All of which is just a long way of saying: it doesn't matter how cool you think the commercial is. It just matters that it's a commercial, and that it's using Eminem to sell sugar-flavored bubble water and a near-defunct brand of automobiles. Being in a commercial means taking the credibility and popularity you've built up over your entire career and exchanging it for a sum of money. It means lending a corporation your halo effect; trying to slyly transfer the good will that your fans give you, the artist, over to a corporation's product. And if that good will was built up on the back something worthwhile, something honest, something from the heart and untainted that resonated with people, no matter how profane—then the act of trying to make that good will rub off on a soft drink, or a car, or a sneaker, is essentially a trick. It's sleight of hand, a con job perpetrated on people who gave an artist their own good will in good faith. That's the reason that "selling out" used to be a taboo—because no amount of money is a reasonable price for the good will that an artist earned with their very soul, through art. It's especially sad when the artist in question gained lots of their fans with the type of unfiltered rage that stands in refreshing opposition to the sell-sell-sell society that leaves many of us with a vague sense of unease, the kind of unease that great music taps into, making us fans. Hardcore, loving fans who so adore an artist for putting words and music to our own feelings that we'd do damn near anything they say, even listen to a sales pitch for Brisk Iced Tea.

"And Eminem was already rich. Shame."]]> http://peterspencer.com/news.html#175 Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800 peterspencer.com - Peter Spencer - Pete's Blog http://peterspencer.com/news.html#174
But one item in the litany of Ms. Chua's bullying struck a a quite literal chord - how she refused to let her daughter go to the bathroom one evening until she mastered a difficult piano composition.

I remember in my music critic days an educator telling me about the demographic shift his conservatory had seen in the past 20 years. In the '70s and '80s, he said, the students willing or able to take on the tremendous workload required tended to be Soviet Jews. With the fall of Communism this pattern shifted dramatically and by the time he was speaking the great majority of his applicants were Asian.

Ms. Chua has indulged in enough ethnic stereotyping already for me to want to avoid any generalizations about the Chinese attitude towards creativity, hard work, individuality, the imagination, and so on. This isn't about that. But when parents of any race arbitrarily choose their children's hobbies based on the effort required to pursue them the result (at least in the arts) can be rote, dutiful, anything but creative.

Witness the superstar pianist Lang Lang, or "Bang Bang" as I've heard him called in several quarters. He tells stories of his father's maniacal discipline and sacrifice (at one point insisting they both commit suicide when a piece wasn't coming along well) after they had left Lang's mother in the countryside and moved to a tiny Beijing apartment so he could study music. There had been no music in the home, no family tradition of music, until the day Lang's father declared that the boy was going to make the family's fortune as a pianist.

The result, repeated in dozens if not hundreds of cases, has been dutiful, proficient playing that, while retaining some interest (it's hard to make Beethoven boring) often makes a listener ask why, exactly, is he listening? Even Lang Lang's much-publicized flamboyance has a packaged quality. I'm supposed to smile so I will smile. I'm supposed to wave my arms so I will wave my arms.

What's missing is what my Catholic friends might call vocation, what prospective Protestant divines refer to as the Call, the sense that God has taken you aside and asked you personally (not your parents) to do this work. Plenty of Asian performers have this quality - Midori comes to mind, and Mitsuko Uchida - but Lang Lang isn't one of them. Neither, I suspect, are Amy Chua's daughters, no matter how much they practice.]]> http://peterspencer.com/news.html#174 Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800 peterspencer.com - Peter Spencer - Pete's Blog http://peterspencer.com/news.html#173
So. If you're reading and want to comment, then PLEASE put something in your comment relating to a specific aspect or entry. So "great site" will continue to be dumped (unfairly or not) and "when you conflated the Monkees, the Sex Pistols, and the Grateful Dead I became convinced you were dropped on your head as a child" will be included.

Coming soon: Lang Lang, or as we sometimes call him around the Ponderosa, Bang Bang.]]> http://peterspencer.com/news.html#173 Tue, 18 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800 peterspencer.com - Peter Spencer - Pete's Blog http://peterspencer.com/news.html#172
My problem isn't the volume or the nihilism or even the fact that you can't hear the words. My problem is the emotional sameness of it all, one screaming rant after another, a one-note act repeated until the performers (and the audience) can't stand up anymore. There is one thing I really like about metal, though, specially the newer varieties that present themselves as a variation on the punk thing.

I never liked punk, for the same reason I never liked the Monkees: You're expected to pay good money to see people who can't play their instruments. I know the '70s punk explosion was a reaction to the bloated pretension of much post-'60s rock and blah blah blah. But if you're calling it music it's supposed to be music, and better music than you could make yourself at home.

Say what you will about metal, it involves being able to play. One metal band is better than another metal band because they can play better - the rhythm section drives better, the guitars shred more. I find this a tremendous relief, because I thought the Sex Pistols, the Monkees, and the Grateful Dead were conspiring to lead their respective followings, and the rest of us, over a cultural cliff into the place the visual arts can be found these days, a place where what you do doesn't matter as much as what you think, which means, really, how cool you are.

Metal isn't cool. Never has been. It can be smart or stupid, but by definition it can never be half-assed. The fact that an entire generation came out of the punk thing wanting music that challenged the players' skill does more to restore my faith in humanity than any other cultural trend of my lifetime. Metal - long may it wave.]]> http://peterspencer.com/news.html#172 Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800 peterspencer.com - Peter Spencer - Pete's Blog http://peterspencer.com/news.html#171
I went to a Christmas show the other night, a benefit for the local food bank given by one of the younger musicians on the Island and several of her musical and non-musical friends. The word that came to mind was "collegiate," meant in a good way - silly, slaphappy, trashy, good-humoured. There was irony, plenty of it, in the winking celebration of things like the Andy Williams Christmas album and songs like "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "White Christmas."

I need to be careful here, because these were good people, doing a good thing. And I need to stress that what I'm about to say may, in fact, be dead wrong. It's just something to think about, not a fact, not even a surmise, just ... something.

In the past year or so I have had to admit that there are more and subtler forms of racism in this society than I used to think there were. A kind of hysteria has greeted President Obama from seemingly ordinary people who doubt his citizenship and religion, whose reaction to any of his programs has been a strange sort of terror. It makes me think that we are not the color-blind society I once insisted we were. And I'm starting to think about the covert racism that might have replaced the overt brand the '60s made obsolete or at the very least unfashionable.

What does this have to do with a "White Christmas" sing-along led by a young man with a ukulele? Before I answer that another tangent. When Napoleon invaded Russia some 200 years ago the Czar's army adopted a strategy akin to Muhammed Ali's notorious "rope-a-dope." They fell back before the invaders, even abandoning their capital, avoiding any large-scale engagement with the enemy and, most important of all, destroying the countryside behind them. This "scorched-earth" policy critically reduced the French army's ability to forage and, as their supply lines grew longer and winter closed in 80 to 90 per cent of the men who marched into the vast country never marched out again.

Is the ironic celebration of the worst of American culture a kind of cultural scorched-earth policy? Unconscious, perhaps, but still having the effect to deny non-white newcomers a cultural patrimony? "Okay, we have to accept you into our culture. But we'll do everything we can to make that culture worthless, by elevating the worst of it, using irony as a shield."

I accuse the kids who put on this particular show or others like it of nothing. They are at worst merely the unconscious inheritors of a dubious legacy. In fact, the whole thing may be unconscious. I don't think a renegade CIA operation or military/industrial star-chamber decided to start this trend in the weeks after the Civil Rights Act was signed. But just how corrosive is the ironic celebration of trash? How self-destructive? How pathological? I'm probably just in a really bad mood.]]> http://peterspencer.com/news.html#171 Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800 peterspencer.com - Peter Spencer - Pete's Blog