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D E P T H
A Classic Rock Format:
From the Nov. 30 White House press briefing: :: :: ::
The exchange lives on at the White House Web site, uncorrected — as it should be, since it transcribes a press briefing — but also undeveloped and thus problematic. It is the president’s only official reaction to the passing of a generational icon. Unless, like Entertainment Weekly, the president offers an end-of-the-year rehearsal of dead celebrities, there’s little chance he’ll say anything more. So what does the statement prove? For one thing, that professional cultural critics need to keep reminding the public that real cultural analysis goes beyond platitude: One result of the boom in pop criticism is that now anyone thinks that she or he can do it, a notion that is manifestly untrue, though a triumph for fratboy anti-intellectualism. For another, what goes around comes around: Untrained political pundits — e.g., me — can glibly offer pop political profundities. Earlier, the second of our Boomer presidents had spoken about Black Music Month, calling the different musical styles African-Americans have originated, developed, or perfected “easy to enjoy, impossible to imitate.” Bush betrayed a grotesque misunderstanding, indeed ignorance, of his generation’s music. And yet, while campaigning, he had made generational affiliation a point in the politics of 2000. At the Republican National Convention, he rallied the troops against the current administration, but also called for ideological recalibration. Bill Clinton and Al Gore are boomers as well — but, he reminded his horrified audience in Philadelphia, not the right kind of boomers. The problem with his inept comments on Black Music Month is that he showed no sign of actually knowing anything about his subject. That is, in Philadelphia he offered to speak with the true, corrected voice of his generation and then, when the time came, he had diddly to say (and I don’t mean Bo.) And his speechwriters obviously thought that the time when such things would matter had passed.
“The Beatles are a big part of the life of all baby boomers.”
Perhaps George Harrison’s passing offered the president a chance to make amends for an earlier cultural critique snafu. Maybe he was a British Invasion guy, not a Soul Man. Perhaps his boomer memories steered him toward the Ed Sullivan Theater. Perhaps he dreamed of Hofner bass guitars and hanging out with lads named Mick and Ian. Isn’t that the implication of an allusion in his convention speech — “Our generation has a chance to reclaim some essential values — to show we have grown up before we grow old” — to wink at all the Republican fans of The Who gathered in Philly? Wasn’t the president’s son implicitly offering to run America on a classic rock format? But no. Although no part of the response to George Harrison’s death screams out presidential ignorance as parts of the Black Music statement had, omission proves once again that the president’s claims of Boomerism are based not on shared dreams or memories, but predominantly on birthdate. If the Beatles “are a big part of the life of baby boomers’ (nice use of the present tense — I’m serious), why not reflect on the fact that we loved George because he was a common man who found himself in uncommon circumstances and rose to the occasion history offered him, the everyman who didn’t get in the way when the geniuses were at work, the hometown boy who pitched in when there was work to be done? Some days history makes things exciting for average guys — makes average guys historical. The hour came when George Harrison could attain greatness and, guess what?, he did. Not a genius himself, he could share a mike with genius and pull it off, with charm and aplomb. Not a great songwriter or singer, he could, occasionally, write great songs and sing them well. As more than one elegist put it, he was the most lifelike Beatle, a human being sharing the stage with giants, and thereby his fans’ psychological “brother” as well as Paul’s. Here I would like to propose a new term — fratriotism — to describe a patriotism of engaged averageness, in which men and women, behaving like siblings rather than hierarchically, match the hour God has given them. Unfortunately, Latin lacks a word for sibling, thus forcing me to choose either frater or soror as my new root term. I have chosen frater mainly because of the way it rhymes with the pater, the root of patriotism, but also because it lets me be sneakily snarky about fratboys in high places. The term may be new, but the concept is old. Recall Henry V’s Saint Crispin’s Day speech. King Henry turns into good ol” Prince Hal once again when he rallies the troops. Let’s drop the I’m-the-king-and-you’re-my-subjects stuff, he says, “For he to-day that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition.” He says they’ll fight together, all of the average Joes in the mud and blood, and become “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’ — like Robin Hood and his Merry Men, like Arthur and his Knights, like Jesus and the Disciples. Like Dubya’s dad (Sen. Prescott Bush’s son) and all his buddies in the Navy (not all senators’ sons). The subtext of the Bush nomination speech was exactly this — that the generation of which Clinton and Gore are members had not yet found its moment. After all, had earlier generations of plowboys and clerks been anything more than average before greatness called? What the Boomer generation, baby brothers all, needed was its very own Pearl Harbor. Then they could “grow up before we grow old.” A Google search of “Pearl Harbor 9/11″ has just given me more than 17,000 hits. The then-and-now connection goes back to 9/11 itself and seems established as gospel, beyond question. While the WWII generation had its military heroes (and we certainly still have service people standing in harm’s way), fratriotic Americans have chosen others in uniform — firefighters, police officers, postal carriers — to bear the symbolic and sometimes literal flag in late 2001. And, just as their 1940s predecessors signified musically — through “The White Cliffs of Dover” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” for instance — so too do America’s New Heroes stride resolutely forward with stirring musical accompaniment. Here is where the president’s lack of musical knowledge works most against him. One would not expect him to have an opinion about the authenticity of Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator) or The Strokes’ Is This It; those albums are too current and the critical problems attending them too arcane. If he has no opinion one way or the other about the three recent interpretations of The Goldberg Variations reviewed here, well, so what? But not being able to construct a cogent thought about George Harrison, even when his chief press honcho is delivering it for him, means that president Bush doesn’t hear the soundtrack of Generation 9/11. The music that America’s New Heroes hear in their heads when they imagine movies-yet-to-be-made is Classic Rock. Along with such big-beat, guitar-oriented offshoots as AOR and Contemporary Country, Classic Rock has been the music of mainline America for more than 20 years. This is not an altogether good thing, as anyone with non-corporate musical tastes will attest. But neither, speaking fratriotically, is it altogether bad. Just think of how the generations have bonded over the past year while listening to The Beatles’ 1. When Paul McCartney threw a big party for the uniformed services of New York City, he asked some vaguely contemporary artists to show up and entertain — Jay-Z, Destiny’s Child, the Backstreet Boys, for instance. But the musical focus of the night was definitely non-contemporary, with Bon Jovi and John Mellencamp and Melissa Etheridge combining to create the illusion that Springsteen had shown up to perform for his core audience, and such “70s one-namers as Elton and Bowie and Billy (all right, he needs a second name, Joel) re-contextualizing songs like “Heroes’ and “New York State of Mind.” Still, the heart of the evening’s lineup was a trio of “60s Classic Rock bigshots, guys who had often been in the same room with George Harrison: The Who, McCartney himself, and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. The latter performed the Rolling Stones’ sleazy New York disco hit “Miss You” and “Salt of the Earth,” which was, according to MTV Online, “a fitting tribute to working-class heroes.” In short, then, what Jagger and Richards (and Bowie, Billy, Elton, et al.) understood was that Classic Rock matters to Fratriots. But our very own president, a Boomer and self-proclaimed representative of his generation, has blown two opportunities to comment on the music of his youth — or, rather, the music of his generation’s youth. In either case, he has spouted gross misinterpretations or banalities bordering on utter ignorance. He, or someone speaking for him, has not met the challenge when it has offered itself. The president is the nation’s elegist. It is up to him to have interesting and intelligent things to say when people die. He must not blither or allow others to blither on his behalf. The occasion, whether it is great or small, must not determine the effort that goes into his elegy. Fratriotism requires that baby brothers be mourned as their older, and greater, brothers were. George Harrison’s death is meaningful in a way that John Lennon’s was not. He died of natural causes, as most Boomers will die, and by that most common of fates belonged among the working stiffs of history when history closed its chapter on him. Natural death links us all, a bond among fratriots; we won’t all, or most, meet our ends interestingly. George’s cancer is to John’s murder as Average Joes are to Great Men. An average president ought to have been able to meet the challenge and say something halfway bright about the Middling Beatle’s death, especially when his nation’s New Heroes know “Something” by heart. Jimmy Dean Smith is an associate professor of English and communications at Union College in Kentucky and a contributing editor to PopPolitics. Related Sites
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