Cathedrals Are Not Built By The Sea

I’ve mentioned a few times previously on this blog my customary habit of scouring the bins for used records at my local Goodwill Store. The store is located a mere four blocks from my home, which I suppose encourages my weekly routine, and while I seldom find anything significant, an occasional gem sometimes can be uncovered. I found nothing during my visit today, but I did notice this time that there were an unusually high number of Christian music LPs. These sort of records, many of them pressed by small and obscure labels, can always be found in the bins there, but this time they comprised the majority of the records, and I don’t mean a simple majority, but perhaps comprising two out of three of all the records there (perhaps 70-80 total).

I’ve noticed this fact for as long as I’ve shopped there. Perhaps the percentage hasn’t been has high as it was today, but these types of records are nonetheless a noticeable and persistent presence in the bins. These Christian records—spoken-word recordings of books of the New Testament, collections of hymns by obscure gospel groups, traditional hymns sung by unfamiliar husband and wife duos (and families), and so on—have always been abundant in the used record bins. Sometimes I’ve found up to eight sealed copies of the same record, as if someone had dumped off the whole pile simply in order to get rid of them. There are more of these records in number than soundtracks to dreary old movies (e.g., Exodus, Dr. Zhivago) and albums by Montovani, Ferrante & Teicher, and The 101 Strings. Far fewer of these latter kinds of records show up than Christian LPs. People don’t seem to want to hold on to their old, once cherished religious records—why?

Elvis, for instance, recorded some great gospel records, but I’ve seldom come across these albums in the used bins. Of course most any record by Elvis is collectible and it is quite likely that some other collector may have grabbed them before I did, but I think the only used gospel record by Elvis I’ve ever come across at the Goodwill store is He Touched Me (1972), but I visually graded it poor, and since I already had an early pressing of the record, I didn’t pick it up. But a gospel record by Elvis is one thing, and a record by an anonymous gospel group consisting of four white nerds garbed in garish polyester is another. If I may speculate, I think these Christian records are dumped by the score at the local Goodwill Store because they just don’t have anything to offer. There’s nothing remotely “inspirational” or aesthetically interesting about them; they are empty signifiers drained of any transcendent meaning. They are dull and uninspiring, eerie and morose, the aural equivalent of a flickering neon cross attached to a rusting metal building alongside the highway.

Or rather, a roadside neon cross on a beautiful, star-filled summer night. The tawdriness of the manufactured symbol is rendered insignificant by the sheer magnificence of the universe itself. The neon symbol says: I’m a cheaply produced, short-lived, and profane object. The night sky says: Behold something greater and more magnificent than yourself. The title for this entry is inspired by a poem by Wallace Stevens:

Cathedrals are not built along the sea;
The tender bells would jangle on the hoar
And iron winds; the graceful turrets roar
With bitter storms the long night angrily;
And through the precious organ pipes would be
A low and constant murmur of the shore
That down those golden shafts would rudely pour
A mighty and a lasting melody.

And those who knelt within the gilded stalls
Would have vast outlook for their weary eyes;
There, they would see high shadows on the walls
From passing vessels in their fall and rise.
Through gaudy widows there would come too soon
The low and splendid rising of the moon.

Stevens suggests that churches aren’t built by the sea because the sound of the sea would overpower any sermon that could possible be recited—the attention of the weary churchgoers would be drawn outside, to the overpowering sound and sight of the sea, not to the paltry words that make up the (familiar) sermon. The wind, the occasional storm, the moonlight, the primordial sound of the waves lapping the shore—all phenomena of the natural world—spiritually satisfy the tired parishioners much better than does the church itself. No wonder the records I saw today are dumped off by the dozen.

A Dirty Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste

It is an error to believe that the Hollywood Production Code prohibited sexual content—it did not. Rather, it simply codified its ciphered expression (e.g., the pan out the window, with the curtain gently flapping in the breeze, to indicate the sex that was about to take place off-camera and out of sight). As Slavoj Zizek has shown, the Hollywood Production Code of the 30s and 40s “was not simply a negative censorship code, but also a positive (productive, as Foucault would have put it) codification and regulation that generated the very excess whose direct depiction it hindered” (The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, p. 6). Stated in another way, the role of censorship is far more ambiguous than it seems. Prohibition does not simply function in a negative way, but in fact generates the excessive, all-pervasive sexualization of everyday experience. Edgar Allan Poe referred to this unintended by-product of prohibition as “the imp of the perverse,” the obscene underpinning that supports systems of symbolic domination. In other words, prohibition encourages the subject to develop a “dirty little mind”: without the prohibition, the perverse impulse remains dormant, inactive.

Hence the best marketing strategy, the best way to sell something, is to hint at the existence of some transgressive image or form of expression while maintaining a socially acceptable decorum at the same time: you must be able to activate the spectator’s dirty little mind while nonetheless adhering to standards of decency. The asterisk, for instance, is a stigmatic mark that both conceals, and yet signifies, profanity, e. g., in the word mother*****r. A famous use of the asterisk is in the title of the Rolling Stones song, “Starfucker,” which became “Star Star” on Goat’s Head Soup (1973). In the audio-visual realm, bleeping is to the audio track what the asterisk is to print media: the bleep interferes in the aural reception of the offensive word while also pointing out that it was actually uttered. The bleep and the asterisk (and the “Parental Warning: Explicit Lyrics” sticker) are therefore censoring devices that prompt and encourage in the mind of the subject the very “dirty” thoughts they presumably function to prevent. I suspect that the placing of the “Parental Warning” sticker has had the unintentional effect of selling far more units of a particular album than would have happened without it (yet another instance of what Foucault means by “productive” codification leading to excessive expenditure).

The censorship of rock and rock music began with Elvis, who, famously, in September 1956, was censored when he appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show: when Elvis began to sing and dance to Little Richard’s “Ready Teddy,” the camera moved in so that the television audience saw him only from the waist up. Here are a few other examples in the history of rock:

Jimi Hendrix – Electric Ladyland (1968) (for the album’s U. S. release, the twenty nude women were replaced by a close-up of Hendrix performing live)
John Lennon and Yoko Ono – Unfinished Music No. 1—Two Virgins (1968) (sold in the U. S. in a plain wrapper in order to cover the couple’s full frontal nudity)
Blind Faith – Blind Faith (1969) (for the U. S. release, a nude young girl holding a phallic model airplane was replaced by a picture of the band)
Alice Cooper – Pretties For You (1969) (on some copies a sticker was placed over the drawing of the girl on the right in order to conceal her exposed white panties)
Santana – Abraxas (1970) (cover had a sticker with an excerpt from a review of the band covering the black woman’s exposed genital area)
Alice Cooper – Love It to Death (1971) (RCA record club issue printed only the top half of the front cover, with the bottom half left blank)
Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here (1975) (early copies of the album in the U. S. were issued with dark blue cellophane in order conceal the cover picture of the man in flames)
Nirvana – Nevermind (1991) (the genitalia of the male baby were airbrushed away)
Chumbawamba – Anarchy (1993) (cover depicting childbirth in close-up was sold in the U. S. in a plain white sleeve)
While Zombie – Supersexy Swingin’ Sounds (1996) (nude girls on the cover and interior booklet are given bikinis in the “clean” version)

Rocky Mountain Way

We’re heading off this morning the Rocky Mountain way, planning to spend a couple of days or so with Becky’s niece and her family, who live in an A-frame home 10,000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains. I couldn’t help but think of two of the more famous songs about the Rockies, Joe Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way” and (of course) John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High.” But there’s also Gene Autry’s “Blue Canadian Rockies” (written by Cindy Walker), later covered by The Byrds on Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968), and Lightnin’ Hopkins “Rocky Mountain.” For movies, there’s Errol Flynn’s Rocky Mountain (1950) and the Three Mesquiteers’ Rocky Mountain Rangers (1940), which has absolutely nothing to do with the Rocky Mountains. Likewise, the Randolph Scott western, Rocky Mountain Mystery (1935), has nothing to do with the Rockies as it was filmed in Big Bear Valley, California. At any rate, we’re off for a real Rocky Mountain high, not a stand-in: a little hiking (I’m not up for more than a little), cold, crisp air (and, I hope, cold, crisp beer), a lot of beautiful scenery, and a little sight-seeing. I’m told, since their home is so isolated, to prepare for a brilliant night sky, as the stars at night are something to see. Apparently there will be some requisite Milky Way gazing as well, which is fine with me. Sing it, Joe.

Private Parts

Near the end of the half-time show of Super Bowl XXXVIII, Justin Timberlake reached across Janet Jackson’s chest in order to remove a cup from her black leather bustier. In doing so, he happened to reveal her right breast to millions of viewers. Predictably, in the aftermath of the event, many Washington lawmakers invoked the rhetoric of moral outrage. A few months after this particular Super Bowl, Congress approved a measure allowing the FCC to increase the maximum fine from $27,500 to $275,000 for violations of decency on television and radio. In fact, the measure was later inserted into the 2005 defense authorization bill, revealing the control of televised images is on par with national security.

In a world in which decorum is the only morality left, the exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast on national television was a fundamental breach of etiquette. American culture obviously believes the censorship of body parts is a deep, fundamental value worth preserving at any cost. If a black woman’s breast (don’t they always come in pairs?) can be revealed to millions on national television, what could be next? It would seem the proper covering of body parts is as equally important as national security. However, just so the point can’t be conveniently neglected, Jackson’s breast was not totally exposed—she was wearing a nipple shield big enough to cover completely the areola. This curious fact led many conspiracy-minded critics to conclude that the event was not accidental but a tasteless stunt, engineered to revitalize the aging pop star’s fading career.

The Timberlake-Jackson event is yet another instance of the problematic nature of pop music in American society: inevitably, it would seem, pop music generates controversy. In any case, censorship and proscription lead to counter-strategies and evasive tactics, among them being the use of slang and euphemism, as the lyrics to many pop songs, so linked to vernacular expression, attest. As might be expected, sex organs are highly fetishized body parts in pop lyrics, but so too are breasts, legs, and gluteal muscles. But where’s William Burroughs when you need him? I know of no pop song featuring a Talking Asshole.

Infernal Organs And Body Parts:
Chuck Berry – My Ding-A-Ling
The Black Eyed Peas – My Humps
Jackson Browne – Red Neck Friend
The Commodores – Brick House
Sheena Easton – Sugar Walls
Peter Gabriel – Sledgehammer
Iggy Pop – Cock In My Pocket
K.C. and the Sunshine Band – (Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty
Led Zeppelin – The Lemon Song
LL Cool J – Big Ole Butt
Mojo Nixon – Stuffin’ Martha’s Muffin
Primus – Winona’s Big Brown Beaver
Reverend Horton Heat – Wiggle Stick
Salt-N-Pepa – Shoop
Bob Seger – Night Moves
Rod Stewart – Hot Legs
Wreckx-N-Effect – Rump Shaker
Frank Zappa – G-Spot Tornado
ZZ Top – Tube Steak Boogie

“More Popular That Jesus”

The way the story goes, John Lennon’s infamous remark about the Beatles being “more popular than Jesus” was printed in an interview that appeared in the London Evening Standard in early March 1966. Lennon is quoted as saying, “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n ‘ roll or Christianity.” Apparently, so the story goes, his remark created nary a stir in Britain upon the publication of the interview.

Things went differently in the United States. Roughly five months after the aforementioned interview was published in England, some of Lennon’s remarks from the earlier interview were excerpted and reprinted in the 29 July 1966 issue of Datebook, a teen magazine, apparently to coincide with the release of Revolver on August 8. Within days of the magazine’s appearance on the newsstands, the American backlash against the Beatles began. It took a few days for the remark to circulate in the media, of course, but by 11 August, or right around that date, rock music, at the very least an annoyance, became a full-blown “social problem.” The vast popularity of the Beatles led many adults to conclude that the band’s influence on teenagers was immense, on the assumption, I suppose, that young people would accept their messages uncritically, the personal beliefs of the Beatles being like scripture. The first edition of Bob Larson’s Rock & Roll: The Devil’s Diversion, the subject of which he called “the moral and religious significance of rock and roll music,” was published in January or February of 1967, that is, about five months after Lennon’s remark was reprinted in Datebook. A second edition of Larson’s book followed in 1968, and a third in 1970. However, in a footnote in the third edition (1970) of his book, Larson claims that Lennon’s remark, “Christianity will go. We’re more popular than Jesus now,” appeared in the 21 March 1966 issue of Newsweek. I haven’t confirmed that reference, but I’ll take his word for it. If so, one wonders why the remark didn’t prompt such controversy in the American media until it was reprinted in Datebook in July later in the year.

Peter Watkins’ film Privilege (1967), about the trials and travails of an influential British pop star, was probably being filmed when Lennon’s remark was first published in Britain. But Lennon’s remark, “We’re more popular than Jesus,” was re-deployed and spoken by a character in AIP’s Wild in the Streets (1968), a satirical allegorical fantasy about the political dangers posed by a charismatic rock star. Written by Robert Thom (Death Race 2000, 1975), the film draws on a wide variety of themes, including, perhaps most importantly, the Oedipal romance. It features a weak father (Bert Freed) and a terrible (castrating) mother (Shelley Winters). The mother’s character was probably inspired by the Angela Lansbury figure of 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate, and like the Angela Lansbury character, the Shelley Winters character is shown to be politically ambitious once she learns that her runaway son has become rich and famous. The film’s anti-hero is Max Frost (born Max Flatow, Jr.), played by Christopher Jones, whose lack of proper maternal love is the implied motivation for his desperate need for adulation and affection. Precociously intelligent but also highly self-centered, Max escapes his unhappy home life to become a multi-millionaire by age twenty-two, by forming a hugely successful rock band and by hiring a fifteen-year-old financial genius as a band member. In order to suggest his fundamental immorality, we learn that Max has fathered several illegitimate children with whom he has no contact, literally and emotionally neglecting them in the same way his mother did him. Oddly, he likes to sleep with children, and encourages his band members to use LSD. He does nothing to discourage being seen as a Christ-like figure; in one scene, his hook-handed and slightly stoned band member, played by Larry Bishop, asks Max if he has the power to restore his missing hand.

After learning that 52% of the U. S. population is under twenty-five, Max uses his celebrity status to hijack the proceedings at the youth-oriented political rally of Senatorial candidate Johnny Fergus (Hal Holbrook, sharing a family resemblance to John F. Kennedy, in the same way that Millie Perkins, who plays Fergus’s wife, is meant to suggest Jackie Kennedy). Revealing that he is fundamentally a demagogue rather than an entertainer, Max presents a platform to reduce the voting age in the United States to fourteen (“Fourteen or Fight”) and initiates a covert plan to gain control of the Senate, first by engineering the successful Senatorial bid of drug-addled band member Sally LeRoy (Diane Varsi). Eventually, by lowering the voting age, he is elected President of the United States. In his Oedipal struggle for control over his figurative father, Johnny Fergus, Max lures away Fergus’s son Jimmy (Michael Margotta), “brainwashing” him to his way of thinking and turning him against his parents. Throughout, during his speeches Max has called his youthful minions “troops” and “babies,” and once he is President, he enacts laws imprisoning those over thirty, requiring them to ingest large quantities of LSD. Not only does the film want to suggest the demagoguery of rock stars, but American youth are shown to be terribly misguided, mindlessly throwing support behind an individual who is fundamentally a self-serving tyrant, able to use the power of the media to shape his image for his own ends. The film also invokes the hippie hysteria of the late Sixties, an hysteria that was in part spurred by the counterculture’s embrace of non-Christian (largely Oriental) religion. I suspect that one of the sources of inspiration for Robert Thom’s script was the “CBS Reports” documentary hosted by Harry Reasoner, titled The Hippie Temptation, that aired on 22 August 1967. Indeed, in general the film seems heavily influenced by the media depiction of the counterculture in the late 1960s. The film is one instance of the widespread reaction to Lennon’s remark, and perhaps one of the earliest films to do so.

God Is Dead, And Nothing Is Permitted

As Jacques Lacan observed, after God is dead, nothing is anymore permitted. Or rather, although everything is permitted, it is hedonism devoid of its vitality: it is fat free and decaffeinated, deprived of its malignant property. Nothing is more heinous, it would seem, than the possibility of someone indulging in excessive enjoyment, as anymore enjoyment is perceived not as enjoyment but as excess. Rather than inhaling with deep pleasure, the postmodern individual does it without inhaling. Virtual sex is an acceptable alternative to actual sex. Although it seems utterly absurd, our media technology—televisions, CD and MP3 players, DVD players, and game consoles, for instance—are purchased on the assumption that we will limit its capabilities, deprive it of its full potential. Our televisions are equipped with V-chips, and our cable TV boxes, DVD players, and game consoles have installed in them parental control features that can block, disable, and filter information. Our CDs and MP3s exist in “clean” or bowdlerized versions which, like decaffeinated coffee, alcohol free beer, and fat free cream, have had the offensive, malignant property removed; it has been cleansed of its dirty element. Hence our technology is actually a control technology, enforcing and supervising our values and morals. The irony of all this is that the very media that once were perceived as so pernicious in their effects, that presumably required such severe restrictive legislation and policing, is now that which legislates, polices, censors, and bowdlerizes (“bleeps”). The fact is, the function of media technology is not to present us a “window” to the world, but to defend us from the world, to show us The Real, perhaps—but not the Too Real.

An example of the power of media technology to invisibly censor is the infamous Stalinist practice of retouching the photos of nomenklatura. Just a few years ago, the United States Postal Service erased the cigarette from the stamps with the photographic portraits of blues guitarist Robert Johnson and of Jackson Pollock, yet another instance of issuing a “clean,” edited version. God forbid we should see these historically significant figures as having indulged in a vice. The impulse for such bowdlerization reveals that today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism is really premised on the experience of Other deprived of its Otherness: the idealized Other, for instance, may smoke (that is, have an offending characteristic) but the practice must remain out of sight, and hence, out of mind, hidden. Depriving the Other of what makes it Other is, of course, an expression of the politics of fear, which is why the blocking, disabling, and censoring capabilities of media technology enable and enact the liberal form of the politics of fear: its purpose is to protect us from the Too Real.

The Nerd and the Poseur

Last time I wrote about the movies Diner (1982) and High Fidelity (2000), both of which suggest the way that the homosocial behavior of the narrowly obsessed record collector prevents him from having neither a fulfilling relationship with, nor a serious commitment to, a woman. Although I am by no means the first person to make the observation, I pointed out the way record collecting is almost exclusively a male activity, and is all about plentitude: the size of the collection is yet another form of male competition, yet another game of one-upmanship.

Since writing the previous entry, I’ve had the opportunity to read Will Straw’s article, “Sizing up Record Collections: Gender and Connoisseurship in Rock Music Culture,” which can be found in Sheila Whiteley, Ed., Sexing the Grove: Popular Music and Gender (Routledge, 1997). Straw argues there’s a difference between what he calls a “dandy” (a person who accurately mimics the dress and behavior of the musical artist but has only superficial knowledge and no deep passion for the music itself, a “poseur”) from the “nerd.” The nerd collector possesses real knowledge and real passion (if unutterable), but is unable to mime properly the correct masculine codes like the dandy, and hence exhibits the characteristic “performative social failure” of the nerd, so “blatantly indexed” by the nerd’s “unmonitored self-presentation” (p. 8). Straw observes, “Collecting is an important constituent of those male character formations, such as nerdism, which, while offering an alternative to a blatantly patriarchal masculinity, are rarely embraced as subversive challenges to it” (p. 10).

Terry Zwigoff’s movie Ghost World (2001) depicts one such nerdy record collector, named Seymour, played by Steve Buscemi (at right in the above picture). Seymour happens to come to the attention of Enid (Thora Birch, left), a recent high school graduate who exhibits a profound sense of alienation from the culture and who takes an instant liking to anyone who seems different. She finds Seymour, a solitary, unmarried man roughly twice her age, different, primarily because of his atypical musical taste. One day, Enid and her best friend Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) happen to encounter Seymour selling records at a garage sale. He recommends to Enid the vinyl LP Country Blues Classics, Vol. 3 (an actual record in an actual series). Following his advice, perhaps because she sees the record as a strangely alluring sort of fetish object being offered to her, Enid takes the record home and listens to it. As it turns out, she is drawn to the recording by Skip James, “Devil Got My Woman” (1931)—a track that, strangely, is not actually on that particular record [!] At any rate, I think we are encouraged to believe that Enid is drawn to Seymour precisely because he is a nerd, that is, he presents what Straw describes as a subversive challenge to “patriarchal masculinity.” (Remember that Enid embraces anything different.) However, Seymour tells Enid that “loser collectors” like himself basically define themselves by filling their lives with worthless junk.

It occurred to me that Seymour—a character who is not in the film’s textual source, the graphic novel by Daniel Clowes—seems remarkably similar to the nerdy Jack Isidore character in Philip K. Dick’s great novel Confessions of a Crap Artist (written 1959, published 1975, and adapted into a French film, Confessions d’un Barjo, released in 1992). Socially inept, Isidore’s life is devoted to collecting “kipple,” useless bits and pieces of matter that rapidly multiplies as if duplicating itself overnight (the character re-appears in the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which, as everyone knows, was adapted into the film Blade Runner). Like the autist, Jack Isidore is fond of collecting odd and worthless minutae (autists often have improbable collections, such as old bus transfers and obscure birthdates). Indeed, I suspect most of us have known people who have collected odd items and pondered the reason why, and I am not speaking of coins, stamps, beetles, or butterflies. It is interesting that Philip K. Dick was a classical music collector, once worked in a record store, and as a young man was mocked by certain individuals for the vast number of records in his collection. In any case, later in the movie Ghost World, when Seymour admits to Enid that he is just a “dork,” she takes issue with him, saying that he is not at all a “dork,” but rather, her “hero,” perhaps because she admires the way he holds on to himself, while she herself is elusive, still forming an identity. Nevertheless, despite the fact that Enid avers Seymour is her hero, their story doesn’t end happily. By the end of the film, Enid has left town and Seymour is left only with his record collection. The film is yet another example of the way our culture represents the male record collector, a troubled, solitary individual perceived as accumulating worthless and arcane knowledge, and immersed within an incomprehensible fetishized world. Somehow, the behavior of these individuals, particularly their remorseless accumulation of records, is linked to the failed internalization of appropriate masculine codes.

The Collector

Movies such as High Fidelity (2000) explore the perils of record collecting, the way that the homosocial behavior of the obsessed collector hinders, if not actually prevents him, from enjoying the pleasurable company of a like-minded female. Around thirty years ago, when visiting the local record stores was part of my daily homosocial routine, it never occurred to me to ask why there were so few women with whom I could discuss the music I loved. Of course there were many girls around, but you didn’t talk with them about Eno, Pere Ubu, King Crimson, or the Buzzcocks, for instance. I remember falling heavily for a girl who told me she loved the Pretenders’ first album, an album that I also happened to think was tremendous (still do). It didn’t hurt matters that she was pretty, intense, and had what is colloquially referred to as “tons of personality,” but I think I fell deeply for her primarily because she loved that Pretenders record. She also happened to indulge my passion for music. One night, over a couple of Margaritas, she actually endured one of my hour-long lectures on that album’s many virtues, its precursors, and its probable historic significance. I envisioned myself a connoisseur of both rock and avant-garde rock, and after we hit it off, I thought I would introduce her to my collection, hence what serious rock music was all about—Eno, Echo and the Bunnymen, Joy Division, the Residents, some later Velvet Underground, and so on, everything important, in other words, so I invited her over to my place for a serious listen. She readily agreed. So she came over to listen to some records . . . and I thought I’d fall on the floor and die when she showed me the records she brought along with her to play for me: Pat Benatar’s In the Heat of the Night, Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s An American Dream, the band’s then current hit record, and a couple others that I can no longer remember, probably due to traumatic amnesia. I was polite to her that long evening, as I endured the playing of two or three of those awful records, but the long-term effect of the evening was that she dropped in my estimation of her, because her musical taste was so bad. Our relationship was immedicably damaged that evening, and while we saw each other often for the next year or so and had some good times together—we both loved dancing to reggae, the music then having a mild resurgence in local clubs—I knew any serious romance between us was over. What a naïve, pompous fool I was.

Looking back, I think I was very much like the character Rob, the narrator of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (1995), the novel upon which the movie released in 2000 was based. Near the end of the novel, Rob is introduced to the CD collection of his girlfriend’s friend. The narrator is confronted with “the sort of CD collection that is so poisonously awful that it should be put in a steel case and shipped off to some Third World waste dump. They’re all there: Tina Turner, Billy Joel, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd, Simply Red, The Beatles, of course, Mike Oldfield (Tubular Bells I and II), Meat Loaf . . .” (p. 279). While I’ve mellowed somewhat since then, I perfectly well understand the sort of disdain being expressed in that passage, as that sort of attitude was mine at one point in my life. So, too, was the inability to engage in any meaningful romance with a single, available female. Predictably, there was no sting of truth, as there should have been, in the memorable scene in Diner (1982), when the Daniel Stern character rebukes his wife, played by Ellen Barkin, for misfiling one of his James Brown records. Several of my friends and I went to see that film when it was released, and while I can’t speak for the rest, I was actual siding with the Daniel Stern character in that scene rather than his poor wife: how dare she treat his filing system as capricious! How dare she put the record in the wrong place!

Record collecting, like home video collecting, is all about plentitude: the more you acquire, the bigger your collection, the more masculine you are (and we all understand the Freudian phallic symbolism implicit in that remark). Besides High Fidelity and Diner, few movies have explored the psychology of the white male collector. The only other movie besides these that I can think of that understands the fetishistic psychology behind collecting is Free Enterprise (1998), which probably owes a debt to Diner in the way it accurately depicts the homosocial activities of a group of males seeking to maintain permanent adolescence. Free Enterprise is not about record collectors, but home video (laserdisc) collectors and completists. Unfortunately, the film was finished just months before the DVD boom (made now, it would probably depict the lives of high-definition home video fanatics), but in its depiction of white male nerds (one of the characters happens to be black, but he is not one of the two primary protagonists) and of the obsessiveness of the completist collector—one character had his power shut off because he couldn’t pay his electric bill, because he preferred instead to spend the last of his money on the latest laserdisc issue of Dawn of the Dead—it ranks with both Diner and High Fidelity as movies wielding the sting of truth (I know because I belong to both worlds, as many of my generation do). Free Enterprise works well in showing how its characters’ love of the movies is connected to an idealized past, but happily its protagonists are willing to let go of their self-indulgent behavior long enough to make a serious commitment to a woman who loves them. Sometimes, nerds can become men.

Iconoclasm

In Richard Brooks’ film, Blackboard Jungle (1955)—the movie that demonstrated the appeal of rock ‘n’ roll to Hollywood studio heads by virtue of its use of “Rock Around the Clock” on its soundtrack—there is a white male character, Josh Edwards (played by the late Richard Kiley, right), who is a jazz music collector. A nerdy, bespectacled mathematics teacher, he collects “Swing” music. There is a scene in the movie in which Edwards, along with his fellow teacher, Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford, left), are sitting in a bar having drinks (pictured), listening to Stan Kenton’s “Invention for Guitar and Trumpet” (1952). Inspired by the recording, Edwards tells Dadier (nicknamed “Daddy-O” by his students) that he is going to play some of his valuable jazz records for his students. Daddy-O warns him that the students may not like his kind of music. In response, Edwards tells Daddy-O that he’s going to do so anyway. He says it took him many years to collect his records, and that “half” the records can’t be replaced. They are good records, and perhaps he can win over the recalcitrant students with music.

His plan fails, of course. The students, led by the villainous juvenile delinquent Artie West (Vic Morrow), smash Edwards’ rare and valuable records, despite his desperate pleas to stop. Soon after this terrible event, we learn that Edwards is so emotionally devastated by the students’ act of iconoclasm that he resigns his teaching position. Apparently, he resigns because he takes their smashing of his records as a personal affront. His mistake, of course, was to presume that the students would share his musical taste and also his enthusiasm for record collecting. But what the audience understands, though, is that they smash his records because he is a weak teacher, a pushover: the destruction of his property occurs not because of the records themselves, but because he is a weak male authority figure. The symbolic affront is to his (male) authority as a teacher. In contrast, the film’s protagonist, Richard Dadier, is shown to be a strong authority figure: he is intense, committed to teaching, and has the courage of his convictions, unlike Josh Edwards, who means well, but fails as a male role model for his students.

Proper masculine role models most certainly were the subject of many Hollywood films of the 1950s: Rebel Without a Cause, for instance, released later the same year, is also concerned with the issue. The association between a passion for music, record collecting, and weak masculine identity (“nerdiness”) is a cultural trope that continued on well into the 1960s. Along the way, though, late in the 1950s, the issue was revisited again, in Elvis’s film Jailhouse Rock (1957). In this film, released just two years after Blackboard Jungle, Elvis shows his disdain for jazz music when he is invited to the home of his female manager’s nerdy parents, who happen to be playing jazz music for their party guests. Asked his opinion of the musical career path of a particular jazz artist, Elvis rudely storms out of the house, telling his hosts he doesn’t know “what the hell” they are “talkin’ about.”

In 1966 (by which time Elvis was no longer the cultural force he was in the 1950s), during which time the Beatles were the most popular band in the world, John Lennon made his infamous remark about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus Christ. (I’ve written about this remark before, in a blog in which I argued that what Lennon really meant by his remark was that the Beatles were more popular than Elvis, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. For John Lennon to have averred that the Beatles were more popular than Elvis would have been more blasphemous to him than the remark he made about being more popular than Jesus.) One wonders whether the backlash that occurred in response to Lennon’s vituperous remark isn’t somehow bound up, in America anyway, with the association of musical taste with weak male authority. After all, in Jailhouse Rock, Elvis didn’t say he loved music, he indicated rather a strong distaste for jazz (and snobbery), which isn’t the same thing as saying he loved rock ‘n’ roll music. Following John Lennon’s remark, in August 1966, there were a number (the precise number of which I do not know) of record burnings and the smashing of Beatles records around the United States. Thus, in 1966, a significant portion of the American population responded to John Lennon’s remark in the same way that the juvenile delinquents responded to Josh Edwards’ playing jazz records in Blackboard Jungle: by smashing his, that is to say, the Beatles, records. The motive seems uncannily the same: to undermine the Beatles’ cultural capital as authoritative male role models. The hope was to undermine their credibility in the same way the students undermined Edwards’ credibility in the 50s film.

Auto Erotic

Inspired by the title of Lester Bang’s June 1980 truculent review of Grace Jones’s Warm Leatherette album, titled “Grace Jones Beats Off” (included in Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader), I thought I’d write a brief blog on la petite mort, the little death, the supposed loss of consciousness that follows a particularly massive orgasm. Since the title of Lester Bangs’ album review refers rather obviously to, well, beating off, I thought perhaps I’d assemble a playlist devoted to the subject, referred to in the Bible as “Onanism” (named after a rather frequent male practitioner), and, in a song that audaciously merges the sacred and the profane, titled “Icicle,” Tori Amos calls simply, “getting off.” Over the years, many rock and pop songs have been dedicated to the subject of autoeroticism. Perhaps no song has better expressed, poetically speaking, the subject of autoeroticism than Fleetwood Mac, with its song “Rattlesnake Shake,” from the album Then Play On (1969):

Now, I know this guy, his name is Mick
Now, he don’t care when he ain’t got no chick
He do the shake
The rattlesnake shake
Yes, he do the shake
And jerks away the blues

In fact, Peter Green and Fleetwood Mac once performed “Rattlesnake Shake” in a rather apt location, the Playboy Mansion, with Hugh Hefner in attendance, as revealed by this video. But if you can’t, anatomically speaking, “do the shake,” do as Cyndi Lauper does, do the “she bop”: “I’ve been thinking of a new sensation/I’m picking up good vibration.” Here are a dozen songs on the subject of autoeroticism. I’ve omitted some of the more common titles, such as Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up,” and the Vapors’ “Turning Japanese,” which the band avers isn’t about the autoerotic subject at all. I have titled this playlist after the name of a mythical band of my own creation. I rather like it. After all, early on in its history rock & roll was sometimes referred to as bop.

She Bop And The Rattlesnake Shakes:
Tori Amos - Icicle
Chuck Berry – My-Ding-A-Ling
The Buzzcocks – Orgasm Addict
Devo – Whip It
The DiVinyls – I Touch Myself
The Dresden Dolls – Coin-Operated Boy
Fleetwood Mac – Rattlesnake Shake
Cyndi Lauper – She Bop
Britney Spears – Touch of My Hand
The Undertones – Teenage Kicks
The Violent Femmes – Blister in the Sun
The Who – Pictures of Lily

Night Movies

Bob Seger’s song “Night Moves” is so famous that it scarcely needs an introduction. Having heard the song on the radio yesterday while running errands, I realized I hadn’t listened to it for quite a long time. Returning home, I was compelled to find out what people have said about it over the years. A web search turned up dozens and dozens of references to the song, but I found myself amused by what I found on a website known as Songfacts. Here is the link to the Songfacts discussion of the song, but before I discuss the assertions to be found there, here are the lyrics:

I was a little too tall, could’ve used a few pounds
Tight pants, points, hardly renowned
She was a black-haired beauty with big dark eyes
And points all her own sittin’ way up high
Way up firm and high
Out past the cornfields where the woods got heavy
Out in the back seat of my ‘60 Chevy
Workin’ on mysteries without any clues
Workin’ on our night moves
Trying’ to make some front page drive-in news
Workin’ on our night moves . . . in the summertime
In the sweet summertime

We weren’t in love—oh no far from it
We weren’t searching for some pie in the sky summit
We were just young, and restless, and bored
Livin’ by the sword
And we’d steal away every chance we could
To the backroom, to the alley, or the trusty woods
I used her, she used me, but neither one cared
We were getting our share, workin’ on our night moves
Trying to lose the awkward teenage blues
Workin’ on our night moves
And it was summertime
Sweet summertime . . . summertime

And . . . oh, the wonder . . . I felt the lightning
Yeah, and I waited on the thunder
Waited on the thunder

I woke last night to the sound of thunder
How far off? I sat and wondered
Started humming a song from 1962
Ain’t it funny how the night moves
When you just don’t seem to have as much to lose
Strange how the night moves
With autumn closin’ in
Night moves . . . night moves
Night moves . . . night moves
Ain’t it funny how you remember
I remember, I remember, I remember . . .

Here are some of the assertions one can find on Songfacts, followed by my rebuttal:

“Fact”: Bob Seger revealed in an interview that the “song from 1962” he refers to in the lyrics is “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes.
PROBLEM: “Be My Baby” wasn’t released until August 1963. Assuming this interview with Bob Seger ever took place at all, one might conclude that Bob Seger is either lying or he has a bad memory, but there’s another way to interpret his claim, which is to interpret it as a proverbial “Freudian slip.” Since the song tries to invoke the nostalgic past, or at least a teenage nostalgic past, Seger’s revelation that he was inspired to write the song after seeing George Lucas’s American Graffiti, released in August 1973, may be true. The tagline on that film’s 1973 theatrical poster is, “Where were you in ’62?” Seger’s confusing the year of “Be My Baby” with the tagline of American Graffiti reveals the way the song draws from motion picture images, from re-presentations of the 1960s, to make sense of the past. What all this reveals, of course, is that the song is really about time, his alienation from the past of his youth (“summertime”) and the weight of age (“autumn”). This sort of high romanticism is characteristic of Seger’s best music.

“Fact”: The song is autobiographical. “The girl had a boyfriend away in the military, and when he came back, she married him, breaking Seger’s heart.”
PROBLEM: “We weren’t in love—oh no far from it . . . we were just young, and restless, and bored.” The lyrics operate at such a high level of generalization (“black-haired beauty with big dark eyes”) that any specific reference to a flesh-and-blood human female is impossible. Change the line to “raven-tressed beauty with pale skin and big dark eyes” and you have one of those dark, mysterious, and provocative women that populate the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Moreover, the actual time period when these activities—by rather stereotyped teenagers, I might add—took place is as elusive as are the period settings in the stories of Poe. Because of the broad level of generalization, the time period could be the 1950s as easily as the 1960s—and that’s just the point. The images in the song are drawn from representations of the 1950s and 60s—that is, from later movies that are set during this historic time period. If the song is about the singer’s memory, curiously, it is a collective memory, not an individualized or specific one.

The problem with this autobiographical reading is that if he and the black-haired beauty with big dark eyes were “Trying to lose the awkward teenage blues” (the singer assumes we all know what he means by this, that we are all drawing from the same source of cultural knowledge), what is the age of the (unrepresentable) boyfriend away in the military? After all, teenagers having sex in the back seat of an automobile is painfully stereotyped teenage behavior. For teenagers, like most people, it was a whole lot easier then, as it is now, to have sex in bed, or on the living room floor for that matter. For some reason, however, the singer and the black-haired beauty with big dark eyes (according to the autobiographical reading, the proverbial mouse who played while the cat was away) preferred the back seat of a Chevy, an alley, or a backroom. Obviously the memory the song is about isn’t about “unrequited love” at all, but about the pleasures of transgression, of illicit sex. “Neither one cared” because they both equally relished the deliciousness of the illicit relationship. So the song is arguably about a memory that may have been, an erotic fantasy that occurred with a girl-who-never-was. The problem with those who prefer the autobiographical approach is that they mistakenly believe there exists a clear window with an unobstructed view of their subject. No such window exists, just as no memory exists apart from desire. The point is, the lyrics may be a representation of past experience, but that doesn’t mean they are literally autobiographical. It’s possible to argue that the song succeeds precisely because it captures a collective form of experience, not the experience of a single individual.

“Fact”: He really did screw the black-haired beauty with big dark eyes with the boyfriend away in the military in the back seat of his ‘62 Chevy. BUT . . . 62 (three syllables) didn’t fit lyrically, so he changed it to 60 (two syllables).
PROBLEM: How do we know it was actually a Chevy and not a Ford? After all, most biographical information about Bob Seger indicates he was born in Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit; Ford Motor Company is based in Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit. Why not sing “62 Ford,” since his birth took place in a hospital named after the automobile-making benefactor Henry Ford? “62 Ford” has the same number of syllables as “60 Chevy.” Why does he say a Chevy rather than a Ford? Well, because “Chevy” rhymes with “heavy,” as in, “where the woods got heavy.” But he could have written the lyrics as follows:

Out past the cornfields where the woods became dense
In the back seat of my ’62 Ford
We were just young, and restless, and bored
Workin’ on our night moves

If this revision doesn’t seem as poetic as the lyrics in the actual song, that’s because it isn’t, although Ford rhymes with bored, and who knows how many times he re-arranged the lyrics? The point is, does it make any difference whatsoever whether it was a Ford, Chevy, Dodge, Nash or Rambler? Apparently, “Chevy” has something more all-American about it than “Ford,” and we all know that Chevrolet later used Bob Seger’s song “Like A Rock” for an advertising campaign. Perhaps the Chevrolet division of General Motors appreciated his reference to “Chevy” in the multi-platinum selling “Night Moves,” and decided to repay the favor. So much for his allegiance to Ford Motor Company and the Henry Ford Hospital in which he was born.

A friend of mine, now retired, once told me an anecdote about going to the movies. He had just seen the James Dean film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and upon exiting the darkened theater was amused to notice that fellow male viewers of the film were standing in the lobby practicing their best James Dean imitation. His anecdote is illustrative of the power movies have over our imaginations and the construction of our identities. It is interesting that Night Moves is also the name of a 1975 film starring Gene Hackman—even the title of Bob Seger’s song is derived from a movie. The lesson: Artists are notorious liars (although perhaps not intentionally so), and therefore the last person you should trust to explain the meaning of an artwork is the artist himself.

On The Town

Raymond Williams observed in his classic, The Country and the City, “’Country’ and ‘city’ are very powerful words, and this is not surprising when we remember how much they seem to stand for in the experience of human communities.... In the long history of human settlements, this connection between the land from which directly or indirectly we all get our living and the achievements of human society has been deeply known. And one of these achievements has been the city: the capital, the large town, a distinctive form of civilisation. . . . On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition . . .”

F. W. Murnau’s justly famous film Sunrise (1927) realizes the contradictions Williams identifies in a rather revealing way: a (naïve) country bumpkin goes to the big city and his life is almost ruined by a wicked temptress. Only the last-minute realization of his deep love for his guileless wife prevents him from certain destruction at the hands of the city woman, the femme fatale. Hence while the city is associated with sophistication and learning, it is also associated with temptation and corruption–feminine guile. In Pretty Woman (1990), for instance, the film that made Julia Roberts into a Hollywood star, the city is also associated with corruption, its opening scenes set on Hollywood Boulevard, with its long parade of hookers and prostitutes. The city woman from Sunrise is among them somewhere.

The word town is derived from the Old English tūn, meaning enclosure, village, or town; the word city is generally used to designate a community of greater size, population, or importance than a town or village. By way of analogy, town is to city as creek is to river, or sea to ocean, although city and town are often used interchangeably, and in any case both actually refer to some geographic place of some indeterminate size. Since the size of the population is irrelevant, to refer to one’s town or hometown is to refer to a community in which one’s identity is remorselessly known and rigidly fixed, a place where one is “stereotyped” and boxed in. In his song, “Small Town,” John Mellencamp sings:

No I cannot forget where it is that I come from
I cannot forget the people who love me
Yeah, I can be myself here in this small town
And people let me be just what I want to be

But this is a myth, of course: since anonymity in a small town is impossible (unlike the liminal space opened up by the anonymity of New York City in Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s On the Town), people will never let you be just what you want to be. Here’s Gene Pitney:

If we stop to gaze upon a star
People talk about how bad we are
Ours is not an easy age
We’re like tigers in a cage
What a town without pity can do

He goes on to ask, “Why don’t they help us, try to help us/Before this clay and granite planet falls apart?” In a small town, as in a big city, the familiar “townspeople” can very easily transform into the members of a faceless and hostile crowd, as they do in, say, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). The horror realized in that film isn’t that people are replaced by pods, but that anonymous crowds aren’t supposed to exist in small towns. It’s not surprising, then, that popular music expresses the same ambivalence toward the town and city: songs like “Downtown” may talk about the fun of being where the action is, but songs like “Poor Side of Town” talk about the hope of escaping rigid class distinctions.

Twenty Songs On The Town:
The Beach Boys – Leavin’ This Town
Petula Clark – Downtown
Rick Danko, Jonas Fjeld, Eric Andersen – Wrong Side Of Town
The Dream Academy – Life In A Northern Town
Steve Earle – Guitar Town
Billy Joel – Uptown Girl
Lipps, Inc. – Funkytown
Gene McDaniels – It’s A Lonely Town
John Mellencamp – Small Town
Roy Orbison – Uptown
Gene Pitney – Town Without Pity
Chris Rea – Windy Town
Stan Ridgway – Lonely Town
Johnny Rivers – Poor Side of Town
Southside Johnny and The Asbury Jukes – Love On The Wrong Side of Town
Bruce Springsteen – Darkness on the Edge of Town
The Stray Cats – Rock This Town
U2 – Red Hill Mining Town
The Vogues – Magic Town
Bill Withers – Lonely Town, Lonely Street