Notes
209 chapter 1 1. Dave Hickey,“Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty,”in The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993), 20–21. 2. Andrew J. Edelstein and Kevin McDonough, The Seventies: From Hot Pants to Hot Tubs (New York: Dutton, 1990). 3. See Ned Zeman, Karen Springen, John Taliaferro, Anthony DuignanCabrera , and Michael Mason, “Seventies Something,” Newsweek, June 10, 1991, 62. 4. Popular culture, however, has shown signs of speeding up. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Clear Channel radio stations began to promote 1990s retrospective weekends on holidays as well as special retro hours in daily broadcasts. The effectiveness of this compression seems to have been somewhat neutralized by the overall restructuring of the music industry and the increasing role of the internet. Will there be a Smells Like the ’90s box set in the near future ? No signs as yet. 5. Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). 6. There is a lot of resentment toward Boomers in this paradigm. “Not that they are necessarily bad people, it’s just that there are so goddam many of ’em,” as I’ve heard it said. It’s something similar to the popular feelings—“like sleeping with an elephant”—many Canadians (justly!) express toward the United States. 7. Three of Strauss and Howe’s books are Generations: The History of America’s Future 1584–2069 (New York: Morrow, 1991); 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? (New York: Vintage, 1993); and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (New York: Broadway, 1997). These authors have since extended their generational argument back to England, reaching 1433! Their preference for twenty-year blocks runs counter to the recent tendency of some contemporary historians and scholars of popular culture to work in decades. Notes 210 | Notes It’s hard to resist, given the usefulness of decades in commerce and the mass media; the existence of Rhino’s 1970s and 1980s boxes is a simple demonstration of this point. But the serious problems with decade periodization in American cultural history, some of which I discuss later in this chapter, actually lend some support to the scheme of punctuation followed by Strauss and Howe. 8. The periodization that Strauss and Howe use seems to me reasonable; scholars may wish to argue, however, with their reliance on a “four seasons”– cum Jungian archetypal model in which there are recurring group personalities, like the suits of a deck of cards: “prophets,”“nomads,”“heroes,” and “artists.” 9. Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 255–58. 10. Ibid., 260–61. 11. In Strauss/Howe terms, this scene is grounded in the social relations between the Boomers and their parents in the “Silent generation.” 12. See Charles Keil, “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music,” and Steven Feld, “Grooving on Participation,” in Charles Keil and Steven Feld, Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues, 96–108, 151–80 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 13. Martha Bayles, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). The rhetoric of Bayles’s disapproval has a distinct “eyewitness” tint that distinguishes it from objections that express the stance of earlier or later generational points of view. This supports my suggestion of that the events of the sexual revolution form a generational object in Bollas’s terms. 14. Ibid., 277–82. 15. Ibid., 13. 16. Bollas, Being, 266–67. 17. I pursue some of these questions in a slightly different form in “Musical Virtues,” in Beyond Structural Listening: Postmodern Modes of Hearing, ed. Andrew Dell’Antonio, 44–69 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 18. I offer a brief consideration of this point in “Three Little Essays on Evanescence ,” in Musicological Identities: Essays in Honor of Susan McClary, ed. Steven Baur, Raymond Knapp, and Jacqueline Warwick, 179–90 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008). 19. The two best historical accounts of the 1970s to date are Stephen Paul Miller, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999) and Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001). 20. It is worth noting that many of the attempts to sustain the variety show in the 1970s were built around pop music groups. Though the obvious models were programs like The Dean Martin Show (1965–73...
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