Rules Of The Game #5: What's Wrong With Pretty Girls

[koganbot]

Latest column. Comments welcome here.

What's Wrong With Pretty Girls?

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[koganbot]

The classes I mention in the piece are freaks/artsy-fartsies vs. cheerleaders and mainstream girls. And I don't mention it in the piece, but the basic attitude of, say, anti-Monkees people would be that the performers are people who can go either way, can be artists/freaks/one of us or they can sell out and be tools for the biz, and the Monkees supposedly chose to sell out. Writing vs. not writing your own material was only an issue because there was seen to be a class difference between who writes the material. E.g., the Jefferson Airplane doing a Dino Valenti song was not considered selling out. The point isn't that the Beatles wrote their own material but that they were seen as having social commitments that differed the British biz people who'd have written British-Invasion-sounding hits for Brit Beatle imitators except that they didn't know how, whereas Beatles and Kinks and Zombies and Stones et al. did know how. Of course, "class" here is a very equivocal term and the Beatles probably had to learn from folkies like Dylan and even from their own fans that they were members of a new class, and I think the Beatles were too smart to ever quite believe this. (As really were Stones and Dylan.)

I am in Connecticut visiting my parents and at the University of Connecticut Library about two miles from the house where Peter Tork grew up, son of an economics professor, upper-middle class. I think Mickey and Davey were showbiz kids; Michael was another musician like Peter. And the show and music producers weren't clearly NOT committed to the freak thing; Rafelson and whoever were definitely into experimentation a la Hard Day's Night. And at least some of the Brill building alumni who wrote the songs probably believed the anti-establishment homilies they put into song lyrics such as "Pleasant Valley Sunday." The thing is, the Monkees got outflanked on the left by people who understood the freak thing in their bones: Airplane, Doors, Byrds, Dead, Hendrix. And most of the garage rock bands were outflanked in a similar way.

The write-your-own-lyrics thing was a red herring 'cause it was never used as a critique of the Stones, who did mostly covers on their first three albums, and the Animals, who hit with songs written by the same people who wrote for the Monkees. And it was never used to praise, e.g., Neil Diamond, who wrote his own songs (as well as writing for the Monkees). The sound of the Stones and the Animals - hard rock - gave signals about the apparent social commitments of the people who made the music, put them on the hard left socially no matter what they may have felt as individuals. The Monkees, of course, went both ways, went hard on a few songs but did ballads for the little girls, too. So they were equivocal, ocmpromised. And the Beatles were very equivocal figures, actually, whom many considered to be pop sellouts for sounding pop.

[koganbot]

seen as having social commitments that differed FROM THOSE OF the British biz people...

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I certainly remember statements, I think from Jagger and/or Richards, that the way the Beatles were seen made them feel totally pressured into writing their own songs, so I think that period totally supports what I was saying.

You're right that there are exceptions: the idea of writing your own material was never all that counted. It seemed to me more that rock acts felt they ought to write their own material, or most of it; and this became part of what rock was supposed to be; and the quality was subsumed into the genre, so a band that clearly sounded like they were part of the same scene as the Stones and all that could get away with not doing so.

I'm not sure the Monkees went both ways at once on their first few gigantically successful albums - there is the odd 'okay Mike, we'll include this song of yours' moment, but they are pretty straight pop until they decided to play their own instruments and all that. Yes, some tracks are fast and some slow, but I don't think there was any sense that they belonged to different genres. Obviously they are an extreme case, both in outselling the Beatles during the latter's highest artistic rep, and in being so blatantly, publicly manufactured.

[koganbot]

The phrase "pretty straight pop" wouldn't have meant much in 1966. Were Love's "Little Red Book" and "Seven And Seven Is" pretty straight pop? Was the Monkees' "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone" pretty straight pop? Was Sam The Shams' "Little Red Riding Hood" pretty straight pop? Tommy James' "Hanky Panky"? The Troggs "Wild Thing"? I don't see how the ears can do the distinguishing, either at the time or in retrospect.

I mean, if "Steppin' Stone" and "Last Train To Clarksville" are pretty straight pop, it's hard to argue that "For Your Love" and "Paperback Writer" aren't pretty straight pop.