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]

But a crucial point of the class I'm calling the freaks/artsy-fartsies is that they were born in sin, that is; they were born mainstream, most of them middle-class. They all had to be born again as freaks, and there was the fear (quite justified, actually) that they could slip back to normality. And this is one of the reasons that soul in general, even obvious producer- and owner-driven operations like Motown, escaped a lot of the opprobrium aimed at "commercial" music. "Black" fundamentally meant not born in sin.

And of course the freaks' attitudes towards the working-class was very equivocal. Freaks actually came from all classes, and there was a huge biker element in the following of bands like Big Brother and Santana and the Grateful Dead. There was probably a difference among the kids who felt at odds with their middle-class parents and those who felt at odds with their working-class parents. But I do think most freaks were from the middle-class, and were probably confused as to whether "working-class" was a validating trope or not. Attitudes towards Elvis would have been quite ambivalent.

But anyway, Opposition To Authority (ill-defined though the opposition and the authority are) is much more crucial as a validating trope than is They Write Their Own Material.