Hey babe, your hair's all right

Something I wrote several days ago that I don't want to get lost:

The moptop haircuts were a Brian Epstein balancing act that the Beatles pulled off brilliantly, making themselves simultaneously dangerous and not dangerous at once, hence a huge audience. But the danger is something that's hard to retrieve historically, especially if you're telling the narrative through pictures, and the meaning of the hairstyle belonged to a moment, and hair now doesn't mean what hair meant then.

Actually, haven't read the histories and don't really know the story of the haircuts that well, don't know if Epstein had a role or not, though I'd be surprised if he didn't. What I'd want to bring back about the haircuts was that they were like Britney's headshave in that they didn't compute. They weren't girls cuts exactly but they threatened or promised to go in that direction. They weren't delinquents and criminals cuts exactly, but they threatened or promised to go in that direction. Etc. What they helped to do in 1964 was to rip up and fuck up my understanding of the world. "Fun band" might have been someone's experience of the Beatles, but it wasn't mine.

Question as to whether you're complicit in the sensibility of the song

I scribbled a response to this statement (from this post) by Sabina, then lost the envelope I'd scribbled upon, but now the envelope has been FOUND.

Sabina: ...what I've always found difficult about the Strand-2 approach, which I see around me a lot - it posits that the so what, the meaning of the music, is to be looked for first in the performer-artist, and that's not my typical approach. I locate the meaning of the music in me, and how (well) it soundtracks my life. I don't have a basic assumption that there is something external that I and others can argue over (if not prove); the best I want to do is recommend and hope.

Me: The various approaches are hardly exclusive: E.g., you can look at a vacant lot, see tell-tale signs, say, "This is the result of arson" (meaning of vacant lot is in the performer-artist); or you can look at the vacant lot and say, "We could have a swell baseball game here; I'll round up some of the gang and we'll do it" (meaning of vacant lot is how well it soundtracks your life). No reason you can't look at the lot and discern both.

But anyway, here's what I found on the envelope, in regard to whether you can ever really escape the "external": Question as to whether you're complicit in the sensibility of the song, whether you identify with or are complicit in the world of the song. You can sidestep this by saying, "Oh, I'm using it for my own purposes - I hear it in my world, and use it along the lines of my own sensibility." And to some extent this must be true - there's no way not to hear it in my world, and whatever sensibility seems to emanate from me will be identified as mine, even if I think it's but a set of clothes I've temporarily put on for fun. But there's still the question of why the sound was so adaptable for my use, what the affinity was in the first place. Can I just disclaim any resemblance between me and the world that produces the sound - the sensibility that produces the sound - that I found so useful?

[OK, what about my vacant lot? I wouldn't say the ballplayers would remotely feel complicit in the arson that created the vacant lot, but there might be, later on, years and miles away from that burnt-out part of the city, a recognition that unauthorized and unstructured baseball space for kids (which one remembers fondly) was a product of a world that produced arson. Or something.]