I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky

[koganbot]

A couple of posts last month by Sabina that I bookmarked and am only returning to now, hoping that she'll return to them as well:

Here's a thought, by the way

One effect of growing up with parents who didn't get rock

The question that leaps into my mind is why haven't Sabina's immigrant parents taken to rock? As she says, "access" isn't the only issue. Words like "generation" and "culture" don't work as explanations here: they're the very concepts that need explaining. Of course, I don't have a good explanation for why my (nonimmigrant) parents didn't take to rock (they being a generation older than Sabina's), and why most of their friends didn't either.

"The Yardbirds - Someone To Love (Part 2)" (Watch on YouTube)

The Yardbirds, 1965
Did people such as Sabina's parents, in that first post-Mao generation, read, say, Hamlet, and Faulkner? I wouldn't be surprised if they did. I ask because I remember fantasizing making a film about a high school drama club, 1968, the real lives of the students as they were confronting everything from the specter of the draft to their own confused and fraught love lives; meanwhile, they're acting in a production of Hamlet, from which we see scenes. This fantasy didn't develop much further, except that the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man" plays near the start (the need for action but no idea what to do), and "Paint It, Black" a little later on, as the various protagonists in the play and in life refuse to reconcile.

"Paint It, Black" (Watch on YouTube)

The Rolling Stones, 1966
Was reading Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, a second run-through, for college, and whenever I picked up the book I'd put the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" on the record player, over and over, my sound of Quentin Compson trying to break out but turning in on himself in loathing.

"The Velvet Underground - Sister Ray - White Light/White Heat - part1" (Watch on YouTube)

"The Velvet Underground - Sister Ray - White Light/White Heat - part2" (Watch on YouTube)

The Velvet Underground, 1968
My point is that here are a couple of the many ways into hard rock, if someone wants to take them. But then, I can imagine my parents appreciating Hamlet, but I can't imagine them being him. And I can see the similarities between Mick Jagger's schematic wrong-end-of-the-telescope analyses of male-female relationships with my dad's hard-headed, persistent political analyses. But I can't imagine my dad wanting to blot the sun out of the sky, even in pretend. And my relationship with my parents wasn't good enough for me to ever explain to them where my dad might have some Jagger inside.

Modern equalitarian societies, however, whether democratic or authoritarian in their political forms, always base themselves on the claim that they are making life happier; the avowed function of the modern state, at least in its ultimate terms, is not only to regulate social relations, but also to determine the quality and the possibilities of human life in general. Happiness thus becomes the chief political issue — in a sense, the only political issue — and for that reason it can never be treated as an issue at all. If an American or a Russian is unhappy, it implies a certain reprobation of his society, and therefore, by a logic of which we can all recognize the necessity, it becomes an obligation of citizenship to be cheerful; if the authorities find it necessary, the citizen may even be compelled to make a public display of his cheerfulness on important occasions, just as he may be conscripted into the army in time of war.
--Robert Warshow, "The Gangster As Tragic Hero," 1948

Such optimism is the cradle for hard rock nihilism, for "Desolation Row" and "Heroin," for a sense that the very language of happiness and progress is corrupt, that the very feelings are suspect. Why wouldn't at least some Chinese intellectuals under Mao have felt the exact same way, if not even more virulently? What's the explanation for, after Mao, a three-decades time lag before a later generation is "ready" to understand hard rock and punk rock and its progeny? I'd think their parents would understand better.

But then, how you're treated in your family may make more of a difference in your temperament and your taste than how you're treated by the government. Anyway, I never thought that my fellow fans of Dylan and the Stones heard them in the way that I did, and I believed that if those fans had really understood them they'd have liked those acts less. But acts that go big mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And there's so much in a record: you can like things in it that other people don't notice, meanwhile they're liking it for things that pass you by.

By the way, I'm guessing, though I don't know, that there was no such delay in Boney M and what I'm loosely calling Italodisco sweeping into post-Mao China — by "Italodisco" I mean the basic '80s international dance pop sound that I could find in San Francisco's Chinatown on three-for-a-dollar bootleg compilation cassettes out of Hong Kong and Singapore, including North American acts such as Lime and Tapps and Click and The Flirts.

"Lime - Your Love (Official Music Video)" (Watch on YouTube)

Lime, 1981

Comments

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

For my parents, it was that my mother was classically trained, and she took control of what the family listened to on the radio.

Her two most common complaints about music she doesn't want to listen to is 1) too much repetition, 2) use of synths, and 3) not enough melody.

It took me until middle school to be able to even ease her into putting the oldies channel on her rotation. Otherwise, it's all classical with a side of jazz. (Not contemporary jazz, though, which doesn't have enough melody)

She herself did say that in her youth, she was exposed to Jpop due to it being the pop culture of her youth, but was never interested in it. I certainly discovered Jpop completely independent of her influence, as she never imparted any of her knowledge of that era to me.

Unlike my father, who has the regular pop music nostalgia, she has also never shown that much interest in Asian pop music, her generations' or otherwise.

[koganbot]

For my parents (ancestry eastern and central European Jewish) it was classical, too. They did like some show music, and my mom had had a pop music youth, the pop and swing of the 1930s, Merman and Astaire and Helen Morgan et al., which of course took in elements of jazz and blues and country while still drawing mostly from European parlor music.

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They were very scared of the whole Sixties countercultural stuff (so was I, even though I was part of it). They switched from negative to positive on Simon & Garfunkel when The Graduate hit in 1968, but would never have sought such music on their own. They'd been happy back in 1963 when young me switched from Top 40 to folk; not at all happy three years later when I went back to Top 40 (a different, rougher Top 40 by then), but only rarely tried to prevent me from listening. The only record they ever confiscated was a folk album, though, Phil Ochs' Pleasures Of The Harbor, which my mom thought was too sexually explicit. She later told me that that was one of the dumbest parenting decisions she'd ever made.

A couple of decades later they actually helped in a small way to bankroll some of my music, and complimented the dark, complex chords.*

Beyond the cultural barrier, they didn't think rock and pop melodies went anywhere in comparison to classical. Probably similar to your mother and her complaint about repetition — though her "not enough melody" seems untrue of most pop music: maybe "not enough melodic development"?

(And as I said, I don't think the word "cultural" explains my parents' barrier; it merely labels it.)

*Those chords being discovered by accident, me screwing around with my fingers.

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

My mom pushed me towards classic cinema, which of course included the gamut of movie musicals, but it was never truly an interest of her. She's never followed Broadway, and isn't really familiar with the artists and songwriters other than the Big Big Names like Irving Berlin and Rodgers & Hammerstein, or the classical crossovers like Gershwin and Bernstein. (I don't think she even knows about Sondheim or Jules Styne. She probably thinks Sondheim is too dissonant. And repetitive.) Like with oldies, I feel like showtunes are just Not As Bad As The Rest Of Music for her.

Probably similar to your mother and her complaint about repetition — though her "not enough melody" seems untrue of most pop music: maybe "not enough melodic development"?
Despite having melodies, most pop music is disqualified by too much repetition or presence of synths. Even the strong vocal melodies are overruled by the arrangements.

She thought Rolling in The Deep was too repetitive and Adele's vocal technique was one-trick pony.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I think the argument is at its base a sonic one. While my parents' English is excellent, it's not good enough for them to pay attention to the lyrics of English songs -- or to grok the vague, allusive style typical of late 20th-century singer-songwriters, if they were to read the lyrics booklet (as my dad sometimes does, and asks me to explain). My dad wouldn't get that "Mr. Tambourine Man" was about drugs; part of that being that he's a very intelligent man who's not given to intuitive leaps, and part of it being that he simply wouldn't be receptive to the feeling Dylan was trying to express.

On the sonic hand, I really suspect that the experience of grokking hard rock upon first listen rests on a basis of having heard previous iterations of guitar/drums/etc.-based pop. And to grok Elvis immediately you need some sense of blues/jazz. There's a learning curve that most Western kids get simply from their environment, the radio or TV or whatnot, which I've always been aware of because that environmental habituation was partially missing for me.

More generally, I would posit: in America, people of Dylan's generation felt disconnected because they saw (or thought they saw) everyone else buying in to the idea of progress and happiness around them, while their internal experience of reality didn't match up. By the time China opened up in the 80s, you might still be compelled to make a good show (which in any case is more of an acknowledged aspect of Asian society: the idea that you'd be putting a face on things in public regardless of your feelings in private), but no one was buying in anymore, and everyone knew no one else was buying in. My parents' generation, if they bought in,** bought in to Mao's dream in their youth in the 50s and 60s and were punished horribly for it. They were exhausted, disillusioned. All they wanted was to forget the entire period and get a chance at education and economic success. They were ready to be yuppies. As you infer, freestyle and Euro-pop and disco sounds were a hit, via the intermediary of Hong Kong and Taiwan. That's why I fall back on those sounds: they were the first pop music I registered, alongside Teresa Teng, who was really the big breakout star. Teresa Teng is pure aesthetic object -- sweetness of voice, sweetness of melody, texts out of the jazz songbook or classical poetry. My dad said once that it was like hearing an angel for the first time. That was the revolution: to be allowed to appreciate music for beauty alone, without having to judge it for its social or political content. What a relief, that art could be meaningless.

** My mother never bought in. If she had gone to high school in the West she would have been the beautiful quiet girl who read her French novel at the back of the class and scorned everyone. But she's one of those people who're sensitive to smells and noises and bright sunlight, and doesn't like much music beyond the soothingly instrumental. My dad is both deeply square and deeply quirky. He has good taste in the areas of music he likes, one of which is 60s folk, purely for its sonic qualities. He doesn't much care if Peter Paul and Mary are singing about war or singing about village maidens. He says the thing above all for him is voice, by which I determine he means sonority, in the sense that he greatly appreciates Leonard Cohen and finds the Beatles milquetoast.

[koganbot]

Stray thoughts:

I remember [white person] Patty Stirling in the 1980s, just back from Australia and China, writing me, "I really did miss American blacks over there. After traveling through Asia and Australia I really realize that American black is an incredibly unique culture. Missing, it was a very big void in culture that differentiated me from Australians, European tourists, and even Canadians. The way we talk, our accents and phrases, are incredibly black-influenced."

Another thing to consider, though I'm hardly competent to, is the Eastern European musical experience under Communism. I don't know how well Eastern Europe kept Western pop out (I expect it would have been a lot harder to keep it out of Eastern Europe than of China). Czechoslovakian dissident Vaclav Havel was a big Velvet Underground fan, though the idea I'd once read that the term "Velvet Revolution" for the overthrow of Communism was therefore derived from the band name seems not to be true.

As you know, I myself am not taken with most recent "rock"; the recent rock I do like (the harder rocking of the country songs, and the Avril and onward teenpop of the '00s) is generally not called "rock." Nonrock like G-Dragon's "Crayon" seems closer in emotion to the old rock I love than is what now gets on the U.S. rock charts. It's as if "rock" has come to refer to a different genre. I'd also say — either apropos this or not — that there's a kind of facile disillusionment among the American electorate, so the culture has lost a good deal of its optimism, though I feel that I'm being facile myself in making such a generalization. But going forward with this thought: disillusion that plays off of ideals and optimism is likely to be more creative (and more self-critical, the disappointment including oneself) than disillusion that's based on a sense of being put-upon and taken advantage of. I'll say about Dylan (but probably not his generation) that his disillusion wasn't just with an overall smiley optimist America, but also and more crucially with the incipient counterculture he was helping to invent and with his own progressive milieu and his own participation in it. It was that optimism, the Civil Rights movement and the freak ideals, and his own activism, that were feeling hollow (this is how I interpret some of what's going on in the four albums he made in 1964 through 1966: Another Side Of Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, though that's hardly the only thing going on in those records). I don't think one gets to be a Dylan without having internalized the ideals and optimism, even if one's own experience and one's very feelings don't match up with the ideals.

But then, most rock of the Sixties, while often trying to sound like Dylan and the Stones, wasn't really in their emotional territory. It isn't as if every or even many songs were "Paint It, Black." And yes, a lot of my sense of "Paint It, Black" and ilk is lyrics based, though my guess is that sonically, without the lyrics,* at least some of the social sense remains. That's not an experiment I can conduct with myself.

A lot of American male culture is about putting a good face on things, though "good face" means "strong face." I think much of the audience for the Stones didn't get that "Heart Of Stone" and the rest were poking holes in that facade. Especially without being strong in English someone would have trouble getting it. The Stones went both ways, embodied a strength the singer didn't believe in, or anyway a strength he desired but distrusted. I'm hoping Big Bang have some of these same complications, though my suspicion is that if they do it's sorta by accident.

*the way most K-pop comes to me!

[petronia.livejournal.com]

You should talk to Subdee about Big Bang and constructs of masculinity. *g* I had a really long email conversation with her and others about this at the beginning of the year, which I mean to quote in my essay about Pete Doherty's genderplay dressup, which is slow going because all this obviously relates to genderplay dressup throughout the history of rock, and I can raise connections but don't have any answers. I mean, actually I don't know why David Bowie or Freddie Mercury wore women's clothes onstage (other than "why not?" of course -- to challenge audiences at the time, but along which axis?). And anyway, did Bowie and Freddie do it for the same reason? I'd have to research. I suspect Pete Doherty has different reasons, and G-Dragon different reasons still, on top of the shared ones, but it's all speculation on my part. If they're smart they won't say -- they don't say -- and no one asks them, which in itself is kind of interesting.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

By the way, my dad has definitely not read Faulkner, though I'm pretty sure he's read Hamlet. The Western books that circulated in his youth were from the 19th and early 20th centuries. He and his school friends were very into Jack London, debated vigorously the merits of London's sort of macho pre-Ayn Rand philosophy. They read and loved Alexandre Dumas (as did the Russians). He said he found The Count of Monte Cristo so shocking he fainted -- that's the level of media literacy/habituation we're talking about: the Victorian.

[koganbot]

Not really relevant to this discussion, and I don't know much about London's politics (or Rand's, for that matter); but I know he was considered a leftist, supported unions and socialism, whatever his opinion of the behavior of people and dogs in the wild. Which doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of macho in his writing.

Did you ever see Monte Hellman's The Shooting? The movie's plot was inspired by a Jack London short story about a deadly but inexplicable pursuit, though in the movie it's transferred from the Klondike to the American West. I don't remember the name of the short story, unfortunately.

[koganbot]

"Night came on, and a full moon rose high over the trees lighting the land till it lay bathed in ghostly day. And the strain of the primitive remained alive and active. Faithfulness and devotion, things born of fire and roof were his yet he retained his wildness and wiliness. And from the depths of the forest, a call still sounded."
--From Season 3, Episode 4, of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which I just finished watching for the first time.

No matter how I try, I just can't make her cry

[koganbot]

Here's a usable link for "Heart Of Stone":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozd1XuYJI8g

[(Anonymous)]

What if this type of playing was available to previous generations? Would they have approved of rock?

[koganbot]

Among other things, she's a lot gentler than Hendrix. I'd surmise that if something like this would have facilitated an earlier breakthrough, the gentleness rather than just the instrumentation might have been what would have made the difference. (Not assuming that all Chinese would prefer gentleness, of course.)

I wonder, had the '66 through '70 Kinks gotten much play in East Asia (and for all I know they did in some places, though I wouldn't bet on it), if maybe they could have killed two birds with one stone: they had all the alienation and a lot of the experimentation of Stones-Dylan-Yardbirds-Animals-Who, but also, by '66, a generally softer sound (while their complaint remained just as virulent).

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(My idea of a potential East Asian predilection for gentleness is based entirely on the East Asian popularity of Feist and M2M — as opposed to what East Asian music is actually like, which I'm too ignorant to make such generalizations about; and anyway, there's more than one person in East Asia, hence likely more than one predilection, not to mention more than one type of music.)

[koganbot]

"Voodoo Child" Gayageum ver. by Luna
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfOHjeI-Bns

"Bold As love" Gayageum ver. by Luna
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id8iu2GadKs

"Waterloo Sunset"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpL4xbfmXlQ