A few different thoughts, not necessarily coherent:
The preservative effect: well, Shakespeare and Austen, Plato and Nietzsche, Mozart and Verdi all have a living presence in current culture, but for this to have happened there had to be people willing to preserve and in some cases go back and appreciate and resurrect them. Nietzsche might be the most relevant to this discussion, in that he gets to be broccoli by being "subversive," and academic "PBS" types who read him as such get to think of themselves as subversive — or at least as raising provocative questions. More penetrating but prosaic thinkers — Kuhn, Wittgenstein* — can't be twisted so easily into this role, though there've sure been attempts. In any event, Nietzsche's being used now for what he can do now ("he"), for what we can do now with him, by types who do what they think they want or need to do using him. Which is as it should be, the problem often being with the types, not Nietzsche.
We do it to ourselves: Well, remember, I'm thinking both of the whole culture ("PBSification") and a subset (the punkish or postpunk Musical Marginal Intelligentsia I fingered in my first Why Music Sucks essay), the subset perhaps doing work on behalf of the whole. But that's a big "We" (the culture-wide) and a smaller "We" both doing the doing, perhaps. In any event, back in the Sixties (and prior to being "postpunk," obv., though the attitudes aren't significantly different), the MMI is plumping for blues and r&b, and is much more ambivalent about rock-as-opposed-to-pop than the burgeoning mass rock audience is. But the retrospective "gentrification" (as opposed to PBSification) of Sixties r&b and soul probably comes from The Big Chill (which I've never seen) and oldies radio and VH-1 docs and Grammy accolades and whatever; anyway, pretty directly from the mainstream. Whereas, what the Rolling Stones did (nonretrospectively) with r&b was to make it more potent and furious and to highlight loads that was contradictory and problematic in it, and to basically invent a new music out of it. This in itself wasn't PBSification at all. But I did claim in my essay that nonetheless the Rolling Stones were the ones who set us on the PBS path, their being so potent ensuring that neither the culture as a whole nor the cultures whom the Stones helped create were able to categorize them as mere entertainment (in the way Elvis had been categorized), and so weren't able to trivialize and protect their own listening and fandom or revulsion (the Rolling Stones were probably the most hated band in the world**) as mere leisure time, either. Hence the capital-S significance, hence the vulnerability to the symbol standing in for the event, and so on. But the late Sixties/early Seventies punk critics tried to reverse this (what I later called) PBSification by plumping for garage rock and bubblegum, the Troggs, the Ohio Express, all this stuff that could even in late '60s/early '70s retrospect still be trash and dangerous and silly and not saddled with Significance. And it's this trashy, accidentally silly and accidentally potent and accidentally subversive music, "96 Tears" and "Pushing Too Hard" and "Yummy Yummy Yummy," that the punk/postpunk MMI effectively turned to spinach, like the profs did to Nietzsche. So anti-PBS becomes PBS one convolution later. Except "96 Tears" still kicks, when I hear it, and so does "Under My Thumb." (But without the profs, would Nietzsche have much of a presence? And without the punks, would "96 Tears" be anything but an oldie, or a lost classic? It would still kick, when I listen.)
*I actually find Wittgenstein more potently poetic than Nietzsche, but he's not as readily epigramizable. None of this is meant as a slam on Nietzsche.
**As some Fusion writer, a Stones fan, probably Les Daniels, said at the time.
no subject
The preservative effect: well, Shakespeare and Austen, Plato and Nietzsche, Mozart and Verdi all have a living presence in current culture, but for this to have happened there had to be people willing to preserve and in some cases go back and appreciate and resurrect them. Nietzsche might be the most relevant to this discussion, in that he gets to be broccoli by being "subversive," and academic "PBS" types who read him as such get to think of themselves as subversive — or at least as raising provocative questions. More penetrating but prosaic thinkers — Kuhn, Wittgenstein* — can't be twisted so easily into this role, though there've sure been attempts. In any event, Nietzsche's being used now for what he can do now ("he"), for what we can do now with him, by types who do what they think they want or need to do using him. Which is as it should be, the problem often being with the types, not Nietzsche.
We do it to ourselves: Well, remember, I'm thinking both of the whole culture ("PBSification") and a subset (the punkish or postpunk Musical Marginal Intelligentsia I fingered in my first Why Music Sucks essay), the subset perhaps doing work on behalf of the whole. But that's a big "We" (the culture-wide) and a smaller "We" both doing the doing, perhaps. In any event, back in the Sixties (and prior to being "postpunk," obv., though the attitudes aren't significantly different), the MMI is plumping for blues and r&b, and is much more ambivalent about rock-as-opposed-to-pop than the burgeoning mass rock audience is. But the retrospective "gentrification" (as opposed to PBSification) of Sixties r&b and soul probably comes from The Big Chill (which I've never seen) and oldies radio and VH-1 docs and Grammy accolades and whatever; anyway, pretty directly from the mainstream. Whereas, what the Rolling Stones did (nonretrospectively) with r&b was to make it more potent and furious and to highlight loads that was contradictory and problematic in it, and to basically invent a new music out of it. This in itself wasn't PBSification at all. But I did claim in my essay that nonetheless the Rolling Stones were the ones who set us on the PBS path, their being so potent ensuring that neither the culture as a whole nor the cultures whom the Stones helped create were able to categorize them as mere entertainment (in the way Elvis had been categorized), and so weren't able to trivialize and protect their own listening and fandom or revulsion (the Rolling Stones were probably the most hated band in the world**) as mere leisure time, either. Hence the capital-S significance, hence the vulnerability to the symbol standing in for the event, and so on. But the late Sixties/early Seventies punk critics tried to reverse this (what I later called) PBSification by plumping for garage rock and bubblegum, the Troggs, the Ohio Express, all this stuff that could even in late '60s/early '70s retrospect still be trash and dangerous and silly and not saddled with Significance. And it's this trashy, accidentally silly and accidentally potent and accidentally subversive music, "96 Tears" and "Pushing Too Hard" and "Yummy Yummy Yummy," that the punk/postpunk MMI effectively turned to spinach, like the profs did to Nietzsche. So anti-PBS becomes PBS one convolution later. Except "96 Tears" still kicks, when I hear it, and so does "Under My Thumb." (But without the profs, would Nietzsche have much of a presence? And without the punks, would "96 Tears" be anything but an oldie, or a lost classic? It would still kick, when I listen.)
*I actually find Wittgenstein more potently poetic than Nietzsche, but he's not as readily epigramizable. None of this is meant as a slam on Nietzsche.
**As some Fusion writer, a Stones fan, probably Les Daniels, said at the time.