The Desultory State of Contemporary Music
Folsom, Bud
dure the most oppressively humid summers in America. Is it not a shame that the government cannot find money to invest in a clean Potomac? Conspicuous on the hank of this fetid river is the...
...Liberals are correctr in this regard...
...In 1967, the Manichaean-Fugs were only mildly ridiculous when they surrounded the Pentagon and.chanted, "out demons out...
...Once started, the operator discovers that "unexpected contingencies" have raised the cost of survival...
...Liberals such as this senato~ think "the arts" are Good Things...
...Simon and Garfunkel wince at an impersonal and materialistic society when they sing: And the peop/e bowed and prayed TO the neon god they made...
...Only a tiny portion of the American population will attend a concert there...
...But we all will pay for the former, and we never will be able to enjoy the latter...
...Anxious Eliot scholars awaited this book's appearance hoping that Soncourt would reveal previously unknown information on the enigmatic and complex first Mrs...
...Even Bob Dylan has temporarily forsaken humanistic protest for the perverted New Left logic contained in "George Jackson...
...The Beatles, Peter, Paul and Mary, Simon and Garfunkel and the Cream are hopelessly separated...
...Prior to the socially activist 196#s, musical lyrics were escapist, platonic and absurdly passionate...
...The Center will go right on serving its predictable clientele, the overwhelmingly white audiences drawn from the upper-income families of the District of Columbia and its wealthy suburbs...
...Whereas in the 1950s and early 1960s curious romantics inquired, "Who put the bomp she bomp she bomp she bomp...
...Since Woodstock, however, there has been a near collapse of the new humanism in a wake of drug-induced deaths, greed and a humanist retreat from the music market...
...Also there were fingering vestiges of the pseudo-romanticism of the 1940s and 1950s...
...At last, sincere sentiments challenged pseudo-romanticism Armed with this gospel of social m volvement, the new humanists {tied to change a materialistic, lonely and frequently inhumane society...
...This will be made possible by the use of general revenues, drawn from the pockets of taxpayers in Boise and Albuquerque and Harlem...
...Last December the Center announced that it would have to curtail various activities unless the federal government supplied some more millions...
...These pseudoromantic musicians of the 1940s and 1950s, unable to relate to the profane universe, wrought such sophomoric titles as "With My Head in the Clouds," "Swinging on a Star," "Dream, Dream, Dream" and "That Old Black Magic...
...But in no sense is it a "Kennedy Memorial...
...Or "How many years must a people exist before they're allowed to be free...
...Valerie) Eliot, will not be ignored (in spite of the expensive coffee table price tag) by any serious Eliot Students...
...When Kennedy was assassinated, the project was named after him...
...Thus the government is asked to choose between helping the project, or callously allowing it to expire...
...Easy to be cold...
...Unromantic questions were posed such as "Will you believe me will you still feed me 'when I'm sixty-four...
...The memoir untortunately was prevented from becoming a complete official biography because of Eliot's expressed wish during his lifetime that no such official biography should be written on him...
...Liberals believe that all Good Things deserve federal subsidies...
...sell your motl~er for a Hershey barGrow up looking like a car...
...Unlike us red-bloeded males, Vinton's rejected men are mystically happy and always lbrgiving after losing girls to whom they have pledged their entire lives...
...Just recently a well-known liberal Republican senator from a significant Middle Western state gave us a glimpse of the future...
...This is nonsense...
...More disturbing is the violent and revolutionary orientation of the Mothers of Invention, Chicago, and most prominently, the Jefferson Airplane...
...With ~ such farcical fustian as "Rubber Ducky," "Gimme Dat Ding" and "Chick-a-Boom" also selling millions, it makes a degenerate and competitive market for the humanists to compete in...
...Also, the new Jesus movement provides a potent symbol for the embattled humaniSts...
...In "Volunteers," a recent album, a costive Grace Slick grunts, "Hey now its time for you and me----Got a revolution-Up the revolution...
...Equally exuberant are Peter, Paul and Mary who peacefully proclaim, "If I had a song, I'd sing of love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land...
...In 1962...
...Last August, greed and hypocrisy were transcended by George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Rlngo Starr, Eric Clapton and Leon Russell in a fund-raising rock concert for the starving Pakistani refugees...
...Conspicuous on the hank of this fetid river is the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a large, ungainly monument to the government's solicitude on behalf of the upper middle classes...
...For example, since 1962 Bobby Vinton has produced perennial chartclimbers with a revised Tristan-Iseult myth as his theme...
...The loneliness theme is symbolized by the Beetles' Elinor Rigby, whose menial task in life was to "pick up the rice at the church where the wedding has been...
...Is it just for the moment we live?...Are we meant to take more than we give...
...It is not equivalent to the Lincoln Memorial...
...Woodstock seemed to be a restatement of the humanist themes of love, peace and non-violent protest...
...This senator heard the Kennedy Center's cry of distress...
...In their consummate imbecility, the Airplane neglect to suggest a course of action after society is destroyed...
...It has not yet cleared the House of Representatives...
...He drew up the required legislation and pushed it through the Senate in the confused closing hours of the session...
...Eliot: A Memoir by Robert Sencourt edited by Donald AdAmson Dodd, Mead & Company, $8.95 I F THERE HAS BEEN a principal conservative thinker in me twentieth century," Russell Kirk has written, "it is T.S...
...In the bubblegum battle of thebladders, Denny Osmond's rendition of 'tOne Bad Apple," a variation of his wounded wombat imitation, has sold over a million records...
...Such occurrences are cause for hope...
...It appeared that the upcoming decade of the 1970s might reinforce the explicit humanism of the 1960s...
...In Rats' Alley T.S...
...The 1970s have produced several artists to replace the retired humanists of the 1960s...
...Originally, the project was to be private...
...Alas, I fear that they are likely to be disappointed...
...Like Russell Kirk, Robert Sencourt claims in his Memoir that he also was an intimate friend of Eliot...
...That is what the aforementioned liberal Republican senator from the Middle West wants to happen...
...of course the Kennedy Center could have tried to meet its money crisis by raising the price of its tickets...
...This annotated edition, complete with Ezra Pound's blue pencil markings and an introduction by the present Mrs...
...There were over 400,000 persons at White Lake, New York, but not one instance of violence...
...The Desultory State of Contemporary Music Bud Folsom I T'S BEEN ALMOST three years now since the Woodstock rock festlvat culmmatea a decade of lyrical advancement iq contemporary music...
...In addition to the cantankerous caterwauling of the New Left, the new humanism is still being vigorously crowded by the bubblegummers...
...And the sign said: The words oF the prophets are Written on the subway walls, And tenement halls, And ufnispered in the sounds of silence...
...Matthew's, which Harper & Row plans to publish two years from now...
...The music of James Taylor, Elton John, Carole King, Cat Stevens and Gordon Lightfoot preach a nonviolent gospel of peace and individual freedom...
...Boy meets girl, an obstacle occurs, and boy loses girl...
...It subscribes to the new principle: those who provide a service should get the taxpayers to foot at least part of the bill...
...the new humanists of the middle 1960s queried esoterically, "What's it all about Alfie...
...Recently, however, the Airplane abandoned humanism for the barbarism of Attila the Hun and Jerry Rubin...
...Before the nauseated listener can reach a brown bag, the Airplane belch further nihilistic dithyrambs which include an attack on private property, a demand that the older generation get up against the wall and a fervent exhortation that society be torn down...
...Recently published this winter was Russell Kirk's biography...
...For example, in "Fakin' It" Simon and Garfunkel beseech their listeners to "take time to treat your friendly neighbors honestly...
...A smart operator asks the government for a certain sum of money "just to get started...
...Adamson does tell us in his Foreward that he altered thd 0rlginal manuscr~p~ very little, restricting himself to the rearrangement of a few paragraphs and the addition of footnotes for clarity's sake...
...Unlike the nlbili.qtic New Left, these humanists can project solutions and hope to mitigate society's problems...
...This new breed w telling it as it was and stressed social involvement, individual freedom and sincere human relationships...
...Bob Dyian adumbrated it when he sang, ~'the times they are a changing...
...In fact, most Washingtonlans, like most Americans, will never set foot in either the Center or the Potomac River...
...The idea of an arts center for the nation's capital was sold to President Eisenhower in one of the fine man's weak moments...
...On the one hand they protest materialism and condemn capitalist society while simultaneously demanding $50,000 for a one night stand...
...Men of similar dispositions and attudes, they became fast friends...
...But there is little reason to believe that the Kennedy Center cannot use itsblackmail on the House...
...With this in mind, 14 The Alternative May 1972...
...These tendentious warblers couple their anarchy with hypocrisy...
...Contemporary innovations incl~led drug oriented songs (although several of these, such as "White Rabbit" and '~he Pusher" can be interpreted as antidrug~satires...
...But that would have involved fidelity to the old,4 Dilemma for t h e Seventies fashioned principle that people who use a service should pay for it...
...But Eliot stuck fast to his beloved England, and Kirk lost his "grand chance of achieving immortality by association...
...Eliot, whose age this is in humane letters...
...Other biographies about to be published are Bernard Bergonzi's, which Macmillan promises for next year, and T.S...
...Finally, bubblegum music, repetiThe Alternative May 1972 13 tious prattle, burgeoned in the late 1960s...
...The several Eliot biographies that are now currently awaiting publication are proof of the durability of interest that persists for "The Invisible Poet...
...Fortunately there are some bright spots on the horizon...
...Black radical George Jackson, killed in an attempted escape from San Quentin, was shot, croons Dylan, because the prison guards "were scared of his love...
...Admittedly, even at its pinnacle (in 1969), the new humanism was challonged by other musical forms...
...Although the 1910 Fruitgum Company and the Ohio Express have gone to pasture, we are now afflicted by the Jackson Five, the Osmond Brothers and Daddy Dewdrop, who swamp their pre-teen listeners in a mucilaginous mire of chicle...
...Tommy James and the Shondells easily won the coveted award for cretinous repetition for their rendition of "Hanky Panky...
...Led by the feculent Grace Slick, the Airplane exemplify the crudest form of hypocrisy and nihilism...
...In its vacuous thirty-four lines, the phrase "My baby does the hanky panky" is repeated twenty-four times...
...In "Lather" and "Rejoyce" they added an antimaterialistic tinge to their lyrics (e.g...
...A few years ago, in songs like "My Best Friend," "Somebody to Love:" and "Let's Get Together," the Airplane preached the new humanist gospel of social concern and peace...
...As the Beetles commented, "All the lonely people, where do they all belong...
...He is also a member of the Kennedy Center's Board of Trustees...
...Before the first note was drawn from the first fiddle, the federal government had invested fifty million dollars in the ostensibly private project...
...During the 1960s, musical lyrics evolved from shallow platitudes into a new humanism far superior to most of the radical protest also abroad...
...In the musical "Hair" an impersonal and apathetic world is depicted with the lines "How can people have no feelings...
...And the sign flashed out its warning In the words that it was lorming...
...While the new humanism has receded, there has been an onslaught from the New Left...
...The next time a senator starts utterhag pieties about the need to "reorder our priorities," ask him how he voted on the various subsidies for the Kennedy Center...
...This senator, whose lust for new priorities is well-known, is on the Senate Appropriations Committee...
...Despite this competition the new humanism attracted high caliber musicians who catered to a receptive market...
...Perhaps the recent drug deaths, the emergence of the bubblegummers, the rise of the New Left and the ridiculously inflated costs will conduce music back to its proper course - - that of entertainment or humanistic protest...
...Eliot...
...Kirk once even tried to entice the venerable old poet to join him on a trip to "Egypt, perhaps, or Cyprus...
...A drug overdose destroyed artists Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Al Wilson (of Canned Heat) and possibly Jim Morison (of the Doors...
...Liberal legislators will see to that...
...Now the flow of public funds will never end...
...With increasing frequency they have emitted musical expletives and intellectual halitosis...
...Ironi-cally, they started out as-humanist...
...The Kennedy Center is anything but old-fashioned...
...What has made his book particularly distinguishing is that Sencourt had met Eliot during the late twenties and therefore he knew Vivfenne, Eliot's first wife...
...Soncourt died in 1969, leaving the unfinisl~ed map.u,~cript~ ~mpng his ~ffects to be found by a professor Donald Adamson (of whom we are told nothing) who edited its contents and had this book published...
...Having met in the early fifties, Kirk and Eliot would often lunch together at the Garrick Club in London, or meet at Eliot's publishing house on Great Russell Street...
...Poet or conservative, whichever appellation may most please the reader, Eliot did hold an almost undeniable sway over English letters during the last decades of his life...
...Was it the militant Jackson's refulgent "love" that produced his record of armed robberies and alleged murders that wouM arouse the envy of Ai Capone...
...How can they ignore their friends?...Easy to be hard...
...But this liberal senator and kindred spirits will go on pouring public money into the hopelessly dependent Center for as long as, well, for as long as raw sewage pours into the Potomac less than a mile downstream...
...This article will investigate several forms of contemporary music as they emerged in the last generation...
...or "Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight...
...Bud Folsom is a graduate student at the University o[ Nebraska...
...In a real sense "the music died," as Don McLean observes in "American Pie...
...Adding to this feast has been the recent publication of the original manuscript of The Waste Land which attracted considerable scholarly attention...
...If not, I may eventially have to content myself with old Glen Miller recordings and the Lawrence Welk show...
...According to rock impresario Bill Graham, it was this greed that forced the closing of New York's Fillmore East...
...During the 1960s, however, the social temper of the country was transformed from the pseudo-romanticism of the 1950s to a new humanism...
...Some mountebanks, incapable of transcending this orgy of emotion, satiated occur fantasies via such nonsense lyrics as "ooh eeh oh ah all ting tang walla walla bing bang," "Zip-a-de-do-de" or "Film flam floogle...
...This was a familiar form of blackmail...
Vol. 5 • May 1972 • No. 8
