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...
...This senator, whose lust for new priorities is well-known, is on the Senate Appropriations Committee...
...In their consummate imbecility, the Airplane neglect to suggest a course of action after society is destroyed...
...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...
...With this in mind, 14 The Alternative May 1972...
...In its vacuous thirty-four lines, the phrase "My baby does the hanky panky" is repeated twenty-four times...
...Liberals such as this senato~ think "the arts" are Good Things...
...He drew up the required legislation and pushed it through the Senate in the confused closing hours of the session...
...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...
...For example, since 1962 Bobby Vinton has produced perennial chartclimbers with a revised Tristan-Iseult myth as his theme...
...Alas, I fear that they are likely to be disappointed...
...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...
...The Beatles, Peter, Paul and Mary, Simon and Garfunkel and the Cream are hopelessly separated...
...Tommy James and the Shondells easily won the coveted award for cretinous repetition for their rendition of "Hanky Panky...
...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...
...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...
...Liberals are correctr in this regard...
...As the Beetles commented, "All the lonely people, where do they all belong...
...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...
...Recently published this winter was Russell Kirk's biography...
...But we all will pay for the former, and we never will be able to enjoy the latter...
...It appeared that the upcoming decade of the 1970s might reinforce the explicit humanism of the 1960s...
...In the musical "Hair" an impersonal and apathetic world is depicted with the lines "How can people have no feelings...
...How can they ignore their friends?...Easy to be hard...
...This article will investigate several forms of contemporary music as they emerged in the last generation...
...Fortunately there are some bright spots on the horizon...
...Finally, bubblegum music, repetiThe Alternative May 1972 13 tious prattle, burgeoned in the late 1960s...
...The 1970s have produced several artists to replace the retired humanists of the 1960s...
...the new humanists of the middle 1960s queried esoterically, "What's it all about Alfie...
...And the sign flashed out its warning In the words that it was lorming...
...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...
...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...
...Eliot...
...This is nonsense...
...Once started, the operator discovers that "unexpected contingencies" have raised the cost of survival...
...In "Lather" and "Rejoyce" they added an antimaterialistic tinge to their lyrics (e.g...
...or "Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight...
...Eliot, whose age this is in humane letters...
...The Kennedy Center is anything but old-fashioned...
...Liberals believe that all Good Things deserve federal subsidies...
...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...
...Before the first note was drawn from the first fiddle, the federal government had invested fifty million dollars in the ostensibly private project...
...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...
...Bob Dyian adumbrated it when he sang, ~'the times they are a changing...
...In 1962...
...Led by the feculent Grace Slick, the Airplane exemplify the crudest form of hypocrisy and nihilism...
...This will be made possible by the use of general revenues, drawn from the pockets of taxpayers in Boise and Albuquerque and Harlem...
...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...
...Like Russell Kirk, Robert Sencourt claims in his Memoir that he also was an intimate friend of Eliot...
...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...
...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...
...This new breed w telling it as it was and stressed social involvement, individual freedom and sincere human relationships...
...During the 1960s, musical lyrics evolved from shallow platitudes into a new humanism far superior to most of the radical protest also abroad...
...A drug overdose destroyed artists Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Al Wilson (of Canned Heat) and possibly Jim Morison (of the Doors...
...This annotated edition, complete with Ezra Pound's blue pencil markings and an introduction by the present Mrs...
...In "Volunteers," a recent album, a costive Grace Slick grunts, "Hey now its time for you and me----Got a revolution-Up the revolution...
...Is it just for the moment we live?...Are we meant to take more than we give...
...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...
...Whereas in the 1950s and early 1960s curious romantics inquired, "Who put the bomp she bomp she bomp she bomp...
...Boy meets girl, an obstacle occurs, and boy loses girl...
...Such occurrences are cause for hope...
...With increasing frequency they have emitted musical expletives and intellectual halitosis...
...Last December the Center announced that it would have to curtail various activities unless the federal government supplied some more millions...
...Contemporary innovations incl~led drug oriented songs (although several of these, such as "White Rabbit" and '~he Pusher" can be interpreted as antidrug~satires...
...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...
...But there is little reason to believe that the Kennedy Center cannot use itsblackmail on the House...
...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...
...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...
...Matthew's, which Harper & Row plans to publish two years from now...
...Ironi-cally, they started out as-humanist...
...of course the Kennedy Center could have tried to meet its money crisis by raising the price of its tickets...
...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...
...In fact, most Washingtonlans, like most Americans, will never set foot in either the Center or the Potomac River...
...It is not equivalent to the Lincoln Memorial...
...Unlike the nlbili.qtic New Left, these humanists can project solutions and hope to mitigate society's problems...
...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...
...That is what the aforementioned liberal Republican senator from the Middle West wants to happen...
...Prior to the socially activist 196#s, musical lyrics were escapist, platonic and absurdly passionate...
...While the new humanism has receded, there has been an onslaught from the New Left...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Just recently a well-known liberal Republican senator from a significant Middle Western state gave us a glimpse of the future...
...Men of similar dispositions and attudes, they became fast friends...
...This was a familiar form of blackmail...
...Also there were fingering vestiges of the pseudo-romanticism of the 1940s and 1950s...
...In Rats' Alley T.S...
...A smart operator asks the government for a certain sum of money "just to get started...
...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...
...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...
...Originally, the project was to be private...
...In a real sense "the music died," as Don McLean observes in "American Pie...
...Woodstock seemed to be a restatement of the humanist themes of love, peace and non-violent protest...
...Admittedly, even at its pinnacle (in 1969), the new humanism was challonged by other musical forms...
...On the one hand they protest materialism and condemn capitalist society while simultaneously demanding $50,000 for a one night stand...
...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...
...During the 1960s, however, the social temper of the country was transformed from the pseudo-romanticism of the 1950s to a new humanism...
...Thus the government is asked to choose between helping the project, or callously allowing it to expire...
...Also, the new Jesus movement provides a potent symbol for the embattled humaniSts...
...It has not yet cleared the House of Representatives...
...Easy to be cold...
...More disturbing is the violent and revolutionary orientation of the Mothers of Invention, Chicago, and most prominently, the Jefferson Airplane...
...Recently, however, the Airplane abandoned humanism for the barbarism of Attila the Hun and Jerry Rubin...
...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...
...sell your motl~er for a Hershey barGrow up looking like a car...
...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...
...Despite this competition the new humanism attracted high caliber musicians who catered to a receptive market...
...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...
...For example, in "Fakin' It" Simon and Garfunkel beseech their listeners to "take time to treat your friendly neighbors honestly...
...But Eliot stuck fast to his beloved England, and Kirk lost his "grand chance of achieving immortality by association...
...Anxious Eliot scholars awaited this book's appearance hoping that Soncourt would reveal previously unknown information on the enigmatic and complex first Mrs...
...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...
...There were over 400,000 persons at White Lake, New York, but not one instance of violence...
...It subscribes to the new principle: those who provide a service should get the taxpayers to foot at least part of the bill...
...He is also a member of the Kennedy Center's Board of Trustees...
...Now the flow of public funds will never end...
...In addition to the cantankerous caterwauling of the New Left, the new humanism is still being vigorously crowded by the bubblegummers...
...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...
...Bud Folsom is a graduate student at the University o[ Nebraska...
...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...
...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...
...This senator heard the Kennedy Center's cry of distress...
...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...
...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...
...Kirk once even tried to entice the venerable old poet to join him on a trip to "Egypt, perhaps, or Cyprus...
...Even Bob Dylan has temporarily forsaken humanistic protest for the perverted New Left logic contained in "George Jackson...
...Only a tiny portion of the American population will attend a concert there...
...The music of James Taylor, Elton John, Carole King, Cat Stevens and Gordon Lightfoot preach a nonviolent gospel of peace and individual freedom...
...When Kennedy was assassinated, the project was named after him...
...In 1967, the Manichaean-Fugs were only mildly ridiculous when they surrounded the Pentagon and.chanted, "out demons out...
...The several Eliot biographies that are now currently awaiting publication are proof of the durability of interest that persists for "The Invisible Poet...
...Other biographies about to be published are Bernard Bergonzi's, which Macmillan promises for next year, and T.S...
...Unromantic questions were posed such as "Will you believe me will you still feed me 'when I'm sixty-four...
...Adding to this feast has been the recent publication of the original manuscript of The Waste Land which attracted considerable scholarly attention...
...These tendentious warblers couple their anarchy with hypocrisy...
...Liberal legislators will see to that...
Vol. 5 • May 1972 • No. 8
