When the Music Stopped

A television was on Sunday evening at one of the locally owned stores we frequent, and as we made our purchase we caught a glance of what looked like Madonna cavorting in a skimpy outfit among a chorus line of beefy fellows in what looked like minotaur costumes. We momentarily assumed it was a Super Bowl half-time show before recalling that a Super Bowl had recently been played, with some other scantily-clad chanteuse doing the half-time honors, and we figured there probably wouldn’t be another one until next winter, so we asked the clerk and he explained that it was the annual Grammy awards ceremony honoring the best of the recording industry. That was all we saw of the show, and the snippet of the forgettable song being performed was the most we’d heard of the recording industry’s latest offerings in a long while, and we didn’t worry that we’ve been missing out on anything.

The next day’s news was full of stories about the event, however, with some of them spilling over into the political pages that usually command our attention. This led us to wonder if we were blissfully ignorant of some important cultural phenomenon blasting through everyone else’s car stereos while we’re listening to the monophonic sounds of Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee on the old folks’ station, and if we might soon arrive at some social event and find ourselves in the embarrassing position of being the only ones there not wearing a minotaur costume. Then we headed out to a writer’s meeting for the upcoming Gridiron Show, a satirical song-and-sketch fund-raiser that is our annual amateur theatric experience, and were confounded by all the unfamiliar titles of songs that the younger members of the ensemble wanted to parody. We had thought that popular music was no longer a significant influence on the broader culture, not like in the days when shaggy-haired, shirtless rockers were exhorting the youth of America to burn to their draft cards and speak truth to power and do it in the road and all the rest of that youthful rebellion schtick, but apparently one is still expected to have some familiarity with the sort of music that is being played on those newfangled FM stations and performed at the Grammy’s.

Judging by the breathless coverage of that extravaganza, studded with stars whose names we vaguely recognize, it hardly seems worth the effort. The big brouhaha of the evening involved someone named Kanye West interrupting one of the winner’s acceptance speeches to protest that the award should have gone to someone named Beyonce, which is apparently his habitual practice at these sorts of affairs, although there was also scandalized talk of the outfit Madonna wore off-stage that revealed her 56-years-old but still shapely buttocks. At the edges of the conservative media there was worry that prominent Democrats Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz were in attendance and might have been there on the taxpayers’ dime, and others were mocking the president’s video-taped statement made the dubious claim that one-in-five American women have been raped and urged the audience to knock it off, but at this point it hardly anyone seems to find it worth mentioning that the entirety of the recording industry except for a few studios in Nashville is outspokenly associated with the Democratic party. If these people do exert an influence on the broader culture, all the more reason they should be ignored. This Kanye West fellow strikes us as merely rude rather than revolutionary, even the most callipygian fifty-something should have acquired some sense of dignity and decorum, and with no draft cards left to burn and speaking truth to power no longer required during a Democratic administration all that seems to be left of the youthful rebellion schtick is doing it in the road, which seemed to be the Big Profound Message of that Madonna number we happened to catch at the store, and so far as we’re concerned the Democrats are welcome to it.

We console ourselves with the belief that the popular culture isn’t so popular as it used to be, and that the recording industry’s influence in particular has waned along with its rapidly declining sales. That’s largely because the music streaming freely through the internet has dismantled the industry’s old model of pitching music through a limited number of radio stations and then selling it on long-playing albums or cassette tapes or compact discs or MP3 downloads or whatever the tech guys have lately come up with, but we suspect it’s also because no one thinks it is worth paying money to have the music permanently. The plethora of terrestrial and satellite and internet radio stations has fragmented the market, which happily allows listeners to indulge a taste for doo-wop or Dixieland or polka or Hawaiian slack key guitar or techno-house whatever other obscure genre they might prefer, and no one seems to have a truly mass appeal even if the marketing schemes for them existed. A handful of highly publicized acts still dominate free streaming audience at sites such as YouTube, and cash in with concerts full of elaborate choreography and high-tech stagecraft that fill huge arenas at exorbitant ticket prices, but none are nearly so ubiquitous as Glenn Miller in ’41 or Elvis Presley in ’56 or The Beatles in ’64, and even the most hyped of them will likely have little effect on the sizable chunk of the country that won’t shell out for the over-priced shows.

Although we’re heartened that the likes of Kanye West aren’t a particularly pressing problem, it’s kind of a drag that there isn’t a popular American musical culture. In a golden age that ran from about the early ’20s to the early ’70s there was a flood of great of music pouring out of America’s radio speakers, from low down blues to up-tompo swing to rough-hewn country laments and sophisticated pop standards to fervent gospel and rowdy rock ‘n’ roll straight from the garages, and sharing the experience of the best of it with everyone else was one of the cultural advantages of being an American. We’d love to see that old American musical inventiveness revived, and a new generation of performers emerge who will cover up their buttocks and ditch the elaborate showmanship and share some lovingly hand-made music at reasonable ticket prices, and we’d even shell out for a vinyl record or compact disc or whatever else it takes to put it permanently on our shelves to share with posterity. In the meantime, we’ll be tuned into the old folks’ station.

— Bud Norman

Super Silliness

Such is the quarrelsome nature of modern America that you can’t even play a football game without provoking a day’s worth of controversies.

We don’t mean the arguments about which quarterback is better, or what defensive scheme might have worked best, or why your team is a bunch of limp-wristed sissies. Those sorts of arguments are a longstanding football tradition, and are arguably the reason they play the game. We mean the incessant cultural and political clashes that people hope to escape from when watching football, but which show up at every Super Bowl.

It is by now an annual tradition, for instance, that one of the many advertisements that interrupt the game will cause a brouhaha. This year it was a spot with movie star Clint Eastwood making a pitch for Chrysler, although you might not have known from that copy, which was a hard-boiled paean to the great American spirit of something or another. If not for a Chrysler logo that briefly and inconspicuously appeared toward the end one would have never known the ad was talking about a bailed-out, Italian-owned headquartered in a decaying, crime-ridden city with a third world literacy rate.

We’re reluctant to criticize Eastwood, partly because of his long and distinguished career in cinema, partly because he’s the rare octogenarian who could whip us in a bar brawl, but the spot seemed an effort to repay President Obama’s bail-out largesse with some tax-payer funded campaign advertising. Eastwood denies this interpretation, saying that “I am certainly not affiliated with Mr. Obama,” but he surely noticed that the ad never got around to mentioning the sponsor’s product.

There’s also an annual controversy over the half-time show, which this year featured the veteran performer Madonna and some big name, red-hot young acts we’d never heard of. Having come of age in a blue jean-clad era of rock ‘n’ roll when anything smacking of show biz was disdained as inauthentic, we were struck by the spectacle of the performance, which featured a cast of thousands and enough high-tech stagecraft to supply a George Lucas sci-fi epic. The general effect of it all harkened way back to the era of Busby Berkeley, but with just enough post-modern poutiness to make it seem contemporary.

Those hoping for another “wardrobe malfunction” to reveal some tantalizing part of Madonna’s still-toned physique were disappointed, as the only shock-the-squares moment came when a leggy young woman in a Cleopatra-goes-to-Vegas costume made an obscene gesture on camera. Once again, the cutting edge seems to be getting dull. Also among the guest-starring performers were a hirsute duo calling itself LMFAO, which we’re told is a text-messaging acronym that contains profanities — we’re guessing the “F” and the “A” — but that went largely unremarked.

The only other non-football controversy we’re aware of concerns the gorgeous wife of the gorgeous quarterback on the losing team making some profanity-laced comments in the aftermath of the game. We’re inclined to let it slide, as they say, in part because it was a spontaneous slip rather than a deliberate provocation, and in part because she’s gorgeous.

As for the many arguments about the game itself, those are mostly beyond our football knowledge, except to say that we’re happy Eli Manning won’t be remembered as the Dom DiMaggio of football.

— Bud Norman