Maverick Philosopher

Guest Post: On the Vapidity of the Popular Music of the 1950s

By London Ed.

Possibly vapid music

Bill writes ‘The creativity of the 1960s stood in stark contrast to the vapidity of '50s popular music’, citing as a prime example Perry Como’s Magic Moments (1960).

This is a sentiment I recognise and still identify with. I grew up with what is now called ‘British light music’, supposedly a ‘less serious’ form of Western classical music, a prime example of which would be Puffin' Billy, the theme of the BBC Light Programme's ‘Children's Favourites’, from 1952 to 1966. Note the Light Programme, one of precisely three radio stations in early 1960s Britain, the other two being the Home Service (news and interviews) and the Third Programme (classical music and improving highbrow stuff like interviews with Iris Murdoch). The idea of American style radio with disc jockeys and music other than serious and less serious was not entertained until the advent of pirate radio. When I first heard Burning of the Midnight Lamp (Hendrix, 1967), it was obvious the world had changed, and I joined my peers in a complete rejection of everything that had gone before. I still unconsciously divide all music into what came before 1967, and everything thereafter.

That said, there is music that is not ‘serious’, but which clearly has a merit within its own genre and perhaps beyond, which never conformed to the 60s progressive ethos. Once I grew up in the 1970s, I realised its value, and continue to listen with pleasure. Here is some of it:

1. All The Things You Are (Jerome Kern 1938). In this version by Dorothy Kirsten and Percy Faith (1951) it is close to schlock. Yet it is transcendent, with its complex harmonic structure, and qualities that were recognised by jazz musicians from early on, particularly by the devotees of the bebop genre. This Charlie Parker version is a classic.

2. You Win Again (Hank Williams 1952) is a simple and timeless story ‘of an utterly defeated narrator who cannot bring himself to leave his love despite her infidelities’. Country music like this was utterly despised by thinking people in the 1960s and 70s. I had a girlfriend who refused to let my Williams records in her apartment. Yet country music is really the same music as folk music, absent the left wing rhetoric. The timeless qualities it appeals to (women who cheat, lonely men drinking at bars) sadly cannot be politicised.

3. Old Cape Cod (Rothrock/Yakus/Jeffrey 1957) Best known in the version by Patti Page. While her earlier Doggie In The Window (1953) is without any redeeming properties, ‘Old Cape Cod’ was revived by hipster house music group Groove Armada in 1997, who clearly saw something of value therein.

4. Route 66 (Nelson Riddle 1962) Not the well known Bobby Troup song. It was written by Riddle as the theme for the 1960s American television drama of the same name, after CBS decided to commission a new song rather than pay royalties to Troup. Riddle is best known for his schmaltzy backing arrangments for Nat King Cole, and his music never appealed to thinking people and leftists. Yet he is a master of arrangement, and the number is clever (in my view).

5. Up Up and Away (Jimmy Webb 1967) Recorded by The Fifth Dimension and released in July 1967, barely a month before Woodstock, it is difficult to see how anyone would take this seriously, and it is exactly the sort of music the Woodstock generation loathed. But it was written by Jimmy Webb, who also penned Wichita Lineman, thought to be the first existentialist country song, and MacArthur Park, another existential song recorded by many, including country artist Waylon Jennings in 1969. Listen to these two fine songs first, and then to ‘Up Up and Away’, upon which it becomes clear that they are by the same writer, and that what distinguishes the last two, also makes the first notable, at least in some odd way.

6. September Song (Kurt Weill 1938). At last some material by a bona fide leftist, a people’s songwriter who cut his teeth in the Novembergruppe group of left leaning Berliners that included communist scribbler Bertold Brecht. Its intellectual credentials are solid, yet here it is in a fine version by Frank Sinatra (1965), sounding just like the sort of vapid 1950s muzak the progressives so despised.

7. Dancing Queen (Andersson/Ulvaeus/Anderson 1975) recorded by the Swedish pop group ABBA. I like this version from the1999 film Mamma Mia for its uncompromising fluffiness. Its value is in conveying precisely the sentiment it wishes to convey. Intellectuals now take Abba seriously, but why didn’t they tell us so at the time, instead of making us listen to the Soft Machine?

The Summer of Hate

Fifty years after the Summer of Love, the summer of 2017 is shaping up as the Summer of Hate.

The Left has come full circle, from (talk of) peace and love to resistance and hate.

Their resistance is tantamount to sedition. Lefties posture as like unto the brave members of the French Resistance who opposed by assassination and sabotage the Nazi occupation. But Trump was duly elected, and to date no evidence of collusion with the Russians has emerged. The leftist posturing belongs in the Theater of the Absurd. Leftists are in effect opposing our system of government.

As for hate, prominent liberals, leftists, 'progressives,' are working to incite it. They should be held morally accountable and not allowed to hide behind the First Amendment. Good advice from Victor Davis Hanson:

The Trump administration should insist that all universities and colleges that receive federal funds guarantee to their students First Amendment protections of free speech, due process, civil rights, and the right to assemble peacefully. If they cannot or will not comply with the Bill of Rights, then campuses should come under review of their funding from Washington.

Moreover, anyone who makes a direct threat or clear allusion to killing the president of the United States should be put on a terrorist no-fly list for six months, an act that can be done without a formal indictment and trial. If revving up a crowd in Washington by yelling out a personal wish to blow up the White House and its occupants, or holding up a facsimile of the decapitated head of the president to galvanize a video audience does not constitute enough suspicion to take a breather from flying, then nothing much else does. If Madonna had to take a slow freighter back to London, then she might curb her macabre enthusiasm at her next rally.

The only way that the Resistance can be halted is to insist that its efforts remain lawful. If they are not, perpetrators must be held accountable.

The first of Hanson's point is rock-solid. The second raises the ticklish question of when hate speech ceases to be protected speech. See first of the related articles below.

You should read the whole of Hanson's latest.

Sunday Afternoon at the Oldies: Scott McKenzie, San Francisco, Summer of Love

Bending to popular demand, here is some more about the Summer of Love, now 50 years in the past. A re-do and clean-up of an entry from five years ago.

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Nostalgia time again. Scott McKenzie, famous for the 1967 anthem "San Francisco" penned by John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas, died at 73 in 2012. Gen-X-er Mick LaSalle gets it exactly right in his commentary:

The thing about that song is that . . . however naive and even sanctimonious it might be, it is so clearly a true expression of a mindset, of a vision, of a moment in time, of a generation, of an aspiration that, even if it is singing about a San Francisco that never happened and a dream that never came true and never really had a chance of coming true, and that had only a scant relationship with reality . . . it’s a precious thing. It’s a document of a moment, but more than that, a perfect poetic expression of that moment.

It was not MY youth, but I can recognize in that song and in the purity of McKenzie’s vocal something that is as unmistakably honest, in its way, as Gershwin playing the piano, or Fred Astaire dancing, or Artie Shaw playing the clarinet. It is youth finding itself in the world and saying the most beautiful thing it can think of saying at that particular moment. You can’t laugh that away. You have to treasure that. Really, you have to love it.

Speaking of the Mamas and Papas, here are some of my favorites: Dedicated to the One I Love (1967), a cover almost as good as the Shirelles original. But it is hard to touch the Shirelles.

[Correction: H. Fisher in a comment points out that the "5" Royales did it first, in 1957. Or at least before the Shirelles. Some of these songs go back a long way.]

Twelve Thirty. Creeque Alley with great video. California Dreamin'.

And then there's Eric Burdon and the Animals, San Franciscan Nights from '67.

The so-called Summer of Love transpired 50 years ago. (Some of my reminiscences of the Monterey Pop Festival of that same summer of '67 are reported here.) Ted Nugent, the guru of kill and grill, and a rocker singularly without musical merit in my humble opinion, offers some rather intemperate reflections in a Wall Street Journal piece, The Summer of Drugs. Excerpts:

The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse. America is still suffering the horrible consequences of hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.

[. . .]

While I salute and commend the political and cultural activism of the 1960s that fueled the civil rights movement, other than that, the decade is barren of any positive cultural or social impact. Honest people will remember 1967 for what it truly was.

Although I am not inclined to disagree too strenuously with Nugent's indictment, especially when it comes to drug-fueled self-destruction, Nugent misses much that was positive in those days. For one thing, there was the amazing musical creativity of the period, as represented by Dylan and the Beatles above all. The summer of '67 saw the debut of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP of the lads from Liverpool. This creativity stood in stark contrast to the vapidity of '50s popular music. Has there been anything before or since in popular music that has come up the level of the best of Dylan? That is what we call a rhetorical question.

Perhaps I should give an example of '50s vapidity. How about Perry Como, Magic Moments? It came out in 1960, I believe, the last year of the 1950s. Of course, songs like this were also found aplenty in the '60s. My point, however, is that they were not characteristic of the '60s as they were of the prior decades in American popular music. Ours was a music of engagement, not escape. A good example is Phil Ochs' There But for Fortune.

The '60s also offered welcome relief from the dreary materialism and social conformism of the '50s. My generation saw through the emptiness of a life devoted to social oneupsmanship, status-seeking, and the piling up of consumer goods. We were an idealistic generation. We wanted something more out of life than job security in suburbia. (Frank Zappa: "Do your job, do it right! Life's a ball, TV tonight!")

We were seekers and questers, though there is no denying that some of us were suckers for charlatans and pied pipers like Timothy Leary. We took on the Big Questions, even if we did so via dubious popularizers such as Alan Watts. We questioned the half-hearted pieties and platitudes and hypocrisies of our elders. Some of the questioning was puerile and dangerously utopian, but at least we were questioning. We wanted life and we wanted it in abundance in rebellion against the deadness we perceived around us. We experimented with psychedelics to open the doors of perception, not to get loaded.

(Trivia questions: name the title of the book to which I allude with 'doors of perception,' its author, his place of residence in later life, and the Los Angeles band that took its name from the title.)

We were a destructive generation as well, a fact documented in Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s. But the picture Nugent paints is onesided. Here is Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" which was one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement. It is a great version by Alanis Morissette and uploaded to YouTube by our very own London Ed.

Or give a listen to the Youngblood's Get Together. This song captures the positive spirit of the '60s, a spirit not much in evidence nowadays.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Monterey Pop Festival, June 16-18, 1967

It transpired 50 summers ago, this June, the grand daddy of rock festivals, two years before Woodstock, in what became known as the Summer of Love. Your humble correspondent was on the scene. Some high school friends and I drove up from Los Angeles along Pacific Coast Highway. I can still call up olfactory memories of patchouli, sandalwood incense, not to mention the aroma of what was variously known as cannabis sativa, marijuana, reefer, tea, Miss Green, Mary Jane, pot, weed, grass, pacalolo (Hawaiian term), loco weed, and just plain dope. But my friends and I, students at an all-boys Catholic high school that enforced a strict dress code, were fairly straight: we partook of no orgies, smoked no dope, and slept in a motel. The wild stuff came later in our lives, when we were better able to handle it.

I have in my hand the program book of the Festival, in mint condition. Do I hear $1,000? On the first page there is a quotation from Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice:

How sweet the moon-light sleeps upon this bank! Here we sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night, become the touches of sweet harmony.

Ah yes, I remember it well, the "sweet harmony" of the whining feedback of Jimi Hendrix's Fender Stratocaster plugged into his towering Marshall amps and the "soft stillness" of the The Who smashing their instruments to pieces. Not to be outdone, Jimi lit his Strat on fire with lighter fluid. The image is burned into my memory. It shocked my working-class frugality. I used to baby my Fender Mustang and I once got mad at a girl for placing a coke can on my Fender Deluxe Reverb amp.

On the last page of the programme book, a more fitting quotation: the lyrics of Dylan's The Times They Are A'Changin', perhaps the numero uno '60s anthem to youth and social ferment. (Click on the link; great piano version. Live 1964 guitar version.) Were the utopian fantasies of the '60s just a load of rubbish? Mostly, but not entirely. "Lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it's been."

Tunes and Footage:

The Who, My Generation. I hope I die before I get old."

Mamas and Papas, California Dreamin'

Mamas and Papas, I Call Your Name

Jefferson Airplane, Somebody to Love

Janis Joplin, Down on Me

Otis Redding, Try a Little Tenderness

Scott MacKenzie, San Francisco

“Some of Us Just Go One God Further”

A revised version of an entry from 26 July 2010.

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I've seen the above-captioned quotation attributed to Richard Dawkins. From what I have read of him, it seems like something he would say. The idea, I take it, is that all gods are on a par, and so, given that everyone is an atheist with respect to some gods, one may as well make a clean sweep and be an atheist with respect to all gods. You don't believe in Zeus or in a celestial teapot. Then why do you believe in the God of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob?

What Dawkins and his New Atheist colleagues seem to be assuming is that the following questions are either senseless or not to be taken seriously: 'Is the Judeo-Christian god the true God?' 'Is any particular god the true God' 'Is any particular conception of deity adequate to the divine reality?'

The New Atheist presupposition, then, is that all candidates for deity are in the same logical boat, and that this boat is one leaky vessel. Nothing could be divine. Since all theistic religions are false, there is no live question as to which such religion is true. It is not as if there is a divine reality and that some religions are more adequate to it than others. One could not say, for example, that Judaism is somewhat adequate to the divine reality, Christianity more adequate, and Buddhism not at all adequate. There just is no divine reality. There is nothing of a spiritual nature beyond the human horizon. There is no Mind beyond finite mind. Man is the measure. This is it!

That is the atheist's deepest conviction. It seems so obvious to him that he cannot begin genuinely to doubt it, nor can he understand how anyone could genuinely believe the opposite. Belief in God is like belief in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or Ed Abbey's Angry Unicorn on the Dark Side of the Moon. You don't believe in any of those nonentities, do you? Well, Dawkins & Co. just go one nonentity further!

This morning I received a message from a Canadian reader, C. L., who asks whether Dawkins and friends are begging the question against the theist. That depends on whether they are giving an argument or just making an assertion. It also depends on what exactly 'begging the question' is. If they are just making an assertion then I say: Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. But suppose they intend the following argument:

1) All gods are on an epistemic/doxastic par: they are all equal in point of rational acceptability. Therefore:

2) If one god is such that its existence is not rationally acceptable, then this is true of all gods.

3) There are gods such as Zeus whose existence is not rationally acceptable. Therefore:

4) No god is such that its existence is rationally acceptable.

This is a valid argument: it cannot be the case that the premises are true and the conclusion false. Does it beg the question? The problem here is that it is not very clear what the informal fallacy in question (pun intended) is supposed to be. If I argue that The Los Angeles Times displays liberal bias because its reportage and editorializing show a left-of-center slant, then I reason in a circle, or beg the question. That is a clear example. But suppose I argue that The L. A. Times displays liberal bias because all mainstream media outlets display liberal bias and The L. A. Times is a mainstream media outlet. Have I begged the question? Not so clear. Surely we don't want to say that every valid argument begs the question! (John Stuart Mill floated this suggestion.) On the other hand, it is impossible for a valid argument to have true premises and a false conclusion which suggests that he who accepts the premises of the second argument above has in so doing begged the question: he has at least implicitly committed himself to an affirmative answer to the question, 'Does The L. A. Times display liberal bias?'

'Beg the question,' I suggest, is not a very useful phrase. Besides, people nowadays regularly conflate it with 'raising a question.' See On Begging the Question. It is becoming a useless phrase.

Regarding the above argument, I would say that, while valid, it is nowhere near rationally compelling and is therefore rationally rejectable. What reason do we have to think that all candidates for divine status are on a doxatic/epistemic par?

In sum, either Dawkins is asserting or he is arguing. If he is asserting, then his gratuitous assertion can be met with a gratuitous counter-assertion. If he is arguing, and his argument is as above, then his argument is easily turned aside.

The fundamental issue here is whether there is anything beyond the human horizon. The issue dividing theists and atheists can perhaps be put in terms of Jamesian 'live options':

EITHER: Some form of theism (hitherto undeveloped perhaps or only partially developed) is not only logically and epistemically possible, but also an 'existential' possibility, a live option;

OR: No form of theism is an existential possibility, a live option.

Theist-atheist dialog is made difficult by a certain asymmetry: whereas a sophisticated living faith involves a measure of purifying doubt, together with a groping beyond images and pat conceptualizations toward a transcendent reality, one misses any corresponding doubt or tentativeness on the part of sophisticated atheists. Dawkins and Co. seem so cocksure of their position. For them, theism is not a live option or existential possibility. This is obvious from their mocking comparisons of God to a celestial teapot, flying spaghetti monster, and the like.

For sophisticated theists, however, atheism is a live option. The existence of this asymmetry makes one wonder whether any productive dialog with atheists is possible. It is probably no more possible than productive dialog with leftists. We live on different planets.

Companion post: Russell's Teapot: Does It Hold Water?

The Political Equivalent of Seinfeld

The famous show about nothing finds its political equivalent in a certain investigation about nothing.

Thinking Concretely About Death

When my death seems 'acceptable,' a 'natural' occurrence, I wonder whether I am thinking about it concretely and honestly enough. I wonder whether I am really confronting my own utter destruction as a subject for whom there is a world, as opposed to myself as an object in the world. If I view myself as object, I can 'hold myself in reserve' and imagine that I as subject will somehow survive destruction. I can think of death as a drastic transition rather than as annihilation — which it may well be.

If you say it is certain that death is annihilation, then I pronounce you a dogmatic fool.

Don’t Spoil Your Success

You may spoil your success if you compare it with someone else's. Beware of comparison. Not all comparison is invidious, but the potential for envy is there. Invidia is the Latin for 'envy.' An invidious comparison, then, is one that elicits envy. One can avoid envy by avoiding comparison. To feel diminished in one's sense of self-worth by the accomplishments of another is the mark of a loser.

One ought to celebrate the accomplishments of others since in many cases they redound to one's own benefit.

If you cannot be satisfied with who you are and what you have, you will never be content. And if you are never content, then never happy. There is more to happiness than contentment, but the latter is an ingredient in the former.

One Step Forward, One Step Back

Forward: The Southern border is being secured. And this despite the obstructionism of the donkeys.

Back: U. S. Army goes 'transgender.' Here:

The Army has begun mandatory transgender sensitivity training for soldiers. The training covers everything from “transfemale” soldiers to transgender shower etiquette to dealing with a male soldier who becomes pregnant.

Interesting times, these. How could anyone be bored?

A Toxic Culture

A toxic culture it is in which lack of self-discipline is promoted, self-indulgence of every sort is encouraged, self-reliance and individual responsibility are ridiculed, everything becomes a disease or addiction, big government is promoted as the solution to every problem, and the right to free expression is misused to spread hate and incite violence.

If Agreement is Out of Reach . . .

. . . then I think there are two conclusions to be drawn. The first is that we ought not allow into our midst individuals and groups with radically different values and commitments. The second is that we ought to be as tolerant as we can of the differences among those we do admit into our midst.

No comity without commonality.

No comity without toleration.

It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women's studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.

The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one's birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.

And a fortiori for transracialism.