Monday, October 17, 2005
Michael Bérubé is the kind of intellectual I always hoped I would grow up and become. Or at least become. He writes:
"Oldies radio lies, man.
More specifically, the “oldies” canon, having congealed over the past decade into a reliable rotation of “Bus Stop,” “Spirit in the Sky,” “You’re So Vain,” and such, nicely demonstrates the point—made twenty-odd years ago by any number of literary critics and theorists—that the process of canon formation is inevitably “partial,” in the sense that it does not (and does not attempt to) retrieve the past “as it really was.”
Instead, it presents us with the past as we now like to think it really was. There’s nothing necessarily insidious about this process; it’s not as if Oldies Radio represents history as told by the victors of some global slaughter. Besides, most of the victors, like Norman Greenbaum’s ubiquitous one-hit wonder, survive to this day because they’re really pretty decent little pop songs (or, at the very least, they have a catchy riff and a cool guitar sound that still sounds tolerably cool thirty-five years later). Granted, there are plenty of oldies—think of Seals and Crofts’ handful of contributions to Western Civ—that should be allowed to die a dignified death. But there are hundreds more that have been purged from the Oldies archives altogether. Some, like Paper Lace’s hideous “The Night Chicago Died,” have a ghostly existence as “oldies novelty” tunes, the kind of thing you have to hear every five or six years just to wonder what the hell people were thinking. Hiding behind the oldies novelty tunes, however, is a vast legion of cultural dreck that no Oldies station will touch—even though it once ruled the charts."
The comments are what makes this, of course.
"Oldies radio lies, man.
More specifically, the “oldies” canon, having congealed over the past decade into a reliable rotation of “Bus Stop,” “Spirit in the Sky,” “You’re So Vain,” and such, nicely demonstrates the point—made twenty-odd years ago by any number of literary critics and theorists—that the process of canon formation is inevitably “partial,” in the sense that it does not (and does not attempt to) retrieve the past “as it really was.”
Instead, it presents us with the past as we now like to think it really was. There’s nothing necessarily insidious about this process; it’s not as if Oldies Radio represents history as told by the victors of some global slaughter. Besides, most of the victors, like Norman Greenbaum’s ubiquitous one-hit wonder, survive to this day because they’re really pretty decent little pop songs (or, at the very least, they have a catchy riff and a cool guitar sound that still sounds tolerably cool thirty-five years later). Granted, there are plenty of oldies—think of Seals and Crofts’ handful of contributions to Western Civ—that should be allowed to die a dignified death. But there are hundreds more that have been purged from the Oldies archives altogether. Some, like Paper Lace’s hideous “The Night Chicago Died,” have a ghostly existence as “oldies novelty” tunes, the kind of thing you have to hear every five or six years just to wonder what the hell people were thinking. Hiding behind the oldies novelty tunes, however, is a vast legion of cultural dreck that no Oldies station will touch—even though it once ruled the charts."
The comments are what makes this, of course.
