“Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.” — Samuel Ullman
A friend suggested that the reason I find contemporary American movies and books and plays and music to be largely junk is that I am just old.
Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, David Crosby, and many other older musicians aver that contemporary popular music today is inferior to the popular music of their day, but that’s just because those guys are old.
Every writer I know over fifty decries the deplorable state of writing and editing today, but that’s just because we’re old. And when older poets recoil at the poetry of younger poets whose verses are rife with clichés, void of subtly, and might be lyrics to rap songs, they are recoiling because they are just old.
If you ask young people about the movies of today, they will name dozens of films they think are light years better than movies we thought were great when we were younger. Young people are certain I cannot see and hear and understand what they are seeing and hearing and understanding because my eyes and ears and mind are just old, and they might be right about that, though I don’t like to think so.
My mother plugged her ears and shouted, “Turn that off!” when she caught nine-year-old me listening to Ray Charles. Maybe Mom was just old. She liked The Mills Brothers and Artie Shaw, and so did I, but she didn’t like Sam and Dave and The Beatles and Buffalo Springfield because she was stuck in the musical aesthetics of Tommy Dorsey and Jack Little.
“Every age has its storytelling form, and video gaming is a huge part of our culture. You can ignore or embrace video games and imbue them with the best artistic quality. People are enthralled with video games in the same way as other people love the cinema or theatre.” — Andy Serkis
I am sixty-five-years-old at last count. Depending on your view of things, I am middle-aged, old, or real old. Yes, contemporary cultural aesthetics are in constant flux, and yes, I am not enamored of most of the latest fluctuations. However, my estrangement from American culture did not begin when I qualified for Medicare and Social Security. No, my disaffection began when I was in the prime of my life, otherwise known as my twenties and thirties, and coincided with the lightning-fast conquest of America’s publishing industry by a few massive, politically conservative, morally bankrupt multi-national corporations.
To echo Allen Ginsberg, I saw the best minds in the publishing business fired by soulless corporate operatives and replaced by Yes people who only follow orders from the unimaginative number-crunchers above them, those orders being: publish books exactly like the books we already know sell lots of copies. Do not buy anything that might be too sophisticated for a poorly educated ten-year-old. Buy nothing remotely original. And only consider things sent to you by literary agents who agree to follow these same orders.
That merciless corporate blitzkrieg of America’s publishers began circa 1972 and the conquest was complete by 1980. Call me a conspiracy nut, but I think this takeover was part of a conscious effort by the ruling elite to snuff out the fires started in the counter-culture renaissance known as The Sixties, with the election of Ronald Reagan a direct result of their coup d’état.
Publishing was not the only branch of our cultural tree thoroughly infected by the corporate fungus during that same decade. Record companies, movie studios, magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television networks were also conquered and gutted by the same multinational consortium, and we have lived in a culture shaped and controlled by this mind-numbing corporatocracy ever since.
I don’t hold this view of history because I am just old, but because I experienced this cultural takeover firsthand when I was a young and successful writer and screenwriter. When I refused to acquiesce to the new cultural guidelines imposed by the recently installed corporate managers, my career was effectively ended.
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” — Alan Watts
Before I was just old, I founded the Creative Writing Department for the California State Summer School for the Arts. Every summer for five years, my faculty and I would greet the fifty young writers we had selected from many hundreds of applicants, and we would invariably discover that all these bright young people were starving for something to read other than Anne Rice or Stephen King or To Kill A (expletive deleted) Mockingbird. I use the word starving because the nincompoops running our schools in collusion with the corporate overlords intentionally deprived those young people of varied, original, challenging and nourishing literature.
One of our first acts of compassion for these bright young people was to give them long reading lists of our favorite novels, short story collections, plays, and non-fiction works, as well as the names of hundreds of excellent writers and poets, most of those authors dead or just old. And for this simple gift of sharing the names of books and writers we admired, we were looked upon by our young peers as angels descended from heaven to end the vapidity of their cultural experiences.
Now that I am just old, I sometimes delude myself, just for fun, by imagining another totally neato renaissance happening in my lifetime. Or maybe, as a friend who is also just old opined, “The renaissance is always here, but like a whale, she dives deep for food and we can’t see her most of the time unless we happen to be watching when she comes up for air.”
(Todd Walton’s website is Underthetablebooks.com
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I agree that most music one hears on the radio is insipid at best, cacophonous at worse. However culture has always been like that: a few very good writers, poets, or musicians; a veritable ocean of mediocrities.
For every Mozart, there were 20 Antonio Salieris. For every Chopin, 20 second rate hack wannabees.
In the sixties and 70s, we were blessed by The Doors—Jim Morrison wrote real poetry, The Beatles, The Stones—whatever happened to them?—and many other outstanding groups. There were also dozens of appalling groups with pseudo-hip names like Strawberry Wristwatch, Electric Douchebag, and Enthropic Ejaculation. Plus The Monkees—a corporate manufactured Beatles. The Monkees couldn’t even play their instruments.
Gil Scott Heron expanded and refined spoken word recited with the accompaniment of great music —a tradition that included Kenneth Patchen and Amiri Baraka. This devolved into rap and hip-hop: Doggerel, gibberish, dead metaphors and dying similes accompanied by phonograph needles dragged backwards across vinyl record, and the most boring, throbbing, redundant rhythms. Add one spoon of racism, abundant four-letter words, four ounces of misogyny, and voila, you get something like,
Niggas on thuh run,
Niggas on a lark,
Runnin’ to a rendezvous
Wif da bitches in da park.
Everyone can look back to their youth and the music they loved. My parents had Sinatra, Crosby, the big bands led by royalty—Counts and Dukes. But they were exceptions in the oceans of banality, as were the artists we loved.
As far as the profiteering, bloodsucking scumbags that control the culture industry, check out the segment of Hail, Hail Rock and Roll where Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, and Bod Diddley wonder out loud how it is possible that they earn two cents on every 45 rpm record they sell.
As the Spanish proverb observes, “Sobre gusto no hay nada escrito”—There are no laws about taste. There are artists who exhibit technical excellence and those who didn’t. I liked The Four Seasons, The Diamonds, and Jay and The Americans, but they are not on the same level as Frank Sinatra, John Coltrane, or Jefferson Airplane on their first two albums. Or The Cream. Or Dire Straits.
Yes, we are old and associate our lost youth with the music that accompanied it. We can point to some of the great artists of the era and sigh that there are few who are their equal today. Yes, but very few were their equals then.