The August heat melts away layers of memory, exposing layers of sedimentary recall long forgotten. This mostly reveals itself in the form of old '70s songs coming to mind unbidden. But I'll try to turn a negative into good because I'm always seeking the elusive Unified Theory of '70s Music, a sort of melodic string theory that will encapsulate all the mytheopoetic elements and heresies.
A sense of loss pervaded so many of the top hits of the '70s. Among the top-selling 25 songs were "American Pie", "The Way We Were", "Kiss and Say Goodbye", "Hotel California", "Seasons in the Sun", "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Alone Again Naturally", "Baby Come Back", "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face", "My Eyes Adored You", "If I Can't Have You", "Best of My Love" - all drenched with pining.
Other lyrics portray the attempt to recreate the drug of first romance:
The first time ever I kissed your mouthThe trembling and yet the feeling of having command. Barry Manilow's "Trying to Get the Feeling" unabashedly laments his lack of command at getting the earth to move. He expressed the love-as-a-drug doctrine that dominated the era:
I felt the earth turn in my hand
Like the trembling heart of a captive bird
That was there at my command
Trying to get the feeling again(The quivering and shivering sounds more like drug withdrawal symptoms than love as a drug.) Is there a single love song singer from the '70s who came out with his marriage intact? Whoda thunk at the time that singing a love song about your wife would become a contrary indicator for the length of marriage? There was John Denver singing "Annie", Lionel Richie "Three Times a Lady"...Manilow's marriage to his high school sweet heart sadly ended after one year and he never re-married.
The one that made me shiver
Made my knees start to quiver
Every time she walked in
The number one selling song, "How Deep is Your Love", is pure Rousseauian in its suggestion that paradise could be achieved if the others would just "let us be":
How deep is your loveI don't think "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" would be a hit today. It's the quintessential baby boomer song because it reflects the aspirations and then dashed aspirations of an era that crossed the Sexual Revolution:
I really need to learn
cause we're living in a world of fools
Breaking us down
When they all should let us be
We belong to you and me
You don't bring me flowersIn the decades before the 1960s, before marriage, couples devoted themselves to each other, the man courting the woman with flowers and talk and sometimes even love songs. Perhaps after they got married much of that devotion was channelled towards their children. After the sexual revolution, personal fulfilment became priority one and if your partner/spouse wasn't fulfilling you then they were a problem. Baby boomer women had experienced the courtly flowers & love song pre-marital period and, recalling it, naturally wanted it continuously. Men wanted to experience the sexual dreams awakened by the revolution; hence the popularity of "The Joy of Sex", where the hunger for novelty was to be sated by a variety of sexual positions.
You don't sing me love songs
You hardly talk to me anymore
When you come through the door
At the end of the day
The GenX generation, the first post-revolution generation, experienced the negative consequences of chasing after the love-drug firsthand. It's a truism that divorce is hardest on children, and they fingered the root cause of divorce as high expectations combined with an insistence on personal fulfilment. They began lowering expectations with alacrity. If the Boomers sold their birthright the Gen-Xrs never had one. "Songs of loss" are not heard much today because Gen-Xrs & Y'rs never experienced the pre-60s era and so don't know that anything was to be lost. The situation was "solved" by GenX girls not expecting flowers, love songs or talk in the first place and sex was already so commoditized that girls began honoring even friendships with oral sex... (So ends Part 1 of the "Unified Theory of '70s songs).
Update: Seems I'm not the only one looking at the real meaning behind the songs. Tom emails:
There's an article [here - thanks Tom!] that looks at...the songs of Nirvana and Eminem and such like (i.e., people younger than me) that have been popular with kids and repellent (for their language and violence) to adults. The thesis of the article is that the songs are popular and violent for the same reason: they're written by, and about, kids from broken homes. You could unify pop music since 1967 (give or take) by saying the 70's were about the Baby Boomers pining for what they weren't giving each other, and the 90's were about the children of the Baby Boomers pining for what their parents weren't giving them (because they weren't giving each other).
No comments:
Post a Comment