rock and roll eclectricity
Here’s the follow up instructional record, to be used slightly later on than the one in the previous post.
It’s a How to Talk to Your Children About Doing It record – I don’t know any more about it than that – searching for “how babies are born” on the Net gives a shocking number of results. Clearly, it’s from the 50s or early 60s (possibly later in certain States), and it has the wonderful Leave it to Beaver tone of the era.
record_2-girls_and_menstruation
From the Waxidermy blog: go listen to this Instructional record for new virgin wives whose sexual experience is limited to the Burt Reynolds Cosmo spread. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Great post.
I have a question. There are a number of songs from the late Seventies/early Eighties Britain proclaiming the singer doesn’t want a job. It seems more literal than rhetorical – the lyrics aren’t about wanting to bang on the drum all day; they’re about not wanting specific employment, or digging welfare.
Most famously, probably, would be The Clash’s Career Opportunities: “Do you wanna make tea at the BBC? Do you really wanna be a cop?” And then the song that got me thinking about this topic was one my little sister recorded in the spring. Wham Rap celebrates being “a soul boy – a dole boy” and turning down work to have more time to par-tay. “So they promised you a good job? No Way!”
I’m not judging here. Just wondering: what was the situation there? I know those were the UK’s Thatcher years, and that things were shitty for the unwealthy. Maybe it’s as simple as the undignified choice between taking welfare and working for a non-living wage – as in Ice T’s New Jack Hustler: “…imagine that: me working at Mickey Ds!”
But some of the objectionable jobs in these British tunes are not that bad. Being a cop? Working at the post-office? Bus Driver – Ticket Inspector – Ambulance Man! These are respectable jobs, aren’t they? Last week, listening to the Messthetics records, I found this one by Scissor Fits about not wanting to work for the British Airways. It’s a sucky song, but for interest’s sake, here it is:
I Don’t Wanna Work for British Airways
So what is the dealio? What’s the context? I’ve looked around a bit, but my search skills aren’t amazing. I put “why were young people turning down decent jobs in Britain in the early 80s?” into google, but no dice. If you happen to read this, and you happen to know the answer, fill me in.
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ADDENDUM:
I got an excellent email explanation from a friend who read this post and knew the answer to my question. Here it is – thanks very much to Johnny LaRue. This is him:
” Saw your post about the “work sucks” songs.
No expert here, but I think the poor economy in the UK, combined with the class system and the dole culture, and mixed with some naïve adolescent posturing, had a lot to with it. Life of the working class in the UK was pretty bleak. You worked, had a council flat, took your allotted vacation time and then retired to bingo and then died. Sound familiar? Unfortunately, even though you worked, you were on a pretty tight income. While Canada and the US economies boomed in the 70’s, Britain’s was in turmoil. (Hell, compared to ours, Britain’s economy had been in turmoil since WWII. Why else would my grandfather come here in the 60’s with 5 bucks in his pocket and a wife and kid back home?) The standard of living in the UK in the 70s was way below ours. Unemployment was up and so was inflation. I remember visiting my great-grandparents in 1978 and they used the electric heater as a toaster and my great-grandma was still employed as a housekeeper. And it seemed like everyone in their ‘hood was in a similar situation, because hoods were very segregated. Which is no different than in North America, right? Sure, except for the fact that while North Americans have always been suckered into believing in the American dream, the class system in Britain was such that there was no fooling yourself: if you worked in the post office, you knew that you were gonna work in the post office for the rest of your life. (Plus the school system in the UK was [is] very different from here. You made major career decisions at about 15, and your social class influenced those decisions; if dad had a trade, then by 16 you’d be in trade school. And of course there was no support for going back to school or switching careers somewhere down the line.) So lots of kids in the 70s saw their parents work their lives away for very little and simply said fuck it. I don’t want that to be me.
One reason that enabled them to say fuck it was because of Britain’s social security system. Being on the dole in Britain was a uniquely British experience and it shouldn’t be confused with being on unemployment or welfare in Canada. (It’s not to be confused with the Mike Harris, “Gawdamn this welfare state” welfare state. And the east coast experience is an entire different culture.) Whether you come at it from the left or the right, it was a tangled mess and many politicians in the 70s looked at the poor economy and pointed a finger at the huge welfare state.
So combine a well-plotted (ouch) future with an emerging political class that blamed a portion of the countries economic problems on the “welfare state” and what’s a punk to do? You want to rebel against your parents and the man? (Or Margaret.) Don’t get a job. Stay on the dole and piss them both off. You can thumb your nose at the destiny your parents envisioned for you (being a plumber) and bait the powers that be. You callin’ me a bum? I’ll show you a bum.
Although it’s not like life on the dole was much fun, as you really were broke and your future was pretty bleak. But compared to turning into your old man? Both were traps: “In 1977 I hope I go to heaven/’Cos I been too long on the dole/And I can’t work at all.” Now, when they sing, “I can’t work at all” is he bemoaning unemployment or the life that society wanted him to live? It could be both. (Lucky for Clash, they had a ticket out.) However, in Career Opportunities they clearly seem to be giving the finger to living the straight life and all that that entails.
Which is, of course, naïve and adolescent. In fact, it can be seen as insulting, because here are these supposedly working-class heroes pissing on their working class heritage by not acknowledging the nobility of the working class. (Yes, that’s an ugly sentence.) It’s especially naïve and adolescent from our point-of-view, where a career and a house and a hobby are sort of the Holy Grail. What, you mean I get a little patch of garden too?
Which is why something like Career Opportunities should be taken with a grain of salt, because while I’d argue that class and economic realities shaped its expression, so did naivety and good old r’n’r hyperbole. As Strummer himself said, “I’d like to think the Clash were revolutionaries, but we loved a bit of posing as well.”
So, yeah, UK’s poor economy, class system, and dole culture (which are all obviously interconnected), plus adolescent rebellion. That’s how I’d explain it or at least make sense of it in a very vague and general way.
BTW, Mike Leigh’s movies are great for getting that bleak mood of early 80s England, especially Meantime, but even the comedy, Life Is Sweet. And while I haven’t seen This Is England, by Shane Meadows, I’ve heard similar comments.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jun/30/entertainment/et-book30
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/05/23/cmjseoul123.xml
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19980218/ai_n14146244
From the ever-pleasin’ Messthetics collections, The Spunky Onions: How I Lost My Virginity.
Rock and roll.
More from the same series – follow this link.
A friend turned me on to an interesting lecture from 2007, featured on TVO’s Big Ideas, by a sci fi writer who wanted to explain why he was mad at George Lucas. You can watch a truncated version of it here, in three well-done youtube clips.
Listen to the full mp3 here.
Essentially, the writer argues that George Lucas derailed a tradition of social commentary and growing respectability by setting Star Wars in a galaxy far away and long ago. Because of this great distance between the story and our lives, set up from the very outset, we’re freed from having to notice that C3P0 and R2D2 are slaves, that Han Solo is a bad dude, and (somehow) that the good guy vs bad guy dichotomy is too, well, black and white. It’s an interesting idea – and hey, if it gets the first year kids thinking about how Arguments can be interesting, right on – but it doesn’t hold water.
It never escaped my notice that the robots were owned – bought and sold and electronically chained – and I was a very young kid when I saw it. I certainly hurt for them at the end of the movie (the 1977 Star Wars) when they didn’t get medals (Chewbacca didn’t get one either, by the way, although Sawyer claims he does, and then goes out of his way to deride that non-human character). The issue of the rights or lack thereof of artificial intelligence isn’t new to sci-fi, and authors always have to choose between granting them rights or not, and mentioning it or not. Lucas made the choice to not mention it – same as he made the choice to have the morality of the characters and their conflicts be stupidly and unflinchingly simple.
Regarding the distancing effect – if we weren’t supposed to draw conclusions about our own situations from fantastical situations and eras, we wouldn’t have all of those useful myths. I get what Sawyer is saying, but he’s stretching his point to make it seem more intentional and insidious than it likely was. If Star Wars was removed from the direct social commentary present in Planet of the Apes or 2001 (or Logan’s Run, or THX 1138), it may have had less to do with a malevolent decision and more to do with the climate of the late 70s: the reason the film took off so mightily had loads to do with people being sick and tired of the complicated real world and its unjust wars, compromised governments and murky morality. It’s a cheap sort of criticism that takes art to be the cause of culture rather than a reflection (ie. “South Park Makes Kids Bad!”). And Cheap Criticism is what Sawyer is up to here: his thesis – not uninteresting, worth discussing – is really lazy.
Sawyer makes the case for a tradition of burning social commentary in the science fiction genre, cherry picking examples from across a period of centuries. But he leaves out any contradictory evidence and ignores any info that doesn’t suit his thesis – especially notably, the clear, obvious and stated sci-fi predecessor of Star Wars – the imperialist, racist, sexist and silly Flash Gordon serials. He completely glosses over the issue of whether Star Wars even is sci-fi – it seems generally agreed to be a fantasy set in outer space – although he does note that the the difference between fantasy and sci-fi is important (about 5 minutes in). Besides all of which, science fiction as a genre contains as much nasty crap as any other storytelling genre, and no single through-line at all beyond perhaps being very speculative. It certainly has no inherent agenda of social change, despite being a good forum for those sorts of points.
Even Star Trek, hailed by Sawyer as a shiny example of Good And Relevant SciFi, has terrible bits. The chicks wear nonfunctional miniskirts and only hold trad jobs – answering the phones, being nurses. Plots rely on mono-trait species all the time (Klingons are cranky, Vulcans are chilled, etc) – a rotten approach to writing and more than a little like interstellar racism. But Star Trek is given a pass because of its interracial smooching and heavy handed metaphors – and, probably moreso because it was on when Sawyer was a kid, and a certain kind of person loves nothing better than to pretend the world is going to hell in a handbasket as they watch. He even contends that Star Trek TNG “…eschewed social commentary in favour of soap-opera and costume drama”, which is complete cranky nonsense. That stupid-ass show was full of boring messages.
Believe it or not, Star Wars had its nice themes too: spirit over technology, and love over hate, to name the main ones. It contained as much relevant stuff as any other movie. And Star Wars certainly didn’t end social commentary in sci-fi movies: the summer blockbusters that endlessly followed had commentary in spades, or not, exactly the same as before.
Star Wars isn’t holy, and is indeed frequently problematic. Take a look of any depth and you’ll note worse things than robot slaves and pirates. In the more recent films, the more relevant one for today’s children, the morality of the “good guys” is seriously flawed (a clone army?) and the little boy hero for whom Lucas has the children rooting turns completely evil – for Love – and then kills a ton of little kids. The SW series never does decide if they’re for kids or adults, and I see that as a pretty major flaw for a lot of reasons.
But if we’re going to do “lectures” about these films, in schools, I think it might be worth doing well, with real balance and real insight and real critical rigour. I think Sawyer’s lecture resembles nothing more than a terribly excited high school essay: RS drops a lot of interesting and vaguely related factoids (Clarke was nominated for an Academy Award – so what?) but only plays at presenting a fleshed out thesis regarding Star Wars and its tagline.
Marking this high-school essay, I’d have big question marks next to nonsense like
“By saying that [the story is set long ago, far away], he’s saying that there is no social commentary to be found in science fiction – no relevance – no reflection of the times – and audiences accepted that, turning off their critical faculties… and leaving them off ever since.” [author's verbal itals]
and write in the margin next to it “Evidence?! – avoid rhetoric.” Next to the next sentence, about the spoon-feeding of morality, I’d write, “Now this is an interesting point – focus on things you can provide evidence for.”
If this kid was generally doing well and being cocky*, I’d fail the paper, and tell him he could do it again if he wanted a better mark. If this was the first essay he’d ever taken an interest in, I’d give him a pass because he’d worked hard and he was excited, but I’d let him know that a spurious argument like his would never fly in real life. Then the kid would skip attending university altogether, get an honorary degree, wind up teaching at universities, be shown on Big Ideas – “the only regularly scheduled program devoted to the art of the lecture” – and prove me wrong.
* This is certainly what would happen: Sawyer is nothing if not nerd-style arrogant. Listen to the second half of the mp3 to come away sticky with his self-aggrandizing, award-dropping, smug tone. Hear him spend five minutes making a case for how he could be as rich as Michael Crichton if only he would compromise his approach and vision, and the next ten showing how he through his intellectual rigour has come to understand God. Seriously, he’s awful.
Last week – Wednesday – I earned another stripe on my Canadian credentials: I saw Rush play. M was offered a couple of comps on her way out of work, and happily brought them home to me to have, as long as I didn’t make her come with. So Kro and I raced over to the Molson Amphitheatre (first time there, too) and took our Box Seats and our anthropological stances, and watched.
I say “anthropological stances” rather than “eager grins” or “beaming mugs” because two and a half full decades had passed between our being Rush fans and this concert. And Rush aren’t Pink Floyd: I’m sure at a Floyd show you’d have great chances of hearing the stuff you liked after 25 years away. But Rush keep on keeping on, and so a lot of songs were played we had no idea about. No worries for the band, though – many thousands of loyal and up-to-date fans surrounded us, wearing the tshirts and paraphernalia of the last 35 or 40 years.
A VIP booklet sitting in the box seats let us know that if we wanted, we could drop thousands of dollars on Rush shit – from the fairly priced 20 dollar shirts to the ridiculous 700 dollar Rush leather jacket, which we saw someone wearing. I thought is was cool that pretty much every album’s shirt was available – a good idea – and I did consider getting a Caress Of Steel shirt, but realized that my ironical wearing of that shirt might be sort of dickish.
In fact, both of us felt dickish at points during the show, sitting in those good seats, knowing that there were kids from Sarnia and Sudbury there who’d made a pilgrimage with saved up bread and had to choose between beer or a t-shirt. If I was a nicer man, I thought, I’d have given the seats to one of them. But I’d been that kid, and not gotten even as close as the right city: in 1983, my buddy’s dad had promised to drive us to see Rush in Detroit, and then just … forgotten. So, a quarter of a century late, I was filling in an old soul hole.
So: how was the show? Fun, basically, but not actually exciting. For one thing, I knew few of the songs – a 2112 medley was cool, Spirit of Radio and the obligatory (awesome) pieces from Moving Pictures were great. There were way more women there than I had predicted, and the age range of the fans was enormous – from 60 to 6, really. The crowd were very excited, very loud. There were flashpots and fireworks and lasers and dragons, as well as some mysterious “roasted chicken” theme we couldn’t figure out. The band played the solos pretty much note for note, which gave me pause for thought, but they seemed happy to do it. I saw the only 15 minute drum solo I am likely to ever see. And I saw YYZ played live and loud, so I can tick that off my list. In fact, they saved it for the climax, which made me wonder how many instrumental anthems held such a spot.
Here’s them doing that in Rio some years ago, care of youtube, pretty much exactly the way me and Kro saw it last Wednesday. Rock on.
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