Wednesday, May 19, 2021

Ubiquitious Entertainment Fills The Memory With Garbage

I WILL NEVER forgive pop music for the ear worm of Tompall Glaser's one-hit wonder which keeps going through my head.  Though I should blame the idiot I worked with who played the radio all day the month it charted, even more.   I got more crap in my memory by accident than ever got in there intentionally.  I can hear a song once and get it in my ear, if I hear it from a month of top 40 radio it stays there forever to recur like a cold sore.  Why was he attracted to that pretentious California girl in the first place?   Though the song writer did, in fact, identify some of the most ludicrous pretension of my generation in the lyric, maybe that's why it's going through my head as I've  got the cheap, street hawker knock-off version of that thrown at me.  Geesh! what a bunch of suckers we were for that sales pitch.  Maybe if more of us had actually read Thoreau we might have been more sales resistant.   Maybe it's the piece mocking the myth of self-reliance I've been avoiding writing because it means I'll have to dip into the transcendentalists, again.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, count yourself as lucky to have avoided a really awful song. 

Update:  The endless division of crap pop music into sub genres is one of the pretensions to have come into it with the profession of "pop criticism."  To talk about the pretensions of my generation and the 3rd rate scribblers who got jobs in what were essentially ad flyers for the industry.  I remember when one of those in jazz insisted on nothing that wasn't in 4/4 time and holding to a rigid early 20th century style of harmony could be jazz.  He never played or sang a note of jazz but he was an expert, don't ya know.   He did write an early book about ragtime but, like jazz, even the revivalists didn't have any intention of staying in his pseudo-academic definitions.  Those who can't and never could write almost all of the "criticism" of the commercial type. 

 

Update 2:  Oh, for pity sake, I played plenty of rock, I got lots of laughs with my parodies of In a gadda da vida and Norwegian Wood.   I couldn't take that crap seriously but I could play it.


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