02-02-2021, 12:01 AM
If you want to know what music of the coming 1T will be like, then just go to a Goodwill store and look at the once-precious LP's now available dirt-cheap. Guy Lombardo. Lawrence Welk. Bing Crosby. Doris Day. Patti Paige. That's what GI's were listening to after the Big Bands quit playing and people relied upon records. There was much "Hawaiian" and "Latin" music... and it was incredibly insipid. If it went a bit rustic it went to Gene Autry, the "Singing Cowboy". And don't forget all the empty Muzak-like arrangements often derided in the 1970's as "elevator music". This was not music to think by.
OK, the Silent went for whimsy and even early rock (think of Chuck Barry and Buddy Holly)... but just think of what it was like to hear the anesthetizing sound that GI's offered Boomers. It's hardly surprising that Boomers would go in every direction other than to that stuff.
Maybe this Crisis will have a different effect upon mass culture... Still, it used to be rather easy to get classical music, jazz, R&B, or folk on CD in retail stores, and it isn't now.
OK, the Silent went for whimsy and even early rock (think of Chuck Barry and Buddy Holly)... but just think of what it was like to hear the anesthetizing sound that GI's offered Boomers. It's hardly surprising that Boomers would go in every direction other than to that stuff.
Maybe this Crisis will have a different effect upon mass culture... Still, it used to be rather easy to get classical music, jazz, R&B, or folk on CD in retail stores, and it isn't now.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.