Category: music

Taylor Swift and ‘billionaire democracy’

I am a middle-age man with vaguely conservative leanings. I live in Ohio. I grew up on 80s heavy metal. Therefore, I am supposed to hate Taylor Swift…if you believe the mainstream media, that is.

I don’t hate Taylor Swift, though. I don’t even “hate” her music.

But dismay is another matter. I will admit that I am dismayed by the Taylor Swift phenomenon, in both musical as well as sociopolitical terms. Let me explain.

Taylor Swift would not have been a big deal in the 1980s. At all.

I enjoy testosterone-soaked heavy metal as much as any Gen X male, but my musical tastes also include plenty of female artists and bands. That’s always been the case.

In the 1980s, we had many talented and popular female vocalists. And they were diverse, in the best sense of that word: Pat Benatar, Whitney Houston, Patty Smyth, Diana Ross, and Gloria Estefan. (Madonna was good, too, before she went totally nuts.)

We had some talented and popular all-female bands. The Bangles were my personal favorite. But there were also the Go-Go’s and Vixen. The Pretenders had a great front lady, Chrissie Hynde.

Had Taylor Swift debuted in 1986 instead of 2006, she would have been regarded as a competent but unspectacular mid-lister. No way she could have edged out the aforementioned musical acts.

Instead Taylor Swift launched at a time when the music industry was in the throes of consolidation. The Internet and online piracy were decimating album sales.

That changed the economics—and the market offerings—completely. Record companies could no longer afford to invest in scores of singers and groups, many of which would inevitably fall by the wayside.

Instead, they needed a manufactured megastar. That’s what Taylor Swift was—and is. Swift is photogenic and competent. Her music is mediocre, but it’s “good enough” for the adolescent/young adult pop sphere.

Even more importantly, Swift is personally reliable and hardworking. Unlike so many musicians of the 1970s and 1980s, Swift has never been an addict or a flake. (It’s worth noting that Taylor Swift really took off around the same time that Britney Spears imploded, due to various personal issues.) Swift is the perfect corporate-driven musical vehicle for an era of industry consolidation.

That much makes sense to me, even though I know how much bleaker the musical landscape is, with so much attention heaped on the unremarkable Taylor Swift. At the end of the day, it’s a matter of economics.

The Taylor Swift personality cult

What makes much less sense to me is the Taylor Swift personality cult.

Back to the 1980s. There were plenty of teens and young adults who were drawn to the flamboyant personas of popular musicians like Madonna, Michael Jackson, and David Lee Roth.

This involved some superficial imitation. 1980s “Madonna fashion” was very much a thing, among high school girls of my generation. There were teenage boys and young men who wore their hair in the style now known as a “mullet”. (“Mullet”, by the way, is a retroactive term that was unknown in the 1980s). All of the male singers on MTV were wearing their hair that way, so it must have been cool.

But such fashions and styles were just that: fashions and styles. We all had our favorite musical acts. But virtually no young person in the 1980s felt or sought a deep personal attachment to Michael Jackson, Madonna, or David Lee Roth.

And as far as taking political advice from them? Puh-leez. We saw them for what they were: profit-driven entertainers.

Fast-forward to the present and the “Swifties” phenomenon. There are millions of young people today who have developed a parasocial relationship with Taylor Swift. A parasocial relationship is a one-sided relationship, in which one person is mostly unaware of the other person’s affections, or even their existence. Such is the lot of the rabid Taylor Swift fan.

Although Taylor Swift has had her share of male stalkers, the Swifties are not distinguished by a sexual attraction to Swift. (Most Swifties are girls and young women.) Rather, Swifties are young people who have built a fantasy world around their imaginary relationship with Taylor Swift.

Oh, sure, Swift might occasionally like one of their social media posts, or pose with them for a selfie outside a concert venue. For the most part, though, Swift doesn’t know they’re alive, at the individual level.

In my social circle here in Ohio, I know at least one young woman who is a diehard Swiftie. I’ll call her Emily.

Emily was born in the early 1990s and is now in her thirties. Emily prominently refers to Taylor Swift on all of her social media profiles. Emily’s prized possession is a photo taken with the Goddess Herself, outside a Taylor Swift concert she attended.

Emily is attractive, but she has no husband, no children. She has a sort-of boyfriend. I’m not sure if she has a cat. (A nod here to J.D. Vance’s contentious remarks about childless Americans, and Taylor Swift’s recent self-description as a “cat lady”.)

Billionaire-driven “democracy”

The Swiftie phenomenon is a marketing juggernaut, of course. Taylor Swift gives her fans the experience of an imaginary friendship, and they give her large portions of their disposable income. Tickets for Swift’s last concert tour rose into the four-figure range.

Taylor Swift recently became a billionaire. Thanks to millions of Swifties like the aforementioned Emily.

The takeaway here is that Taylor Swift has become much more than a manufactured megastar. For millions of young Millennials and Zoomers, she’s become a substitute for healthier, real-life relationships.

And since Swifties have so much invested in Taylor Swift, they’re willing to do just about anything the singer requests—or is perceived to request.

Taylor Swift has just endorsed Kamala Harris for President of the United States. This, in itself, is her right to do.

Nor am I perturbed by the fact that Swift’s politics are Democratic Party boilerplate. The Democratic Party, once the party of factory workers and farmers, is now the party of entertainment and business elites. Swift’s endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket surprised no one.

What is more troubling is that the singer, thanks to the vacuum in so many of her young fans’ lives, is able to exert the influence of a cult leader. Swift’s ability to command her followers has been documented in past elections, namely the 2018 midterms and the 2020 general election.

The mainstream media has not scrutinized this. On the contrary, there is a substantial overlap between the personality traits of a Taylor Swift cult follower and a mainstream media journalist. Journalists and university academics have lined up to fawn on the billionaire entertainer.

A recent article in UC Berkeley News began with the line, “Leaders at the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans say Swift and other young icons might inspire millions to feel hope—and power.”

The whole thing seems, on the contrary, rather top-down to me. Let’s see:

  1. Millions of young people send Taylor Swift their money, making her a billionaire at the age of 34.
  2. Taylor Swift tells millions of young people how to vote.
  3. Millions of young people do as the singer commands.

How is that “democracy”?

Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris-Walz will no doubt bring about denunciations in the conservative media space. I can also see conservatives floating a boycott of Swift’s music and concerts. This will be an embarrassing failure. The fans of Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh were never Taylor Swift fans, anyway.

They would do better to focus on getting Donald Trump elected instead. Taylor Swift might be a mediocre singer whose talents nevertheless shine in the Internet-vaporized music industry space. She might have found herself the (probably) accidental leader of a personality cult.

And yes, Swift is the ultimate limousine liberal, the supreme Hollywood hypocrite. Swift is uninterested in energy policy and fuel prices, because she travels around on a private jet. Swift’s enormous wealth shields her from the negative effects of inflation.

Whatever the Founding Fathers had in mind when they put American democracy together, I’m pretty sure the Taylor Swift version—billionaire democracy—wasn’t it.

But Taylor Swift is not evil. She isn’t even the source of what ails us. Taylor Swift, rather, is a symptom: of a society that has been systematically dumbed down for three generations now.

Don’t blame Swift. Blame the gullibility that has given her such unwarranted economic and political clout.

-ET

Tom Petty, media overload, and a still-relevant song from 1987

In the summer of 1987, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers released the song “Jammin’ Me”, with an accompanying MTV video, embedded below.

The theme of the song is: mass media overload.  Some of the specific references in the song are now dated (El Salvador, Vanessa Redgrave, Joe Piscopo, Eddie Murphy, etc.). But with a few updates, this song would be perfectly relevant in 2024.

It’s worth noting that 1987 was a year before social media, the Internet, and mass-market cell phones. There were no podcasters. Talk radio had yet to take off in a big way.

And even in 1987, it was possible to feel news and media overload.

While 1987 was not without its political controversies, that was a calmer, saner era than the one in which we find ourselves today. There was a general sense that in the halls of power, adults were in charge.

The video therefore focuses on the excesses of 1980s consumer culture, but you can see and hear multiple nods to the political issues of that bygone time, too.

-ET

**Save on Tom Petty music and merchandise on Amazon

Nostalgic for ’80s music I didn’t like

Twitter (or “X”, if you prefer) informs me that Shout, the highly successful album from the British new wave/synth-pop group Tears for Fears, was released this week in 1985. Thirty-nine years ago.

A teen of that era, I liked lots of music from the 1980s. One of the wonderful things about that decade was the sheer diversity of the music scene.

And I mean “diversity” in the best sense of that word. There were plenty of nonwhite and female artists. That was the decade of Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Pat Benatar, and Billy Ocean. But there was also a lot of stylistic diversity.

(This is one of the many aspects in which I pity the youth of today, who must face a nonstop barrage of coverage surrounding that overrated mediocrity, Taylor Swift.)

Everyone could find something that they liked in the 1980s. I liked Def Leppard, Triumph, AC/DC, Journey, and Rush.

British new wave/synth-pop? Not so much. I remember groaning when the eponymous single of Tears for Fears’s 1985 album came on the radio for what seemed like the zillionth time. (And “Shout” got a ton of FM radio airplay in the late summer of 1985, let me tell you.)

But time changes our perspectives in myriad ways. I’m still not a fan of 1980s British new wave/synth-pop. But it was so much a part of an era for which I am now hopelessly nostalgic. I find—somewhat to my chagrin—that this formerly groan-inducing music is now a trigger for scores of happy memories.

Ditto for a hit song from another ‘80s British new wave/synth-pop group called Soft Cell.

In 1981 and 1982, Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” was on FM radio nonstop. I literally cannot hear it today without being transported 40-odd years into the past. But there is one memory in particular that stands out.

For me, the summer of 1982 was the summer between the eighth grade and the first year of high school. That summer, I accompanied my parents on a trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

I was thirteen years old, not quite fourteen. I was bursting with the hormonal energy that made me constantly preoccupied with all female humans falling between my age and about thirty.

But all of this was very new. Alas, I often found myself tongue-tied when it came time to talk to one of those female humans. And so it was on that trip to Myrtle Beach.

One afternoon, I walked out of the condo my parents had rented and headed for the beach. Little did I know, when I set out, that I would remember that walk for 40 years, though not for any reasons worth bragging about.

Directly in my path was a girl in a dark blue one-piece swimsuit. She was lying on a towel in the sand, facing my direction. I remember that she had shoulder-length brunette hair, and she was deeply tanned. She was wearing sunglasses.

She had an FM radio on her beach towel. What song was playing? Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love”. I distinctly remember that.

As I drew closer, I saw that she was probably a year or two older than me. Maybe an incoming high school sophomore. A junior? Possibly.

And then, the impossible happened. She smiled and said, “Hi”. But not in a dismissive way. She removed her sunglasses.

That was my cue to talk, to strike up a conversation.

What did I do, though? I uttered some guttural response that roughly approximated American English. “Haa-augh!”  would be a close transliteration, I think.

Then I kept walking. And walking. When I returned an hour later, she was gone. I looked for her later in the week (having prepared a dozen cool conversation openers), but I didn’t see her.

***

What would have come of it, if I’d had a bit more game in the summer of ’82?

Probably nothing. We were both very young, and we were both on vacation. Our homes were likely hundreds of miles apart. And that was long before email, texting, or FaceTime.

But hey, you never know.

That’s an embarrassing memory, but also a good one. As anticlimactic as that incident was, the summer of 1982 was the portal to many happy times. I had a pleasant teenage experience, as teenage experiences go.

I’m still not a fan of British new wave/synth-pop. But I no longer groan when I happen to hear it.

-ET

Geddy Lee’s memoir

I recently read Geddy Lee’s memoir, My Effin’ Life.

Geddy Lee was the bassist and lead singer of Rush, my all-time favorite band.

(I discovered Rush in the fall of 1982, when I heard “New World Man” playing on FM radio. I was instantly hooked. At some point, I’ll probably write a longer piece about my passion for Rush. For now: suffice it to say that I’ve been a rabid fan for 40-plus years.)

Geddy Lee begins his memoir with a discussion of his childhood. He was born Gary Lee Weinrib in Canada in 1953. Lee was the son of Jewish emigres and Holocaust survivors.

Lee discusses his Jewish identity and his youthful experiences with antisemitism. (Canadians, it seems, aren’t all nice…at least they weren’t in the 1950s.)

He includes a chapter about his parents’ ordeals in the concentration camps, in both Poland and Germany. This was not something that I had bargained for when I bought the book. But it’s one of the most interesting chapters, despite the dark subject matter.

He then takes the reader on a journey through the long history of Rush, album by album.

I devoured the book in about three days.

My only complaint was the repetitious—and inevitably tiresome—references to marijuana smoking. After a while, I was like: Okay, you guys toked up a lot; I get it. Enough already! But that’s a minor quibble about an otherwise engaging story.

Speaking of story: Geddy Lee is a talented and relatable storyteller. My Effin’ Life is obviously a book that will only be of interest to Rush fans. But if you do like Rush (and if you don’t, what’s wrong with you?), it is a read that you shouldn’t miss.

-ET

**View MY EFFIN’ LIFE by Geddy Lee on Amazon**

Classical music in small doses 

Amadeus, the biographical drama about the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was one of the most critically acclaimed movies of the mid-1980s. Starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, and Elizabeth Berridge, Amadeus brought the famed 18th-century composer and his times to life.

Amadeus remains one of my favorite movies of all time. But when I saw it for the first time, as a teenager in the 1980s, I was inspired: I had a sudden desire to learn more about classical music, or at least about Mozart.

This was more than a little out of character for me at the time. As a teenager, my musical tastes ran the gamut from Journey to Iron Maiden, usually settling on Rush and Def Leppard.

So I read a Mozart biography. I was already an avid reader, after all. Then it came time to listen to the actual music. That’s when my inspiration fell flat.

I found that Mozart the man was a lot more interesting than his music. At least to my then 17-year-old ears. Nothing would dethrone rock music, with its more accessible themes and pounding rhythms.

Almost 40 years later, I still prefer rock music. In fact, I still mostly prefer the rock music I listened to in the 1980s.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1781 portrait
**View Mozart biographies on Amazon**

Recently, however, I took another dive into classical music.

Classical music, like popular, contemporary music, is a mixed bag. Some of it is turgid and simply too dense for modern ears. Some pieces, though, are well worth listening to, even if they were composed in another era.

Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” is one such piece. For the longest time, I mistakenly assumed that this arrangement was written for the 1986 Vietnam War movie, Platoon, in which it is prominently figured.

I was wrong about that. “Adagio for Strings” was composed in 1938, long before either Platoon or the Vietnam War.

“Adagio for Strings” is practically dripping with pathos. It is the perfect song to listen to when you are coping with sadness or tragedy. This music simultaneously amplifies your grief and gives it catharsis. You feel both better and worse after listening.

“Adagio for Strings” was broadcast over the radio in the USA upon the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945. It was played at the funeral of Albert Einstein ten years later. The composition was one of JFK’s favorites; and it was played at his funeral, too, in 1963.

Most of the time, though, you’ll be in the mood for something more uplifting. That will mean digging into the oeuvre of one or more of the classical composers.

While the best-known composers (Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, etc.) all have their merits, I am going to steer you toward Czech composer Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) instead.

Dvorak was born almost a century after Mozart and Beethoven, and longer than that after Bach. To my philistine ear, Dvorak’s music sounds more modern, while still falling within the realm of the classical.

Antonin Dvorak

I would recommend starting with Symphony Number 9, Aus der Neuen Welt (“From the New World”). This is arguably Dvorak’s most accessible work, and my personal favorite at present. Symphony Number 9 contains a lot of moods. It takes you up and down, and round again.

This is not the story of an older adult turning away from the pop culture of his youth for more sophisticated fare. Far from it. Dvorak is not going to replace Def Leppard on my personal playlist. Bach and Mozart have not supplanted Rush and AC/DC. 

But time has made me more musically open-minded. Almost 40 years after I was inspired by the movie Amadeus, I have, at long last, developed a genuine appreciation for classical music.

But that is a qualified appreciation, for an art form that I still prefer in measured doses.

-ET

The bygone, venerable 8-track

Members of my generation lived to see plenty of changes in the ways popular music is consumed. We were born in the golden age of the vinyl album. As adults, many of us are learning to cope with streaming music services.

Throughout most of the 1980s, the audio cassette tape was the most popular means of buying music and listening to it. When I see nostalgic Facebook posts about physical music media from the 1980s, the cassette tape is most often the subject.

But there was another musical format that was already dying out as the 1980s began, but which was actually quite good, by the standards of the time. I’m talking about the venerable 8-track tape.

The 8-track was a plastic cartridge that had dimensions of 5.25 x 4 x 0.8 inches. Like the audio cassette, the 8-track contained a magnetic tape. But unlike the audio cassette, the 8-track was much less prone to kinking and tangling.

The 8-track was actually 1960s technology. The 8-track took off in the middle of that decade, when auto manufacturers began offering 8-track players as factory-installed options in new vehicles. Throughout the 1970s, 8-track players were popular options on new cars. 8-tracks were further popularized by subscription music services like Columbia House.

Columbia House magazine ad from the late 1970s/early 1980s

I purchased my first home stereo system for my bedroom in 1982, with money I had saved from my grass-cutting job. I bought it at Sears, which was one of the best places to buy mid-level home audio equipment at that time. The stereo included an AM/FM radio, a turntable for vinyl records, a cassette deck, and an 8-track player. 

I quickly discovered that I liked the 8-track format the best, because of its relatively compact size and ease of use. That spring I bought 8-track versions of Foreigner 4, Styx’s Paradise Theater, and the Eagles Live album. All of these produced good sound (again, by the standards of that era), and none of them ever jammed or tangled. I was convinced that I had found my musical format.

It has often been my destiny to jump on a trend just as it is nearing its end. Little did I know that my beloved 8-track was already in steep decline.

8-track sales in the USA peaked in 1978, and began falling after that. The culprit was the slightly more compact, but far more error-prone audio cassette. This was the format that all the retailers were suddenly pushing. By the early 1980s, cassette players were also replacing 8-track players in cars.

I would like to say that I yielded to the march of technological progress, but this wouldn’t be truly accurate. The audio cassette, invented in 1963, was slightly older technology than the 8-track.

I did, however, yield to the march of commercial trends, simply because I had no choice. Nineteen-eighty-three was the year that retailers began phasing out 8-tracks in stores. You could still purchase them from subscription services, but they were disappearing from the shelves of mall record stores and general merchandisers like K-Mart. By early 1984, the venerable 8-track had completely vanished.

In recent years, there has been a movement to resurrect the vinyl record. I’ve noticed no similar trend aimed at bringing back the 8-track. At this point, in the early- to mid-2020s, I may be the only person left on the planet who still fondly remembers this bygone musical medium.

-ET

The Beatles in Hamburg, and ‘The Cairo Deception’

As many of you will know, I recently wrapped up The Cairo Deception, my 5-book World War II series.

One of the final chapters of the book depicts the Beatles performing in Hamburg, West Germany in December 1962. (I won’t go into more story detail than that, so as to avoid spoilers.)

This is actually true. When I discovered this lesser known piece of rock music history, I just couldn’t resist putting it in the book, as an Easter egg for Beatles fans.

The Beatles both resided and performed in Hamburg from August 1960 to December 1962. The Beatles’ Hamburg residence took place shortly before they became a global phenomenon. The band also performed at a music venue in Hamburg called The Star-Club, as described in Postwar: Book 5 of The Cairo Deception. 

The Beatles of the Hamburg period involved a slightly different lineup of the band: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best. After the group returned to England at the end of 1962, Sutcliffe and Best left the band, and Ringo Starr was hired on as the new drummer.

Click here to view THE CAIRO DECEPTION series on Amazon

The story of Led Zeppelin (book recommendation/quick review)

Led Zeppelin formed in 1968, the year I was born, and disbanded in 1980, when I was twelve.

I was therefore too young to become a Led Zeppelin fan while the band was still a going concern. But Led Zeppelin was still enormously popular when I discovered rock music as a teenager in the early to mid-1980s. Lead singer Robert Plant, moreover, was then launching a solo career, and making use of the new medium of MTV.

Most of my musical interests lie in the past. I admittedly lack the patience to sort through the chaotic indie music scene on the Internet, and I shake my head disdainfully at the overhyped mediocrity of Taylor Swift. When I listen to music, I listen to the old stuff: Rush, Def Leppard, Led Zeppelin, and a handful of others.

Led Zeppelin is very close to the top of my list. I listen to Led Zeppelin differently than I did in the old days, though. The lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven” sound less profound to me at 55 than they did when I was 15. I now appreciate Led Zeppelin when they’re doing what they did best: raucous, bluesy rock-n-roll that had only a hint of deeper meaning: “Black Dog”, “Whole Lotta Love”, “Kashmir”, etc.

And of course, reading remains my first passion. I’m still waiting for an in-depth, definitive biography of Canadian rock band Rush. (I suspect that someone, somewhere is working on that, following the 2020 passing of Rush’s chief lyricist and drummer, Neil Peart.) But a well-researched and highly readable biography of Led Zeppelin already exists: Bob Spitz’s Led Zeppelin: The Biography.

At 688 pages and approximately 238,000 words, this is no biography for the casual reader. But if you really want to understand Led Zeppelin, its music, and the band’s cultural impact, you simply can’t beat this volume. I highly recommend it for the serious fan.

-ET

View Led Zeppelin: The Biography at Amazon

Kansas and the perils of creative indecision

Kansas was one of my favorite bands while growing up. But this was always something of a minority viewpoint. Sadly, Kansas is a band that never reached its full potential.

Kansas, like the Canadian rock trio Rush, always had an intellectual, progressive streak. Kansas always wanted to make rock music “something more”.

Here’s an example: the band’s debut, self-titled album contains a song called “Journey from Mariabronn.”

What the heck is Mariabronn, you ask? That’s a reference to German-Swiss author Herman Hesse’s 1930 novel, Narcissus and Goldmund.

Highbrow, yes. But a little too highbrow for popular music. Even in the artistically indulgent 1970s. How many 16-year-olds—either then or now—are conversant in mid-twentieth-century German classic literature?

Kansas basically had two commercially successful albums: Leftoverture (1976) and Point of Know Return (1977).

View on Amazon
View on Amazon

Leftoverture contains the spiritual rock anthem “Carry On Wayward Son”. This song brought the band mainstream success. This is also the Kansas song that non-devotees are most likely to recognize.

On Point of Know Return you’ll find “Dust in the Wind”, another Kansas song that still gets a fair amount of airplay.

That was about it, as far as commercial success went for Kansas. Although the band soldiered on for years (a version of Kansas continues as a going concern today), the group was fading out by the mid-1980s.

Kansas’s songs are well-thought-out, often to the point of being abstruse. In short, most of the group’s music isn’t immediately accessible to the casual listener. And that’s a fatal flaw in rock music, where the competition is fierce, and audience attention spans are notoriously short.

Kansas was also riven by an internal philosophical dispute. Founding member and chief songwriter Kerry Livegren became a born-again Christian in 1979. He often infused Kansas’s lyrics with quasi-Christian themes. These were seldom preachy or bombastic, but their spiritual import was hard to miss.

The other members of the band weren’t on board with this new direction. Many of Kansas’s albums during the 1980s (Drastic Measures (1983), comes to mind here) contain songs that aren’t really enough of one thing or another. It wasn’t explicitly Christian music, but it wasn’t mainstream rock—or even progressive rock—either.

The last Kansas album I bought was Power (1986). Kerry Livegren had left the band by this time, and the remaining members cobbled together an album that was imitative of the commercial rock music that was popular at that time.

Power contained a few worthwhile songs. But by this time Kansas had simply become too unpredictable as a musical entity—even for fans like myself.

View on Amazon

Kansas had a good run in the 1970s, but the band ultimately floundered because its members couldn’t agree on what the band was supposed to represent musically and artistically.

Kansas was never going to be Foreigner or Journey, let alone a Led Zeppelin. All the group’s movements in those mainstream directions were awkward stumbles.

Christian rock was a thing in the 1980s and beyond. (The Christian rock group Stryper, founded in 1983, still has a fan base.) But Kansas never fully cultivated that market, because at least half of the band’s members were uncomfortable with the “Christian rock” label.

So Kansas was ultimately a lot of half-hearted missteps in many competing directions. But not enough of any one thing.

What’s the lesson here? Creator, know thyself. That advice applies not only to rock bands, but to anyone trying to stand out in a marketplace filled with “me-too” offerings.

-ET

Reflections on the life (and passing) of Steve Harwell

Steve Harwell, the lead singer of the 1990s band Smash Mouth, passed away earlier this week.

I will confess that I was a lukewarm fan, not because I disliked Harwell or his music, but because of my age. By the time Smash Mouth broke out, I was already in my late twenties. I had largely moved on from that phase of life in which one feels compelled to keep up with the latest in youth music.

Nevertheless, the news of Harwell’s passing has led me to explore some of Smash Mouth’s material retroactively. I recall hearing “Walkin’ On The Sun” in the late 1990s, but I never paid much attention to it. I just watched the video on YouTube, and I keep rewatching it. It’s downright addictive.

Smash Mouth’s music typifies the youth music of the 1990s. Whereas 1970s music was (often unnecessarily) heavy, and 1980s music was bombastic and preening, 1990s pop music was usually just fun.

That’s a fairly accurate description of “Walkin’ on the Sun”. There’s no discernible sociopolitical message here, not even any adolescent angst. Just tongue-in-cheek exuberance.

That was what the 1990s were all about. In those years before 9/11, the war in Iraq, and pointless culture wars at home, American culture was mostly optimistic and mostly enjoyable. I miss the 1990s, back when “woke” simply meant “alert and awake”.

Steve Harwell was arguably a perfect lead singer for that era. If you watch him in the aforementioned video, he isn’t going out of his way to be moody, sexy, or confrontational. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, like a Robert Plant or a Mick Jagger. Harwell is just having fun. And he makes you want to have fun, too.

Although Smash Mouth is remembered most fondly by Millennials (who were in their youthful salad days in the late 1990s), Steve Harwell, born in 1967, was a GenXer.

Nothing particularly odd about that. It is the preceding generation that typically creates the bulk of youth cultural artifacts for the current generation. In the 1980s, Gen Xers watched the teen movies of Baby Boomer John Hughes, and listened to rock musicians who were almost exclusively Baby Boomers.

Harwell’s life was much too short. And while there is doubtless a lesson in his passing about the pitfalls of alcohol, we’ve seen and heard similar stories before. Back to my era: Gen Xers recall the 1980 deaths of AC/DC singer Bon Scott and Led Zepellin drummer John Bonham. Both of these musicians’ lives were cut short that year because of alcohaol.

I’m sorry Steve Harwell is gone, but I’m glad I discovered his music, albeit belatedly.

Steve Harwell, 56, RIP.

-ET

Gordon Lightfoot (1938 – 2023), his music, and me

When I was a kid in the mid-1970s, my dad used to sing this song from the radio. The refrain went:

“Sundown, you’d better take care

If I find you’ve been creepin’ round my back stair.”

This was Gordon Lightfoot’s hit song, “Sundown”, of course. In the year the song climbed the charts, 1974, I was but six years old. I therefore didn’t grasp its meaning. But the song still brings back memories of that time.

And now that I’m old enough to understand “Sundown”, I find it an unusual take on the familiar romantic love triangle: that of the cuckolded male.

Fast-forward to 1986. My high school English teacher, wanting to demonstrate how stories could be told in poems and song lyrics, played “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” for us on one of the AV department’s record players. Yet another of Gordon Lightfoot’s songs.

I immediately connected with this song, even though I was unaware of the historical reference behind it. My teacher told our class about the November 1975 shipwreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior. That gave the song even more weight. It was a work of imagination and art…but also something real.

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was released in 1976, to commemorate the shipwreck of the previous year. It remains one of my favorite songs from a musical era that I was too young to appreciate as it was taking place.

Last November marked the 47th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. This got me thinking about the song, and about Gordon Lightfoot. According to Google, Lightfoot was still touring in his eighties.

But all tours, and all lives, must come to an end. Gordon Lightfoot passed away on May 1, of natural causes.

While Lightfoot and his music were a little before my time, I always appreciated his work. There are few songs quite as haunting and memorable as “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. And whenever I hear “Sundown”, I always hear my dad singing along with the radio in the mid-1970s.

A brilliant musician, and an artistic life well-lived. Gordon Lightfoot, 84, RIP.

-ET

**View Gordon Lightfoot’s music (CDs and vinyl) on Amazon**

 

‘Dark Places’, and the heavy metal controversies of the 1980s

I’m a fan of Gillian Flynn’s novels, and I enjoyed the film adaptation of Gone Girl (2014). So I thought: why not give Dark Places (2015) a try? Although I had read the 2009 novel, enough years had passed that much of the plot had seeped out of my mind. (That happens more and more often, the older I get.)

First, the acting. The two female leads in this movie (Charlize Theron, Chloë Grace Moretz) were perfect choices. Charlize Theron has proven herself willing to downplay her physical beauty for the sake of a dramatically challenging antihero role. (See her performance as Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003).) And the lead role of Libby Day, the tragic but unlikable protagonist of Dark Places, forced her to make the most of these skills.

Chloë Grace Moretz, meanwhile, played the teenage femme fatale, Diondra Wertzner, in the backstory scenes (which comprise a significant portion of the movie). Moretz provided just the right blend of sex appeal and darkness that this character required, more or less what I imagined while reading the novel.

I’ve been following Moretz’s career since her breakout role as a child vampire in Let Me In (2010). Now in her twenties, Moretz seems almost typecast as a dark/horror movie actress; but she always manages to pull off the perfect creepy female character. (Note: Be sure to watch Let Me In if you haven’t seen it yet.)

Dark Places kept me glued to the screen. As I was watching the film, the plot of the book came back to me. Dark Places remained faithful to its literary source material, but in a way that moved the plot along more smoothly than the novel did. (This might be one of those rare cases in which the movie is actually a little better than the novel, which—despite being good—drags in places.)

As alluded to above, Dark Places is primarily set in the twenty-first century, with a significant portion concerning flashback events of 1985, when the adult characters were children or teenagers.

I was 17 in 1985, and I remember that era well. Much of this part of the story revolves around rumors of teenage “devil worship”, and the influence of “satanic” heavy metal: Dio, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne. This is an old controversy that I hadn’t thought about much in decades. Dark Places brought some of those long-ago debates back to me.

I listened to plenty of heavy metal back in the 1980s. (I still do). The heavy metal of Ronnie James Dio, Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne and Iron Maiden does not encourage satanism, any more than films like The Exorcist encourage satanism. But like The Exorcist, some ‘80s heavy metal does dwell excessively on dark themes. And here is where the source of the confusion lies.

I never had the urge to draw a pentagram on my bedroom wall or sacrifice goats while listening to Blizzard of Oz or Piece of Mind. Nor did I detect any dark exhortations in the lyrics, whether overt or subliminal.

Since the 1980s, Ozzy Osbourne has become a reality TV star. Iron Maiden’s lead singer, Bruce Dickinson, has emerged as a polymath who writes books and flies commercial airliners when not on tour.

Ozzy strikes me as one of the most gentle people you might ever meet. Dickinson, meanwhile, is a conservative (in the British context of that political label) and a eurosceptic. Neither man fits the profile of the devil-worshipping maniac.

I will admit, though, that some 80s metal music became a bit cumbersome to listen to on a regular basis. I eventually moved on to more light-hearted, commercial rock like Def Leppard. I still listen to a lot more Def Leppard than Ozzy Osbourne or Iron Maiden. But I digress.

The 1980s fear-mongering over heavy metal turned out to be just that: fear-mongering. Although I’m sure there were isolated real-life horror stories, I didn’t know a single kid in the 1980s who was into satanism. The teenage satanists of the 1980s existed almost entirely within the fevered imaginations of a few evangelical preachers and their followers.

Back to Dark Places. The problem (with both the book and the movie) is that it is a fundamentally depressing story, without any characters that the reader/viewer can wholeheartedly root for. While there is a reasonable conclusion, there is nothing approaching a happy ending, or even a satisfying ending. That is a central flaw that no acting or directing talent can rectify.

This doesn’t mean that the movie isn’t worth watching. It is. But make sure you schedule a feel-good comedy film shortly thereafter. You’ll need it. And don’t watch Dark Places if you’re already feeling gloomy or depressed.

-ET

Huey Lewis, and a different kind of torch song

Thirty-nine years ago today, on September 15, 1983, Huey Lewis & the News released their 3rd studio album, Sports.

I can’t listen to any songs on this album without being catapulted back to the mid-1980s (which was, on the whole, a nice place to be).

Sports was the group’s breakout album, with four top-ten hits. The song below, however, is the best of the bunch…or at least the most unique.

It’s a different kind of torch song. Whereas most songs about unrequited love are sappy and rather pathetic, this one is more down-to-earth.

“If this is it, please let me know…” isn’t a perfect comeback to unreturned affection, of course. (If you have to ask, you already know the answer.) But it’s better than most.

-ET

‘The Osbournes Want to Believe’: quick review

Watch The Osbournes Want to Believe on Amazon 

The music of Ozzy Osbourne has long been one of my guilty pleasures. I’m from the Ozzy generation, you might say. I hit adolescence in the early 1980s, perfect timing for Ozzy’s three breakout albums: Blizzard of Oz (1980), Diary of a Madman (1981) and Bark at the Moon (1983).

By the time I graduated from high school in 1986, Ozzy Osbourne’s music  was already becoming somewhat predictable and repetitive. Or maybe I was just getting older?…Who knows? But anyway—if you were around in the early 1980s and into rock music, you’ll surely remember the energy of those first few albums. They were really something.

Ozzy Osbourne was always more of an entertainer than a technical musician. From the beginning of his solo career, the former Black Sabbath frontman effected this macabre persona, which was uniquely appealing to 13-year-old boys, circa 1981. Then there was the thing about him biting the head off a dove at a meeting with CBS record executives. (He was intoxicated at the time.)

By the early 2000s, Ozzy Osbourne’s style of music was long past its expiration date. The singer pivoted—to reality TV. From 2002 to 2005, MTV aired The Osbournes. Each episode of The Osbournes was basically a day-in-the-life with the singer and his family. I caught about fifteen minutes of one such episode, and immediately knew that The Osbournes wasn’t for me. I’m not a big fan of reality TV to begin with, and I found Ozzy’s two teenage children, Kelly and Jack, somewhat annoying.

I was therefore a bit skeptical when I tuned into my first episode of The Osbournes Want to Believe, which now airs on the Travel Channel. But the The Osbournes Want to Believe is actually not too bad…if you’re willing to accept it for what it is.

The Osbournes Want to Believe presents a new spin on the well-traveled paranormal investigation/ghosthunting TV genre. This show doesn’t feature parapsychologists and professional skeptics, breaking down videos of shadowy figures and independently moving objects. Here, instead, you watch and listen as three members of the Osbourne family give their take on such matters.

Son Jack serves as the host of the show. Yes, I found him annoying 18 years ago; but he’s now 35 and actually pretty good as a television host.

Ozzy Osbourne, meanwhile, is a shadow of his former self. To quote his Wikipedia entry, Ozzy “has abused alcohol and other drugs for most of his adult life.” In 1978, he unapologetically told a journalist, “I get high, I get f***ed up … what the hell’s wrong with getting f***ed  up? There must be something wrong with the system if so many people have to get f***ed up … I never take dope or anything before I go on stage. I’ll smoke a joint or whatever afterwards.”

The singer is now in his early seventies, and his decades of substance abuse are readily apparent. Ozzy is always likable, and at times genuinely witty; but he seems constantly on the verge of falling asleep. If not for his reputation, Ozzy could be mistaken for Joe Biden giving an unscripted press conference. (Sorry! I couldn’t resist.) No one need wonder, though, why Jack serves as the show’s moderator. Ozzy would not be up to the task.

Sharon Osbourne, of The Talk, is perfectly lucid and endlessly chirpy. Nor is she exactly unlikable. But—like the class clown of everyone’s school days— she tries too hard to turn every remark into a joke. Her humor doesn’t always miss the mark; but it rapidly wears thin because it just never stops.

The overall tone of the show is informal and conversational. The set looks like a room in one of the homes owned by Osbourne. Watching The Osbournes Want to Believe gives you the sense that you’re sitting around with this oddball family, watching these weird videos of weird happenings.

The Osbournes Want to Believe is not cutting-edge television; but it isn’t trying to be. And although I’m not an expert on such matters, it doesn’t appear to be cutting-edge in the field of paranormal research, either. Most of the commentary—however witty and occasionally funny—is purely speculative and anecdotal. 

This show seems to be yet one more attempt to cash in on the Ozzy Osbourne brand. That brand was launched more than 50 years ago, when the first Black Sabbath album hit the record stores in 1970.

How long can the Ozzy brand go on and continue to make money? Probably for as long as Ozzy can be dissuaded from completely obliterating himself with drugs and alcohol.