I am with Andy Warhol on this one. American art = pop art. More or less.
What constitutes American culture?
Broadly defined:
http://usera.imagecave.com/seifer/jesus_on_the_cross.jpg
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I thought that this particular oevre d’art reflects perfectly the modern art and the creative process of contemporary artists:
World’s best art piece? [b]A urinal[/b].
I really don’t agree about Pop Art; there are three very distinct genres of music that originated in the United States. One of them is Gospel, and one of them is Rap. But, more importantly (Because I think people have a habit of deeming stuff they dislike invalid), Jazz and all its different forms (Big Band, Bebop, Swing, etc.) originated in the here. I don’t know if I’d call Gospel or Jazz Pop Art.
I think Warhol’s words are infinitely more interesting than his designs, while I appreciate those too. His entire life seems like he made it out to be one long performance piece, maybe about the individual being shaped by society and/or the artist in the service of society, like the few poets left in Plato’s republic.
While he’s not one of my great interests, I could go on and on about Andy Warhol. But do the great majority of Americans know anything about him other than Campbell’s soup cans and Marylin Monroe? He’s the standout figure, along with Pollack, of the last 50 years in American art, but it seems Americans aren’t interested in being acquainted with either. I wish I could say that the people who furnish them with the entertainments they actually participate in–filmmakers, pop musicians, and let’s face it, commercial artists of all sorts OH MY FUCKING GOD WINDOWS XP EXCUSE ME WHILE I GO RESTART MY COMPUTER BECAUSE OF THESE ABSURD “FILTERKEYS” BULLSHITS
FUCK
Only three? What about blues, bluegrass, country, and rock (and all its various subgenres)?
Point! Though, I tend to couple Blues and even Bluegrass with Jazz. I think that ‘various subgenres’ have likely been developed in other countries (cos who the fuck knows where punk and ska originated, for example?), but for all intents and purposes, yeah, Rock started here.
A ‘subculture’ inside a culture is often simply a way of aquiring independence and an social explanation for different behavior while remaining equal, but if persecuted, critiquised or judged, they can flail, and complain about being ‘of a different culture’.
A lot of times it’s legitimate. Because, you know, differences are a good thing. But sometimes it’s just bullshit.
My little grain of salt.
Punk started in NYC in CBGCs and soon afterwards went to Britain. Ska is a somewhat of a bastardization of ska music from Jamaica, which is quite different (and not the same thing as reggae, either). Just in case you were curious.
I just read a fabulous essay called “Rock as Art” by Camille Paglia in her book Sex, Art, and American Culture. I’m a big fan of hers. In it, while decrying the degenerating state of modern pop music, she takes the position that rock and roll musicians should be learned in the history and art the same way painters, classical musicians, and writers. That they should be treated and treat themselves as genuine artists.
“We must tell the young musician: Your peers are other artists, past and future. Don’t become a slave to the audience, with its smug hedonism, short attention span, and hunger for hits.”
That rock and roll artists are artists isn’t anything new really, at least in the sense that it has been thought in a previous age, when bands like the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the VU “read poetry, studied Hinduism, and drew psychadelic visions in watercolours.” I think it’s been lost though, and Paglia asserts that this is mostly when young, naive musicians are surrendered to the vultures of the music industry. I see this spreading from just pop music into places like literature and painting, where old buzzards fly circles over prestigious art schools hoping to find the next Andy Warhol. We need public voices to say to the kid: “You are an artist, not a money machine.” I think she’s right.
I don’t think it has been lost. Maybe if you look at mainstream bands, then yeah sure, they’re mostly just trying to maintain that popular status. There’s plenty of underground bands(and even some more popular ones) that truly do realize they are artists and fight to keep the integridy in their art. There’s plenty of metal bands that are like this, for example. Yeah yeah sure, it’s crazy old Gila derailing a thread into a metal discussion(not really ), but it’s true. Many metal bands play what they want and how they want to. This doesn’t hold true for all metal bands, but really, it’s the same with almost any music genre: you’ll have bands that do what they want, and you’ll have some that cater to their audience.
I think it’s more appropriate to say that rock and roll started in Liverpool.
Here’s another interesting product of the genrefication of our culture. I assume here that we can all agree that the Beatles are the Shakespeare of rock and roll from whence all standards of judgement must come. The Beatles in their decade or so of hegemony gave at least the smallest seed to all the genres we’re now dealing with–except, no one anymore has the range and scope of the Beatles, no band today produces She’s So Heavy, Helter Skelter, Eleanor Rigby and Hey Jude alongside eachother.
This leads me to another point, speaking of Shakespeare, his greatest tragedy–that kids these days seem to disregard Shakespeare as “boring”, etc. I’m very afraid the same thing is happening to the Beatles. If we’re going to progress as a society, we need to have these common canonical points we can all agree on, or at least know about.
I would certainly suggest that some modern bands, even some popular ones (like the divine Strokes), “play what the want,” so maybe it suggests that the problem is deeper, that the “tastes” of modern performers of pop music have been damaged from the get-go. My friend tells me about when he asked his dad how it must have been in the 60s to be able to turn on your radio and hear good music all the time. The artists of not just popular music but the popular music of the past were connected to the artistic lineage. When we read Your Band Sucks on Something Awful we can easily see that the bands being touted as some kind of revolution today are completely disconnected from it.
(As an anti-emo aside, I’ve recently realized one of the major deficiencies of the emo phenomenon. That is, that all great art, not an outpouring or an uncontrolled expression of emotion, is rather a flight from emotion. The entire emo debacle proves this theorem of T.S. Eliot’s to me better than anything else I know. Share with friends.)
I dunno about that…I think that the emotion of emo is surprisingly the only thing it has going for it. It has much less to do with what they do, so much as it is HOW they do it. For example, Weezer was one of the more OG ‘emo’ bands, and I think their first two albums were GREAT. Now, emo is just a bunch of guys raised by their single mothers, taught to act total nerds in front of the opposite sex (or not taught to have any sort of confidence at all), and wondering why they can’t get chicks to like them while crying about it. It’s just depressing.
It sounds harsh, but actually, it was my friend who listens to emo who pointed it out to me. Here’s the exact transcript of his blog:
“Emo explained?”
On the drive up here, emo started to make sense. Why was it so big? I finally knew.
A large portion of this new generation of children was raised by single mothers. These single mothers raise their sons to be: sensitive especially towards women, everything is their fault not the woman’s, never hit a woman, this we learned was how we would be “gentlemen.” That, and lots of negative energy comes from the mother toward the absent father. This generation of men grew up without a strong male role model and so they based their personalities on their mothers. I have found that the people who enjoy emo come from families where either the father is absent or at the very least, the mother is greatly in charge. Those who hate emo have strong “classic” father figures who is a drinker, a womanizer and have still have the control over the family. (Psst! He’s exaggerating here. It’s hard to tell through his text, but this is just the way he likes to kid around)
When looking at lyrics of emo songs you can see that in their relationships the men often bring the blame on themselves. This is in sharp contrast to an older era of music, what we call “classic rock.” In most classic rock, notably Led Zeppelin, the lyrics aren’t very emo in that sense. I will use Led Zeppelin and The Postal Service / Death Cab For Cutie in these examples.
Emo:
“I am finally seeing why I was the one worth leaving”
Rock:
“You’ll look for me but baby, I’ll be gone.
This is all I gotta say to you woman”Emo:
“Just tell me how to make it right and I swear I’ll do my best to comply”
Rock:
“Lots of people talk and few of them know, Soul of a woman was created below.”
Emo:
“It’s no stretch to say you were not quite a father, but a donor of seeds to a poor single mother that would raise us alone”
What the does future hold? Perhaps rap/hip hop holds is the answer, rap originates from the urban african american community which has had a lack of fathers for a few generations now. Perhaps the next generation will be angry because of their absent fathers instead of incredibly hurt and sensitive about it. They will however not lose the love for their mothers, many rappers do show “much love” fo’ they moms.
But yeah, I think the only saving grace of emo is its intensity, which is why I can stomach listening to the occasional Saves The Day song when my brother feels like listening to it, god fuckin’ forbid. When you remove the intensity, you get this HORRIBLE breed of Indie Rock that is just so lame, dry, and dull that it’s easy to forget that you’re even LISTENING to music.
Weezer was different cos for a while, they weren’t such lame-os about it. They had songs dealing with sex and relationships that went both ways, and not just the crybaby style.
And also, maybe it’s a bit of a stretch for me to say so, but music on the radio has always been sort of the same. If you don’t believe me, go sit in Carl’s Jr. for an hour and listen to their lame ass 50’s rock. I’d find some ridiculous lyrics to help my case, but I’m just too lazy for that. 
Rock and Roll started in Liverpool? That doesn’t jive with history. Rock and roll started with Chuck Berry, and Little Richard, and all those blues artists that decided to speed up their work and make it more accessible to the public. That’s the short answer, of course.
The Beatles started in Liverpool and were heavily influenced by those rock and roll bands. And if you want to say anything about the Beatles, they KILLED rock and roll along with all of their imitators. They started just plain rock. There is a distinction, if only a really picky one.
And just so you know, Your Band Sucks on Somethingawful is a joke. He makes fun of any band that you will put in front of him- he’s making fun of elitists.
SG: Go back even before the radio and you’ll find some real clunkers. You could buy the lyrics and sheet music to hundreds of tunes milled out every day from NY City in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteeen hundreds. Also, listen to old folk songs and you’ll get that same lack of depth and general boringness that plagues much of pop music today.
When I say the Beatles invented rock and roll, I say it in the same way people have said Aeschylus invented tragedy, though other playwrights had came before him.
They left such a huge mark upon rock and roll that their influence is completely inescapable, even if the later artist defines himself in opposition, they are still the starting point.
Your Band Sucks is more than a joke. While Thorpe criticizes almost everything, I’ve always detected a greater respect for certain bands than most, and at least, I’ve never seen him ever write a word against Lennon. You can also see his greater respect for movements like the original post-punk where he at least thinks the artists are being true to themselves or something, as opposed to the outright contempt he has for most modern popular bands.
Before we can even discuss “emo” we need to define our terms, as I stridently deny Weezer, at least early Weezer, to be anything of the sort. Emo, perhaps more than any other genre of music, elludes categorization. I think to qualify as emo, a band almost has to consciously indentify itself as such, or as one of its contituent subgenres. I’ll write more on this later.
Wordsworth said that art results when emotions overflow. Art may very well be an escape from emotion, but there is no denying that great art is frequently emotional: King Lear, Faust, and Antigone cannot be described as unemotional. If anything, I would think of art as a liquid in a glass. The first little sip tastes the best; after a while you need to drink more at a time to enjoy it as much; and finally only the dregs are left, which are as disgusting as they are intensely flavored. Emo music represents those dregs of emotion, left over from an overly emotional daily existence.
And doesn’t this seem reasonable, when you think of emo kids? They make a big deal out of their emotions, but it’s not because they feel a lot. Rather, they’re trying make up for being emotionally exhausted by feeling intensely whatever is left. It’s what happens when you spend all day listening to music on your headphones and then spend the night partying and listening to music with your friends.
I wouldnt say that emo boys are upset because they can’t get girls, because ‘emo’ itself is a method of sex appeal.
Okay, for a second I thought you were trying to deny the Beatles’ influences. I’ll acknowledge that they (along with Bob Dylan) are the most influential artists as far as modern music goes.