70s crap

[Sherwood, Harrison]

>From: 	RR.TFCNY at mail.fdncenter.org

>would any of you waxing nostalgic about punk and other 70s ephemera be 
>surprised that some us find it ironic that much of punk was a reaction 
>against, among others, such (hippie or otherwise)  nostalgia?
>what do we crow about now:  "phoney sex pistol mania has bitten the 
>dust?"

No, that was 1994, with Green Day, when the Buzzcocks got recycled and
introduced to a whole new generation of happy little consumers.

1) Punk was a reaction against a particular set of circumstances that
obtained in the mid-Seventies, which included political apathy among the
young, entrenched, encrusted, and elitist artistic values, and the aging
of the Boomers. Certainly many early punk bands railed against nostalgia
in itself, but largely as a symbol of something much more monolithic. It
is also possible to argue that New Wave, punk's more elegant little
brother, mined the past gleefully and with relish for idioms and styles
to appropriate--and did a bang-up job, too.

2) I'm pretty sure the
"nostalgia-for-nostalgia-for-nostalgia-for-nostalgia" merry-go-round has
twirled enough times that finding irony in it is hopelessly passé. ;-)
I'm waiting for the moment when the nostalgia-cycle gets so tight that
it disappears up its own fundamental aperture, achieving (again trying
to pull us back toward relevancy, here) a cultural heat-death, where we
feel a constant nostalgia for the exact moment we're living in right
now.

(And _I_ want points on the merchandising!)

I've often thought I detected a note of nostalgia-for-Right-Now in the
human tendency to have sexual fantasies even while engaged in the
Capital Act itself. Or do I reveal too much?
>
>Punk also had some really horrid consequences for music qua music:  lousy 
>musicians. (please don't say that was the point.)

I'm pretty sure Andy Partridge, Difford & Tillbrook, Elvis Costello,
Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Tom Verlaine, Lene Lovitch--hell, even
John Lydon--could hold their own in a "good musician" contest with
anybody you'd care to name. The era of the Glorification of the Bad
Musician lasted for about ten minutes in 1977. After that you needed
some chops. The Clash saw to that.

Harrison