IVIV (1) Can't Buy Me Love

[Mark Kohut]

And, on the simple level, Doc kinda asking/suggesting whether Shasta is just being kept/bought or is it the "free" mutuality of love.

--- On Wed, 8/26/09, John Carvill <johncarvill at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: John Carvill <johncarvill at gmail.com>
> Subject: IVIV (1) Can't Buy Me Love
> To: "Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> Cc: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Wednesday, August 26, 2009, 8:34 AM
> (Dave, hope you don't mind me
> steppin' in here...)
> 
> Just been thinking some more about this bit.
> 
> "Doc whistled the title notes from 'Can't But Me Love.'
> ignoring the
> look on her face. 'You're givin him IOUs for everything, o'
> course.'
> 
> "'You fucker, if I'd known you were still this bitter--'"
> 
> Ok, certainly Doc sounds quite bitter there. And it's a
> very funny exchange.
> 
> Any significance in the song choice? Notice Pynchon is
> careful to make
> explicit the fact that Doc whistles "the title notes"?
> 
> A couple of possible relavancies spring to mind:
> 
> (1) The literal meaning of the song title, extolling the
> virtues of
> emotion over materialism, that totemic word 'love' which
> Doc will
> ponder on later, and which was always close to the heart of
> The
> Beatles and The Sixties. Make love, not war. All you need
> is Love.
> Love me Do. Can't Buy Me Love. The irony that the Sixties
> are, in the
> book's 'present', dying all around Doc, and the era of
> (among other
> things) 'free love' is coming to an end.
> 
> (2) The nature of the song itself. Although firmly apart of
> teh new
> pop idiom the Beatles were carving out, and as such a
> relentlessly
> modernist piece of work, there are more traditional forms
> stirred into
> the mix: there are jazz and blues notes in there, and even
> 'big band'
> and 'swing' elements. Consider the following, in the
> context of what
> Pynchon is doing in Inherent Vice, from MacDonald's 
> 'Revolution in
> the Head':
> 
> "Among the simplest of the group's hits, CAN'T BUY ME LOVE
> consists of
> a jazzy blues in minor chords with a straight-up eight-bar
> major
> chorus. As such, it spoke a musical language teh parental
> generation
> could relate to, and it was almost logical that Ella
> Fitzgerald
> recorded a cover version as soon as she heard it."
> 
> MacDonald goes on to say that "The Beatles' ability to be
> two
> contradictory things at once - comfortable safe and
> exhilaratingly
> strange - has been displayed by no other pop act", and
> praises the
> song's "effortless rightness".
> 
> Consider also, that, compared with the group's more complex
> and
> artistically intense masterpieces, the song is musically
> and
> (especially) lyrically simple, yet it is impeccably
> arranged and
> produced.
> 
> Is this not similar to what Pynchon has done with Inherent
> Vice? Taken
> an old, comfortable genre - noir fiction - and produced
> somethng
> (seemingly) simple and straightforward, which is still
> infused with
> that uniquely Pynchonian strangeness, these two facets
> combining to
> create something exhilirating?
> 
> Of course, the song was written and recorded quickly, while
> the group
> were playing a series of concerts in Paris. Which might fit
> with the
> speed with which we assume Pynchon to have written Inherent
> Vice. On
> the other hand, only the guide vocal was recorded in
> Paris.
> McCartney's actual vocal for the track was added later,
> after the
> group's first US tour, so the song came into existence
> during a
> transitional period, as the Beatles were pulled even
> further into the
> mania of a new existence, one where both love and money
> were flowing
> so freely that the meanings of those words were changing
> rapidly. As
> Paul McCartney told Barry Miles, in 'Many Years From Now':
> 
> "Miami was incredible. It was teh first time we ever saw
> police
> motorbike outriders with guns. I've got photographs I took
> out of teh
> car window. It was amazing. It was a big time for us,
> obviously, and
> there were all these lovely, gorgeous tanned girls. We did
> a photo
> session down by the beach and immediately asked them out.
> And MG
> Motors were trying to sell their convertibles down there,
> which was a
> perfect little Florida car, and lent us one each as a
> publicity thing.
> I remember meeting this rather nice girl and taking her out
> for dinner
> in this MG in the cool Florida night, palm trees swaying.
> You kidding?
> A Liverpool boy with this tanned beauty in my MG going out
> to dinner,
> It should have been 'Can Buy Me Love', actually."
> 
> Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Yeah!
>