Gold to Plastic

[Robin Landseadel]

Perusing the "Nick Tosches Reader" this morning I ran across an  
excerpt from "Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams."  
Considering the theme of pop music that runs through "Inherent Vice,"  
this passage seems relevant:

	Henry James foresaw in 1886 a coming "reign of mediocrity."
	But the world that James portrayed with such brilliant elegance
	was already decaying around him. The reign of mediocrity,
	democracy's flowering, had come. America respected James;
	but respect is cheap, and she did not buy his books. She
	bought Mark Twain's. His sentiments lent eloquence to feelings
	that long had been held back in diffIdence. It was Twain's
	mockery of the classical European store of culture in The
	Innocents Abroad that established him in 1869; established him
	not merely as a writer but also, among those not given to books,
	as an entertainer, a vindicator of the mob's cultural suffrage.

	But it was neither Twain nor James who was the voice of the
	age, but rather Johnson-George Washington Johnson, the
	Whistling Coon, the ex-slave who became America's fIrst
	recording star. For the fIrst time, a common man achieved fame,
	a fame greater than Twain's, greater by far than James's, a fame
	won through the supremely democratic art of whistling. The
	centuries of quarrying rock and hammering gold for the glory of
	gods and men were ended. Carrara marble gave way to
	linoleum, granite to concrete and Sheetrock. All was transitory,
	nothing built to endure. Eternity ceded to the moment, as gold to
	plastic.