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#581699 - 10/01/08 09:36 PM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: RealMuso]
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MercuryXL
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Muso, I do see your point, and it's actually a good one. I sounded sarcastic there, I apologize. I think I was annoyed at all the mockeries on the VR tonight.
Jesuswept: I know what you mean. I think by 1969 though, it wasn't a matter of years, it was such a definitive break with the past that Sha Na Na were almost perversely anachronistic, a performance-piece. But alarmingly influential! That a huge amount of people today think of the 50's as a time of pre-60's political "innocence" in American life is astonishing. The 1950's were an intensley political decade.
Also astonishing is how this fake imagery of the "greaser" so rapidly eclipsed the Beats as "rebels" in pop imagination. A smoothed over subversive, Fonzie as the good-hearted symbol of 50's rebellion in the 70's- ludicrous! Camille Paglia once wrote, "Fonzie would never have been admitted into the Cunningham house in the 1950's, much less been accepted as a family member."
The greaser "Fonz" image of the loveable rebel, was a fiction that most of the US takes for granted. He was a wildly commercial stand in for the real rebels, the Beats, made family and TV-friendly a mere 20 years later.
Ultimately, the retrospective rewriting/nostalgia for the 50's (in the 1970's) was a reaction against the wild 60's. And if our still-current "culture wars" tell us anything, it's still the 1960's a great deal of people in public life are fighting against, sadly.
Reading Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, basically about the origins of our culture wars and Rovian politics, it's easy to see how fake nostalgia - the yearning for an idyllic past that never was, amidst the tumult of the 60's- Sha Na Na were the perfect act for the Nixon era, actually. There really was a mass blowback against the scary youth movements of the late 60's.
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#581744 - 10/02/08 12:27 AM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: MercuryXL]
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MercuryXL
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Ps. Thanks to everyone who read this and took it seriously. The restrospective invention of what we think of the "1950's" in pop culture I thought was interesting.
The multiple mockeries of my original post.. well I thank the people who read it seriously, cultural studies-wise. I don't think I'll post anything like this ever again here. I'm sorry I wasted anyone's time.
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#581749 - 10/02/08 12:40 AM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: MercuryXL]
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Willard
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well, it wasn't a waste of my time - I thought it was very interesting and some what enlightening.
Smells Like Teen Spirit" was seventeen years ago, but you don't see Columbia students forming grunge parody bands.
Thats true, but I think your analogy is missing the point. Like what the orginal article points to. Most everyone remembers the 1950s as a very positive time, and they never associated the decade with strife,economic hard times, war, drugs, crime,etc. Which in effect made it a prime and obvious topic for satire. Feel-good silly satire, that made people want to be nostalgic. Grunge was very negative, dissafected, etc.
_________________________
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#581787 - 10/02/08 02:59 AM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: Willard]
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jesuswept
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Yeah, my analogy was a little off-topic. It's just that I was struck by how quickly pop music and pop culture in general was changing back then, and how that doesn't seem to be possible anymore. For most of the 20th century music changed dramatically every generation or so. Think of the jazz of the 1920s vs. Victorian music-hall. Or the bop of the 50s vs .the swing of the 30s. Those were tectonic shifts. I'm in my 40s and I'm desperate for the kids to be making some form of music that I just don't get, but it's not happening. They're listening to the same shit I was listening to when I was their age. It's like everything's ground to a halt.
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#581865 - 10/02/08 12:38 PM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: MercuryXL]
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Quest4BetterPop
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Ps. Thanks to everyone who read this and took it seriously. The restrospective invention of what we think of the "1950's" in pop culture I thought was interesting. The multiple mockeries of my original post.. well I thank the people who read it seriously, cultural studies-wise. I don't think I'll post anything like this ever again here. I'm sorry I wasted anyone's time.
Are you kidding? Your thread was refreshingly interesting and very much appreciated. Pay no attention to the naysayers in the peanut gallery. Please make a habit of starting threads like this. Far from wasting anyone's time, you filled some of our time with thought-provoking enlightenment. That's a big improvement over silly chatter about braindead Britney and her ilk...
_________________________
"I wouldn't even think of playing music if I was born in these times."
-- Bob Dylan, 2001
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#581925 - 10/02/08 02:38 PM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: MercuryXL]
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teverett
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Ps. Thanks to everyone who read this and took it seriously. The restrospective invention of what we think of the "1950's" in pop culture I thought was interesting.
Seriously, thanks. I've been sending the original piece to a number of friends, some of whom were there are the time. Mixed reaction, but all who have responded at least find the article interesting.
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#581937 - 10/02/08 02:53 PM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: Quest4BetterPop]
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Dylan_Dog
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I still stop by here occasionally to see what my old friends -- that would be the ones who know what they're talking about -- have to say. Don't post much anymore 'cause it's a waste of time. But this thread interested me.
And that is an interesting premise/theory presented in the original post. However, I can't believe the discussion has gone this far without mentioning Elvis (and the other early rockers) who were also the true rebels of the '50s...and where the Sha Na Na ethos of musical "greaser" originated in the first place. And I can't believe his name isn't mentioned in the original paper. Just shows that a lot of "intellectuals" and "academic elites" still view Elvis and the people who gave birth to rock 'n' roll as unworthy of serious academic discussion. I like to call it the Albert Goldman factor/syndrome. Yes, the beats were also "the rebels" of that era. But while mainstream society viewed them as social pariahs and they were attacked by the media and "mainstream" writers like Truman Capote, they also weren't attacked from the floor of the U.S. Congress, denounced in an offical House of Representative proclamation, nor did they have to deal with the KKK and white supremists of the era. The History Channel ran an excellent documentary in the late '90s called "Jack & Elvis" which documented how they (Jack would be Kerouac, of course) were the yin and yang of the cultural revolution/upheaval of the '50s...which led directly to the social unrest/countercultural explosion of the '60s.
I was a big Sha Na Na fan, btw. Saw them numerous times BEFORE the television show (which ruined then) and they led me to discover a lot of '50s music I may have missed before that. I later saw Flash Cadillac & the Continental Kids, however, who absolutely blew Sha Na Na clear out of the water and then some (I know teverett agrees with that assessment). But it's a huge leap to suggest they "invented" the '50s as we know it today. (And really glad to see realmuso mentioning Cat Mother & his All-Night Newsboys, and the Hendrix production, just 'cause almost no one remembers that great single anymore.)
Yeah, the Cunninghams would've never allowed someone like Fonzie into their house. But the first or two seasons of "Happy Days" weren't all that bad...and Fonzie wasn't that same kind of lovable character early in the series. "Happy Days" jumped the shark, however (pun intended), very early on and became nothing more than total fantasy. That said, I'm older than most of you here. Thanks to an older aunt, who lived with us, her friends and numerous high school babysitters (most of whom I remember fondly, especially because they all had transister rock 'n' roll radios going full blast every post-school waking hour), I remember 1962 quite well. And I think "American Grafitti" was actually very accurate in depicting the way it was back then. Big John Milner was way more believable than the latterday Fonz. John Waters' "Hairspray" as well. And I believe Sha Na Na had very little to do with either of those. Life Magazine ran a cover story in 1972, I believe, about the '50s being back. It spotlighted Sha Na Na, Flash Cadillac, Grease (on B'way, which premiered in NYC on Feb. 1972), the triumphant return of the King (still at that point), etc., treating it all as a chain reaction.
My aunt used to date greasers. Her boyfriend "Crow" was kinda like the early version of the Fonz...but, back then, we used to say he reminded us of Elvis. (Saw him years later at my grandmother's funeral...and he'd transformed himself into a fine, upstanding and bald member of society, btw.)
Finally, during the initial post-Beatles hippie era, small towns like the one I lived in still had guys who greased their hair back, had huge sideburns (akin to the Teddy Boys in Britain) and drove hot rods. A lot of these guys liked to get drunk on Friday night and start fights. Many of them still listened to '50s rock 'n' roll. We referred to these guys as "rockers" and "greasers" -- and this was well before any of us had ever heard of Sha Na Na. Likewise, my mother (who, at the age of 79, now adores Elvis, especially his gospel music) told me that when Elvis first hit, she despised him because (her exact words) "he reminded me of all those motorcycle toughs and hoods we were scared of in high school." She didn't say "greaser" -- but it was the same concept. Likewise, when I was a high school senior and student council president, we had a 1950s dance and hired a Sha Na Na-like band from the city (anyone remember Vince Vance and the Valiants?) to play. People kept tearing down the posters to keep the photo as souvenirs, I suppose, and when I complaiend to the principal (they'd only sent us so many promotional shots to use), he said: "If they'd have lived during that era, as I did, they wouldn't have admired those guys because they'd have been beat up by them, as I was once or twice."
So, yeah, the Fonz would have been a pariah to real Cunningham families (although one could argue that Elvis -- as the dangerous greaser who loved his mom, often revealed himself to be compassionate early on and called everyone "maam" and "sir" was a prototype of the greaser with a heart of gold).
I guess my point, though, is that Sha Na Na didn't invent the notion of a "greaser," nor even that word (although wikipedia also claims the word wasn't prevalent until the '70s). Think Marlon Brando in "The Wild Ones," the prototype for the "motorcyle toughs" my mom feared when she was in school. Nor did they invent the '50s; at least I'd give more weight to, say, the lyrics in numerous Chuck Berry songs. So the academics' very thesis here seems flawed to me.
Also, someone -- I think Willard -- mentioned the irony of Sha Na Na being "nostalgia" so soon after the fact. This was never lost on me, especially during the wave after wave revival of "punk rock." I remember kids in Southern California dressing the way the Sex Pistols and their fans dressed in '76; however, it was then 1995 or so and the "punk" regalia now looked more like Halloween than it did rebellion. And the irony was these kids were waaaaay further removed, timewise, from the Sex Pistols than Sha Na Na was from the music and style that influenced them and they aped.
This is a pretty good "academic" report on "Grease," the musical
OK, that's my quota for this semester.
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#581944 - 10/02/08 03:07 PM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: Dylan_Dog]
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RealMuso
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Good stuff indeed.
And since we're talking about "greaser" prototypes, we should throw the name James Dean onto the record.
BTW: The entire Cat Mother album was pretty nifty, though only that one track was 50s-ish. There was a good reissue CD (with most of their two albumns) that seems to have disappeared.
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#581951 - 10/02/08 03:14 PM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: Dylan_Dog]
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teverett
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Agreeance on Flash Cadillac. The NGDB, whom I mentioned upthread, were also pretty good. And though he's never (to my knowdlege) expounded on his roots at length, Paul Simon has never been that far away from his '50s roots.
Here's a response to the article from a friend, old enough to have been there, and who grew up in New York (though not exactly the "mean streets") at the time. I won't name him, because I didn't get permission to run it here:
Interesting read, but what a load of crap. As usual, the intellectuals, living in their bubble, see only their own kind--the Beats, etc.--and miss what "the little people" they claim to care about were really doing.
There were no Beatniks where I grew up. "Hoods" abounded. At the dances held in Catholic church halls, rumbles occurred outside. We listened to Alan Freed and, yes, we watched American Bandstand, which was jolly fun.
The idea that our heads were filled with politics is a joke. Not rockers, for sure. Politics were the baliwick of fuzzy headed folkies in the Village, whose music sucked.
I might point out that, in contrast, where and when I grew up, "Ozzie and Harriet" was considered a documentary.
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#581952 - 10/02/08 03:16 PM
Re: Did Sha Na Na Invent "The 50's" ?
[Re: Dylan_Dog]
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ginchopolis
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The Juicy Fruits!
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