Cultural Detritus, Reviews, and Commentary
Marc J. Soares – 100 Hikes in Yosemite National Park (Mountaineers Books 2003)
Lacking in detail, and generally worthless other than as a list of some of the trails and directions to where they begin. The Falcon Guides book on hikes in Yosemite is superior, with elevation maps and in-depth discussions of trail difficulty and conditions.
Joe Boyd – White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s (Serpent’s Tail 2006)
Joe Boyd is a music and film producer, and onetime club operator. His name is all over a lot of curious music from the late 1960s and early 1970s (and less conspicuous music after that), mostly folk, folk-rock and psychedelic rock. White Bicycles is his memoir of that time. He describes a trip to Great Britain in early 1965, saying, “I loved the feeling that I was in a foreign place, and the more alien the better.” (p. 65). This works as a concise summary of his musical tastes as well. Always keen for the most exotic sounds — especially if they can also be labeled “authentic” — he was kind of a collector of musical trophy experiences. At least, that he how his memoir White Bicycles reads. He provides only the barest details of anything about his life that isn’t a brag, or used as a discrete counterweight to give a more punch to an extended brag — like the story of walking away from the rights to ABBA‘s publishing before they got huge is really an excuse to claim he was in on the band’s appeal before the rest of the world. But he certainly did rack up an impressive resume of musical acquaintances, record production credits (or co-credits), and scene caché.
As a writer, Boyd is kind of an expert con man. He has a journalist’s flair for witty one-liners and turns of phrase. He also has a deep appreciation for how the universal can be explained though isolated examples, betraying that universality in a memoir that seems to suggest (implicitly) that everything universal about the 1960s had something to do with him. It isn’t that he lies or exaggerates. The man was there for a lot of important countercultural milestones, though he should earn no credit or applause for it because anyone with the opportunities and resources that he did should have been obligated to do at least as much. For instance, he suddenly is helping manage the Newport Jazz Festival, but we read nothing about how he managed to get the job. We hear about how he stretches his resources and empty pockets when in college, though a moment’s pause might remind the reader that Boyd is in an Ivy League college in the first place, with room and board, and still able to travel and devote any earnings toward discretionary travel and musical investments.
Boyd is at his best doing hit-and-run synopses of particular artists and musical sub-cultures, from the sympathetic perspective of someone who “was there.” When it comes to autobiographical details, his accounts are thin and self-serving. There is no shortage of name-dropping. Yet that’s also the reason anyone reads this book, to find out about the seemingly unending roster of musical luminaries that crossed paths with Boyd at one point or another. But his little synopses are quite engaging, like one about the music of his teenage years:
“The years 1954 to 1956 were the great cusp, when black music was discovered by white teenagers and sold millions of records. The horrified guardians of the nation’s morals feared the underclass world it represented and the miscegenation implied in its rhythms; major record labels hated it because they didn’t understand it, putting them at a disadvantage with buccaneering independents [he mentions a few, none from the South, leaving out Sam Phillips at Sun]”. (p. 8)
He does sum up the book on a sober point about music in the 1960s:
“The atmosphere in which music flourished then had a lot to do with economics. It was a time of unprecedented prosperity. People are supposedly wealthier now, yet most feel they haven’t enough money and time is at an even greater premium. *** In the sixties, we had surpluses of both money and time. *** The tightening of the fiscal screws that began with the 1973 oil crisis may not have been a conspiracy to rein in this dangerous laxness, but it has certainly worked out to the advantage of the powerful. Ever since, prices have ratcheted upwards in relation to hours worked and the results of this squeeze can be seen everywhere.” (pp. 267-68).
This is all true, to a point. But your frame of reference has to be that of middle and upper-middle class white people. This book will appeal most if you are one of those too. It also must be mentioned that the way that things have changed such that the 60s experiences can’t be recreated a half-century later just happens to emphasize the rarity of Boyd’s experiences, and that privileged rarity is what he plies to his own advantage.
In the end Boyd manages to paint vivid portraits of scenes and incidents from his life. He is nothing if not articulate. Whether these portraits, and their point of view, is of interest, though, is kind of a separate issue. Boyd doesn’t emerge from the narrative as the sort of chum you are likely to find endearing. There is an elitism and off-putting self-importance to much of his chosen narrative. This is to say Boyd stops short of making any kind of existential realization that the achievements he boasts about are just as silly and arbitrary as anything else, and they stand in the way of the benign co-existence he claims to have fostered through music — in a way, therein lies the seeds of the downfall of 60s ideals. Your interest will probably peak if you have heard a lot of musical acts that Boyd was involved with: Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, The Incredible String Band, Nico, Vashti Bunyan, Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, etc.
Link to reviews by Ben Terrall of the books What’s Yours is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy (2016) by Tom Slee and Raw Deal: How the “Uber Economy” and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers (2015) by Steven Hill:
“Raw Deals: Challenging the Sharing Economy”
Bonus link: “Spam & What’s Yours Is Mine, Book Reviews: The Loss of Internet Innocence”
Link to Anna’s review of Social Class in the 21st Century (2015) by Mike Savage:
“Social Class in the 21st Century“
Online copy of the Introduction to the book:
“The Great British Class Survey and the Return of Class Today”
Link to a review by Tony Bates of The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts (2015) by Richard and Daniel Susskind:
“Book Review: The Future of the Professions (Including Teaching)”
Bonus links: Forces of Production and “Edutopia” and Homo academicus and Making Money
Link to a review by Joe Kennedy of Enjoying It – Candy Crush and Capitalism (2015) by Alfie Bown:
“Productive Pleasure: Alfie Bown’s Enjoying It Reviewed”
Selected Quote:
“‘Our ideas surrounding the enjoyment of critical theory and political resistance lead to the celebrated identity of the radical, which is another way of being a subject that suits capitalism’. In other words, the inclusive, absorptive nature of capitalism, which needs to bring everything within the scope of its mechanics of commodification, means that the radical is yet one more demographic to be sold to, another identity which can only find its expression through consumer preference. If this seems far-fetched, follow the twitter account of left-leaning London publishers Verso, who frequently retweet photographs sent in by satisfied customers of the piles of Marx (and assorted modern Marxist thinkers) which have just landed on their doormats.”
“For the October Revolution our class produced a small play in which a group of young Pioneers expelled the heroes of Russian fairy tales as ‘non-Soviet elements’. The curtain opened on this drab little group of Pioneers. Their appearance brought no response from the audience. Then the group leader . . . got up and made an introductory speech. She explained that the old fairy tales, about princes and princesses, exploiters of simple folk, were unfit for Soviet children. As for fairies and Father Frost [~Father Christmas/Santa Claus], they were simply myths created to fool children.
“After her speech the colorful crowd of ‘non-Soviet elements’ appeared on stage. A sigh of delight passed through the hall and grew into a wave of applause . . . .
“The Trial began. Cinderella was dragged before the judges and accused of betraying the working class . . . . Next came Father Frost, who was accused of climbing down chimneys to spy on people. One by one we were condemned to exile. The only exception was Ivan the Fool, because he belonged to the common people and so was no traitor of his class. He was renamed Ivan the Cunning.”
Svetlana Gouzenko, Before Igor: My Memories of a Soviet Youth (1961)
Gouzenko was the wife of Soviet defector/traitor Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko, a key figure in the start of the “cold war”. The passage quoted above sneers at the Pioneers, and sympathizes with betrayers of the working class, but wasn’t that play great? Children should put it on again.
Loretta Lynn with Patsi Bale Cox – Still Woman Enough: A Memoir (Thorndike Press, 2002)
Loretta Lynn’s second memoir fills in a few gaps from her first, Coal Miner’s Daughter (1977), and picks up the years since that first book. This isn’t an autobiography that attempts to chronicle her entire life. It is episodic, jumping from one story to the next, revealing only as much as Lynn wishes. At times, that is the biggest limitation of the book. When she has something nice to say about someone, they are mentioned by name. When she has something negative to say about a person or band or business, she typically withholds the proper name. This is somewhat common with country music memoirs (Cash: The Autobiography does a little of the same, for instance). But the strength of the book is Lynn’s willingness to accept herself as she is without letting shame or embarrassment get in the way — at one point she acknowledges that she doesn’t read well.
The bulk of the book is devoted to explaining her relationship with her husband, known by his nicknames Doolittle and Mooney. As much as her music creates a persona of an independent woman, she stuck with Doo since her marriage at age thirteen, in spite of his philandering, alcoholism, abusiveness, jealousy, male chauvinism, and general craziness. She also writes a lot about the rest of her family, including her many children. There are maybe two pages total devoted to recordings, a larger number devoted to descriptions of live performances, and substantially more to the grind and crazy escapades of touring and being in the cutthroat entertainment industry.
Loretta Lynn’s best quality was her earnestness and total lack of guile. This shone through her music brilliantly. This memoir captures that same aspect, though at the same time her naivety comes through too, and it is hard to accept her frequently superficial explanations on a few topics, some of which veer into supernatural explanations. One such problem is that while she (rightly) takes some credit for being a pioneering businesswoman in the music industry, taking more control over her music than “girl singers” were usually permitted in the misogynist Nashville music machine, she has no grasp whatsoever of broader social forces. So she never quite gets around to offering any explicit context for how the three decade “golden years” of the working class coincided with her rise to fame. If you want that analysis you will need to look for a biography. But she still has plenty of great stories that revolve around her likeable bewilderment. For instance, she talks about being on a Dean Martin celebrity roast and leaning over during the taping to ask Martin when dinner will be served — she thought the event was really a dinner where celebrities get together and (literally) eat a pot roast.
I was reading this on an airplane and a steward leaned over and asked what it was, then — after saying he admired Loretta Lynn too — jokingly suggested that maybe I should put it in a paper bag so no one could see it. The cover definitely markets this as a “woman’s” book, the kind promoted on daytime TV. No doubt, this is driven by emotional responses to difficult life circumstances. But anyway, it is a decent enough memoir though this will probably only be coherent if you have read her first memoir or have seen the (rather excellent) biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), which is mentioned many, many times.
Link to a book review by Staughton Lynd:
George Clinton With Ben Greenman – Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster 2014)
George Clinton, of Parliament–Funkadelic fame, has written his memoir in the “as told to” format with journalist Ben Greenman. This gives the book a narrative feel, as if gathered from a series of conversations or recorded monologues. It’s comparable to other memoirs in that format (Cash: The Autobiography, The Autobiography of Malcolm X). Fans of Clinton’s music will learn plenty about how his bands evolved. The accounts of some of his bandmates are a little selective. Though his friendship with Sly Stone in the 1980s and 90s is rendered well as a sympathetic portrait of another star on a downward slide still trying to forge his own way. The first parts of the book, recounting his early days in a hard-working touring band and the middle years as part of a colossal musical entertainment empire that evolves into a corporate “organization”, are snappy and engaging like most music memoirs of this sort, while the last part of book covering the later years (tales of old fart funkadelijunkie) are bitter and resentful and a bit less endearing, just like so many of these memoirs that chronicle the autumnal years when few(er) were listening.
Latter-day fans who think of Parliament-Funkdaelic as two sides of the same band may be surprised to learn how differently they evolved, meeting only for a brief window in time. Funkadelic established itself first, and the band was influenced by psychedelic rock. Clinton mentions the English rock supergroup Cream as an influence repeatedly, and The Beatles, and Jimi Hendrix. He had an appreciation for the white British invasion blues-rock bands, applauding their interpretations of black American blues. He talks about Funkadelic being a very democratic band into the early 1970s. But he also discusses those days like a businessman, never failing to mention how he watched the charts for ideas, made promotional connections in radio, and worked every angle on commercial terms. When Parliament takes off in popularity, Clinton jumps at the chance to be the frontman. He felt that to be really huge a band has to have a focal point. What he glosses over, though, is what the rest of the band thought about that. Clinton talks about some of the key members like Eddie Hazel, but others are mentioned more in passing. He addresses some of the splinter bands led by others with a sense of slightly condescending pity.
If you believe Clinton’s account — and you probably can’t believe all of it — he has been screwed royally on financial matters and he’s cleaned up his life just before writing this book. Still, he comes across as pretty defensive. He has a rationale for everything. Yet he works pretty hard to put those rationales across to the reader, while trying not to let on to those intentions and apologetics. He is also a bit hypocritical. He waxes on about how all music is adapted from other music. And yet, a good portion of this book is a rant about how he’s been ripped off, especially in the hip-hop era when DJs have frequently sampled Parliament-Funkadelic songs. On one page, he’s praising adaptations of old songs (without payment), on another he’s complaining how he hasn’t been paid for samples. Now, he makes some good points that sampling royalties shouldn’t be set up as they are, and should instead be proportional to the sales of the sampler. But his arguments are confused and rather self-serving, ultimately resting on nothing more than his whims and fancies. Some deserve compensation, and others not, and the two can hardly be told apart without Clinton’s infinite wisdom (read: unlimited discretion). He mentions the George Harrison/Chiffons copyright lawsuit, and defends the ridiculous outcome. Yeah, maybe Clinton fell in with some crooked people who haven’t compensated him and pocketed the difference. He makes that case. It is a fair argument. But the idea that anybody at all should be raking in royalties for their efforts of decades before, and that sampling isn’t a fair use that creates no need for royalty payments, have kind of assumed away a big part of the public policy issues.
The most interesting way to look at this book is to set aside Clinton’s own spin and put his hippie ideals into a sharper critical focus. Sure, he was into free love and all that, though pretty early on he tried to reveal the superficiality of much of the 60s counterculture, in terms of how it failed to fundamentally transform society. But doesn’t that critique apply to him as well? The book doesn’t go there, but it should have.
Clinton is fast to discard the democratic cooperation of Funkadelic to achieve bigger commercial success with Parliament. The question of what was surrendered in that process goes largely unexamined, and the assumption that big commercial success is necessarily an achievement superior to purely cultural cachet looms large over the narrative. He derides those who sought material possessions. Yet at the same time he talks about how he instead wanted to use his wealth from Parliament’s success to accumulate experiences. Social scientists have explored how developing “cultural capital” through exclusive experiences and the “nonproductive consumption of time” is just another mode of establishing social distinction, not really opposed to the kind of thinking that gives rise to conspicuous consumption of luxury items. This is a curious flaw in Clinton’s version of hippie ideals.
He blasts those whose message was about “pointing at a power structure and condemning it as they went about installing themselves at the head of a new one.” But again, his pleas for credit (and remuneration) for his past achievements kind of seek to locate himself at a particular position in popular musical history, which is to say in a hierarchy. When discussing a Funkadelic reunion project that required large payments to Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrell, Clinton complains about how they wanted to be reinstated as co-leaders and acted like stars, lording that status over the long-time (yet non-famous) members of his working band. Who decided that Clinton gets to make these calls? Hasn’t the audience, for better or worse, decided that they want to hear Bernie and Bootsy more than the members of Clinton’s latter-day working band? Isn’t that really why Clinton recruited Bernie and Bootsy back in the first place? There is a tacit assumption that in spite of what the audience thinks he gets to be the center of the operation and, like a CEO, slot everyone else in the band into their “proper” place. Sound very hippie-like to you? Or were hippies always short-sighted capitalists at heart, evidenced by the way they later gave into the “me generation” and vapid 1980s Reaganomics materialism? Don’t expect Clinton to pause long on these questions, because he doesn’t.
No doubt, Clinton has made some great music in his long career. But was his autobiography published only because of his musical talent or did his relentless ability to self-promote have more to do with it? The man admits some faults and mistakes, for sure, but those admissions are limited mostly to things he feels like he has since resolved. The demons he hasn’t bested still lurk in the shadows, and those shadows seep into the pages of this book more than Clinton probably intended. It is good to have this available as Clinton’s side of the story, but there are other perspectives that need to be explored to understand the Parliament-Funkadelic legacy.
