A time capsule for us; for its time, a sordid/tragic, lamenting
melodrama and piece of “social realism”
Because sometimes, with the
muddiest mud puddle, if the light is right, we can see ourselves.
Seventh, and maybe the last, in
an occasional series, “Patchouli and B.O.” (a recollection of the ’70s)
Also in the series:
Films including Diane Keaton, an exemplar of Baby Boomer leading
actresses
When women go
wrong, men go right after them.
—
Mae West, according to a Broadway show done of her work about 14 years ago
[Search this entry under the
phrase “theme key” and read relevant moral/ethical considerations, to decide if
this entry is for you. Also, links to Wikipedia articles on the actors are in a
list at the end of Part 2. Edit 3/20/14.]
Subsections below:
The original film is generally crafted OK; the VHS version is rather
“fly-blown”
The film echoes a “decayed” time; a “fallen woman” trope is conspicuous
The film’s different social-thematic strains
Whether per a feminist philosophy, or per a critique of hedonism, males
are the negatively serving “prime movers” in this story
The last scene, setting some terms: Theresa escapes the illusorily wrong guy with the aid of the
really wrong guy
In Part 2, on my other blog:
The director: an old hand stepping up to the plate with competence, if
not always full sympathy for the prerogatives of the young
Critiques of some details orient us to what this esthetic “carnival
ride” is like
The “Italiano” boyfriend: not your father’s Goofus, in a decade of
pop-culture “paesan’s”
The pomposity of the partying subculture in the ’70s
The scoliosis theme: a sad background of family health and tragedy
The weird street-party prelude to the last sequence
My overall assessment of the film
Info on the availability of the film
Actors [list]
I never saw any part of this
movie, I am almost 100 percent sure, and certainly never saw the whole thing,
until this year. I remember when it came out (I was too young to be admitted
then); it made the cover of Time
magazine, as if it was regarded as (if I recall rightly) reflective (in an
artistic mode) of current social conditions. And more than I would have
expected when I asked (a few months ago) at a local library to have it located,
it reflects a good deal of the heart of what I (from my own angle) wanted to
say about the 1970s—particularly in the decade’s more negative side—while we look
back from something of a forgiving perspective (and it helps explain, for
whoever cares, that decade’s now-dated thinking and morés).
It’s good to review this film at
age 52 also, because I can do so from a viewpoint that enables me to probe and
sum it better than I definitely would have in my teens or even a few years
later (when I was still of a studently mind, when I was more under some illusions
than now). Enough of its original cultural context is water under the bridge—and
morés, trends, and attitudes among the American middle class have changed
enough—that today Goodbar looks like
a definite period piece that today may be a little hard to interpret for some
twenty-something watchers (or it may impress them as an artifact that, if they
can “read” it in some canny way, they may find puzzling as to how adult
audiences took it seriously in 1977).
The film is based on
a novel by
Judith Rossner, and the adapting screenplay was by
director
Richard Brooks, who apparently reconceived some aspects of the
story (according to critic Leonard Maltin). The novel had been inspired by a
murder of a young woman in, I believe, the New York area. The fictional story, to judge
from the film, is about a young, middle-class Irish Catholic woman named
Theresa Dunn who, in high school–literature parlance, undergoes a “loss of
innocence”: she both has a sexual awakening and gets motivation to free herself
from the provincial strictures and socially paranoid attitudes of her traditional
(and even close-minded) parents (especially her father, who seems like a stubborn,
noisily assertive, not-very-entertaining Archie Bunker).
(Note: The putative location of the film story—San
Francisco—is different from the book’s, which was New York. But the film was shot in Chicago,
according to the film’s Wikipedia article. Still, the urban-darkness aspect of
the story seems to connote that the societal-temptation
location is New York.)
As for what the story presents
as a sort of natural consequence—it is something of a tragedy, as well as a
rather tendentiously shaped “cautionary tale” (more on all this later)—Theresa gets
further involved, when living on her own, in a world of nighttime club life,
with copious sex and drugs (whether or not indulged in at home in her private
“pad”), and general busting the bounds of the “old morality.” Eventually this
leads to a horrific end for her. The story goes to pains to show a sort of
tense duality in Theresa: not only does she come from a “nice” background, but
she has a virtuous (or noble) side, manifested at least in her being a sincere
teacher of deaf children in a city school.
Her initial inculcation in
“matters of the flesh” seems to arise out of genuine curiosity (along with a
certain rebellious impulse, we presume); her
slide into a far more elaborate nightlife than mere experimentation can be
questioned, by us today (and could have been even in 1977, perhaps), as to whether it was meant to be a “fair reading”
of what a broad array of kids were doing (and, if so, whether the film’s depiction
were not overwrought) or it was meant to
be a “cautionary tale by extreme example,” showing someone going downhill
so badly that it represents in extremis
the moral danger that in real life a wider array of youth were potentially entering,
even if many individuals among the group didn’t go so far as Theresa.
Some of the same artistic paradox
occurs with the much later movie Thirteen
(2003). However, if you have experienced firsthand another, close person in the
throes of what either movie’s heroine undergoes, it can be scalding, and
abstract issues of how typical—“statistically distributed”—the moral phenomenon
is are rather beside the point when we feel how badly an individual undergoes a
sort of spiritual trauma (or, if that sounds too “religious” for you, a
condition of health, psychological as well as physical, that puts the person at
grave risk to her constitution). In short, a story about a Hamlet tells us
about an aspect of life than many of us can find edifying; any questions of how
often a Hamlet occurs in the population, complete with varimax rotation,
jiggering the chi-squares, and checking the p-values
(I don’t give a shit to be on point with
this stats jargon) show a drily, irrelevantly Soviet statistical bent of
mind that indicates how far we’ve fallen from true liberal culture in the U.S.
(Doing a statistical analysis: is that like the doctor’s grabbing the male’s
balls and saying “Cough”?)
The original film is generally crafted OK; the VHS version is rather
“fly-blown”
This movie is fairly well made
for what it is—a sort of melodrama-cum-morality play aimed at a middle class
audience. (When we appreciate in Part 2 the career of the director, who was
born as long ago as 1912, we can appreciate two things: the director’s generosity
in embracing a story that nevertheless rubbed his presumably fastidious nose in
the generation-gap squalor being depicted; but also the way his view may have
been “old-fashioned” enough that it helped produce, for better or worse, the
“rhetorical extreme” that shapes this film’s diagnosis of a social condition.)
Goodbar is tightly edited with some sequences involving fairly
quick runs through images (with the pacing of events varying and some being a
bit confusing, which can be resolved on re-watching); and copious pop music of
the time (in its analog glory, sometimes too bass-y for modern tastes) wafts into
and off the soundtrack fairly “luxuriously.” (There is both “needle-drop” use
of hits of the time and some original soundtrack composition that reflects the
sometimes-seamy, sometimes melancholy potential of that era.) (See End note on music.)
I saw this film on a videotape
that appears to have been cheaply produced (the VHS tape came out in 1997);
flaws in the original film print are evident, some of a type that it seems hard
to believe got past quality control (though I’m not sure if some or all of the visual
flaws are from the original film positive or arising from within the process of
the transfer to videotape-digital form). The ways this film seems a relic of
the past are conveyed by (1) a sort
of vague visual quality as if it was shot through a haze (though this may
partly reflect the quality of the videotape; the film actually won recognition
for its cinematography in ~1977) and (2)
the soundtrack’s sometimes-murky analog quality (including some songs that seem
to have been recorded with heavy reverb, the way some music was presented on
record or on the radio in those days).
Today’s kids might find the
sound so muffled as to be almost indecipherable at times. (They also might be
amused at who—with voices as attractive as bare feet—became stars during the
disco era. Makes you appreciate all the more today’s vocally endowed sirens
like Katy Perry and Adele.)
The film echoes a “decayed” time; a “fallen woman” trope is conspicuous
These qualities, plus the story
itself, really brings back that time to me. I was 15 in 1977, and I was
undergoing the darkening beginning of a personal crisis that would climax
starting at the end of the year (though I kept doing well in school). Whether
or not tinted by my personal travails, I had entertained generally the same
sense of social crisis that the film conveys, which wasn’t simply inspired by
family conditions but was plain to see at school (at least, as colored by my
“puritanical” inclinations) and was conveyed by the media (whether in real-life
stories or in journalistic commentary of some sort). I would affirm this
distressed sense of things that I had all the more in long retrospect, for reasons that hopefully will become clear.
For one thing, the attitude of
the film (in terms of lamenting Theresa’s lifestyle choices) may seem to modern
young viewers on the childish side, and my own similar attitude of 1977 could
be assessed today about as “immature.” But also, as people may forget today, in
the 1970s social changes were taking such surprising and disquieting turns, and
so pervasively, that it wasn’t hard to seem “childish in 2014 terms” in being
morally dismayed at the time.
One measure of how I was “tuned
in” to social-critical thinking then is that, in mid-August 1977, I was finishing
writing the last of the first collection of short stories (I did several such
collections in high school, just as a first enterprising try at becoming a
writer, but overall, only a very few [from 1977-79] got published in any way).
The last story that was the most “socially lamenting” of the collection was
titled “Another Fallen Woman.” It is narrated by a young man who listens to the
confessions of a girl who used to be a good student and had been respected in the
high school that both of them attend, and who fell into bad behaviors—sex,
drugs—and had reached bottom and now wanted to redeem herself.
(It would be oversimplifying to
say this was merely inspired by my sister. In fact, in August 1977, she and I
were coordinating in some short-story writing in the wake of my “debuting” the
set of short stories I mentioned. This situation I’ve long recalled as [mood-wise,
at least] a sort of “rueful swan song” to how we’d gotten along as kids in
earlier years [part of the scenario was her playing the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon], prior to our
“going our separate ways” with the new school year, starting in September 1977.
She joined the rebellious crowd all the more, after being given a taste of
their ways when she was in eighth grade at the high school in 1976-77 [yes,
eighth-graders attended the high school in its first few years]. Another little
fact of the local times: In September 1977, it made a notorious little news
item at school that a classmate of mine [not a friend of mine], Vinny Wolff [I
think the spelling was], committed suicide [at home, or otherwise not at
school]. I don’t think we classmates ever heard the reason.)
Back to the argument: It
is almost too striking for me to find, from this movie, that—amid occasional
references to abortions (still hugely taboo then, especially among Catholics)
and other “darkly socially marginal” stuff—a male college professor, who first
takes Theresa Dunn (the heroine)’s virginity—who is also presented throughout
his scenes as an insufferably self-centered dork—says to her glibly, after they
are done with their encounter, “You are now a fallen woman.” (To which she
responds, “Thank God!”—which goes to show the moral straits/awry-ness, and
“experimentation,” this film depicts—and also the relative crudeness of the way
it is expressed.)
By the way, the larger plot
follows Theresa—after her having a literature class with the dork—getting her
degree/certification as a teacher of deaf children, which it is a breath of
fresh air to see her character getting into, complete with sunny episodes with
the children, a good many minutes into the film, after her tawdry episodes of
sexual pit stops.
(See the
theme key, especially on references to
hedonism, and the subsection “
Different sets of ethical precepts may make
it hard to adjudicate a solution” [in no way am I endorsing students’
coupling sexually with teachers in line with both of them subscribing to some
kind of hedonism, or Epicureanism, as justification for this], and the
subsection “
Some personal experiences
from high school: teachers crossing the line.” Whether both of these
characters, Theresa and the prof, would have alluded to a “hedonistic”
philosophy as a justification for their sexual behavior is speculative at best,
but what is more ascertainable is that they don’t seem to have compunctions
about what they’ve done, in view of their respective and relative roles,
teacher and student/paid assistant. Further, what the movie’s director presumably
sought as a “judicious critical response” that audiences would bring to this is
a little unclear, but is suggested by my considerations, starting below, about
the film’s
feminism as well as its
criticism of
youthful hedonism. As to
more obvious facts: It’s important to note that at this point in the film,
Theresa would not have plausibly been [in 1977] apt to claim sexually-related
abuse or the like from the professor, especially as she is of adult age at this
point. If she had claimed such abuse years later, if all the facts were known,
she would have been considered not credible. But this is all inference and
supposition from fictional characters; where 1977 audiences might have taken
issue with the professor—while they may have felt the sexual liaison was
daring/questionable but not necessarily a
complete, awful breach of ethics—was with his crudeness, high-handedness,
and other aspects of male chauvinism to be discussed elsewhere in this entry.
Of course, on an ethical level
as a
professional, he probably would have been considered by his teaching peers
and administrators to have erred then, as such a person similarly acting would
in later decades.)
(Autobio
blip: When I was seeing a talking counselor in 1977 [this had started
in 1976], and I had him read my collection of stories from summer 1977, he
commented apropos of “Another Fallen Woman” that I should stick more to what I
knew, i.e., I was taking too much of a risk as a writer with it. In its sheer
formal qualities, I felt at the time this criticism may well have been true,
but I thought I was not far off-base with at least some of its social
observations. In fact, one thing he might have considered a kid’s fictional bit
of pretentiousness—as I figured in the wake of his response—was a reference in
the story to a “sex club.” But wouldn’t you know, Goodbar has a reference to
this sort of thing in almost the same terms. And as I long thought since
1977, I had heard that year of something like “sex clubs”—from the media, no
doubt. That was one hallmark of 1970s social life, that kind of “social
development,” even if you disapproved. Meanwhile, I didn’t know of “sex clubs”
firsthand or from friends.)
##
We hear stories of people who
lived through tough times of another era: the World War II vet who was on the
Bataan Death March—and he tells you details, can talk about the sweat, the
pain, the despair…. If he wrote about his experience like Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead, you could assent
fully that, yes, that was a tough time for men to be brave, to trudge mightily
under frightful war conditions in beastly-tropical environs…. But there’s
inevitably a limit to how much today’s young can fully “relate.” The most they
can do is appreciate the story of old experience, and if they return to it
years later, maybe they can appreciate it more with age-enlightened eyes.
Well, growing up in the 1970s,
with not as much air conditioning as today; developments in popular music that
seemed to go (for young minds) tragically downhill with the growing popularity
of disco (End note); economic
troubles such as resulting from the Arab-induced oil embargos (in 1973 and
~1979); and the difficulties of family members succumbing to temptations from
drugs, etc.,—was all not as bad as being a soldier in WW II. But each
generation is entitled to name its own “pain from which it had to grow,” just
as today’s is or will be. And for me, the peculiar pain of seeing peers go down
the murky road of experimentation in drugs and sex was something that had the
fullest flowering of its galvanizing essence then.
And it wasn’t just I who was
given to lamentation about this; this movie illustrates this too, in fairly
blunt terms.
But what does Looking for Mr. Goodbar have to say to a
broader array of us today? One of the interesting things is that it seems to overlap two themes in a way
that sometimes has them work together, and sometimes puts them at odds (or maybe
leaves the film rather betraying what I think its source novel wanted to say). The two themes are (1) the independence and
self-determination of women, as an obvious outgrowth of the feminist movement
(while this was mocked or opposed by some at the time); and (2) that of what the wages of hedonism can be, especially when it
comes to unbridled sexual activity.
In aiming its moral arrows at
the issue of hedonism, it may seem to undercut its value as a sort of feminist
“screed” or analysis.
The film’s different social-thematic strains
If the novel meant to be a
tragedy along the lines mainly of feminism
[as the major issue] linked to sexuality (I didn’t read it, so I don’t know
if it was), the movie seems to lather this thematic strategy up with a
component of hedonism that may make it seem like an overdone morality play,
which (this one aspect) some people might regard as rather childish or strident
today.
The film ends up showing a young
woman’s suspense-inspiring decline—Theresa is played by Diane Keaton, who
provides clearly the most important actorly anchor in this film (most probably
wouldn’t watch it if not for her)—while also detailing some sexual bizarreness
that was probably scandalizing (among the “proper”) in 1977, and the film may look
less bad today (depending on the age of the beholder). But some details that
are important to note make it tricky to keep on a PG-13 footing (as I try to
make my blog entries). In fact, the film was rated R in 1977, and I think still
would be so today.
For instance, the professor,
named Martin Engle, who indoctrinates Theresa into the “sexual life” early in
the film, is presented as a Prime Jerk, which would seem to serve a feminist
agenda in the film. (I will present this
as cleanly as possible.) They first have sex in his office (as I said, she
works for him as a paid student assistant)—this film just barely skirts a porno
quality, while it doesn’t depict sexual acts fully; certainly there are shots
that go pretty far to suggest what specifically is going on (a lot of which is
important for understanding the story). Anyway, with their first carnal
encounter, the professor, let’s say, has to (opts to) finish the business at
hand quickly. Theresa doesn’t reach the terminus she’d been expecting (though
she’s naïve about the whole thing; she asks if she was the problem…). The prof makes excuses for himself….
Not only do you have Theresa
being (minorly?) disserved at the end of the encounter, but it is at the end of
this scene where the prof says to Theresa glibly (and yet as if he is fond of
her), “You are now a fallen woman.” Feminists schooled within several decades
(whether first-generation “daughters of Gloria Steinem” or the modern
smartphone variety) would sneer, as if cued to “the expected reaction” by
almost Rocky Horror–like
tendentiousness in a playful context, at what a cad the prof is.
Engle later shows himself to be
a horrifically narcissistic oaf: once, Theresa has phoned him at home and
accidentally gotten his wife on the line briefly; then, the next time the prof
sees Theresa, after berating her on the specific phoning faux pas, he barks
that he won’t be compromised, and he stoutly declares he won’t leave his wife.
Yet, just a couple short scenes later, he calls to hook up (to use the modern
term) with Theresa again, apparently out in his vehicle; and shortly afterward,
he grouses to her harshly…in a way that, suffice it to say, continues his
status as Prime Jerk. (It’s interesting to consider how relatively tastefully
Woody Allen handles extramarital affairs in, say, Manhattan [1979].)
Another time, later in the story,
when the prof is calling off their relationship, he is rigid and unsympathetic
in talking about how he and Theresa had just had a fling and now it was over.
(His character is such an ass that even I—however much of a troglodyte
regarding women you see me as—found him completely scorn-worthy. To the point
that I thought he made this story seem
like a brashly, rather too-crass feminist screed [i.e., too crass even for
feminists’ best purposes].)
Theresa, her “good Catholic”
girl-ness coming to the fore, ingenuously takes his cutoff hard, and makes a
passing reference to “love”—as in, what about that? Engle says, his cynicism
pretty canned, “Ah, love.” (Much
later in the film, when Theresa has become a more jaded, experienced
bar-hopper, she meets Prof Engle in a bar—he has given up teaching and has
started writing a novel [gulp!], and he even preposterously claims she was his
one, true love [double gulp!]—she, with a sort of self-satisfaction with her
own Epicurean life, placidly throws his “Ah, love” sneer in his face.)
Whether per a feminist philosophy, or per a critique of hedonism, males
are the negatively serving “prime movers” in this story
Not only with Prime Horse’s Ass
Engle, but with some of the other males Theresa takes up with, collectively as components
of a feminist story they seem quite heavy-handed and even too cartoonish in
depiction of a “bad male.” Now whether this reflected the designs of novel
author Rossner more than screenwriter Brooks, and whether more intentional on Brooks’
part, it now does help shape how modern viewers might view this film. Maybe
they would consider it of anthropological interest, to see how issues of sexual
politics were handled in mass media in 1977 (this anthropological way would not
be a bad approach; actually, one of my preferred ones for something like this);
but others might regard the film almost as what in retrospect has become a Rocky Horror “big goof” at which, over
beer and cheap snacks, they can hurl darkly enthusiastic catcalls at the screen
on a Saturday night.
It is a measure of this film’s
story—again, with its lesser sides bound up with its more interesting
sides—that as an apparent “consequence” of the end of her affair with the prof,
Theresa seems she is a bit disillusioned and liberated all at once (not both
precisely together). Is this to say, as a thematic agenda item, if it wasn’t for the narcissistic, imperial
male “using” the genuine female, she wouldn’t go down the slippery slope of
wider and lingering moral turpitude?
Keep looking, and you shall find
more satisfaction, the film seems to suggest…but at what price?
Theresa finds some more
satisfaction—but more danger—when she meets up (in a bar, natch) with another
enticing sexual partner—played by a young-looking Richard Gere, who is playing
Tony LoPonto, a sort of mystique-bearing, temperamental Italian American.
Later we find (was this
connection meant?) that Tony has accidentally dropped a switchblade into her
lap…. Which tends to foreshadow an unpleasant denouement to the larger story. (By
the way, it is not Tony who does her in, though the story seems to suggest this will happen, up till quite
close to the end.)
The last scene, setting some terms: Theresa escapes the illusorily wrong guy with the aid of the
really wrong guy
I watched this film three times,
and only once watched the very last
sequence, when Theresa is killed; that was effective as cinema chaos, but awful
to see—fortunately, it was disguised somewhat by a strobe light slicing the
visuals up—and it was awful not just in what visual details conveyed the
violence, but in the way it “completed” the moral arc. Notably, this murder situation,
with actor Tom Berenger as Theresa’s most fatal sexual partner, has this
partner with a serious case of sexual identity confusion. Pointedly in this
film, this man who does in Theresa is not the Italian hothead Tony, despite an
enticing bunch of red herrings that have suggested he will kill her, but is
someone she has randomly “picked up,” and not primarily for sex, but really as
a means to get away from one James at a bar, who she is now regarding, in
modern terms (but not terms used at the time), as a stalker.
James has been her one
occasional “hookup partner”—and yearning “puppy dog” of a guy—who really seems
like a decent sort and conveys that he has her best interests at heart. Indeed,
James (played by William Atherton, whose film debut was in the Steven
Spielberg–directed The Sugarland Express
[1974]) is a social worker who has earnestly gotten involved with her (professionally,
at first) when she has gotten herself ingenuously involved in the family of a
young Black student in the class she teaches at the deaf-students school.
Contrarily, the wary man who
Theresa brings into her apartment to escape James—actually, when she has just
proclaimed to a bartender that she is resolving to foreswear the sex-and-drugs
life—is a psychopath who not only “swings” between heterosexual relations—he
says he has fathered a child—and homosexual, but also seems notably unstable.
He sniffs what may be amyl nitrate for an “as-needed” high, and is
spontaneously defensive about his sexual identity: he seems to be a sometime
gay who is paranoid about being identified as gay, and then seems to prove
impotent when he is on the brink of sexual relations with Theresa. And then he
is not too slow to resort to physical violence when he finally starts giving
her a rough kind of sex I won’t elucidate further.
It’s to be noted that of all the
seamy and sordid stuff in the film, this murder sequence, coming at the end, is
the most appalling. We should briefly consider (in Part 2) what immediately
precedes this situation, a sequence involving outdoor New Year’s revels out of
which the killer male emerges rather randomly, a weird situation that seems,
per the film’s terms, somewhat a mysterious “parable” as well as a “realistic”
situation illustrating the darker side of the world Theresa flirts with and is
hurt by.
To be continued in Part 2, on my other blog.
##
End note.
In a way that I would have been
enthusiastic to explain, I would have said it helps to understand how pop music
got to the point where Diana Ross, originally of the broad-appeal,
Motown-produced, 1960s musical trio The Supremes, put out a song called “Love
Hangover” in 1976 (which, in its breathy delivery, minor chords, and so on,
connotes all the dark seaminess the song’s title may suggest). This song indeed
is sampled in Goodbar, and to me
really sums up the atmosphere of disco (dance club) life in 1976-77. I had
started a big blog entry that, seemingly too ambitiously (yet meant to support
this film review entry), sought to sketch the history of pop music in the U.S. from the
1950s through the 1970s, with glimpses at its antecedents.
It was to show how
R&B—“rhythm and blues,” which was initially more popular among Blacks—developed
along with the genre known as rock ’n’ roll (rock), which was initially more
popular among whites, with the historical/cultural development that rock (in
the 1960s) first became the province of “acceptable-to-whites” bands like The
Beatles (and other British-invasion groups). This British “incursion”
represented a (in retrospect) weird situation of British music combos aping
(and blending) what they saw as typically American folk music (two originally
independent genres), blues-related (a Black form) and country-related music (a
white form). The resultant product, whether hewing more to traditional U.S.
blues/R&B or not, featured a conspicuous dance beat (and was generally
marketed, or thought of, by the Brits as R&B).
This then led to the musical
developments of the 1970s, when initially more genre-pure Black-oriented music
developed popularity among white audiences (i.e., soul, funk, and so on did) on
the “risen tide” of marketing and consciousness of the already-popular whites-aping-Blacks
music. Black music developed disco strains (by about 1975), from different
specific directions (the artists at issue came out of Motown, e.g., Diana Ross;
and the Stax/Volt constellation, e.g. Johnnie Taylor, and elsewhere; all of
these schools originally, in the 1960s, did not attract the opprobrium [from
whites] that was later, in the 1970s, aimed at disco). Also, by about 1976, white
artists started to include disco songs (alternatively released as singles)
among their albums or songs that more generally conformed with their usual type
of product (the reign of disco, as a marketing avenue that seemed to extract
“concessions” out of every artist who started as purveying something else, was
about 1976-80). The main drawback in
disco for fans of earlier pop (rock) music was that it featured a cynically
pronounced dance-beat component and seemed, in its lyrics and some of its
production values, to celebrate the perceived tawdriness and self-indulgence of
“disco” life (life surrounding the dance clubs that thrived on this music).
More recent histories tend to emphasize the way New York gay culture supported this
development, but I don’t know too much about that.
This may all sound like a
history of a lot of pompous positions taken on something relatively trivial;
but pop music as an important component of American life still exists, and
remains a sort of important alternative “language” for youth. My history here
is meant to show how “disco culture” seemed to run a darker, and arguably
distracted, course from what the likes of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones
did, even if very early on their music was looked at as gauche, “jungle music”
in the view of Archie Bunker types, and so on.
Here is a tentative “table of
contents” from the drafted blog entry, to help you get the drift:
1. American pop music long had Black influences; records became a
key conduit
2. Cultural improvements for Blacks following World War II
3. Pop sensations of the 1950s crossed racial lines in creative
ways; merging of identities became an emblematic trope
4. Young artistic types in England climbed out of low economic
prospects via American music
5. With all else, The Beatles may have represented an
Irish-folksong influence; The Rolling Stones’ difference
6. When The Beatles got manager Epstein, their career launched;
Beatlemania as a cultural epiphenomenon followed close behind
7. Rock music developed credibility among critics, as its ambition
grew; Black artists enjoyed a standing, in the popular charts and pantheon,
amid the whites
8. How did disco start? Was it so new? Yet white-aimed, “authentic”
rockers eventually made disco songs on their own albums
9. What was “wrong” with disco?
10. Various disco hits came out of groups that had long been in the
R&B field
11. What kind of historical justification, or “having a place in
the sequence of things,” did disco have?
