Rarely has the bifurcation in American popular culture been so neatly summarized as it was in two recent television song fests broadcast a week apart on the most and the least mature television networks. The C.B.S. network presented a production of its electronic renaissance man, Robert Herridge, “Folk Sound, U.S.A.”; and A.B.C., where private eyes and public enemies roam at large, apotheosized teen-age fake sounds in an unrefreshingly long nonmusical pause sponsored by the Coca-Cola Company. The aural and visual juxtaposition of true vocal art with the most blatant prefabricated kitsch clarified the choices involved in having our musical culture dominated by show-business robber barons rather than imaginative and dedicated artists.
What the payola scandals never revealed, the A.B.C. teen-age
special did: it matters more that the wholesome Pat Boones and Dick Clarks keep
teen-agers from a truly satisfying musical heritage than that they make a lot
of dough from their own music-publishing firms and pressing plants. It is less
significant that the teen-agers and subteens get a bad deal on the $50 million
they spend for single records each year; the true larceny is that the tinsel
curtain of blah raised by the wizards of the echo chamber separates early 16
million kids from the kind of art and leisure which it takes to make adults.
This is no academic quibbling; genuine maturity doesn’t
coexist with the fake substitutes for art that package producers like P & G
have sponsored for a generation in soap opera, and tat soft-drink makers
support in their subliminal campaign to equate sociability with the cultivation
of caries. The marketing strategies of the mass-volume, low-unit-cost
manufacturers (with exceptions that prove the rule, like Purex sponsoring “The
Sacco-Vanzetti Story”) are committed to a philosophy that puts the profit
picture of their individual corporations above any and all other
considerations—the security of a country of befuddled entertainment addicts,
the over-all programming balance of the dominant medium of our culture, the
real growth of individuals captain in a teen-ager culture.
The “Coke Time” special provides a good insight into the
dynamics of a teen-age culture, perhaps symbolized by the title of Dick Clark’s
book, Your Happiest Years, its basic
assumption being that maturity is a necessary anticlimax. The TV program of
“face sounds, U.S.A.” sketched out this Normal Rockwell image of fun.
Pony-tailed innocents affecting their fathers’ tail-dragging shirts; the
stereotype (and implicitly pathetic loneliness) of the teen-ager forever on the
telephone, looking for the kind of friendliness and perspective that his
popular culture denies him; the dreamy irrelevance of the songs fixated on
going steady (will we stop this madness when it gets back as far as
kindergarten? it's back to junior high already), the terror of realizing that
this program celebrating an adolescence of carefree innocence (despite the
tacked on seriousness of the last few bars) is a concept of life also accepted
by the adults who watch this program—half of Dick Clark’s afternoon sessions in
cultural amnesia are adults, using the term loosely.
One hears about the miracles performed by tape editors and
echo-chamber masters on the tonsils of Fabian and Frankie Avalon, but one has
to see them, eyes full of fear and amateur-night-stiff on camera, to realize
how much these children have been had. One wonders what kind of an adult life
such pseudo performers can live the day they are barred from the echo chambers.
Annette Funicello, who was as charming as it is possible for a Mouseketeer to
be, looked literally terrified as she tried to carry a tune with Frankie
Avalon. In a taped montage of “hits” by the stars, where echo chamber
prevailed, it was possible to separate the singers from the long-playing
pinocchios. It is interesting to speculate on the wish fulfillment involved in
making stars out of them. In the ugliness of working-class sections of our big
cities, it is easy to identify with someone, who, but for the grace of
R.C.A.-Victor goes I, easy to forget the cheapness and despair of actual life
by dreaming through television and the network of fan magazines that feed on
the same pseudo-art.
But the horror of the teen-agers’ bargain with the show-business
robber barons is fully apparent only when its emptiness is compared with the
real article. Robert Herridge, though a kind of cultural polymath himself, is
wise enough to go to the best consulting talent to develop his specials. Nat
Hentoff, who collaborated with Herridge on “The Sound of Jazz,” the best single
program on the subject so far on television and the only one to win a Newport
Jazz Festival TV Award, was also the consultant for this program. What this
means is that directors cannot take over with tricky exhibitionism, but must
stick to a hierarchy which subordinates TV’s resources to the hegemony of the
musical form under consideration. Cisco Houston was the narrator, keying fluid
transitions from singer to group to singer as the camera explored the wide and
varied terrain of folk music. The Herridge tradition of spare, even austere,
staging was doubly appropriate for a program of folk music. Two things
distinguished the teen-ager’s pseudo world from the fully dimensional cosmos of
the folk singer: the comprehensiveness of emotional range and thematic content.
There were songs about working, songs about living, and loving, and dying,
chants about Whitman’s America and chants about selling peanuts, songs of hope
and despair.
And there was a magnificent display of unique personalities,
a colorful spectrum of individuation that made the gray blurs of the teen-age
heroes all the more pitiful: John Lee Hooker, lips quivering in the honest
laments of his feelings; John Jacob Niles, with a prophetic kind of intensity
in both eye and tenor voice; Joan Baez, a teen-ager with voice and soul both
beautifully her own; Cisco Houston, a roustabout sensibility.
There is a
certain logic after all to the gimmicks and gyrations of Teenland’s pseudo
artists: they must try to establish themselves by an external sign that hides
their inner lack of grace. Ed “Kookie” Byrnes, as Jack Gould wryly observed, is
the only performer that ever combed his way to stardom. His narcissistic
gesture, so typical of today’s teen-age obsession with surface, betrays an
empty head. Just as the painfully arch hip talk between him, the “beatnik” of
the Dobie Gillis Show, and Pat Boone (aging, unhip representative of that adult
land known as Squaredom) is another example of the fake individuations of the
teen-age kitsch makers. (Teen-agers can buy for 50 cents at their drugstores
now a dictionary of hip Kookie talk.)
Nor should we be misled by Coca-Cola’s shrewd merchandising
campaign in the high schools, with its sloughing off an artistic problem by a
phony genuflection to Culture. Hi-fi clubs have been formed in several hundred
high schools to encourage talent in the popular arts. The three winners—a
painfully chopped up Chopin etude, a reasonably interesting soprano aria, and a
sympathetic version of the best-selling quartet—show how possible it is for
fake popular art to coexist with genteel Culture, six days of noisy tripe
followed by a hushed day of reverence. If Coke really wants youngsters to grow,
rather than simply to hook them early by “being more sociable’ than its
competitor, it should distribute kinescopes of the Herridge program for
high-school assemblies and give their English teachers free Folkways albums—to
show the teen-agers what they’re missing in their sticky little cotton candy
cosmos.
For when you finally get down to it, the tragedy and waste
of fake art is that it renders people “connable”—these poor innocent lambs
believing they’re living in the best of all possible worlds! (Don’t their
transistorized ears keep telling them they’re on the right wave length?) And
the measure of our respect for folk art is that it keeps little people wise in
their own way, ready to spot and spurn the faker. We have Herridge to thank for
making the case so clear.
--The Humanities Today, The Clearing House, Vol. 35, No. 5 (Jan., 1961)
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