Reviving San Diego's Rock Renaissance
I’ve opined that the two definitive eras for Christmas music were the Middle Ages and the 1940s. Even my favorite performers from later eras have come up with compositions that underwhelm me. (Exhibits A and B: Chuck Berry’s “Run Rudolph Run” and the Beach Boys’ “Little Saint Nick,” with both Lennon’s and McCartney’s efforts representing C and D.)
However, there are some holiday songs that do offer new views of the season … Not always jolly, but interesting in one way or another.
(Paul Kaufman gets Crass with a Beatle’s musical legacy.)
On Saturday, John Lennon would have been 70 years old. Hard to fathom for someone who personified youthfulness; I felt the same way when this occasion passed for John Kennedy back in the ’80s.
These days, everything in this country is FOR $ALE, including democracy itself. So I’m afraid the most likely scenario I imagine had he lived is a barrage of advertisements, ready to ride the huge demographic wave of baby-boomer retirees:
“Picture yourself taking some Metamucil…”
“Well, you should see Polygrip Pam…”
“Viagra, yeah, yeah, yeah … Viagra, yeah, yeah, yeah … And with a pill like this, you know you should be glad … ”
(Paul Kaufman contemplates exciting new hacks for the Beatles simulation game.)
VH1 is in full promotional mode for the release of the The Beatles: Rock Band game. I’m an unabashed fan of the band, and I’m generationally marked as one who never tires of hearing these tunes and seeing the film footage. Seth Schiesel of the New York Times raves that “by reinterpreting an essential symbol of one generation in the medium and technology of another, The Beatles: Rock Band provides a transformative entertainment experience.”
I like that idea in concept, and teaching a new generation about this music via today’s electronic vernacular is a great idea. But somehow, hitting color-coded buttons in time to the music strikes me as a rather limited goal. As the technology grows, these are the buttons I’d like to be able to push:
Toby Gibson reminds us it’s been 28 years since John Lennon’s death. We’ve already discussed at length that very dark moment just before the Reagan era, but it was an event that affected many of us deeply, provoking black humor and profound sorrow and coloring our attitudes about peace, love and understanding. (I can still recall every detail of that other Monday night.)
How about if we change gears, though, and talk a little more about what Lennon and the Beatles meant to us? For me, they were the original touchstone for what being in a rock-‘n’-roll band was supposed to be. How about you?
Blackberrying CNN on the ride in to work, I learned that next week marks the 30th anniversary of the mass murder-suicide of 909 Americans who’d followed Jim Jones from California into the jungles of Guyana.
It got me thinking (again) that there was a lot of really horrible stuff happening when most of us were in secondary school — much of it in California in general or San Diego in particular.