Simon & Garfunkel and Millionaires as different but related social classes
Any opinion of Millionaires? They seem like a really cheap, bad version of Ke$ha, but a cheap, bad version of Ke$ha doesn't particularly violate the spirit of Ke$ha (though the comparison only works best if one notices only the party-'n-excess Ke$ha without the rest of her). Also, it turns out that Millionaires' early singles predate Ke$ha hitting the Top 40, so influence may run two ways here or might not be direct but just a similar milieu or zeitgeist. Also, I like Millionaires' live cover of "My Chick Bad" (the studio version is drier).
Also, "cheap and bad" isn't always bad. Also, I kind of like "Drinks On Me," at least when it reaches the chorus. And the video is clever:
They're no Ke$ha, or Dev, but I'm not here to think about their relative merit so much as to compare and contrast them to Simon & Garfunkel in order to sketch out my ideas about social class. Well, won't even sketch the ideas, just say that "upper-middle-working-class," while often playing a role, is conceived too broadly to describe how we perceive/conceive social class in our immediate experience. (The word "immediate" is my fudge factor here.)
Why Simon & Garfunkel? Because a bunch of us were talking about them the other day and I pointed out that Paul Simon in his S&G days romanticized the fuck out of suicide and portrayed self-destruction as social critique and so forth. S&G and Leonard Cohen were sort of my teenage gateway drugs who led to Dylan then the Velvets then the Stooges.
Regarding social class, you could say that Ke$ha and Dev and Millionaires are more white trash and less teacher's pets than are S&G-Cohen-Dylan-Velvets-Stooges (and Nirvana and Hole and onward). I'm not sure how right that is; in any event, that distinction is still too broad considering how similar Ke$ha et al. are to S&G et al., while yet so obviously being distinct that... well, why am I so sure they're distinct? In any event, there are plenty of people in the "white trash" category who don't share Ke$ha's drinks-'n'-party romanticism, and plenty of teacher's pets who don't share Iggy's old drugs-'n'-dissolution romanticism. So what I'm fiddling around with here is the idea of two kinda sorta distinct romanticized self-destruction social classes: the S&G side is self-destruction as a social critique, taking oneself out as a moral stand - even if you're smart enough to know better, e.g. Dylan going, "She knows there's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all." Despite this great knowledge, Dylan '65 sat mostly on the "no success like failure" side of the seesaw. And he wouldn't have been famous if he hadn't.
Now, in the Ke$ha party-hard class, the Party here isn't just fun, it's a social identity, it's a stance, it's integrity in the face of being settled,* it's a streaming banner proclaiming LIFE.
So our two social classes here are (1) the self-destruction-as-social-do-good class, the beautiful losers and sensitive suicides running their self-immolation as social critique, and (2) the party-till-you-puke,-and-puke-and-puke-again class, self-destruction as an offering to the life force. Maybe we can call the two classes the Critical Thinkers and the Religious Party Pukers, "religious" because the Party is an ethic and an ideal, the vomit is a sacrament.
Of course, implicit in this is that no true Critique and no true Party is achievable in this compromised and lifeless world, so really what our deadly revelers are doing is honoring the Critical Thinking God and the Party God in His/Her absence, self-destruction being the act of honoring, death as an homage to (absent) life. The Crit Thinkers back in the day were more clear about this than the Party Pukers are now, which is maybe why as a class Party Pukers continue to make good music, while nowadays the Crits rarely do.
My Party Puke pantheon for recent years is Ke$ha's "Blah Blah Blah" (and a lot of her first album), Asher Roth's "I Love College," and LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem." For the Crit side I have to go back to Courtney Love's "Life Despite God" to find anything pantheon-worthy, though I've such a prejudice against the past 30 years of the Crit class's music (my class? my former class?), that I'm really not looking. So who knows? Maybe there's something amazing going on with the Japandroids that I'm just not getting. I've only started paying attention to them. And still on my must-get-around-to-reading-this list is Sabina's Libertines gig at One Week One Band, which likely will result in my finally listening to some Libertines tracks.
John Belushi belongs in this discussion somewhere,** and Guns N' Roses. GN'R might have straddled our two social classes, and several more social classes as well.
Country music's beer-and-bust tracks are a different story, though with some similarities to this one.
This blogpost plays on riffs I've been going on about for over forty years, but I'm trying to push social class into the discussion these days.
*At least it symbolizes such integrity and refusal to settle, even if I think it actually is too settled.
**But I've seen very little of his work.
Click to viewAlso, "cheap and bad" isn't always bad. Also, I kind of like "Drinks On Me," at least when it reaches the chorus. And the video is clever:
They're no Ke$ha, or Dev, but I'm not here to think about their relative merit so much as to compare and contrast them to Simon & Garfunkel in order to sketch out my ideas about social class. Well, won't even sketch the ideas, just say that "upper-middle-working-class," while often playing a role, is conceived too broadly to describe how we perceive/conceive social class in our immediate experience. (The word "immediate" is my fudge factor here.)
Why Simon & Garfunkel? Because a bunch of us were talking about them the other day and I pointed out that Paul Simon in his S&G days romanticized the fuck out of suicide and portrayed self-destruction as social critique and so forth. S&G and Leonard Cohen were sort of my teenage gateway drugs who led to Dylan then the Velvets then the Stooges.
Regarding social class, you could say that Ke$ha and Dev and Millionaires are more white trash and less teacher's pets than are S&G-Cohen-Dylan-Velvets-Stooges (and Nirvana and Hole and onward). I'm not sure how right that is; in any event, that distinction is still too broad considering how similar Ke$ha et al. are to S&G et al., while yet so obviously being distinct that... well, why am I so sure they're distinct? In any event, there are plenty of people in the "white trash" category who don't share Ke$ha's drinks-'n'-party romanticism, and plenty of teacher's pets who don't share Iggy's old drugs-'n'-dissolution romanticism. So what I'm fiddling around with here is the idea of two kinda sorta distinct romanticized self-destruction social classes: the S&G side is self-destruction as a social critique, taking oneself out as a moral stand - even if you're smart enough to know better, e.g. Dylan going, "She knows there's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all." Despite this great knowledge, Dylan '65 sat mostly on the "no success like failure" side of the seesaw. And he wouldn't have been famous if he hadn't.
Now, in the Ke$ha party-hard class, the Party here isn't just fun, it's a social identity, it's a stance, it's integrity in the face of being settled,* it's a streaming banner proclaiming LIFE.
So our two social classes here are (1) the self-destruction-as-social-do-good class, the beautiful losers and sensitive suicides running their self-immolation as social critique, and (2) the party-till-you-puke,-and-puke-and-puke-again class, self-destruction as an offering to the life force. Maybe we can call the two classes the Critical Thinkers and the Religious Party Pukers, "religious" because the Party is an ethic and an ideal, the vomit is a sacrament.
Of course, implicit in this is that no true Critique and no true Party is achievable in this compromised and lifeless world, so really what our deadly revelers are doing is honoring the Critical Thinking God and the Party God in His/Her absence, self-destruction being the act of honoring, death as an homage to (absent) life. The Crit Thinkers back in the day were more clear about this than the Party Pukers are now, which is maybe why as a class Party Pukers continue to make good music, while nowadays the Crits rarely do.
My Party Puke pantheon for recent years is Ke$ha's "Blah Blah Blah" (and a lot of her first album), Asher Roth's "I Love College," and LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem." For the Crit side I have to go back to Courtney Love's "Life Despite God" to find anything pantheon-worthy, though I've such a prejudice against the past 30 years of the Crit class's music (my class? my former class?), that I'm really not looking. So who knows? Maybe there's something amazing going on with the Japandroids that I'm just not getting. I've only started paying attention to them. And still on my must-get-around-to-reading-this list is Sabina's Libertines gig at One Week One Band, which likely will result in my finally listening to some Libertines tracks.
John Belushi belongs in this discussion somewhere,** and Guns N' Roses. GN'R might have straddled our two social classes, and several more social classes as well.
Country music's beer-and-bust tracks are a different story, though with some similarities to this one.
This blogpost plays on riffs I've been going on about for over forty years, but I'm trying to push social class into the discussion these days.
*At least it symbolizes such integrity and refusal to settle, even if I think it actually is too settled.
**But I've seen very little of his work.