Bohemian Footnotes #2 - Bohemian Like You
You got a great car.
Yeah, what's wrong with it today?
I used to have one too,
Maybe I'll come and have a look.
I really love your hairdo, yeah.
I'm glad you like mine too,
See we're looking pretty cool.
Getcha!
So what do you do?
Oh yeah, I wait tables too.
No I haven't heard your band
Cause you guys are pretty new.
But if you dig on Vegan food.
Well come over to my work
I'll have them cook you something that you'll really love.
Cause I like you,
Yeah I like you.
And I'm feeling so Bohemian like you,
Yeah I like you,
Yeah I like you,
And I feel wahoo, wahoo, wahoo!
Wait. Who's that guy just hanging at your pad?
He's lookin' kinda bummed.
Yeah you broke up that's too bad.
I guess it's fair if he always pays the rent
And he doesn't get all bent
About sleepin' on the couch when I'm there... Etc.
Bohemian Like You, Courtney Taylor-Taylor.
With sixty percent being good middle-class boys, The Rolling Stones were Bohemians from the start1.. They didn’t need rock’n’roll to work for them, like Mr. Presley or The Beatles did. The others could break the rules once they’d become successful, but Mick Jagger was still enrolled at the LSE and could become a banker anytime he chose. He was into R’n’B for purely aesthetic reasons, meaning that, even if his blues were never very sincere (and he never wanted them to be), the band’s imitation of the blues always was2..
If The Stones and others managed to mobilise millions of students and teenagers in free-love and drug-use, they encouraged even more to sit in their parents’ houses listening to records. The mass-Bohemianism of the late-sixties changed Bohemia from a place that could be pin-pointed on no map to a state-of-being transmitted through record sales3.. One could consume Bohemia or live it vicariously; working all day and growing your hair long at night4.. You could even try and live it, if you wanted, with the rock star as the perfect role-model. Youth culture and mass-Bohemianism became the same, just as rock’n’roll was a synonym for freedom5..
It was no surprise then that The Dandy Warhols cribbed, knowingly, The Stones’ Brown Sugar, when they mined the platinum snub of Bohemian Like You. Not because The Rolling Stones were a joke, but because the image of the Bohemian The Stones had constructed was still the one to aspire to thirty years later. Or, at least, it was the popular image of Bohemianism, because the music was still popular. It was something upon which even parents and progeny could agree.
The litany of clichés sung were snide, but harmless; they must have applied to The Dandy Warhols once and most of their fans still6.. The joke was that we could all sound like that if we took ourselves too seriously. And, in the video of the single, the words run along the screen, as on a karaoke video, so that you can sound like that if you wish.
Of course, The Dandy Warhols are singing the song for real, on the records7. and in the ads8.. They made the money from it too. The rock star’s success makes them acceptable9.. Without stardom, one can support the rock’n’roll fantasy from a minimum wage (The Slacker) or a trust fund (The Hipster), but, however it is done, it remains only the moving around of the image, rather than Bohemianism itself. To be successful, one must play by the rules or, at least, cheat discretely. And with success come mansions instead of squats and A* grade drugs instead of whatever killed that guy you‘ve never heard of. Rock stars would be decadents, if they could find the time10..
Rock is the right medium for the Bohemian; it rejects technique, offering a living without demanding discipline. All you need is someone to drive the van. The Rolling Stones have a bus though and so do The Dandy Warhols. Such are the trappings of success and it is the successful ones that people want to be like. Ever-changing non-convention is easily ignored for the time-tested representation, but when the two set against each other, as in the Dandy Warhols/Brian Jonestown11. Massacre12. tour film, DiG!, the difference becomes clear13.: The Dandys organise their photoshoot in the BJM’s drug-strewn, party-ruined living room. Although, few would have heard of the film, if they hadn’t heard of The Dandy Warhols first.
Notes
1. "(The Beatles' success) allowed the Rolling Stones to come along and then be as cool, as obnoxious, as bohemian, as 'fuck you,' as in-your-face as they wanted to be. It suddenly turned out that you could act this way and not suddenly burst into flames. You could just get away with it." Greil Marcus in interview with Jason Gross, June 1997.
2. “Mick Jagger was never a rocker. He wasn't a mod, either. He was a bohemian, an antiutopian version of what Americans called a folkie. That is, he was attracted to music of a certain innocence as only a fairly classy--and sophisticated--person can be.” Robert Christgau, The Rolling Stones, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, 1976.
3. “What was about to happen was an unprecedented contradiction in terms, mass bohemianism, and this is where the idea of "pop" became key. (…) Applied first to low-priced classical concerts and then to Tin Pan Alley product, the word was beginning to achieve more general cultural currency by the mid-Fifties, when London-based visual artists like Eduardo Paolozzi were proposing that a schlock form (e.g., science fiction pulp) might nurture "a higher order of imagination" than a nominally experimental one (e.g., little magazine). Shocking.” Robert Christgau, Ibid.
4. “There were solid economic reasons for the rise of mass bohemianism. Juxtapose a 20-year rise in real income to the contradiction in which the straight-and-narrow worker/producer is required to turn into a hedonistic consumer off-hours, and perhaps countless kids, rather than assuming their production function on schedule, will choose to "fulfill themselves" outside the job market. (…) for all these kids, popular culture meant rock and roll, the art form created by and for their hedonistic consumption. In turn, rock and roll meant the Rolling Stones.” Robert Christgau, Ibid.
5. “We don’t care, we want product as cynically as they dish it, too bad. After all, the stones have a lot to stand for. After all, so do we.” Lester Bangs, It’s Only The Rolling Stones, The Village Voice, Oct. 1974.
6. "The Portland quartet known as the Dandy Warhols were born kicking and screaming in 1993, making music to, ahem, “drink to”, an alternative soundtrack for slackers, stoners, and midnight tokers which celebrated the permanent vacations of the elegantly wasted. Think Keith Richards with New Wave hair." Matt James, Pop Matter, Aug. 2010.
7. Bohemian Like You, No. 5 in the UK charts, 2001, taken from the album Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia.
8. Vodafone, Ford Focus, Ford Mustang, Holden Astra,GM Summerdrive, Citroen C4 Picasso, Next.
9. “Conservatives can accept some Bohemianism, but only for the few to whom it is appropriate, not for the masses and as Allan Bloom wrote, it must justify itself with intellectual or artistic achievement. Anything else is just mass non-conformism, as self-contradictory as it is self-indulgent.” Robert Locke, Sweet Land of Libertarians: A Conservative Critique of Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s So Great About America, Front Page Magazine.
10. “We’re too busy to be decadent.” Bill Wyman in an unpublished interview with Lester Bangs, cited in Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste.
11. Brian Jones, of The Rolling Stones, died on July 3rd 1969.
12. Although presented in the film as an unhinged, self-destructive, 'free spirit,' the 60s-based music of Anton Newcombe and The Brian Jonestown Massacre is described as: "not an act of invention; it was not based on any pretense of crafting something new; it was a thoroughly post-modern music; it was pastiche of everything." Carlo McCormick, editor Paper Magazine, DiG!, 2004.
13. "The Dandy Warhols are the greatest cartoon, that's what I think it takes to be successful as a pop star. I don't give a fuck what they do. It's not for me; he's not singing songs to me." Anton Newcombe on The Dandy Warhols, Ibid; "They were absolutely our favourite band. And they were the most interesting, amazing characters, but it's basically like a pack of fourteen year old boys from abusive, broken homes set loose in the ghetto. Y'know, that's basically what that felt like. Yeah, let's go hang out with them, but come on, these kids are all gonna end up in prison." Courtney Taylor, of The Dandy Warhols, on The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Ibid.