What modern invention/innovation do you wish had *never* been developed?

And again, pop culture has always moved at the fastest rate possible. With only those elements of what has gone before that "the masses" enjoy retained. Injineer's young friend plays Django, if he keeps that up for a decade or so he'll be playing century old music! Not a bad innings.

Chaplin, much the same. I'm sure more college kids recognise whoever stars in whatever show is big at the minute than recognise the little tramp. But again, the fact anyone recognises someone whose media exposure was as relatively trivial, a century after he became famous speaks to his iconic status.

The point I was making with Chaplin, though, was that he continued to be a present figure in contemporary culture long after his heyday on the screen. His films were constantly packaged and repackaged, shown and reshown, for decades. Reissues with soundtracks prepared in the early thirties were still showing up as filler in Saturday matinees during my own childhood -- not as historical artifacts or novelties but as simple entertainment intended to be taken at face value as such. There were many comics who came along in the years between 1914 and the sixties -- but Chaplin, a figure out of the pre-WW1 past, was still viable entertainment for ordinary New England schoolkids in 1969. New popular culture appeared -- but it didn't erase or obliterate the old.

As recently as the '90s Chaplin's image was still recognizable enough to be used as the mascot in a series of IBM computer commercials. Now, thanks to the internet, you can watch nearly every film he ever made on You Tube, any time of day or night. And yet -- the millenials, for the most part, wouldn't know him from Ben Turpin.

Technology *has* changed the way popular culture is distributed and perceived -- I fully agree with you there. But I'm not satisfied to say "It's always been thus," because quite obviously it hasn't. It's *changed*, and changed for the worse.

LizzieMaine said:

The point I was making with Chaplin, though, was that he continued to be a present figure in contemporary culture long after his heyday on the screen. His films were constantly packaged and repackaged, shown and reshown, for decades. Reissues with soundtracks prepared in the early thirties were still showing up as filler in Saturday matinees during my own childhood -- not as historical artifacts or novelties but as simple entertainment intended to be taken at face value as such. There were many comics who came along in the years between 1914 and the sixties -- but Chaplin, a figure out of the pre-WW1 past, was still viable entertainment for ordinary New England schoolkids in 1969. New popular culture appeared -- but it didn't erase or obliterate the old.

As recently as the '90s Chaplin's image was still recognizable enough to be used as the mascot in a series of IBM computer commercials. Now, thanks to the internet, you can watch nearly every film he ever made on You Tube, any time of day or night. And yet -- the millenials, for the most part, wouldn't know him from Ben Turpin.

Technology *has* changed the way popular culture is distributed and perceived -- I fully agree with you there. But I'm not satisfied to say "It's always been thus," because quite obviously it hasn't. It's *changed*, and changed for the worse.

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I don't know that the view of Charlie Chaplin 50 years ago (40 years after his heyday) and the view of him today is an apples to apples comparison. What if you showed an image of Elvis today? Do you think he would still be recognizable, 37 years after his death? I would certainly think so. Isn't that the kind of cross generational recognition you refer to? It's not that it's dead, it's that it's moved in.

Bing Crosby died the same year as Elvis, and he was still a prominent figure in the public eye right up to the day he died. Why is Elvis still ELVIS, and Crosby, who had a far longer and more varied show business career, is merely a figure from the remote past? Isn't it because the great amoebic creature that is the "Boomer-Rock Era" has obliterated the memory of just how important Crosby was? If anyone under forty recognizes him at all, it's as that weird old guy singing Christmas music with David Bowie. Oh, and he beat his kids.

LizzieMaine said:

Bing Crosby died the same year as Elvis, and he was still a prominent figure in the public eye right up to the day he died. Why is Elvis still ELVIS, and Crosby, who had a far longer and more varied show business career, is merely a figure from the remote past? Isn't it because the great amoebic creature that is the "Boomer-Rock Era" has obliterated the memory of just how important Crosby was? If anyone under forty recognizes him at all, it's as that weird old guy singing Christmas music with David Bowie. Oh, and he beat his kids.

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Why one and not the other is a different issue. I'm simply pointing out that cross-generational recognition is still alive and well, even if you don't particularly like the parties involved.

Modern inventions I wish had not been developed......the blue tooth ear piece. I don't understand how you can spend all day walking around with that thing in your ear.

[video=youtube;ydXenL7iu0w]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydXenL7iu0w[/video]

LizzieMaine said:

But as noted, it hasn't always been such a cycle of consume-digest-excrete the way it is now. The culture of a hundred years ago tended to stick to the ribs of its consumers a lot longer than today's. I submit that this was a *good* thing in that it allowed a real cross-generational appreciation for its products rather than the current everybody-in-their-niche thing we have today.

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I don't think people should make generalizations about 'the culture of one hundred years ago' unless they were there. I'm sorry, but I've said this before on the 'decline in general standards today' thread;
Nothing changes.
Nothings getting worse.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Our interest in the past as a hobby should not blind us to realities of the golden era, nor bias our opinions.

Some of us have more than a little knowledge of those times, often directly from people who *were* there. A hundred years ago was well within the lifetimes of many of our grandparents. Many of us absorbed our knowledge of the Era directly from participants -- or are even old enough that we ourselves experienced holdovers from its culture.

Some things did improve considerably over the past century.

Other things, however, did not.

Things do change.

Things do get worse.

Denial of those truths is merely a way of avoiding responsibility for their consequences.

HudsonHawk said:

Why one and not the other is a different issue. I'm simply pointing out that cross-generational recognition is still alive and well, even if you don't particularly like the parties involved.

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"Why," however, is the very root of the point I've been trying to make. Recognizing a rock-boomer figure like Elvis is to be expected because his recognition has been perpetuated by rock culture itself. But a performer from just ten years before Elvis, oh, let's say Vaughn Monroe, who was fantastically popular with teenagers in the mid to late forties, is utterly forgotten. Why are rock-era performers remembered and non-rock-era performers shoved down the memory hole? There had never before been such a sharp and sudden erasure of an entire popular culture. That's what's different between then and now.

We have this weird collective amnesia about certain events, nostalgia about others, and then attention deficient disorder the rest of the time. What fascinates me is that Elvis, the JFK assassination, and several other events/ people stand out in the minds of our modern culture as belonging to the "boomers" more so than any generation.

JFK, as much as people portray him as this "young visionary president" has this fictional persona suggesting that if he survived would have aligned himself with the boomer subculture of peace and love. JFK was not a boomer, boomers didn't vote for him, and he was very much old guard in a large number of his policies. He's not the president of the boomers. But yet our popular culture has this vision of him that is inaccurate as anything could be. (I'm not saying that his death did not shape the boomer generation- that is a separate issue.)

Elvis wasn't really of the boomer generation either. The eldest boomers were all of 10 years old when he hit number one. But if you talk about the boomers, particularly the older boomers, Elvis is seen as being part of the culture. In all likelihood even the eldest boomer kids were being shielded from this type of music by their parents.

If I ask my parents (the eldest boomers by birth year) the types of things they remember as children I get an entirely different answer than if I ask them what they remember from the fifties. From the childhood it is all Howdy Doody, getting a television set, Melamine plates, snow falls that covered up the windows, when Hurricane Clementine blew the barn doors off, etc. If I ask them about the fifties I get things like Elvis, poodle skirts, etc.

I think it all comes down to money and marketing. You can market JFK and you can market Elvis; both in part because they died relatively young and tragically. You can "have magic" about people who are no longer with us. It's kind of like a generation romanticizing a deceased or absentee parent- the parent takes on all these great magical qualities- "if only this person was still alive- wow the world would be so much better."

I think marketers have picked up on the tendency to romanticize and ran full steam ahead.

As I said, the hand of the Boys has been very much in evidence in all of this. We had an excellent discussion along those lines about a year ago in the "Origin of the Fifties" thread.

I lump the rock era and Boomer culture together precisely because they're all part of the same obscene amoeba -- for exactly the reasons you describe. It's that giant sprawling mass of virtual protoplasm that's engulfed or displaced everything that came before it.

An interesting historical excercise might be to consider where music might have ended up if there had been no World War II, and thus no Baby Boom, and thus no mass juvenilization of popular culture. I blame Hitler, or maybe the Treaty of Versaillles, for rock. Let's see Rolling Stone do an article on *that.*

LizzieMaine said:

"Why," however, is the very root of the point I've been trying to make. Recognizing a rock-boomer figure like Elvis is to be expected because his recognition has been perpetuated by rock culture itself. But a performer from just ten years before Elvis, oh, let's say Vaughn Monroe, who was fantastically popular with teenagers in the mid to late forties, is utterly forgotten. Why are rock-era performers remembered and non-rock-era performers shoved down the memory hole? There had never before been such a sharp and sudden erasure of an entire popular culture. That's what's different between then and now.

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But let's go back to your example of Chaplin...you suggested that the fact he was so well recognized by subsequent generations said something objective and validated his art. Furthermore, the fact that the current generation doesn't recognize him so well says something about their lack of objectivity, as they only recognize the present. Ok. But then we have a figure like Elvis who is still well recognized well beyond his heyday and by the very generation that supposedly has no objectivity. So how do we explain that? You argue that it's because the current generation only appreciates him because they've been told to. I don't agree that's necessarily the logical explanation for Elvis today any more than it is for Chaplin in the 60s and 70s. In fact, I think the evidence contradicts it.

Back in the Cold War, military planners used to say about the USSR and their large Army and Air Force:
"Quantity has a Quality all it's own..."
You could say the same about the Boomers (of which I am one). There were a *lot* of us and what we liked and wanted would be provided by someone, and that includes cars, movies, music, and etc.
As one who was there and enjoyed it immensely, I say, "It was fun while it lasted." The Boys in Marketing didn't provide anything we didn't want, in large quantities. Excellent symbiosis... No apologies...

LizzieMaine said:

As I said, the hand of the Boys has been very much in evidence in all of this. We had an excellent discussion along those lines about a year ago in the "Origin of the Fifties" thread.

I lump the rock era and Boomer culture together precisely because they're all part of the same obscene amoeba -- for exactly the reasons you describe. It's that giant sprawling mass of virtual protoplasm that's engulfed or displaced everything that came before it.

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Yes, I was thinking of that thread when I wrote it. It was an excellent discussion.

I wonder how long the re-imagining of the boomer generation (most of which is done not by the boomers themselves as a generation) will last. Will we still have these pervasive thoughts about the fifties and the sixties 100 years from now? Will "modern" music culture still start with Elvis?

There's also an interesting racial angle to "rock and roll" being "started" in the popular imagination by a white dude who sang a mix of music influenced greatly by black musicians. Even Elvis himself hated being cast as the start or king of rock and roll. I'm not sure if he saw the racism in this or not (he seemed to be quite aware of social issues, but being dead we can't ask him) and that was what made him uncomfortable or if it was a sense of humility or what.

It stands out today in a society that is supposedly so much more "racially aware" and "racially tolerant" that it is an accepted fact that Rock and Roll started with Elvis despite so much evidence to the contrary.

(And in full disclosure, while I am not an Elvis fan who has all his albums, I do love several Elvis songs. I am not anti-Elvis in any sense of the word. I have to change the station when "In the Ghetto" comes on because it makes me cry if I am in a fragile mood. I don't downplay his influence on modern music at all or take any dispute with people who are fans.)

We explain that by the fact that "rock culture" is all they've ever been fed. Popular music began in the mid-1950s, and Elvis was one of its founding gods. Or so goes the mythology.

Chaplin wasn't viewed that way by the kids who saw him in those cheap matinees in the 1960s. He wasn't an Icon, he wasn't The Founding God Of Movie Comedy. We didn't even know he was, in the 1960s, an old man living in Switzerland with Eugene O'Neill's daughter. We didn't know he made the pictures we were watching more than fifty years earlier. All we knew about him was that he was funny. He wasn't presented with historical context, there was no Robert Osborne type figure stepping out before the film to tell us how important it all was. It wasn't even a "film." It wasn't even "art." It was a *movie* that entertained a room full of kids the exact same way that it entertained their parents and their grandparents decades before. It was just a funny little man on the screen who did funny things, and we responded to it by simple, honest laughter.

That's not to say the academics hadn't gotten hold of Chaplin long before then and leached all the fun out of him. Chaplin himself was the biggest blowhard in Hollywood. But his work, as old as it was, could still be presented, not as nostalgia, but as valid entertainment. How many kids today listen to Elvis that way? There might be some, but I doubt there's very many.

sheeplady said:

There's also an interesting racial angle to "rock and roll" being "started" in the popular imagination by a white dude who sang a mix of music influenced greatly by black musicians. Even Elvis himself hated being cast as the start or king of rock and roll. I'm not sure if he saw the racism in this or not (he seemed to be quite aware of social issues, but being dead we can't ask him) and that was what made him uncomfortable or if it was a sense of humility or what.

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The same generation that acclaimed Elvis thusly denounced Paul Whiteman for being billed as "The King of Jazz." Interestingly, Whiteman himself disliked that title precisely because he was well aware of where jazz came from. He preferred the title "Dean of Modern American Music," which while a bit pompous was nonetheless accurate. And yet, those few modern folk who know who Paul Whiteman was see fit only to mock him as a pretender to the Kingship of Jazz. "Ha ha ha, his name was even 'White Man," get it?"

LizzieMaine said:

Bing Crosby died the same year as Elvis, and he was still a prominent figure in the public eye right up to the day he died. Why is Elvis still ELVIS, and Crosby, who had a far longer and more varied show business career, is merely a figure from the remote past? Isn't it because the great amoebic creature that is the "Boomer-Rock Era" has obliterated the memory of just how important Crosby was? If anyone under forty recognizes him at all, it's as that weird old guy singing Christmas music with David Bowie. Oh, and he beat his kids.

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When I was a kid I sang in a men and boy's choir directed by the real life Father O'Malley- the man who was the prototype for Crosby's character in "Going My Way" and "The Bells of St. Mary's." (The real life guy was as far removed from the lovable Crosby character as could be imagined: an unmitigated S.O.B. who managed to make our young lives less than ideal in his relentless quest for perfect polyphony of the Palestrina genre and Gregorian Chant... but that's another story.) I don't know what he actually thought of Crosby's musical performances, but to him the term "crooner" was employed as a put-down for a vulgar musical wannabe. Someone with perhaps moderate vocal talent, but unwilling to really work at developing skills. Safe to say that he likely lumped all "popular " music together-- Crosby, the Beatles, or whomever.

Like so many he was a product of his environment. I had always gotten the impression that his parents were the classic lace curtain Irish types who had middle class aspirations for their children, and that played out pretty much according to script: the daughters married well, two sons became priests, and one son ended up as an exec at Chrysler. That reflected in the music to which he was exposed to at a tender age: he had grown up following the careers of Caruso, Mary Garden, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Nellie Melba, and Geraldine Farrar the way that most kids followed major league hitters, so I suppose that he had firmly established perimeters of what he deemed as "good music." I envision a piano in the parlor, and all the kids having to take lessons- a fairly common practice of that turn of the century time.

The conclusion I draw, then, is that music is much like religion or politics: by either attraction or reaction, what we embrace as adults is most determined by how we are raised- what we heard at home. What we view later in life as musical preferences can likewise be associated with certain songs or pieces that bring back pleasant memories. (Conversely, what we loathe in music we associate with things or people we'd rather forget. Remember that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David discusses the Mr. Softee Ice Cream truck music? Or the other episode where the nanny has a psychotic breakdown on hearing "The Merry Go Round Broke Down?") I think that it may be a lot more primal than what our peers listened to on the radio or TV.

LizzieMaine said:

Chaplin wasn't viewed that way by the kids who saw him in those cheap matinees in the 1960s. He wasn't an Icon, he wasn't The Founding God Of Movie Comedy...... We didn't even know he was, in the 1960s, an old man living in Switzerland with Eugene O'Neill's daughter. It was just a funny little man on the screen who did funny things, and we responded to it by simple, honest laughter.

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Chaplin, Schmaplin. Give me Curly Howard, any day of the week.

Personally I prefer Harry Langdon, but in 1969 all his films were still hidden under Raymond Rohauer's mattress.

Something that I truly wish had never been developed: radio and television commercials that employ the phrases, "....all of your favorite [whatever]" or "...your friends at [business name here]."

They don't know me...they have no clue as to what my favorite anything is, and they most certainly are not my "friends."

It's a little thing.... my wife says that I rant too much about it, ..... and there are more vexing dilemmas facing mankind. But, you asked.