by Wouter van Oorschot
Translated by Brent Annable
Previously in this series…
- Amuse bouche
- Who the book is (not) for – part 1
- Who this book is (not) for – part 2
- Anything but idolatry – part 1
- Anything but idolatry – part 2
- Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 1
3. Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 2
(continued)
Rock ‘n’ roll and pop owed their ability to establish themselves as the newest offshoots of Western popular music within a span of less than ten years (1955-1964) to the industrial magnates, who quickly realised that there was a small fortune to be made with the commercial exploitation thereof. The target audience at the time was the first generation of predominantly white, middle-class youth born after the Second World War, who had access to two resources hitherto unheard of for teenagers: a small disposable income, and more free time than any preceding generation in history. And so, it was for the first time that young teenagers and adolescents were ‘identified’ by capitalist entrepreneurs as a discrete consumer group. I, at least, am unaware of any period from the preceding centuries when they were similarly ‘exploited’ even as a distinct segment by commercial businesses.
It seems fitting that this new definition of the word ‘youth’ – no longer merely as a developmental stage, but now also denoting a separate demographic within a human population – came out of the United States. The country had emerged from the Second World War relatively unscathed (aside from around 400,000 casualties ‘on foreign soil’ and countless wounded), while Europe and Japan had been blasted to ruins – inasmuch as they had not already done so themselves – in order to neutralise Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire. The war and other industries had been running at full throttle: Russia’s Red Army had been armed by the United States in order to aid Hitler’s defeat in Eastern Europe. Economic growth continued after that, not least to aid the very same Europe and Japan in their ‘rebuilding’ and restoration efforts and/or the implantation of democratic foundations based on Western models. Consequently, with the exception of a single year, unemployment in the United States remained stable between 3.5% and 6% until far beyond the 1940s, which was deemed acceptable. And that was where the first younger generation grew up where there was money to be earned by creating a demand for products that spoke to the themes that moved them most: love, dancing, sex, and heartache. The chief supplier? The music industry.
The end of the war was welcomed by a rise in the mass-production of cheap consumer electronics. The number of television sets exploded from tens of thousands to many millions within only a few years, and even cheap gramophones were soon within ‘everybody’s’ reach. Because these devices are useless without anything to play on them, the music industry flourished in tandem with that of consumer electronics: money can only be earned by creating artificial demand where it does not occur naturally.
The only thing that did not follow the same trajectory was the American love song. From around 1920, light music had developed to support the mass-production of Broadway musicals and Hollywood films. The ‘best’ songs that came out of this process were entered into The Great American Songbook, several entries deservedly earning worldwide fame.
This trend stalled in the 1950s, however, and constitutes a prime example of the law of the handicap of a head start, as formulated in 1935 by the world-famous-in-the-Netherlands historian, Jan Romein (1893-1962) in his essay The Dialectics of Progress. Put simply, his law states that a head start in a certain field often results in a lack of any stimulus to seek out further improvement or progress in that field, so that sooner or later, one is overtaken. Romein focused primarily on the technology sector: companies that manufacture and commercialise highly innovative products fall into the trap of living off the immediate income and neglecting to invest in further innovation.
Competitors are then able to copy the invention and continue to improve it without the burden of the initial development phase, enabling them to rapidly earn a large market share. An early example of the law of the handicap of a head start is the decline of English industry in the nineteenth century, in favour of that on the European continent.
Romein’s law can be applied directly to the entertainment industry that produced The Great American Songbook. Its boundless growth began in the wake of the economic boom that followed the First World War in the ‘roaring twenties’, as evidenced by the export of jazz to Europe (among other things). The global turbulence resulting from the economic depression in the 1930s and the ensuing Second World War had no noteworthy adverse impact on the development of the songbook, as the producers continued to supply the type of carefree diversion that the predominantly traditional, Christian, heterosexual masses needed in such uncertain times.
Only once the United States had emerged as the clear winner from the Second World War did the era known as the Pax Americana truly set in. The aura of victory made the rest of the world particularly susceptible to The Great American Songbook, and all that it stood for. The global social, political and cultural origins of the country and its people were clearly evident, and the music industry spread its wings.
But while it reached record heights due to its ‘head start’, the light music of the 1950s fell into a rut of stale predictability, and its quality had run to seed. The greatest culprit in this sense was the saccharine love-and-marriage morality infused into Walt Disney’s animated movies that was taken for granted by the conservative Christian white majority, because it was simply right and therefore did not need to change. Boy meets girl, they marry ‘til death do us part’, have children, dad is the breadwinner, mum stands beside her husband as the happy-homemaker-and-all, they regularly swear fealty to the American flag and that ‘for which it stands’, and live happily ever after, eternally barbecuing beside their oh-so-lovely neighbours.
Although there was no more substance whatsoever to this hetero-Christian consumptive morality, it nonetheless penetrated the finest capillaries of society, where all original artistry became stifled and nonconformists of any kind essentially became enemies of the state. In short, the entertainment industry had no reason whatsoever to wonder whether The Great American Songbook was in need of innovation, even to a small degree. The theatres and drive-ins needed filling, and the ratings determined the success or failure of commercial television stations, which were interested in nothing more than dime-a-dozen entertainment shows that drew the most viewers.
It was in this bed that the industry had made for itself that hordes of mediocre singers were churned out in rapid succession to satisfy the mediocre tastes of the masses, and if they did not, they were replaced – Pat Boone, Don Cornell, Vic Damone, Doris Day, Connie Francis, Sunny Gale, Georgia Gibbs, Julius La Rosa, Russ Morgan, Patti Page, Joan Weber, and many, many more – along with cavalcades of mediocre vocal trios and quartets – the Andrews Sisters, Beverley Sisters, Bonnie Sisters, Fontane Sisters, Four Aces, Four Coins, Four Esquires, The Four Voices, The Five Satins, and again, many, many more.
They may not have written the superficial lyrics themselves, but they could have refused to sing them and because they did not, is it their names that are listed here and not those of the lyricists. They were accompanied without exception by show-business orchestras, the timbre of which was dominated alternately by saccharine strings and bold brass: that striking, typically American fusion of the classical European string orchestra and the traditional big bands made up of brass instruments and a rhythm section, that proliferated as soon as jazz had gained a foothold in the northern cities.
This resulted in an entertainment overstretch sound, scripted meticulously and predominantly by white producers, with an offensive tendency toward ostentatiousness that they nonetheless considered subtle. They even believed that the vast majority of the global population enjoyed it just as much as they did – which sadly even proved to be the case, as this insipid mediocrity became the dominant style. To meet the insatiable demand from hundreds of millions of bourgeois citizens, many tens of thousands of love songs were rolled off the production lines at breathtaking speed. Here, the law of the handicap of a head start was in full swing – pun intended.
continued: Dylan and Us: Beyond America – 3. Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, part 3
Wouter’s book is only available in Dutch for now:
Dylan en wij zonder Amerika, Wouter van Oorschot | 9789044655179 | Boeken | bol
We will publish more chapters from it in English on Untold Dylan in the coming weeks