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Monday, October 17, 2005

Arbitrary but fun Monday for a change

Oldies radio lies, man.

More specifically, the “oldies” canon, having congealed over the past decade into a reliable rotation of “Bus Stop,” “Spirit in the Sky,” “You’re So Vain,” and such, nicely demonstrates the point—made twenty-odd years ago by any number of literary critics and theorists—that the process of canon formation is inevitably “partial,” in the sense that it does not (and does not attempt to) retrieve the past “as it really was.”

Instead, it presents us with the past as we now like to think it really was.  There’s nothing necessarily insidious about this process; it’s not as if Oldies Radio represents history as told by the victors of some global slaughter.  Besides, most of the victors, like Norman Greenbaum’s ubiquitous one-hit wonder, survive to this day because they’re really pretty decent little pop songs (or, at the very least, they have a catchy riff and a cool guitar sound that still sounds tolerably cool thirty-five years later).  Granted, there are plenty of oldies—think of Seals and Crofts’ handful of contributions to Western Civ—that should be allowed to die a dignified death.  But there are hundreds more that have been purged from the Oldies archives altogether.  Some, like Paper Lace’s hideous “The Night Chicago Died,” have a ghostly existence as “oldies novelty” tunes, the kind of thing you have to hear every five or six years just to wonder what the hell people were thinking.  Hiding behind the oldies novelty tunes, however, is a vast legion of cultural dreck that no Oldies station will touch—even though it once ruled the charts.

Sure, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” was a horror.  And it was the number one song of 1973.  But what is there to say of “Say, Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose?”—Tony Orlando and Dawn’s followup single, which wound up as number 34 of the year?  Or, God help us, “Who’s in the Strawberry Patch with Sally?” No oral or written language known to humankind can adequately express the profound and promiscuous badness of these songs.  Likewise, Gilbert O’Sullivan is justly renowned for having written the world’s most bathetic tune, “Alone Again (Naturally)” (as one critic put it, “the worst potential influence on the direction of pop music since Tiny Tim”).  But how many of us remember—or care to remember—that we were subsequently treated to three or four more “hits” from O’Sullivan, each of which was even worse (though, of course, not more bathetic)?

You don’t believe me?  Fine.  Then you deserve this:

Told you once before, and I won’t tell you no more
Get down, get down, get down
You’re a bad dog baby
But I still want you around.

You give me the creeps, when you jump on your feet
So get down, get down, get down
Keep your hands to yourself
I’m strictly out of bounds.

Don’t make me quote O’Sullivan again.  You’ll regret it.

Similarly, Helen Reddy’s bizarre, groundbreaking portraits of women with mental illness (“Delta Dawn,” “Ruby Red Dress,” “Angie Baby”) have been wiped from our collective public memory, together with Bobby Sherman’s neo-existentialist “Easy Come, Easy Go” and Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods’ searing antiwar anthem, “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero.” And while this Funes-like blog is more or less content to call to mind Looking Glass’s “Brandy,” an inoffensive piece of pop fluff that wound up at number 12 for 1972, who, I wonder, will dare to put in a good word for Wayne Newton’s “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast” (number 10 that same year) or Mouth and MacNeal’s “How Do You Do” (number 25) or Daniel Boone’s “Beautiful Sunday” (number 42)?

The selectiveness of the Oldies Canon is understandable enough.  All of us (that is, all of us of a certain age) want to believe—and want others to believe—that we were listening to “Brick House” in ‘77 when, in fact, we were being subjected to Leo Sayer’s “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” five or six times a day (a classic Paradoxical Song, in Janet’s famous phrase, like Orleans’ “Dance With Me” insofar as it is utterly—nay, rigorously—undanceable).  Even worse, if we were to be reminded of the existence of Gallery’s “It’s So Nice to Be With You” or Cher’s “Dark Lady,” we might realize that we were not merely subjected to these songs but, in fact, fond of them.  And then we would not be able to face ourselves, now, would we?

(Don’t get me wrong—I wasn’t fond of that crap.  Not me!  Along with the rest of the seventh grade, I was hoppin’ and boppin’ to the Crocodile Rock.  Which, I believe, was recorded by the Velvet Underground.)

So here’s today’s Fun Game.  What’s your favorite example of an Oldie Too Hideous to Acknowledge?  Extra points will be awarded to suggestions that carry with them an obvious tinge of remorse (for example, I’ve always thought that Helen Reddy’s cover of Leon Russell’s “Bluebird” was perfect for her voice, so all my Helen Reddy examples above are tinged by remorse-by-association).  And extra extra points will be awarded to suggestions so hideous that they derange the entire thread.

Posted by Michael on 10/17 at 02:50 PM
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