The Man Who Panned the Beatles

[westen44]

I'm sure others have, but I had never heard of this infamous newspaper article about the Beatles before.  This is funnier than Decca rejecting them by telling the Beatles that guitar music was going out of style. 

https://scottwesterman.com/?p=12552

[Pilgrim]

I'm not surprised.  The music that gent grew up with had been turned on its head more than once, from classical, to big band, to rock & roll, to rock. I imagine that even what Pat Boone did was a stretch for him.

There are musical forms now that I simply don't enjoy, rap being first among them.  It simply does nothing for me, but I realize that for people one-third my age it's very popular.

In popular music, I'm most comfortable with variations based on the 12 bar blues format which ruled popular music from the late 50s through perhaps the year 2000.  It still is the basic of most country music.  I don't think i will ever make peace with some of the new formats, but at least I'm aware that I shouldn't be reviewing them.

[westen44]

I just found the part in which he said the rock 'n' roll fad had died when Elvis entered the military.  Clearly, writing about modern music was not this guy's forte.

[uwe]

Rock’n’Roll was just another form of American music that became popular. Blues, Gospel, Jazz, Country, Big Band Music, Bernstein, Gershwin, American modern military marches and Bluegrass/Folk had all preceded it. You Yanks sometimes don’t see what a huge and lasting cultural influence on the world you’ve been, thankfully so - you’ve ruled the music world for more than a hundred years now. And you show no inclination of letting up —> Taylor Swift.

Now the Fab Four were Brits of course, but they didn’t come from England and then an English Atlantic harbor town for nothing. Without American troops and their influence in WWI and WWII, no “Love Me Do” or “I Want To Hold Your Hand” would have ever seen the light of day. Talk about “soft power”, there you have it.

[westen44]

I think Ronson may have a valid point with that song.  However, a false impression may be created.  Because American music and movies may be the two best things about American culture.  Other things about the country may not be quite so good.  i do find American history interesting, though, just not current events very much. 

[uwe]

To me, American history is dialectic to the max. Wonder- and awful things have often happened in the same time period, sometimes one and the same act entailed both. The US can be baffling off track or do exactly the right thing. The global experience however is that the world is not automatically a better place if the US does not act for fear of doing the wrong thing.

There seems to be no foolproof recipe for always doing the right thing. With the US I get the feeling that some of the greatest blunders were at least well-intentioned, that helps when you eventually need to correct them.

And I can come up with a long list of countries that have done less for others than the US has.

The US is not just a nation state, it is also a very romantic idea, which in the face of all difficulties and disappointments still holds global appeal. Cassandra calls how that idea is on the verge of being toppled are premature IMHO.

That doesn’t mean you don’t have work to do!

[westen44]

I think the pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other was most clearly displayed in comparing and contrasting the 1860s and 1920s. 
It would be hard to come up with two decades more different.  The differences were so great, it's almost like you're talking about two different countries.

For roughly the past ten years, the mood in the U.S. has not been good.  The outlook is not very optimistic, IMO, despite that being uncharacteristic of the country.   This became more obvious to me when I would visit the Netherlands and then compare what I had experienced there to what I found here.  I would hesitate to say more for fear of being political.  Yet even if I could, I would not discuss politics here or anywhere else.  There aren't many people who despise politics more than I do. That doesn't mean, of course, I believe in avoiding, for instance, the news.  I've got a relative who does that.  She thinks if she avoids listening to the news then the problems that are discussed might just go away.  I was once watching the local news.  I went into the kitchen.  While I was there, she changed the channel.  It's my aunt, BTW.  When I got back, I found speed racing which for audio had some inexplicable country music playing.  She said "I was afraid that channel you had on was going to start talking about war in the Middle East!!!"

[uwe]

No country on Earth or in history has developed as radically and as quickly as the US of A. You guys are a stark lesson of Western evolution on steroids. Inevitably, that brought growing pains with it.

Politics are a necessity of any governing system where different views compete with one another - as they should. Democracy is the only form of rule that assures that everyone gets to make mistakes eventually and not just one group over and over. It doesn’t ensure better policies per se, just more varied ones, but trial and error is a development concept too.

Popular dissatisfaction is not just an American issue, all Western democracies battle with it. People seem to forget what they have got. Oscar Wilde would say that the migration pressure on most Western countries is the sincerest form of flattery imaginable. It shows how desirable we live if viewed from the outside. All the bickering is out of proportion.

Your aunt is kinda cute, I have people like that in my wider family too. Anything that is too complex or threatening gets shut out.

[westen44]

No country on Earth or in history has developed as radically and as quickly as the US of A. You guys are a stark lesson of Western evolution on steroids. Inevitably, that brought growing pains with it.

Politics are a necessity of any governing system where different views compete with one another - as they should. Democracy is the only form of rule that assures that everyone gets to make mistakes eventually and not just one group over and over. It doesn’t ensure better policies per se, just more varied ones, but trial and error is a development concept too.

Popular dissatisfaction is not just an American issue, all Western democracies battle with it. People seem to forget what they have got. Oscar Wilde would say that the migration pressure on most Western countries is the sincerest form of flattery imaginable. It shows how desirable we live if viewed from the outside. All the bickering is out of proportion.

Your aunt is kinda cute, I have people like that in my wider family too. Anything that is too complex or threatening gets shut out.

Once again, it's kind of hard to talk about politics without talking about politics.  I realize the necessity of politics.  I've got an M.A. in political science.  But that doesn't make me an expert.  Not by a long shot.  The only people that I consider political experts are people who have a Ph.D. in political science or naturally gifted statesmen who've been on the political stage for a while.  I don't know what it is, though, that makes so many people overrate themselves when it comes to politics.  I just get outright sick of it.  So when I say I'm tired of politics, mostly what I'm talking about are all the people out there so convinced that they're the world's leading experts on politics when, obviously, they're not.  Personally, I'd rather be a real expert in, for instance, music.  But I know even less about music than politics.  I certainly like music a whole lot more, though.  I think the world could go pretty far just on love and music.  And politics be damned. 

[uwe]

Whether a political measure is right or wrong is something that can often only be decided by historians decades later. But hardly anyone seems to think long term anymore, it's all short term gratification and perspective.

And political debate to me is in its purest form just an attempt of people trying to get along, exchange ideas and maybe arrive at a compromise. It doesn't need to descend into tribalism - considering it possible that the guy holding an opposing view might perhaps be correct or at least have a less than evil motivation for his/her opinion is a first step. Most of life takes place in the middle, not at the fringes.

There is a name for the absence of political debate, it's called dictatorship.

[westen44]

Whether a political measure is right or wrong is something that can often only be decided by historians decades later. But hardly anyone seems to think long term anymore, it's all short term gratification and perspective.

And political debate to me is in its purest form just an attempt of people trying to get along, exchange ideas and maybe arrive at a compromise. It doesn't need to descend into tribalism - considering it possible that the guy holding an opposing view might perhaps be correct or at least have a less than evil motivation for his/her opinion is a first step. Most of life takes place in the middle, not at the fringes.

There is a name for the absence of political debate, it's called dictatorship.

Unfortunately, in the U.S. and other places as well, political debate has descended into tribalism.  I'm so weary of hearing "I'm right, you're wrong.  Case closed, go to hell."  It would be impossible to have something similar to the Constitutional Convention now.  That would require compromise.  You can forget about compromise.  It has become something unknown--at least in the U.S.  As for dictatorship, that's always a possibility.  When people are so ignorant of the past they don't even know what a dictatorship means, that makes them vulnerable, needless to say.  All I can say is try living in the U.S. for a few years and see just how bad the political polarization has become.  The only thing comparable would be the 1850s/1860s.  BTW, how do people in real life view me that I sometimes go into detail with?  In general, conservatives view me as a liberal and liberals view me as a conservative.  Anyway, that's all I have to say.  If Dave wants to ban me for life now, that might make sense and I'm not even joking. 

[uwe]

I never understood why "compromise" all of the sudden had to become a four-letter-word. If you don't want policies to be arbitrarily yanked forward and backward, it's the way to go.

[westen44]

I never understood why "compromise" all of the sudden had to become a four-letter-word. If you don't want policies to be arbitrarily yanked forward and backward, it's the way to go.

I've never quite been able to grasp why so many people end up allowing their emotions to completely overwhelm them when it comes to politics, either.  It's like they let primal urges going back to the cavemen take over.  If we acted toward everything the way we tend to act toward politics, we would, in fact, still be cavemen.

[Pilgrim]

In the US, domestic news generally takes first place to news of other countries, but I get the impression that increasing polarization of views is something happening in many countries. It certainly is in the US, where (as noted above) polarization/tribalism has progressed to the point where people do not listen to each other.

I can't even quote an NPR (National Public Radio) story in social media without a knee-jerk reply from someone who tells me everything on NPR is lies and "lefty propaganda." I feel the exact opposite as someone involved with a leading journalism college, and I know that NPR listeners are increasing in number, but rational arguments don't seem to carry any weight.

It makes the situation more confusing that there are elected leaders who are rational and interested in compromise when they can discuss it in private, but when they appear in public they feel that they have to don the mask of their party and oppose everything the other party says.

The situation is worse when we have one really dangerous leader whose closest analog is the uber-nationalists seen in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. Once such a figure gains power over their party, it's dangerous (in various ways) to say anything critical of them. We have long-time elected officials retiring because they're not willing to deal with it any longer.

I think we will ride out the current power figure and avoid going down the path of isolationism and nationalism, but it concerns me deeply. Good news is that there are members of both parties trying to find mutually acceptable ways to make things work without sticking their heads up far enough to lose them politically.

[uwe]

Germany was perhaps a bit later in the game, but by now we've caught up and people are polarized to an extent we haven't seen since the end of WWII.  Any news that doesn't fit your particular point of view is quickly decried as Systemmedien, a term whose usage makes me ache as it is borrowed from what the Nazis called the press in the Weimar Republic ("Systempresse"). I just read an article how the COVID pandemic has dug the trenches even deeper and how fringe groups that never had much to with one another like anti-migration, anti-vaxxers, anti-EU, anti-conservation and anti-Germany-in-its-current-form-as-a-carrier-of-statehood have morphed together into this numb nihilist anti-stance.