I recently gave a youngish girl I know a copy of John Fowles’ “The Magus” -as strange and wonderful a literary journey as you may ever hope to read.And as you takes her trip with Simon Urfe, she keeps on sending me texts, like postcards, along the way. It has her in its grips and I envy her. I wish I could read it for the first time (I also wish someone would write of me that my only value as a man is as a lover…).
But I can’t. I’ve read it four times and it has lost its mystery.
So has 60s popular music.
With the exception of some real early stuff (and some of the obscurities Mike Nessing pointed out in his 1969 Single Review columns here) it has lost its magic. It is like an a girl loved and no longer love. You meet her again after a couple of years and she looks the same, a little older, and you can see the contours of your old love somewhere in her face, in the way she moves, and you know you loved her once, but something isn’t there. She has lost her magic.
It is not quite that I always hated the hippies but for sure punk showed up the hippies inequities and if you go back and listen to hippie music from Country Joe to the Dead to Jefferson Airplane -the country blues boogie is so transparent, so… self-satisfied and lazy, I don’t even hate it or anything. I just shrug my shoulders and move on.
This is never clearer than with the Beatles.
IN English release, I still can hear the first three albums and accompanying singles. But after that its charms are completely dead to it. For instance, the second side of Abbey Road is McCartney’s greatest moment even if it amounts to a whole lotta segues, but a very moving movement like “Golden Slumbers” fails to tug me in any more. I wish it could. I wish I had never heard Abbey Road or rather I wish it had just been released and I was hearing it completely fresh, new. I would be blown away. It would beat out Titus Andronicus for album of the year.
But it isn’t. It hasn’t. I can’t.
And when “Golden Slumbers” shows up on a mix, I hit next.
I’m not picking Abbey Road apart. I am not reassesing it. It is what everybody claims it is. But like “The Magus” there is nothing left to offer me.
And so it goes for all the biggest stars of the 60s.
I don’t deal in musical nostalgia so that would be an irrelevance to me. And, Alyson Camus and Oliver Sacks opinion notwithstanding, I have no special feelings for the music of my youth.
So there is nothing INTRINSICALLY to draw me the 60s.
I give up on the decade.
I was a kid living through it and I don’t feel it was a great decade (musically: I think this is the greatest moment since the 70s), and so fuck the 60s and fuck the Beatles. The 60s are dead.
Next decade please.