The 70s: Threat Or Menace

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

When I got married I was given a CD-R by NED RAGGETT!! of Rhino Record's Super Hits Of The 70s compilation, a collection of, essentially, mostly US pop chaff from the 1970s. The rule seemed to be that nobody with more than two hits or with a famous album to their name was allowed through the door so what you get is about 150 songs worth of purest 70s pop sensibility. And what I learn is that the 70s were bonkers, about half the songs are these stately pop/rock songs about DEATH - why?? Was it something in the water?? Also it is really really hard to listen to this stuff and work out even where it came from - how exactly did the dots join between the music being made in the 60s and this odd overwrought kind of pop. The ones that aren't about death are either:

- weird nursery rhyme shit about smiling
- songs about how the man can't cut our hair & other vague 'social comment'
- tubthumpers about how good rock n roll is.

NB none of this is meant as disparaging, half these records are terrific and all of them are strangely addictive.

Anyway the record that tipped my balance from 'cool' to 'WTF' was "Wildfire", the chorus of which goes wildfire oh wildfire and the verses of which go as follows:

verse 1: singer sings of a girl he luvved who owned a pony called Wildfire. Wildfire oh Wildfire etc.
verse 2: there is a terrible storm and the pony escapes and DIES and the girl follows and tries to rescue him, also DIES. Wildfire oh Wildfire.
verse 3: another storm leaves the singer starving to death and he can hear the hooves of the GHOST PONY approaching!!!!! WILDFIRE OH WILDFIRE.

The entire thing is incredibly drippily performed. WHAT ON EARTH was going on with all this 'death of Little Nell' stuff being not even a fringe but a completely core part of pop???

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

This was an era which put 'Wuthering Heights' at No 1!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

no one knows what wuthering heights is about alex: it starts "out on the windy weendy wundy" and then not a word can be understood till it ends

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

surely 'death of little nell' is core pop!? aren't death songs an element of the standard pop menu that the rock generation DISPENSED with in its AGE-OF-AQUARIUS/FOREVER YOUNG boomer wisdom? (ans = not entirely but there was NEW ADULTHOOD episteme i think, in which casual teen sex replaced casual teen communing with the deceased)

(or something)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yeah I guess it was core at times before the 70s. And of course it never left in country music, probably.

Why did it vanish in rock tho? I sort of see what yr getting at, but can you elucidate? (the fatal request..)

One of the things that makes this stuff incongruous is the adult seriousness of the delivery, a lot of the time.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i. there was a cearly zeitgeist shift in TOPICS THAT ARE COOL TO SING ABOUT
ii. this coincided with a shift towards "being teenage" as the thing everyone ought to want to be
iii. talking about death and the dead wz kid of off-radar cool-wise, for teens? sort of fubsy and grown-up in a bad square way? (also: has to be distinguished from younger-type kidstuff)
iv. the dormant structuralist in me would want to argue that something took the PLACE of the deathsong in rock culture, but i'm not sure i'd be doin more than mad arm-waving if i tried to identify it

something like "johnny remember me" -- even the shangri-las -- had come to be considered corny? because mere personal loss isn't "political" in the way that pop topics now had to be? and where the death song survives is this unpoliced uncool zone?

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

but There Is A Light That Never Goes Out and about 80% of Nick Cave to thread!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yeah but that's the 80s really, when the switch back to pre-"60s" tropes began to gather momentum (cave eg uses rock sound to blues-country-brecht&weill effect; while morrissey is notoriously obsessed by the john leyton moment in british pop)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

expanding on that, when it returns, it's in the quaratine quotemarks of personal crackpot expressive style -- ie it's an element how cave or morrisey are UNLIKE the mainstream, or challenging it

(actually this is the kind of topic i'd like chuck eddy's input on cz he has a genius for noting where the actual mainstream mainstream has continued to be the thing it's always claimed it isn't, sometimes even more so than those who critique it)

(ie maybe mid-70s hairmetal is FULL of nursery-rhyme deathsongs)