What It Is

 So everyone’s talking about Andy Rooney, being his Greatest Generation, 91-year-old self and talking on Sunday night about his confusion about modern pop culture, flaunting his lack of knowledge about personalities like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber.

And perhaps to the delight of his 60 Minutes audience. But honestly, Andy, you have so heard of these people. You may not know any of their songs, but you couldn’t talk about not knowing them unless you did. So there.

It just so happens that this week, neither Justin Bieber nor Lady Gaga is in the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, but Usher, also mentioned on 60 Minutes, is #1 this week. The song is called OMG and features will.i.am from the Black-Eyed Peas. I have never consciously heard this song, and may never have heard it at all. But I’m sure I hate it, and probably more virulently than Andy Rooney, even though I’m less than half as ancient as him.

You can say I’m old and I just don’t get it, but the problem is that I do get it. I got it the first time around, when Madonna created the first musical product that was based more around the personality and visual style of the singer than their voice or their songs. Madonna has made a splendid fortune selling her image, with her records as a sort of aural souvenir, a way to conjure her up before the next film or CD or book or magazine or ad campaign dose. On the way, she also (I believe) helped bring gay culture into the mainstream, warming up the populace by giving them a glimpse into her club-kid, fashiony world. Her very public, ambiguous sexuality challenged the popular notion of the unattractive lesbian who “couldn’t get a man”, mainstreaming the 90s lipstick lesbian underground scene fomenting in storefronts and basements since at least the mid 80s. But I find most of Madonna’s records almost unlistenable almost all the time.

I watched and listened to Bad Romance, and I found it derivative and poseury, full of fake masochism and pop cliches.Contrasted with, say, the banned video for Nine Inch Nails’ Happiness in Slavery.

Anyway, my point is that as the tidal wave of information sweeps over us in the post-modern age, we’ve forgotten how great the Top 40 used to be. Today, please consider this song, which peaked at #4 in both the US and the UK in April 1971:

Co-written and arranged by George Harrison, this is the kind of song that was mainstream at the time. David Bowie was still an up-and-coming underground star pre-Ziggy, Lou Reed hadn’t yet released Transformer and Iggy Pop was still in the Stooges. Other top 40 artists included James Brown, Sly & the Family Stone, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Marvin Gaye… and not one lick of that accursed autotune.

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