Whenever I hear bands like America or Jefferson Airplane, I marvel that so many people once took such great comfort in these things that most now consider rather silly. This keeps on happening: a movie will define a generation only to be laughed at by the next. Is this a necessary function of popular culture?
I complained to my friend Alan Jacobs about the bad timing of my releasing a new book of poems just when all the bookstores in America closed down and he replied “thankfully, poetry is news that stays news, so people will eventually find it”. News that stays news.
That phrase has haunted me since he said it. Because I am—aren't you?—not only uninterested, but basically disgusted by yesterday's news, to say nothing of last weeks'. We throw out as garbage what we we're very eager for just hours before. By contrast, how much consolation, how much joy I have had in Constantine Cavafy's poems from a century ago!
I am trying to think about why this should be or why it might matter. The poet Percy Shelley often thought about the eternality, or lack thereof, of artistic productions. He admired painting, but worried that its shelf life was necessarily short due to the degradation of its materials. Sculpture he found the more lasting, but was still upset by the way later curators felt free to alter it, adding fig leafs, or whole limbs to replace missing ones. Poetry he saw as eternal, not, I think, only because it is his own chosen medium, but because of the thing I'm talking about here. A Shakespeare sonnet that I read now is not similar to, but identical to the one recited at the court of Elizabeth I. If the past is any indication of the future, we can be fairly certain that in another 100 years, or 500, the sonnets will endure and endure in precisely their same state, losing none of their affective power due to the half-life of certain molecules.
So, it seems, the problem isn't in the lyrics: either in the ideas or in their enunciation in sentences. But the problem also doesn't seem to be in the music. Duke Ellington's three-minute miracles are every bit as powerful today as they were nearly a century ago. Beethoven, though he likely sounds a little different, likewise. The work doesn't sound dated. We don't listen to it for nostalgic purposes but because we find it beautiful and useful in the present: as full of power as it ever might have been.
My question then is the following: what is it about combining lyrics and instrumentation that reduces so the use-by date? I suppose to engage it, you'd have to believe that it does. I can imagine some people arguing that The Beatles haven't really aged. They'd be wrong, and hilariously so, but I can imagine it. My sense is the that the Fab Four endure almost purely for nostalgic, and then for ideological reasons. Those of us who listen do so to remember certain times or feelings from our youth, or to sign up for the rebellious posture they advocate--down with religion! Your teachers are stupid! The government is evil! Whether one supports such rallying cries is irrelevant to the issue that that's a large part of the band's appeal. I can hear people saying Bob Dylan music is beyond time as well, but I don't think that's right either. There is nothing eternal or universal in that music. But given that you're a normal person, surely you'd have to admit--even if the music of your upbringing was great, like mine was, that it begins to show its age eventually. Some records I unashamedly love, even still from 30 years ago; others I can only love because I have decided to place their obvious emotional manipulations to one side, to look past their excesses in the same way I agree to look past their hair or attire.
Even if you don't agree completely with the way I've framed the question here, don't we think this odd? Poems last forever. Non-vocal music lasts a rather long time, sometimes centuries. But put them together and it starts looking not only threadbare, but comical, embarrassing, within a decade, if that. It doesn't seem to me self-evident why that should be the case and yet there are literally thousands of examples.
To further complcate matters, it seems also as if the breadth of appeal is inversely proportinate to the linear. So, Richard Marx reached across nearly the entire spectrum in the English-speaking world in the early 1990’s, but did so insanely briefly, only to be so cringeworthy as to be unlistenable, not long thereafter. I think there is more going on here than the sense of backlash, our corporate embarrassment over having loved something so much. It seems to me more like rose bushes that only have so much energy inbuilt. They can spend it on fragrance, or color or size or lasting-ness, but they must still choose somehow which.