the problematics of taste
thomas conroy
by your peers on the basis of such things as whether or not you did drugs and
if so, how much and what sorts (as well as how well you handled yourself while
on them) and related to this, what sort of music you listened to. There was
also probably less overt racism than in the mid 60s and earlier, but it was
(and is) still an influence on how you went about relating to others. Anyway,
these things come to mind as I reflect back on my time being,a more or less
typical, and rather aimless high school kid under Carter era
malaise. Although the sexual revolution (pre-AIDS carefree times) was probably
at, or just reaching its peak, not everyone was necessarily scoring all the
time (particularly those like myself in a single gender Catholic high school).
So, the country's political and economic future was beginning to look shakier
and shakier, Carter (now playing peacemaker) was turning further to the right
and looking feebler in the process - attention Bill Clinton!), drugging could
result in various sorts of chaos, sex was avaliable in varying degrees, but,
there was always Pop Culture - the question being which elements to partake
in and identify with.
As I said, one was (and probably always has been) judged by whether one
follows one's own ideosyncratic path or goes along with the crowd. In the
seventies, for white boys like me, culture came down to this basic dichotomy:
ROCK VS. DISCO/TOP 40. I realize now that I probably wasted hundreds of hours
listening to really crappy 2nd and 3rd rate music in the form of concept
albums, double live albums, and by even decent musicians, all sorts of crappy
filler and gimmicry. Even then, I realized how dull much of it was but I
listened, dutifully, so as to maintain my membership in official guyhood (for
example - listening to Deep Purple Live in Japan (actually, not a bad
record) after smoking several bowls of hash at a party). In this example, it's
not necessarily that it was a bad piece of music, and in fact, it was probably
designed for the use to which my friends and I put it, but that it's excessive
and repetitious and incouraged lesser talents to rock out in a totally
self-indulgent manner.
There would also be times in someone's car, where someone in the front seat
would be flipping the dial around and pass through some funky black/dance
oriented station and it would be like inhaling pure oxygen. The dial flipper
would then keep going until he landed on some familiar FM rock (Doobie
Brothers, Lynrd Skynrd, Crosby Stills and Nash, Aerosmith, etc.) and that's
what we'd listen to. Similarly, I'd sometimes be within proximity of an AM
radio (back when AM stations still mostly played music) and hear some silly
and very catchy top 40 song which I might privately enjoy but publicly
disavow.
Finally, punk rock came along and changed my life. But that's another story.
Mark Fearer
Skynyrd'.