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"Wet-dog records, in the end, productively arrest the process of pop-culture consumption. The best albums—or rather, those considered classics—reward repeated listening, but they also have an indisputable initial impact. The wet dogs seem like disappointments at first, and grow into something more than respectability. They’re records that draw listeners back in, that require an audience’s help to complete, that provide cheering proof that an artist’s goal isn’t necessarily success so much as creative exploration."
— Ben Greenman on Morrissey’s “Kill Uncle” and the Wet-Dog-Record Theory http://nyr.kr/14952PI -
The Hundred Best Lists of All Time→
Shouts & Murmurs - Gary Belsky compiled the 100 best lists of all time, including Schindler’s list, the 10 Commandments, the ultimate grocery list, and more: http://nyr.kr/Tpas0j
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When the new season of “Mad Men” began, just a few weeks ago, it carried with it an argument about whether the spell it casts is largely a product of its beautifully detailed early-sixties setting or whether, as Matthew Weiner, its creator, insisted, it’s not backward-looking at all but a product of character, story line, and theme. So it seems time to pronounce a rule about American popular culture: the Golden Forty-Year Rule. The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past. (And the particular force of nostalgia, one should bear in mind, is not simply that it is a good setting for a story but that it is a good setting for you.)
To cases. In the nineteen-forties—the first decade in which all the major components of mass culture were up and running, even early television—the beloved focus of nostalgia was the innocent aughts of the early century, a time imagined as one of perky girls in long dresses and shy boys in straw hats. “Meet Me in St. Louis,” a film made in 1944 about a fair held in 1904, was perhaps the most lovable of the many forties entertainments set in the aughts, from “The Magnificent Ambersons” to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” a musical made in 1948 about a song written in 1908. The nineteen-fifties saw lots of movies about the First World War—“The Seven Little Foys,” anyone?—and kicked off our Titanic romance, with “A Night to Remember.” The decade also brought the revival of the jazz of the teens, with the essentially serious music of Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton recast by middle-aged white men in straw boaters and striped jackets as something softer, called Dixieland
- In this week’s Comment, Adam Gopnik writes about what “Mad Men” shows about American pop culture: http://nyr.kr/HHz5gG
