Pop culture amnesia

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Stephen Worth, an animation producer of note, has been guest-blogging on BoingBoing for a few weeks, and has been unearthing all kinds of vintage animation, film, and sensible ideas about the forgotten richness of American pop culture. This particular post struck a chord with me for two reasons. First, it's a pretty concise summary of the current state of corporate popular culture and its victims who, for example, like "all kinds of music" as long as it's something they can hear played in stress rotation on a Sirius XM channel targeted to their particular consumer demographic. Second, it reminds me how my own tastes as a youth were molded by giant entertainment corporations which gleefully convinced me that, prima facie, the past sucked, so I would be well primed buy their product.

The video embedded in the BoingBoing post is the grand finale from the 1943 musical "Stormy Weather." I'm struck by how different it looks to me now versus how I imagine I would have reacted to it as a late-night TV movie 35 years ago. It would have been unthinkable for twentysomething Baby Boomers to find anything to admire in it. Tap dancing? Shit --- that's what we were forced to sit through every Sunday night while Selig and DoubleE stared at The Ed Sullivan Show with us as collateral damage. The counterculture had no use for tap dancing because purveyors of Revolution like Capitol Records, Warner Brothers, Columbia, and all their groovy subsidiaries convinced us that we were too hip for it. And the funny thing about it: I do believe it was a more innocent time. For awhile, at least, entertainment corporations were content to throw money at freaks and impresarios, stand back, and let them create both innovative music and bales of cash.

So what changed? Why is the product of today's entertainment conglomerates so much more odious than it was 40 or 45 years ago? My guess: the marketing focus group as a social engineering tool --- a tool that, today, is probably less successful at funding the cocaine habits of entertainment tycoons than at trapping the American mind in an endlessly recursive matrix of multimedia cross references, taglines, brand names, and virtual reality.

Tap dancing? It's all about dudes and babes playing jump-jazz percussion using castanets bolted to the soles of their shoes, while bounding across tabletops, grand pianos, and what-have-you. The Nicholas Brothers must have had adductors with the proportionate strength of piranha jaws. So if you have 10 minutes to spare, click through to the YouTube video clip embedded in the BoingBoing post. There are more dancing zoot suiters, foxy babes, and African-American GIs than you can shake a stick at, plus Cab Calloway keeping the tempo and Lena Horne dolling up the joint.