The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of Postmodernism

The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of Postmodernism

The Review

by 10 Contributors

June 14, 2019

What was Postmodernism? In the 35 years since Fredric Jameson’s New Left Review essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” — and the 40 years since the publication of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition — it’s fair to say that no other idea from the academic humanities has had so vast, if murky, an influence on the broader culture. (Often assumed to be a proponent of postmodernism, Jameson is rather its diagnostician.) [The TV Series] Seinfeld was said to be “postmodern,” and so was the architecture of Frank Gehry. So, too, was the “fashionable nonsense” targeted by Alan Sokal in his infamous 1996 Social Text hoax. As the recent “Sokal Squared” hoaxes showed, the specter of postmodernism continues to be a useful cudgel wielded against the university.

Debates about postmodernism have returned, in both vulgar and sophisticated forms — from Jordan Peterson’s crusade against “postmodern neo-Marxism” to Bruno Latour’s defense of climate science to Rita Felski’s probing of “the limits of critique.” And the accelerating media bombardment enabled by our proliferating devices has only intensified what Jameson, all those years ago, called the “transformation of the ‘real’ into so many pseudo-events.”

In that spirit, we asked 10 contributors to reflect on the continuing relevance — or irrelevance — of postmodernism to the academy and the larger culture.

Jean-François Lyotard | BRACHA L. ETTINGER

You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think

This Conspiracy Is About You

by Moira Weigel

Postmodernism has long been an object of conspiracies. But I had forgotten that, in the middle of his canonical essay “Postmodernism,” Fredric Jameson himself turns to the subject of conspiracy theorists. What’s more, he acknowledges a kinship between their methods and his own.

Such an acknowledgment might sound like precisely the confession that the self-described opponents of postmodernism have been waiting for. Since the Culture Wars of the late 1980s, these opponents have come from many and politically varied quarters, from bow-tied defenders of Great Books courses to class-first Marxists who argue that emphasis on discourse and representation has been distracting and destructive for left politics.

In the era of Donald Trump — and YouTube — the most fevered version of the case against postmodernism has become increasingly visible. That is, the claim that a coalition of critical theorists, poststructuralists, multiculturalists, feminists, queer theorists, and African-American and other “studies” professors have successfully conspired to take over educational institutions, the media, and the U.S. government, and even to establish a new International World Order. (Why those same masterminds so often prove unable to secure the minimal funding needed to keep their departments open, or university presses running, does not come up. Nor do the many intellectual and political differences that we have among ourselves.)

As the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy has migrated from Holocaust-denier conferences and terrorist manifestos to White House memos and the opinion pages of The New York Times, its exponents have continued to deploy a rhetoric of reaction that at once abjures and identifies with the targets of its criticism. The “studies” department politicized culture, so “we” must start a culture war. The Social Justice Warriors have made the transgression of gender norms so normal that “we” must transgress them. Joe Biden doesn’t like you either. Look what you made him do.

Now: The writers who expound the Cultural Marxism story have not necessarily read Jameson. The most popular accounts — books like Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West (2001) or Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation (2011) — end in the 1960s, with Herbert Marcuse. In 2017, when Jordan Peterson told an audience at the Manning Centre that “you need to understand postmodernism, because that’s what you’re up against,” he recommended that people buy Understanding Postmodernism, by Stephen Hicks.

The refusal to engage with power makes mainstream

critics of postmodernism often sound conspiratorial.

But Jameson is one of relatively few thinkers who has ever actually described himself as a “cultural marxist.” And both the style of thinking that he practices and the “cultural logic” that he describes — his insistence that everything is historical, and therefore political — is what stands accused.

And not just by self-described white nationalists. Since the election of Donald Trump, even reputable cultural critics who identify as liberals and leftists have begun to say that they, too, blame “postmodernism.” The MLA has sponsored panels of earnest self-criticism on the responsibility that literary scholars bear for creating the conditions of “post-truth.”

That is, there has been a growing consensus that postmodernism destroyed a necessary capacity to draw distinctions, created epistemic conditions in which left and right, it is all the same. Rereading Jameson, I found conceptual resources for countering such claims. The sense that there is no outside, that everything connects to everything, is one that Jameson really does share with Glenn Beck. But at the heart of his essay on postmodernism, anticipating the charge that he is similar to conspiracists, Jameson articulates the differences between them.

The passage I mean comes at the end of the section on the “technological sublime.” Jameson has made his argument that, whereas Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant conceptualized the sublime as an encounter with divinity or nature, by the 1980s those forces had been replaced by technology. It’s a concept prescient enough to seem banal, now. If the sublime is that which overwhelms the subject with the finitude of his own reasoning capacities, anyone who has ever attended a Silicon Valley Demo Day or called their health-insurance company to dispute the denial of a claim by “the computer” knows that Big Data does exactly this.

According to Jameson, a new genre of writing and filmmaking he calls “high-tech paranoia” captured this situation best. The narratives he had in mind were stories of conspiracy: “Yet conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt — through the figuration of advanced technology — to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system.” Degraded why? Because while it went through the motions of revealing truth — the shadowy agency behind the global plot, the men in smoky rooms who had made everything happen — ultimately conspiracy theory preserved the invisibility that it thematizes.

At the end of “Postmodernism,” Jameson proposes that the task of art and of criticism in his time is to do something that he calls global cognitive mapping: to create “a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system.” Superficially, the work of cognitive mapping resembles conspiracy theorizing. Both abandon “depth reading” in favor of tracing connections. Both aver that there is no “outside.”

The key difference is that the first activity aims to demystify. The frantic activity of Glenn Beck at his chalkboard or Jordan Peterson tweeting about “cultural Marxists” does not ultimately enable the reader or viewer to recognize the forces that keep her in her place. Rather it exaggerates their incomprehensible sublimity. The Big Boss’s Boss stays offscreen — for the sequel.

This refusal to really engage with power is what makes the mainstream critics of postmodernism, cultural Marxism, and allegedly related movements — intersectionality, “safetyism,” etc. — so often sound conspiratorial themselves. While they point to many interrelated cultural and political changes, they provide no concrete account of how these changes happen. They have no theory of power. They like it that way.

It is common, for instance, for contemporary anti-postmodernists to claim that students with “illiberal” ideas have gotten their professors fired, or that a Twitter mob has “censored” a major magazine or book. Sure, student unrest can lead to the dismissal of a teacher, and social-media outrage can be a reason that a publishing conglomerate decides to halt the presses. But to say that the overheated feelings of a few teenagers can make professors destitute — or that snark broadcast to a few dozen followers can oppress a presidential candidate — is to skip over a few key steps.

We cannot actually understand the relationship between students’ embrace of certain ideas and the precarity of their teachers — just for instance — without mapping the academic and corporate bureaucracies, the government-backed lending institutions, that shape their lives. The widespread accusation that “theory” has produced our situation may be so popular precisely because it allows existing power structures to remain as they are. Pay no attention to that debt bureaucracy behind the curtain!

Whether you think exposing power this way is the only legitimate task of art or literature or criticism is another question. But to account for culture at the present will require descending from the online marketplace of ideas into the workshop of their production.

Otherwise, at the end of this thriller, the anti-theorist valued for his “viewpoint diversity” will fly to the next campus, give his next talk on how he is being silenced by teenagers, and collect his $30,000 — and the next installment of the Culture War franchise will remain just as predictable.

Moira Weigel is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.

Tracing Fossils of the Old Beast

by Justin E.H. Smith

All things come to an end, not least the coming-to-an-end of things. And so it had to be with the end of modernism, and the couple of decades of reflection and debate on what was to come next. For me, postmodernism is the copy of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, which I bought in English translation in 1993. It’s sitting in a cardboard box, its pages slowly yellowing and its cover design receding into something recognizably vintage, in my old mother’s suburban California garage. I stowed it there when I moved to Paris, in 2013. And in the past six years I have seen only fossil traces of the old beast said to have roamed here in earlier times, eating up grand narratives and truth claims like they were nests full of unprotected eggs.

A few living fossils, coelacanth-like, survived from French philosophy’s âge d’or and could still fill lecture halls. But the survivors were mostly known for their non-representativity, in part because they loudly proclaimed it. Alain Badiou, for example, talked about the transcendental forms of love and beauty. Bruno Latour, not long after 2001, began regretting what his own brand of truth-wariness had done to stoke the “truther” conspiracy theories that had quickly spread to the villagers who worked his family’s vineyards, in Bourgogne. And for the most part, as Perry Anderson observed, by the early 21st century French philosophy had gone the way of French cinema: the way of nostalgia, safe formulas, and whatever special effects could be pulled off in the absence of adequate funding.

So much for France, then. In the Anglosphere, new technology was meanwhile ensuring that whatever had been said a few decades prior about simulacra and spectacle may as well have been said not about television, or even the early internet, but about telegraphs and semaphore. I, a clueless normie, first noticed the full extent of the epochal shift in 2015. Old institutions were crumbling — media, entertainment, education, democracy. Along with them, old ideas about what constitutes authority came to seem laughable. An American president was propelled into office through trolling. Mobs emerged to shame and ostracize anyone, no matter how distinguished or eminent, who did not agree with them. The internet, which should long ago have been transformed into a public utility, had instead been transformed into a weapon of war: not just a metaphorical “war of words,” but actual war, an asymmetrical vigilante war (with covert support from a recrudescing superpower) bent upon bringing old institutions to the ground. We are in the midst of this war as I write.

Old institutions were crumbling — media,

entertainment, education, democracy.

By the time of this epochal shift, academic postmodernists had become fully identified with their institutions. They might have entered into them in a spirit of play and subversion, but try telling the precariously employed and prospectless grad students that their professors’ health insurance and retirement plans are just so much play.

This shift has also hailed a stark return to old ideas about truth and falsehood, ideas that the postmodernists had been dismissing for my whole conscious life as unsophisticated and passé. No moment for me is more emblematic of this than Avital Ronell’s implosion in the wake of her harassment scandal last year. She thought she could pass it all off as “camp,” that is, an expression of free play unbound by simple rules of right and wrong. Slavoj Žižek and a few other coevals offered up variations on the importance of not rushing to judgment. After all, the heart is a dark forest and those of us on the outside of an emotionally charged affair are in a poor position to judge of its true nature, so be quiet and let my friend Avital keep using NYU office space as her deconstructionist romper room. The young people were not having it.

One of the preferred phrases in internet-based debate is “full stop.” For instance, “Trans women are women, full stop.” Conservatives such as Jordan Peterson, who continue in the habit of believing that the problem with the left is its “postmodernism,” have been so floored by what they take to be the disregard for scientific or transcendental truth in the first part of this sentence that they have completely failed to notice the utterly un-postmodernist spirit of the second part — the “full stop.” But the kids mean what they say, and in this they are a world away from the postmodernists, to whose spirit nothing could have been more contrary than the suggestion that there is a final word, a full stop, on anything. The future, at least the near future, belongs to them. Playtime is over.

Justin E.H. Smith is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris Diderot and the author of Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason (Princeton University Press, 2019).

Jacques Derrida | ULF ANDERSEN/GETTY IMAGES

The End of the World

By Mark Greif

“Postmodernism” referred to three different things.

Postmodernism1 asked a question about art. The question was: Had the story of modern art ended? The answer seemed to be yes. “Modern art,” in this sense, meant a sequence of stepwise advances in style, begun in the 1860s, each novelty making its predecessors obsolete. The story of modernism in art had been told such that it could have an ending, once the possible new steps were reduced to minimal, repetitive, or chance gestures (in the fine arts), and no improvements in function could be conceived (as in architecture). Now, in the 1970s and 1980s, art ended before critics’ eyes. Minimal music. Rephotographed Marlboro Men. Decorative party hats on skyscrapers. Fredric Jameson recorded some of the changes in his great essay “Postmodernism” (1984), as Arthur Danto celebrated others in “The End of Art” (1984) and elsewhere. Artists kept making works, but knew they all came “after.”

Postmodernism2 asked questions about society. Considering economics, politics, and technology, it asked: Had a “modern” order, begun in the 1500s or the 1700s, ended in the rich nations? Industrial capitalism underwent deindustrialization. The democratic utopias — of bourgeois revolutions for rights and freedoms, and socialist revolutions for equality and plenty — seemed to be running out of steam. Information and computation might liquidate and concentrate all spheres of knowledge and value — or just multiply and clutter them. In different ways, these were the questions asked by Jean-François Lyotard, David Harvey, and Francis Fukuyama in the 1980s and 1990s. But the answer here to “postmodernity” seemed to be: No, modernity hadn’t ended after all; it had accelerated, metastasized, reorganized. On this view, we still dwell in the familiar “modernity” that launched with the Renaissance, scientific revolution, or industrialization, just more pessimistically.

Postmodernism3 was less coherent. It helped to name a conflict in philosophy. A strange struggle had occurred in English-language university departments after 1945, when philosophy and some social sciences lost touch with Europe and refashioned themselves as progressive and anti-historical imitators of the “hard” sciences. Postwar European social science and philosophy found alternate homes in literature and anthropology departments, as “theory.” Sometimes it was called, by its opponents, “postmodernism.” (Perhaps because “modernism” in thought could mean rigorism, scientific unification and purification. But philosophical “modernism” had also meant relativism, pragmatism, and phenomenology, and the objected-to portions of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, or Bourdieu preceded them in modernists like Dewey, Boas, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, not to mention Weber, Freud, and Marx.) During the period from 1970 to 2000, the disciplinary musical chairs upset, or inspired, all sorts of people, quite needlessly. The continuing use of “postmodernism” as a pejorative, today, is a know-nothing usage, and should decline in importance.

“Postmodernism” has become a historical term,

naming forms of debate from the last fin-de-siècle.

Thirty-five years after its best formulations, “postmodernism” has become an essentially historical term. It names forms of debate from the last fin de siècle. All the phenomena underlying the debates still live, however. The major critical statements are each in their own way quite great, and worth reading. Jameson’s contributions, especially, have held up best because of his indestructible Marxist commitment to overlaying the artistic and cultural (his métier) upon the social and economic, even where they mismatch.

My own position is that the explanation for the “postmodern,” and its role as a mysterious vortex for intense energies of the late 20th century, can only be understood within the larger proliferation of “posts” in the period, including also “posthistory” and the “posthuman.” The energizing feature of all these debate-containers, which also named lively fantasies (of intellectual messianism, of world destruction), belongs to that gap you can see between Postmodernism1 and Postmodernism2, a magnetic dynamo (for those who flopped between culture and political economy) repeated in many other intellectual locations.

Some forms of structured progress really did end, like modern art. Other forms, equally intellectual yet real, really didn’t end — like capitalism and socialism, even though the U.S.S.R. went kaput. Still others more unpredictably didn’t end — like the world itself, though it sometimes seemed it should have. The expected U.S.-U.S.S.R. nuclear war never happened, despite ample opportunities. Yet the world itself secretly embarked on another possible ending in unforeseen guise, and nuclear terror has been adapted for a slow climate catastrophe already underway. This persistence fits within the modern habit of thought that overvalues the new, feels the accelerated tempo of eventfulness, and can’t quite decide whether it should prefer to be in the last generation, or to abide. Whether, in other words, the pleasure of being the first to name, describe, or even help cause the end of the world and time would be worth the price of undergoing it.

Mark Greif is an associate professor of English at Stanford University.

Postmodernists Didn’t Go Far Enough

by Ethan Kleinberg

The Bonaventure Hotel still stands in downtown Los Angeles, 35 years after Fredric Jameson presented it as an exemplar of postmodernism. But walking through the Bonaventure today, one has the inescapable feeling of inhabiting a past promise of what the future was to be. One has a similar feeling re-reading Jameson’s essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” The building and the text each gestures to the hopes or fears of an inevitable future that never came to pass — though it is principally fear that has driven attacks on postmodernism, from the time of Jameson’s essay to now.

Jameson’s fear was that postmodern theory disabled Marxist critique and political action. More recent attacks from public intellectuals on the Marxist left conserve Jameson’s claim that postmodernism abandons the concept of “truth,” paralyzing the critic in negation and revolt. These are claims that I reject.

It is wrongheaded to assert that postmodernism abandons “truth.” While the postmodern position does hold truth to be socially constructed, it does not follow that truth does not exist. Instead, postmodernism seeks to understand why and how some truths are accepted while others are not. This is a deeply historical project which requires scholars to engage with the ways that epistemological commitments change at different times and in different places. Far from inciting paralysis, an understanding of historical contingency is liberating because it denaturalizes suppositions previously taken to be foundational or immutable. It opens up the possibility of change.

Surprisingly, aspects of Jameson’s critique have provided a template for critics of postmodernism from the political center and right. Jordan Peterson’s cartoonish characterization of postmodernism as “an infinite number of ways to interpret a finite set of phenomena” and his conclusion that under such a world view “no interpretation can be privileged above another” merely serve as a means of misdirection allowing him to privilege his own odious interpretations. Steven Pinker’s work has more academic credibility, but the family resemblance is visible, as when he asks an imagined postmodernist this rhetorical question: “If truth is just socially constructed, would you say that climate change is a myth?” But to assert that the truth is socially constructed is not tantamount to saying it is impossible to privilege any one truth above others. We can and we do. The potency of the postmodern approach lies in its ability to question why and how such privileging occurs.

The issue has never been that postmodernism has gone too far but that academics have yet to go far enough. Given the precarity of our current political, ecological, and epistemological climate, the time has come for academics to embrace postmodernism — to activate not only its potential for critique but also its power to create space for change.

Ethan Kleinberg is a professor of history and letters at Wesleyan University and editor-in-chief of History and Theory.

Judith Butler | MIQUEL TAVERNA, CENTRE DE CULTURA CONTEMPORÀNIA DE BARCELONA

Still Modernist, After All These Years

by Marjorie Perloff

Contradiction, disruption, dislocation, decentering: In the 1970s and ’80s, I was a confirmed believer in those defining attributes of what was known as postmodernism. From David Antin’s groundbreaking essay “Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry,” published in the first issue (1972) of boundary 2, to Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979), to Fredric Jameson’s definitive “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984), with its elaboration of “the death of the author,” “the waning of affect,” the “new depthlessness,” the blank parody we call “pastiche,” and “the new spatial logic of the simulacrum” (the term simulacrum made famous by Jean Baudrillard), postmodernism was the order of the day.

Ihab Hassan’s elaborate charts, which pitted modernism against postmodernism, using such categories as urbanism versus the global village, elitism versus community and anarchy, and irony versus camp and the absurd, were widely cited as if their neat bifurcation was a fact of life in the second half of the 20th century. Derridean anti-essentialism demanded that we all scoff at the very possibility of transcendental value or external “truth.” The only difference was between those who thought the coming of postmodernism was a good thing — a liberating notion ushering in a new avant-garde — and those who saw it as the darker and inevitable logic of a late and brutal capitalism.

Jameson was of the second camp, I myself of the first. The artists I loved and championed — John Cage, Jasper Johns, Robert Smithson, Laurie Anderson, the Language poets — were doing things that seemed new and exciting; theirs were “breakthrough” performances (and indeed performance art was deemed to be a leading new practice), challenging the “old” modernist ethos, with its “elitist” canon of predominantly white European males. But whether one approved or disapproved of postmodernism, it was, well into the 1990s, considered a valuable period concept.

Then suddenly — or at least it seemed sudden to many of us — postmodernism was finished. The turning point came, I believe, with 9/11, although no one realized it at the time. The attack on the World Trade Center at the threshold of the new century, with its terrible death count, followed by the coming of ISIS and other political upheavals and culminating in the election of Donald Trump, in 2016, made it increasingly difficult to talk of simulacra and multiple truths, of the absurdity of master narratives and the refusal of all categorical imperatives. Derridean différance increasingly gave way to the concept of diversity, which, in practice, means the necessity for previously underrepresented communities to gain recognition. The notion of decentering now came to refer not to ambiguity or undecidability, but to a statistically based inclusiveness.

In the strangest way, Proust and Kafka,

Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp,

remain unsurpassable.

Indeed, in 2019 the pendulum seems to have swung as far away from “postmodernism” as possible. The sentence “Trump is a racist” is now regularly pronounced on CNN as if it were a simple fact, equivalent to “Trump is 6'3".” The assumption is that racist means a specific thing and Trump is definitely that thing. Or again, when people today refer to “social justice,” a term postmodernism would have been reluctant to use, they see no need to define the term. No simulacrum here: We all know what social justice would and should look like.

Accordingly, if postmodernism can now refer to anything, it can only be a historical period, from around 1960 to 2000. What, then, about our own moment? Surely there is no use calling ours the post-postmodern, especially since — and this is the real complication — even as postmodernism has gone away, modernism is still very much with us.

Indeed, the art and literature once thought to be “postmodern” (say, the theater of Beckett) now seems more properly “late modern.” And the work of the great modernists — Joyce and Pound, Mahler and Malevich — continues to be hotly debated and discussed, even as their postmodern successors, like William Burroughs and Günter Grass, have largely been eclipsed. It seems we are somehow still in the orbit of that great revolution known as modernism. Indeed, one of the seminal books Fredric Jameson has published in this century is a fat volume called The Modernist Papers (Verso, 2007). In the strangest way, Proust and Kafka, Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp, remain unsurpassable.

Given the digital revolution, given the displacement and migration of people around the globe, given the increasingly urgent call for political transformation and for the end of racial and gender inequality, why is it that, at least in the arts, modernist norms have remained so hard to shake off? I can’t answer that question. But time will surely provide an epithet or two for our own epoch. And it won’t be postmodernism.

Marjorie Perloff is an emerita professor of English at Stanford University.

It’s Back, Baby

by Jessica Burstein

Fashion explains everything. Hemlines, hummingbirds, architecture, the structure of scientific revolutions, universities. And I’ve got a party to get to, so I’m going to make this fast.

First, you have to understand that logic is a mug’s game. It works and all that, and I like it that bridges don’t fall down, but the Enlightenment was one among a number of trends. Also, by the way, you are an irrational being — Michael Lewis tells us that you just need a narrative to swallow and you’ll think anything is reasonable. Freud said that too, but that’s another story.

Second point: Academia is not only a very good idea; it is populated by human beings. Most of us were not invited to the prom, so we’re especially pleased to be included in “critical waves.” A critical wave is something that two people said and then there was a special session at the MLA (“Whither Postmodernism?”) where a professor started crying and The Chronicle did a story on it.

Third: Academic trends are just that.

Fourth: The only reason you’re wearing denim this year (you idiot) is because you weren’t last year. Ditto hemlines: Up then means down now. Get it?

Fifth — and here I’m getting indigenous, but my Uber is still three minutes away — the 1990s were investment bankers telling you at cocktail parties it would be great to be a professor since they have summers off, and I was concentrating on not throwing up at my qualifying exams. Modernism was fascism, and then there was the time I cajoled Derrida into telling me what he thought of the new book on Paul de Man. I can’t write what he said, and not just because my French lexicon of obscenities is underpopulated. You (don’t) remember de Man — deconstruction, Yale, and the grad student who found de Man’s newspaper columns in the 1940s collaborationist paper Le Soir? The handsomest man in academia had co-edited a book called Responses — go look it/him up. Belgium was actually in the news. There was, if not a feeding frenzy, at least an animated chow-down in which lots of folks aligned deconstruction with the idea that words meant nothing, that these guys (not sic) said there was no meaning, and so that led to the breakdown of a moral center, and next stop gas chambers.

Academia is not only a very good idea;

it is populated by human beings.

Sound familiar? It’s back, baby. And you look fab-u-lous dragged out in that vegan kidskin moral recrimination Mary Quant miniskirt, throwback Armani #MelanieGriffithheaddesk power-suit jacket, and neoliberal kidskin gloves. (By the way, are there any ladies aboard this little bus?) Anyhoo, the hair shirt comes in Gray Beard and Ivy-Hall, but either way it ain’t optional.

Jessica Burstein is an associate professor of English and gender, women, and sexuality at the University of Washington.

Jordan Peterson | CHRIS WILLIAMSON/GETTY IMAGES

Are Postmodernism and #MeToo Incompatible?

by Seo-Young Chu

There’s a so-called love scene in the 1982 film Blade Runner — usually considered a classic of postmodern art and a staple of the postmodern curriculum — through which I have often fast-forwarded or dissociated.

In this “love scene,” Rick Deckard (the film’s protagonist, a bounty hunter played by Harrison Ford) attempts to kiss Rachael (a “replicant,” or humanoid artifact played by Sean Young). At first Rachael rejects Deckard’s advances. She struggles against him physically. She tries frantically to leave his apartment. But when he commands, “Say, ‘Kiss me,’” she begins to relent: “Kiss me,” she echoes with reluctance. When Deckard goes on to instruct her, repeatedly, to say, “I want you,” she complies in a barely audible voice. Throughout this exchange, Rachael’s face is alive with fear while Deckard’s face is menacing. Meanwhile, the music — a slow yet vigorous and grotesquely tender diatonic saxophone melody that stands out in what is otherwise an explicitly eerie cyberpunk soundscape — announces that what we are witnessing is a triumphant romantic conquest.

I first saw Blade Runner as a naïve teenager in the 1990s. Even back then, I found the “love scene” disturbing, though I could not articulate exactly why. After my own encounter with sexual violence (I was raped and sexually harassed in 2000 by a man in a position of power), I continued to have trouble articulating why I would fast-forward or dissociate during the “love scene” while rewatching the movie.

The film’s spectacular cityscape still entranced me — despite or perhaps because of its Techno-Oriental aura. Thus I was able to teach and to some extent enjoy Blade Runner, telling students that it was one of my favorite films. It was, I thought, a postmodern cinematic masterpiece in which robot rights become trenchantly available for representation when the replicant Roy (played by Rutger Hauer) utters his dying soliloquy.

Recently, after #MeToo, I taught Blade Runner again. This time one of my students emailed me about the “love scene.” She was upset by it. Upon reading her email, I forced myself to watch the scene in its entirety while struggling not to dissociate. A word like “postmodern” would be obscenely irrelevant to a discussion of my reaction, which was visceral, raw, too real, too authentic, too present, the opposite of absent, the opposite of depthless. It was horrific. The coercion, the obvious unwillingness, the trauma — I don’t think I can teach Blade Runner ever again.

If postmodernism renders the replicant Rachael legible as a glossy simulacrum, then #MeToo renders her brutally legible as a victim of sexual violence.

I will conclude this piece the way I sometimes conclude my classroom lectures: with questions for discussion. If you disagree with my reaction to Blade Runner, how would you support your argument? In what ways, if any, is #MeToo postmodern?

Seo-Young Chu is an associate professor of English at the City University of New York’s Queens College.

The Best Lack All Conviction

by David Bromwich

Was there ever a more cheerless name for an art-historical movement? Yet the name fit the mood: Postmodernism wanted to be history before it wagered anything as art. “Neoclassicism” and “the Gothic Revival” went halfway to self-description by declaring that they aimed at a return. Whereas the very word postmodern spoke of exhaustion. It came after a something whose own name meant “of the mode; of the moment.” What could it mean to come after the mode, after the moment?

The idea that the postmodern bears a special relationship to high capitalism owed much to Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s architectural primer Learning From Las Vegas (MIT Press, 1972). Their celebratory approach nonetheless signaled a radical intention, if you knew how to read the surfaces: “Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect.” Of course it is also a way of being conventional. This bland evasiveness would become a characteristic manner for Pomo theorists.

The very word postmodern spoke of exhaustion.

The postmodern meant coming after and pointing to your location. Its key term of art was the word “reference,” transformed from a noun to a verb in sentences that would once have used “mention” or “allude to.” See how this design by Venturi references Gothic ornamentality. Or how Scorsese references the iconic taxi scene in On the Waterfront. For that matter, the Pomo word “iconic,” meaning generally known and known to be known, began its climb to pop currency as a synonym for “famous.” It imparted to fame itself a sacral overtone.

In universities, the new language carried its widest appeal in the visual arts, with some spillover in literary theory and a small allowed ration in political theory and philosophy. Another sample from Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour:

A choice between Perpendicular and Decorated for [19th-century] English churches reflected theological differences between the Oxford and Cambridge Movements. The hamburger-shaped hamburger stand is a current, more literal, attempt to express function via association but for commercial persuasion rather than theological refinement.

This blurring of lines between theology and commerce, art and commerce, high art and the existing landscape of motels and shopping malls, was a Pomo gesture; the authors preferred “roadside eclecticism” and “representational architecture along highways” to the hostile environment built up by modernists like Le Corbusier and Gropius. What was true in architecture could be extended as a democratizing move to literature, painting, music, film.

Ideas of individual talent or personal style were accordingly called into question or “decentered.” But the retrospective judgment of Jean-François Lyotard on his influential book The Postmodern Condition might be taken to qualify the importance of the result: “I made up stories, I referred to a quantity of books I’d never read, apparently it impressed people.”

Postmodernism is sometimes linked with relativism, a speculative theory no one has ever lived. You can’t believe you are right about the worth of an activity or the truth of a proposition and simultaneously believe a person who thinks the opposite is also right. Still, there may be an affinity here: The genuine disagrees with the fake, but Pomo theory called that binary (among others) into question. Postmodernism was a sophisticated stand-in for a lack of conviction, and it prospered most of all on the nonpolitical left of the 1980s and 1990s.

Fredric Jameson’s New Left Review essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” was published five years before Francis Fukuyama’s National Interest essay “The End of History?” The politics of the two authors differed markedly, but the spectacle of hypnotic distraction, which Jameson described in ambiguous tones, was the cultural facade of the same weak-spirited luxury whose triumph Fukuyama celebrated after the fall of communism. In the academic mood of the arts today, it would be hard to find anyone with a good word for postmodernism. The pendulum has swung the other way. We are on the brink of a return of the social-realist doctrine of the 1930s. The arts are said to matter chiefly for their service to culture, and culture is understood to be a province of politics.

David Bromwich is a professor of English at Yale University.

Frederic Jameson | FRONTEIRAS DO PENSAMENTO

The End of History — For Real

by Anna Kornbluh

In the mid-1980s, when eminent theorists proclaimed “the golden age of criticism” in the university without recognizing the imminent economic restructuring of higher education, Fredric Jameson articulated anew the challenge of recognizing the present: Where are we in time? It was this question of historical periodicity — and not really aesthetic style — which he figured as “Postmodernism.” Although obviously a temporal question, Jameson also framed it as a spatial one: the problem of registering a “mutation” in global space — the globalization of capitalism — and subsequently registering how this mutation provokes new representational acts, both artistic and critical.

In the original essay, the paradigmatic medium of these new spatial relations is architecture. Tracking theoretically driven practitioners like Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, or Robert Venturi, Jameson reads their disjoining of style and context, building and surrounding, subject and object. Structures like the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles evoke disorientation in the global environment: What is the space of the totalized economy, and what is the place from which it is mappable? Postmodernism may be an aesthetic of confusion and contradiction, but this is only because it often strives to become a synthetic projection of geopolitical coordinates. The task of the critic is to take up this striving.

Revisiting this periodization exercise with due respect upon its 35th anniversary requires asking how 2019 differs from 1984. The “mutation” in our burning present effects a different closure of the world than the one Jameson described then: the already arrived, unevenly distributed, ecocide. Which critics will interpret this world closure? A pitiful parallel to environmental wreckage is the wholesale destruction of the university, that precious environment where students work to exercise their critical faculty, and where faculty work to model it. Adjunctification of academic labor, withdrawal of state funding, booming administrative overhead, busting personal debt — and the pernicious apportioning of all these factors upon racialized and gendered constituents — all commenced in hideous earnest in the selfsame Bonaventure 1980s. Thirty-five years out from the golden age, there are, as this very platform repeatedly chronicles, only last critics standing.

If the critical task that Jameson so marvelously exemplified in the golden age was to eschew “moral judgements” in favor of “a genuinely dialectical attempt to think our present of time in history,” and ultimately to “think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together,” then we few who remain in these worst of times in the ruined university must say that now this task has changed. What is the dialectic of too late capitalism, when it is too late to have altered the course of catastrophe, when no progress glimmers? Embrace the moral judgement: Too late is precisely when radical transformations are our duty. Remake the university, remake the infrastructures, produce other modes of production.

As for architecture, “of all the arts that closest constitutively to the economic,” in this epoch of double destruction it again furnishes some inducements for constructive criticism. Structures such as Sara Tamez’s Huiini House or LOT-EK’s Johannesburg apartment tower make inexpensive, sustainable, sometimes portable shelter from the byproducts of unsustainable commodity society, harkening resource de-intensifications and alternative scales of social space while also alluding to the imminent threats of civil violence and deluging storms. Today, rather than sublime systems subsuming everything through exploitative extraction, the monstrous ecosystem is purging the human from its swells. Among them, perhaps, some will have wished that they had dedicated their critical labors to building up the university, imagining projects for thriving, even after it was too late.

Anna Kornbluh is associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of the forthcoming The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Beating a Dead Donkey

by Steven Weinberg

In 2001 I expressed the view that the arguments over science as a social construction seemed to be settling down. As one who enjoys arguing, I added that “perhaps it is still not too late to draw back from the brink of peace.”

Alas, it was too late. I may be just out of the loop, but it seems to me now that for scientists to argue against constructivism is beating a dead donkey. There is widespread skepticism about the judgments of science, on topics like climate change, but it has other sources — as far as I know, there are no social constructivists in the Trump administration.

Steven Weinberg is a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979.

* * * * * * * * *

A version of this article appeared in the June 21, 2019, issue.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.

Justin E.H. Smith

Justin E.H. Smith is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris. He is the author, most recently, of Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason (Princeton University Press, 2019).

David Bromwich

David Bromwich is a professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking (Yale University Press, 1992).

Anna Kornbluh

Anna Kornbluh is associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She gratefully acknowledges communal conversations about faculty concerns in various social media venues.

"The Day America Died" and the Birth of Postmodernism

Meaning of American Pie by Don McLean (w/lyrics)

Some might ask, "When did America Die?" and how did "the Birth of Postmodernism" redeem the uglier side of the 20th Century's secular modernism? For those who lived through that momentous era (myself included) it all began in the 1960s when America fought an unnecessary 12-year war in Vietnam to protect its industrial and mining operations.

And it was because of the Vietnam War that the very fabric of American democracy was torn away to challenge its citizens to be better than their policies, racisms, and fell perception of itself as "Savior of the World." It was an unwanted war that deeply divided the country.

It was also during this era "When clear-eyed postmodernism replaced the wretchedness of secular human modernism" fallen from its industrial thrones in the riotous uproar of protests raging across America crying out that its society regain its sanity and begin to live out what it means to be human to one another.

This came to be known as the birth of the hippie movement with its drugs and "peace signs" and protest marches to "Make Love Not War". It was an age of great disillusionment where the baby boomer generation could find no footing for its promised future become more a nightmare than the utopia they were led to believe was out there to be grasped.

The 60s also were witness to the great Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King decrying the killing of young black men on the front lines of the war while the injustice of civil liberty continued to be experienced by the nation's sacrificing African-American black minorities. After 200+ years of slavery and dehumanizing racism they continued to live in a land promising Constitutional equality and liberty that was only true for America's White majority populations. But to the black man and woman across the nation there was no advocacy, no healing, no purposeful vindication stopping White discrimination. And there was anger. And whole cities burned to the ground in protest. It was a cry for respect, love, and dignity.

And so it is in the light of these desperate events - and all the upheaval that came with them challenging the American Dream - that a generation of hard core rockers sang their frustrations, their hopes and dreams, their dissatisfactions and protests. And it was into this musical mix that a young sing/songwriter by the name of Don McLean captured it all from a musician's viewpoint as secular modernism finally fell away stripped of its humanity. We know this song today by the title, "American Pie."

Sixty years later (circa 2016 and following), America has learned nothing from the agonies of its past generations, has switched off "the music", and is making the same mistakes generations earlier had made, showing to the world the uglier side of democracy gone terribly wrong when held in the clutches of the unredeemed. This was the promise of postmodernism against the chaos and anarchy of the world that is, and is to come.

R.E. Slater

May 11, 2017

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Introductory Remarks

"Not as Simple as American Pie"

Part 1

by R.E. Slater

February 14, 2012

[Disclaimer: Please note, I have not written this article as a political piece. Rather, my interest is in developing a historical perspective of Postmodernism's birth in America so that we may be better able to think about it in our contemporary cultures today.]

Last week, while driving around, I happened to be looking for a radio talk show to listen to and stumbled upon the Glenn Beck show reviewing Don McLean's song American Pie. Well that got my interest perked right away. I love the rocker sounds of the 60's and, being curious, I proceeded to listen to Glenn's political commentary about America's lost cultural icons and popular sophisms. Moreover, this got me thinking about the life-and-death stages of our philosophical eras... in this case the dying throes of the Modernistic era and the nascent birth of Postmodernism... as I was listening to Glenn's analysis of the America of the 1950s culturally dying in the face of what he perceives as today's rampant liberalism. Not being a Glenn Beck fan (literally because I don't listen to him though I have tried) but more probably because I tend to be less cynical and fatalistic about societal evolution than he is as a political (or is it religious?) commentarist. And because I don't prefer Glenn's historical nostalgic revisionisms and pontifications about America's past modernistic society and culture. For these reasons I don't generally listen to him.

Anyway, as I was listening to Glenn's reflections on American Pie it began to dawn upon me, from a postmodernist viewpoint, that the 1960's was the decade of American institutional collapse. Every major public institution was under severe attack - from the government itself, to major university campuses and smaller, municipalities, churches, and public agencies in general. Along with these public displays of outrage and dissatisfaction came the short-lived Flower Power hippie movement, Woodstock and the age of hard rock, unbridled sexual liberation, indiscriminate drug usage, fierce civil riots with a correspondent police and military response, and the collapse of Vietnam in the wake of an untimely military withdrawal of American troops from the war with China in SE Asia. All of this I lived through as a young boy, and later as a student of a major university, undergoing its own internal strifes and disturbing civic remonstrations.

Our views of society had changed. America had become disillusioned by its abilities to liberate subjugated societies from ruin and destruction. Our sons and daughters were dying at an alarming rate. The focus on our nation's civil problems were glaringly deficient and requiring much more attention to basic equalities and civil liberties. Our national budget was going bust. And our national optimism of the 1950s had collapsed with modernism's death so that we were unable to discriminate our national identity and purpose any longer. Over the next 60 years America would necessarily recommit itself to its founding charters and constitutions. Absorbing newer lessons of failure and reviewing nationalistic ideologies that continue to form even now as we grapple with the meaning and intent of postmodernism for not only America, but the western world at large.

So that as I listened to Glenn Beck explain a song that we've all have heard a thousand times - and for those of us who grew up during the 1960s and were quite familiar with McLean's inferences - I thought that this may be enlightening to review again from a socio-politico-philosophical point of view. I don't propose any solutions to Mclean's song - though I have provided plenty of commentary and articles to that end below - but I do propose that we listen to the song and observations made from a postmodernistic point-of-view. Giving to us a more physical object lesson as to what postmodernism was, and has come to be, rather than as a mere philosophical definition little understood by our present day societal culture. Lessons as important to the world-at-large, as they are to America today, in an attempt to create a generalized understanding between us of where we have come as civilizations, and what we can become as the 21st Century proceeds forwards as international communities stretching across the oceans into the Mid-East and Far-East, Africa and Latin South America.

Consequently, I have provided a final, more Emergent Christian commentary-and-reflection on postmodernism in Part 2 found further below, which I cannot provide here in my introductory comments as they would be too preliminary. So then, let us start....

R.E. Slater

February 14, 2012

*[A short aside... If anything - and I'm sorry to disappoint any of my readers but in the interest of honesty - I tend to lean towards more of a political conservatism economically - in a moderating, commonsense approach to less big government.  But not in a neo-political / neo-cultural sense, as can be seen here in this web blog journal's more liberal cultural citations and articles of humanitarian plea and gender recognitions.  But in a more formative, capitalistic engagement, entrepreneurially as opposed to today's political leanings towards social capitalism and the anti-business environments found in public schools, colleges and government. If anything, western civilization has to determine how to re-engage itself towards a socially literate capitalism as versus a constrictive socialism... these are the political hot topics of the day which we see being played out in American media. And so my vote will lean towards capitalism despite all of its social faults. I find it supports more basic human liberties while avoiding less societal egregiousness that can become more restrictive, socially demeaning, creating a more rigid economic class structure that is harder to remove oneself from. Especially when based upon opposing compelling arguments for more exasperating legislative governmental laws that are tearing apart our ability to create new industries and commerce under the largess of a big government wishing to micro-manage our lives, our trades, our worship and freedoms.

Further, making money can be a good thing especially if it can be re-directed towards creating capitalistic-based social agencies, educational units, and public institutions as evidenced in the newer courses found in colleges focusing on "Non-Profit Management" and "International Study." In any system there are faults. And no system can be perfectly in balance with one another that is equally structured on rights and liberties. Communism and Socialism had their experiments and have failed. Naked capitalism as epitomized by Ayn Rand's books have shown its failures and short-sightedness too. The best we can do is to learn to communicate in sane, common-sensical, working relationships with one another, whether liberal or conservative. Not in the current state of hyper-critical, continuing destruction of one another. To me, these are the main political issues of the day. And in the meantime it is my duty to continue to explain why I am positive on America, and on the idea of postmodernism itself, for redeeming western civilization out of its political morass and cultural instabilities. Now back to the topic at hand.... ]

* * * * * * * * * * *

History and emergence of Postmodernism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

...After [1949], Postmodernism was applied to a whole host of movements, many in art, music, and literature, that reacted against tendencies in the imperialist phase of capitalism called "modernism," and are typically marked by revival of historical elements and techniques.^[8] Walter Truett Anderson identifies Postmodernism as one of four typological world views. These four world views are:

1. the postmodern-ironist, which sees truth as socially constructed;
2. the scientific-rational, in which truth is found through methodical, disciplined inquiry;
3. the social-traditional, in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western civilization;
4. and the neo-romantic, in which truth is found through attaining harmony with nature and/or spiritual exploration of the inner self.^[9]

Postmodernist ideas in philosophy and the analysis of culture and society expanded the importance of critical theory and has been the point of departure for works of literature, architecture, and design, as well as being visible in marketing/business and the interpretation of history, law and culture, starting in the late 20th century.

These developments—re-evaluation of the entire Western value system (love, marriage, popular culture, shift from industrial to service economy) that took place since the 1950s and 1960s, with a peak in the Social Revolution of 1968—are described with the term Postmodernity,^[10] as opposed to Postmodernism, a term referring to an opinion or movement. "Postmodernist" describes part of a movement; "Postmodern" places it in the period of time since the 1950s, making it a part of contemporary history.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Don Mclean said...

"You will find many 'interpretations' of my lyrics but none of them by me... sorry to leave you all on your own like this but long ago I realized that songwriters should make their statements and move on, maintaining a dignified silence."

I take this to mean that he wants us to find our own meaning in it, that's why music and art exists; the artists creates it and sets it free to let us all appreciate it in our own way and take from it our own special meaning.

- by utubeforthepeople

* * * * * * * * * * *

Understanding American Pie

http://understandingamericanpie.com/

From The 1950s by David Halberstam

In the autumn of 1971 Don McLean's elegiac American Pie entered the collective consciousness, and over thirty years later remains one of the most discussed, dissected and debated songs that popular music has ever produced. A cultural event at the peak of its popularity in 1972, it reached the top of the Billboard 100 charts in a matter of weeks, selling more than 3 million copies; and at eight and a half minutes long, this was no mean feat. But this was no ordinary song, either: boldly original and thematically ambitious, what set American Pie apart had a lot to do with the way we weren't entirely sure what the song was about, provoking endless debates over its epic cast of characters. And these controversies remain with us to this day. But however open to interpretation the lyrics may have been, the song's emotional resonance was unmistakable: McLean was clearly relating a defining moment in the American experience—something had been lost, and we knew it. Opening with the death of singer Buddy Holly and ending near the tragic concert at Altamont Motor Speedway, we are able to frame the span of years the song is covering—1959 to 1970—as the "10 years we've been on our own" of the third verse. It is across this decade that the American cultural landscape changed radically, passing from the relative optimism and conformity of the 1950s and early 1960s to the rejection of these values by the various political and social movements of the mid and late 1960s.

Coming as it did near the end of this turbulent era, American Pie seemed to be speaking to the precarious position we found ourselves in, as the grand social experiments of the 1960s began collapsing under the weight of their own unrealized Utopian dreams, while the quieter, hopeful world we grew up in receded into memory. And as 1970 came to a close and the world this generation had envisioned no longer seemed viable, a sense of disillusion and loss fell over us; we weren't the people we once were. But we couldn't go home again either, having challenged the assumptions of that older order. The black and white days were over.

Bye bye, Miss American Pie

The 1950s are fondly remembered as a kind of golden age in American history, a charmed moment in time when the country seemed more confident and hopeful than it has ever been. A period of unprecedented economic prosperity, it was the era when the majority of Americans, freed from the constraints of the Great Depression and World War II, took some time off from the uncertainties of life to simply enjoy themselves; and in a long, giddy parade of marriages, babies, automobiles, suburban homes and kitchen appliances, celebrated their achievement of the American Dream. Never before had the wealth of a nation been so widely distributed. But American enthusiasms during these years were rooted in more than just the good things that money could buy. Allied victories in World War II had been great moral victories for the country as well, and as the United States rose to economic and political world dominance in the postwar years, national pride went soaring right along with it. Americans at mid-century were mighty impressed with America—and happy for awhile:

"In that era of general good will and expanding affluence, few Americans doubted the essential goodness of their society. After all, it was reflected back at them not only by contemporary books and magazines, but even more powerfully and with even greater influence in the new family sitcoms on television. These - in conjunction with their sponsors' commercial goals - sought to shape their audience's aspirations. However, most Americans needed little coaching in how they wanted to live. [Americans] were optimistic about the future."

- From The 1950s by David Halberstam

* * * * * * * * * * *

“American Pie” explained by Glenn Beck:

What does “The Day the music died” mean?

http://www.glennbeck.com/2012/02/09/american-pie-explained-by-glenn-beck-day-the-music-died/

by Glenn Beck

Thursday, Feb 9, 2012 at 1:09 PM EST

Part 1:

click to listen to Glenn's radio commentary

Part 2:

click to listen to Glenn's radio commentary

“Our culture has erased the meaning of anybody who tried to issue a warning. Anybody who was on the other side. They’re trying to do it now with the ‘Hobbit’ and the ‘Lord of the Rings’ and they are saying that that has nothing to do with Jesus and Christianity. That was the point. They’re trying tried to do it with ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ and the ‘Adventure of the Chronicles of Narnia’. They try to do this every step of the way and they’ve done it with much of music,” Glenn said on radio this morning.

He was specifically referring to songs like “Revolution” by The Beatles, which was clearly suspicious of violent revolution and uprisings, as well as “American Pie” by Don McLean.

Many people think that the song “American Pie” is about the death of Buddy Holly and other musicians in a plane crash, but Glenn presented a reading of the lyrics on radio and showed how it could also be seen as a warning against the danger of violent uprisings like what is happening now with Occupy Wall Street.

“ I’ve never understood I drove the Chevy to the levee, I didn’t know what that was. Let’s just start there on the simple part because Chevy, just think of Chevy and mom and apple pie. He’s making a point here. Chevy, I drove my Chevy to the levee. This actually goes back into the 1950s and a Dinah Shore commercial for Chevy,” Glenn explained.

Watch the commercial Glenn is referring to below:

“So America is the greatest country of all and it was an era that believed in America. I drove my Chevy to the levee. I drove the Chevy. I bought into the idea that America was the greatest.”

“So in the second verse he goes back to his childhood and he goes back to sock hops in the gym and the pickup trucks and… and here he’s talking about the book of love, which was a song by the Monotones in 1957 and he asked her about faith. He asked her about faith and whether she believes, no matter what, if the Bible tells her so. That is the representation of the faith in the Fifties. He then talks about, do you have faith in rock and roll, that music will save your mortal soul.”

“But music is the metaphor for life in America. So the girl moves on to somebody else, leaving him with his truck and the carnation. But it’s not really about the girl. It’s about America. She’s moved on from all of those things just as America began to move on from all of those things that faith would help you, that faith, you would do it through faith. You would do things because the Bible told you so. But now you’re starting to believe that music will save your soul.”

Glenn played more of the song, reaching the part where McLean sings “Now for 10 years we’ve been on our own”.

“For ten years now we’ve been on our own. It’s the decade of the Sixties. Remember in the Fifties you had faith, you had the Bible, you had family, you had all of these things that were there. But now for ten years we’ve been on our own and moss grows fat on a Rolling Stone. This is referring to Bob Dylan who the court jester and his song like a Rolling Stone. Also Dylan wore a coat from James Dean on the cover of his ’63 album Free Wheelin’ and McLean laments all of the change in our values that was occurring in the 1960s when he said that’s not how that’s not the way it used to be.”

“So he’s singing dirges in the dark mourning the loss of America, that America is changing fundamentally. Lenin read a book of Marx. We know that John Lennon was influenced at the time by Karl Marx. Lennon read a book of Marx. The quartet practiced in the park. Could be a reference to the Beatles preparing for their role in the cultural revolution. And as the ultimate icons of the new era. But McLean is saying, but we sang dirges in the dark because we knew what was coming.”

What was coming?

Helter Skelter in a summer swelter
The birds flew off with the fallout shelter
Eight miles high and falling fast It landed foul on the grass
The players tried for a forward pass
With the jester on the sidelines in a cast
Now the halftime air was sweet perfume
While sergeants played a marching tune
We all got up to dance
Oh, but we never got the chance
‘Cause the players tried to take the field,
The marching band refused to yield.
Do you recall what was revealed,
The day the music died?
We started singing

“Helter Skelter in a Summer Swelter, again the Beatles song reference also indicates the chaos and the violence that broke out in the summer of ’68. The Byrds he spells with a Y, flew off to the fallout shelter. Nature, represented by the Byrds, sense the danger, headed for safety in a shelter. But eight miles high is another song reference by the band the Byrds. So they are falling fast, because everything is falling fast. Everybody, the smart people, nature knows, get into a fallout shelter. Then he goes into the youth culture clashing with the government violently, using a football metaphor.”

“You’re at halftime. He said the players youth going for a forward pass. The players going for a forward pass. That’s the youth, going for a forward pass. And the government hitting back. And the jester on the sidelines in a cast. Remember that’s, the jester is Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan had a serious motorcycle accident for a while and he was healing on his own and music flounder everything kind of floundered for a time. Then he gets to halftime.”

“Halftime, he’s seeing the summer of love. This is 1967, a brief respite in ’67 with the flower children. Sergeant’s playing a marching tune. That’s the Beatles and Sergeant Pepper. And the summer of love was an opportunity to get up and dance. But the violence returned in the summer of ’68. And remember we’re here at ’68, recreate ’68. We never got the chance.”

“We just passed our summer of love. What happened there in the park, that was just love. There were people in the park that were just trying to be loved. We’re now headed for 1968.”

“What happened in the summer of ’68. Do you remember, do you recall what was revealed, the Miss America protest of ’68 when women were burning their bras and everything else. But also Altamont, and this is such a clear, clear message against what is coming and what happened in an event that almost is erased. It’s more important than Woodstock, and it was it’s being erased in history. Here he is warning.”

There we were all in one place
A generation lost in space With no time left to start again
So come on Jack be nimble, Jack be quick
Jack Flash sat on a candle stick
‘Cause fire is the devil’s only friend.
As I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
No angel born in hell
Could break that satan’s spell
And as flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw satan laughing with delight
the day the music died.

“ Because fire is its only friend. Okay. Gathering all in one place, 300,000 flower children flocked to Altamont in the fall of 1969. It was, it was the followup to Woodstock: Drugs, alcohol, increasing violence. They were a generation lost in space. Remember, the space race was also going on. There was nowhere left to go. Their momentum was fading and the decade was gone. And so was America. Then the rolling stones who had pushed the counterculture envelope with the last couple of albums took the stage as McLean alludes to with, “Come on, Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack sat on the candlestick,” that is the Jumpin’ Jack Flash song by the Rolling Stones. And he’s referring here to Mick Jagger was the Devil who refuses to end the Altamont concert despite the violence and the loss of crowd. Even, even the Grateful Dead said this is crazy.”

“’No angel born in hell could break that Satan spell.’ The Hells Angels were hired for security. They couldn’t stop the chaos. In fact, they added to it. And Jagger, Satan in the song, continued to hold the audience in his spell.”

“A gun wielding man in the crowd heads for the stage but Hells Angels intercept him and they stab him to death. That’s what happened at Altamont. They stab him to death. The sacrificial rite. Shortly before the stabbing, right before this guy starts going on a rampage, the Stones had performed ‘Sympathy For the Devil’.”

“Could it get any creepier than this? Don McLean was not just writing about this event but the demise of an era. The erosion of your culture. The erosion of our values. Altamont was the final blow to bring about the day the music died.”

Glenn took a break and then returned to discuss the song further.

“We’re just looking at some of the old interviews with Don McLean because he never talks about this song anymore. But at the time he said that he was obsessed with what he called the death of America and so many things. The loss of so many things that he grew up with.”

“ (McLean) said in a sense ‘American Pie’ was a despairing song. In another way it was hopeful. He said Pete Seeger told me that he saw it as a song in which people were saying something, that they had been fooled, they had been hurt and they weren’t going to let it happen again. He said that’s a good way to look at it, a hopeful way. Unfortunately Pete Seeger was a communist and I mean, that’s the way that’s why this happens again.”

“It happened with Mao and it won’t happen this way again. It happened at Altamont but it won’t happen like that again. I mean, it’s the same story over and over and over again.”

“The good news is, is that there was at least somebody that was in this culture at that time that was mourning the loss of America then and we didn’t lose America then. We’re still going. We might despair now and say, ‘Jeez, we’re going to lose America’. That’s not necessarily true unless we allow it.”*

by Glenn Beck

February 9, 2012

* * * * * * * * * * *

Concluding Remarks

"Baking New Smorgasbords for the 21st Century"

Part 2

by R.E. Slater

February 14, 2012

*Contrary to Glenn Beck's final statements, it is not that "we're mourning the loss of America in the political sense of our conservative cultural heritage, but that America's philosophic landscape of constructive social optimism had changed from the 1960s era of despair having become earmarked by what we are now understanding to be the early beginnings of postmodernism in America. And rather than looking upon this newer postmodernistic era with dread and dismay, it is the position of Relevancy22's blog/journal here that with modernism's anarchical death has come a lot of good, constructive things.

True, postmodernism has been built upon modernism's deconstruction as well as the death of its more popular epistemologies of unhindered hope and the American dream. But postmodernism has also created a reconstructive epistemology of hope and a future global dream of cooperation and international social justice. Rather than dreading the passing of America we should be hopeful in a global future that places America - with the world at large! - at the center of a radical epistemological change that can be beneficial, realistic, and positive. A most curious and ironic development that one wouldn't expect with the death of American modernism... but a most necessary one because of the strong human spirit found in the image of God who is relational, loving, just, and ordering.

Sometimes to get from "here-to-there" humanity has to reapprise its historical past and simply say, "Hey, we've been doing this wrong, and need to change from here." The eras from WW2 through to the Vietnam War era focused on subjugated nationalistic tyrannies and oppressions, lost humanitarian rights, freedoms and citizenry exploitations, which certainly added to America's resultant fears of encroaching communism. It was the time of McCarthyism...

Mc·Car·thy·ism [muh-kahr-thee-iz-uhm] noun

1. The practice of making accusations of disloyalty, especially of pro-Communist activity, in many instances unsupported by proof or based on slight, doubtful, or irrelevant evidence.

2. The practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism.

... and the Cold War era as America, and the Western world-at-large, attempted to balance their fears through war, excluding nationalistic boundaries, and philosophical isolationisms. However, as necessary as these actions seemed to be, they would never be enough, because fear can never bring about positive, unifying change. It can only bring about greater disillusionment and disintegration which we see in the aftermath of postmodernism. So that by the start of the 21st Century (and building upon our national lessons of the past 20th Century) we now have curiously begun the task of ordering a new world of idealisms and international cooperation within our contemporary postmodernistic societies (sic, Aldus Huxley's Brave New World as opposed to George Orwell's 1984 as countering arguments to the same system of death that they saw with the era of Modernism).

A society that includes the world, along with the separate interests and demands of each participating nation, creating a semblance of cooperation and goodwill towards one another. Whether this can be done or not will be left to history. In a sense I believe it can be, but in another sense I tend to doubt its factuality. On the one hand sin, death and an anti-God (or an a/God) worldly system stands opposed to such restorative efforts. On the other hand, Christianized systematic thinking like process theology in its broadest, most liberal understanding, gives me pause to believe that it can happen. However, as a liberal system it too is based upon an unredeemed human spirit latent with worldly aspirations and selfish dominion so that in the end, I still see little hope for complete restitution based merely upon the image of God, and not on the renewal of the image of God brought about by Jesus' transformative and atoning death and resurrection.

However, I do pray that even in the liberal spirit of humanitarianism, societies may learn to inter-cooperate with one another, and provide the basic human freedoms and liberties that can be beneficial and lasting. And generally for a world peace that can grow in a truly new paradigm in the sociological, evolutionary sense of development, unknown since the formation of human society eons ago. However, without our dependency upon our Creator God, and committal to the idea of redemption through repentance and renewal in Christ, I don't believe this can ever be done as fully as it could be. To do this will take a Savior ruling and reigning in the midst of mankind. Such a One as is promised in the Bible known as Immanuel, God with Us, the crucified and risen Messiah, to whom all nations will one day bow knees and heads and hearts to give thanksgiving and homage to. But until that day when Jesus returns in His Parousia to rule and to reign I suspect that this societal endeavor will never be transformative enough to prevent sin's corruption and destruction of all things good.

Still, we must try. Humanity is worth fighting for. Sin is worth standing against. Evil is not a choice we can allow through inaction and despair. Corruption must be opposed. And legalisms - any legalisms! however beneficially legislated - are no substitute for a heart, or a spirit, of goodwill and love based upon God's empowerment and enlightenment. Until Christ returns the church and its remnant body of repentants/remonstrants must proceed on bended knees of prayer; active hands and feet of good works; and obedient, cross-struck hearts of peace; speaking and acting in one accord building as unto the temple of God made without human hands. Not building a renewed tower of Babel to the spirit of human pride and ego (an ancient ziggurat that God caused ancient mankind to abandon through the striking of a perplexing plurality of tongues = actual human languages unexperienced up-until-then). But the building of a heavenly body of faithful followers of Christ committed not to our selves, nor to the corruptions of our sinful hearts, nor to any one nationalized ideology, but to the sacrificial Cross of Christ where was slain the eternal Lamb of God. Who is the Hope of the world upon some future Day of Visitation when the Lion of God will return as King of David and the bright Morning Star of revelation and rebirth.

And until that day comes we must continue to seek God with all of our hearts. To seek His favor. And to learn not to lean upon our own understanding, pride and ego. Nor the works of our hands. Nor the pride of our accomplishments. Nor to be content with a false, disingenuous peace. But to follow Jesus as seen in Peter's passages of a "Suffering Servant and Arisen King" - whose path of suffering is also the path chosen for His body and bride, the Church. Suffering and death will be our daily companions. But so too can Life be present when God is in the mix. Let us then be hopeful and not despairing. Though the America of the 50s has died it can live again as the dream of every nation seeking peace, prosperity, and liberty with one another. But it took the death of humanism and modernism to get us there. And I suspect postmodernism can be but the intervening vehicle to a more Authentising, or a more Participatory, Age of societal reconciliation, unto a golden age of the renewal among mankind. This is not an age to despair of, but to find hope within.... And yet, mankind's best and truest hope will ever-and-always be in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. To that end let us work as God has gifted us until that shinning day of Jesus' return in the clouds of the air, upon a trump's resound, to the lifting of all human hearts, the bowing of all knees, and the end of sin, death and devil. Amen.

R.E. Slater

February 14, 2012

Genesis 11

English Standard Version (ESV)

The Tower of Babel

¹ Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. ² And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. ³ And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. ⁴ Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” ⁵ And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. ⁶ And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. ⁷ Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech.” ⁸ So the LORD dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. ⁹ Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused^[a] the language of all the earth. And from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth.

1 Peter 4

Suffering as a Christian

¹² Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. ¹³ But rejoice insofar as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. ¹⁴ If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory^[b] and of God rests upon you. ¹⁵ But let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer or as a meddler. ¹⁶ Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name. ¹⁷ For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? ¹⁸And “If the righteous is scarcely saved,    what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?”<sup>[c]

19</sup> Therefore let those who suffer according to God's will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good.

* * * * * * * * * * *


Don McLean - American Pie [better quality]




Don Mclean - The Real Meaning of American Pie




Don McLean - The meaning of American Pie (UPDATE)

American Pie Lyrics

A long long time ago

I can still remember
How that music used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while
But February made me shiver
With every paper I'd deliver
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn't take one more step
I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died.

So bye, bye Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
And them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye
Singing this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die.

Did you write the book of love
And do you have faith in God above
If the Bible tells you so?
Now do you believe in rock and roll?
Can music save your mortal soul?
And can you teach me how to dance real slow?
Well, I know that you're in love with him
'cause I saw you dancing in the gym
You both kicked off your shoes
Man, I dig those rhythm and blues
I was a lonely teenage broncin' buck
With a pink carnation and a pickup truck
But I knew I was out of luck
The day the music died
I started singing.

Bye, bye Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
And them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye
Singing this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die.

Now, for ten years we've been on our own
And moss grows fat on a rolling stone
But that's not how it used to be
When the Jester sang for the king and queen
In a coat he borrowed from James Dean
And a voice that came from you and me
Oh and while the king was looking down
The Jester stole his thorny crown
The courtroom was adjourned
No verdict was returned
And while Lenin read a book on Marx
The quartet practiced in the park
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died
We were singing.

Bye, bye Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
And them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye
Singing this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die.

Helter skelter in a summer swelter
The birds flew off with a fallout shelter
Eight miles high and falling fast
Landed foul on the grass
The players tried for a forward pass
With the Jester on the sidelines in a cast
Now the half-time air was sweet perfume
While sergeants played a marching tune
We all got up to dance
Oh, but we never got the chance
'Cause the players tried to take the field
The marching band refused to yield
Do you recall what was revealed
The day the music died?
We started singing.

Bye, bye Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
And them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye
Singing this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die.

Oh, and there we were all in one place
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again
So come on Jack be nimble, Jack be quick
Jack Flash sat on a candlestick
'Cause fire is the devil's only friend
And as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
No angel born in hell
Could break that Satan's spell
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died
He was singing.

Bye, bye Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
And them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye
Singing this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die.

I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news
But she just smiled and turned away
I went down to the sacred store
Where I'd heard the music years before
But the man there said the music wouldn't play
And in the streets the children screamed
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed
But not a word was spoken
The church bells all were broken
And the three men I admire most
The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died
And they were singing.

Bye, bye Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
And them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye
Singing this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die
they were singing.

Bye, bye Miss American Pie

Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry

And them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye

Singing this'll be the day that I die.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Wikipedia - Don McLean

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_mclean

McLean's magnum opus, "American Pie", is a sprawling, impressionistic ballad inspired partly by the deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J. P. Richardson (The Big Bopper) in a plane crash on 3 February 1959. The song popularized the expression "The Day the Music Died" in reference to this event, although it might have given music the chance to go on living at a time when it was dangerously ill. WCFL DJ Bob Dearborn unraveled the lyrics and first published his interpretation on 7 January 1972, eight days before the song reached #1 nationally (see "Further reading" under American Pie). Numerous other interpretations, which together largely converged on Dearborn's interpretation, quickly followed. McLean declined to say anything definitive about the lyrics until 1978. Since then McLean has stated that the lyrics are also somewhat autobiographical and present an abstract story of his life from the mid-1950s until the time he wrote the song in the late 1960s.^[2]

The song was recorded on 26 May 1971 and a month later received its first radio airplay on New York’s WNEW-FM and WPLJ-FM to mark the closing of The Fillmore East, a famous New York concert hall. "American Pie" reached number one on the U.S. Billboard magazine charts for four weeks in 1972, and remains McLean's most successful single release. The single also topped the Billboard Easy Listening survey. With a running time of 8:36, it is also the longest song to reach No. 1. Some stations played only part one of the original split-sided single release.

In 2010, John Ondrasik - the singer-songwriter known as Five for Fighting - released the single "Slice" from the album of the same name. The song is a tribute to "American Pie", a nostalgic look at how it once captivated people's collective ears, minds and voices, and an expression of hope that our increasing individuality hasn't dulled our ability to 'sing the same song'.^{[citation needed]}

In 2001 "American Pie" was voted No. 5 in a poll of the 365 Songs of the Century compiled by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts. The top five were: "Over the Rainbow" written by Harold Arlen and E.Y. "Yip" Harburg (performed by Judy Garland in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz), "White Christmas" written by Irving Berlin (best-known performance by Bing Crosby), "This Land Is Your Land" written and performed by Woody Guthrie, "Respect" written by Otis Redding (best-known performance by Aretha Franklin), and "American Pie."

Wikipedia - Background

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Pie_(song)

Don McLean wrote the song in Cold Spring, New York and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.^[1][2] The song made its debut at Temple University when he was opening for Laura Nyro.^[1][3] The song is well known for its cryptic lyrics that have long been the subject of curiosity and speculation. Although McLean dedicated the American Pie album to Buddy Holly, none of the musicians in the plane crash is identified by name in the song itself. When asked what "American Pie" meant, McLean replied, "It means I never have to work again."^[4] Later, he more seriously stated, "You will find many interpretations of my lyrics but none of them by me.... Sorry to leave you all on your own like this but long ago I realized that songwriters should make their statements and move on, maintaining a dignified silence."^[5]

McLean has generally avoided responding to direct questions about the song lyrics ("They’re beyond analysis. They’re poetry.")^[6] except to acknowledge that he did first learn about Buddy Holly's death while folding newspapers for his paper route on the morning of February 3, 1959, (the line "February made me shiver/with every paper I'd deliver"). He also stated in an editorial published on the 50th anniversary of the crash in 2009 that writing the first verse of the song exorcised his long-running grief over Holly's death.^[7]

The third verse begins "Now for ten years we've been on our own".^[8] According to one interpretation^[9] much of the rest of the song refers to events of the 1960s, particularly illustrating how once unified, peaceful, and idealistic youth movements began to split apart, how the death of US President John F. Kennedy (JFK) was used as the symbolic "loss of innocence" for 1960s youth,^[10] leading up to the Altamont Free Concert, a symbolic end of 1960s youth movements.^[11]

The concert at Altamont took place in December 1969, the same year in which the third verse in "American Pie" opens. Lines from "American Pie", particularly in the fifth verse, may refer to this event.^{[12][13][14][15][16]} Altamont was supposed to be a second Woodstock Festival; but instead was characterized by drugs and violence (reference the death of 18-year-old Meredith Hunter^[17]). Sociologist Todd Gitlin says of Altamont, "Who could any longer harbor the illusion that these hundreds of thousands of spoiled star-hungry children of the Lonely Crowd were the harbingers of a good society?"^[11][18] Given the year the song was released, the date suggested in the third verse, and the themes of loss of innocence that exist throughout the song, embodied by Holly's death,^[19] it is not unlikely that American Pie was inspired by the events at Altamont, although McLean has never indicated so.

Many American rock radio stations have released printed interpretations and some devoted entire shows to discussing and debating the song's lyrics, resulting in both controversy and intense listener interest in the song. Some examples are the real-world identities of the "Jester", "King and Queen", "Satan", "Girl Who Sang the Blues", and other characters referenced in the verses. Also Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly, and The Big Bopper could be referred to as "The Father, Son, and The Holy Ghost." These three figures could also represent John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. or the three remaining Crickets, Buddy Holly's group.^[20]

* * * * * * * * * * *

Another Interpretation of "American Pie"

http://www.rareexception.com/Garden/Pie.php

by P. O'Brien

originally published July 10, 1993

revised March 3, 1999

The Analysis and Interpretation of Don McLean's Song Lyrics

Page One - Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, The Big Bopper, and the day the music died.

The following pages offer the most detailed explanation of the song, the lyrics, to American Pie that you will find anywhere. Some of the information is fact, some is rumor; we only serve to entertain by providing the information in its entirety. Enjoy it and let us know if you have other ideas!

American Pie is rumored to be based on the name of the plane (A Beechcraft Bonanza, Number N3794P) in which Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens were killed. It is said that the song is a tribute to Buddy Holly and commentary on howrock and roll has changed in the years since his death. Ironically, according to McLean, the song is not about Buddy Holly but was dedicated to him. The following will provide a unique look at the meaning of the lyrics Don McLean wrote over 20 years ago. Some of the interpretations are accurate, some are outlandish. Some say, this song is a history of Rock n' Roll.


Page Two - A long, long time ago...

"American Pie" reached #1 in 1972, shortly after it was released. Buddy Holly ; unfortunately, died in 1959. I can still remember how That music used to make me smile. And I knew if I had my chance, That I could make those people dance, And maybe they'd be happy for a while.

Sociologists credit teenagers with the popularity of Rock and Roll, as a part of the Baby boomer generation, they found themselves in a very influencial position. Their shear number were the force behind most of our country's recent major transitions. McLean was a teenager in 1959 and he begins by simply commenting that the music had an appealing quality to him as well as the millions of other teens. McLean also had an intense desire to entertain as a musician. His dream, to play in a band at high school dances, was the dream of many young boys who wanted to make people dance to Rock and Roll.

But February made me shiver,

Buddy Holly died on February 3, 1959, in a plane crash in Iowa during a snowstorm. Its rumored that the name of the plane was: American Pie.

With every paper I'd deliver,

Don McLean's only job besides being a full-time singer/song writer was being a paperboy.

Bad news on the doorstep... I couldn't take one more step. I can't remember if I cried When I read about his widowed bride

Holly's recent bride was pregnant when the crash took place; she had a miscarriage shortly afterward.

But something touched me deep inside, The day the music died.

The same plane crash that killed Buddy Holly also tragically took the lives of Richie Valens ("La Bamba") and The Big Bopper ("Chantilly Lace.") Since all three were so prominent at the time, February 3, 1959, became known as "The Day The Music Died."

So...
(Refrain) Bye bye Miss American Pie,

**Don McLean dated a Miss America candidate during a pageant and broke up with her on February 3, 1959. (Unconfirmed interpretation)

So its probably...

Just a reference to the plane, "American Pie" that crahed.

I drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry, Them good ol' boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye Singing "This'll be the day that I die, This'll be the day that I die."

Driving the Chevy to the levee almost certainly refers to the three college students whose murder was the subject of the film 'Mississippi Burning.' The students were attempting to register as black voters, and after being killed by bigoted thugs their bodies were buried in a levee. Them good ol' boys being: Holly, Valens, and the Big Bopper, They were singing about their death on February 3. One of Holly's hits was "That'll be the Day"; the chorus contains the line "That'll be the day that I die."

(Verse 2) Did you write the book of love,

"The Book of Love" by the Monotones; hit in 1958."Oh I wonder, wonder who... who, who wrote the book of love?"

And do you have faith in God above, If the Bible tells you so?

**In 1955, Don Cornell did a song entitled "The Bible Tells Me So." It was difficult to tell if it was what McLean was referencing. Anyone know for sure? There is also an old Sunday School song that goes:"Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so" McLean was somewhat religious.

Now do you believe in rock 'n roll?

The Lovin' Spoonful had a hit in 1965 with John Sebastian's "Do you Believe in Magic?". The song has the lines: "Do you believe in magic" and "It's like trying to tell a stranger 'bout rock and roll."

Can music save your mortal soul? And can you teach me how to dance real slow?

Music was believed to "save the soul" and slow dancing was an important part of early rock and roll dance events. Dancing declined in importance through the 60's as things like psychedelia and the 10-minute guitar solo gained prominence. McLean was asking many questions about the early rock 'n roll in an attempt to keep it alive or find out if it was already dead.

Well I know that you're in love with him 'Cause I saw you dancing in the gym

Back then, dancing was an expression of love,and carried a connotation of commitment. Dance partners were not so readily exchanged as they would be later.

You both kicked off your shoes

A reference to the beloved "sock hop." (Street shoes tear up wooden basketball floors, so dancers had to take off their shoes.)

Man, I dig those rhythm 'n' blues

Before the popularity of rock and roll, music, like much elsewhere in the U. S., was highly segregated. The popular music of black performers for largely black audiences was called, first "race music," later softened to rhythm and blues. In the early 50s, as they were exposed to it through radio personalities such as Allan Freed, white teenagers began listening, too. Starting around 1954, a number of songs from the rhythm and blues charts began appearing on the overall popular charts as well, but usually in cover versions by established white artists, (e.g."Shake Rattle and Roll," Joe Turner, covered by Bill Haley; "Sh-Boom, "the Chords, covered by the Crew-Cuts; "Sincerely," the Moonglows, covered by the McGuire Sisters; Tweedle Dee, LaVerne Baker, covered by Georgia Gibbs). By 1955, some of the rhythm and blues artists, like Fats Domino and Little Richard were able to get records on the overall pop charts.In 1956 Sun records added elements of country and western to produce the kind of rock and roll tradition that produced Buddy Holly.

I was a lonely teenage broncin' buck With a pink carnation and a pickup truck

"A White Sport Coat (And a Pink Carnation), "was a hit for Marty Robbins in 1957. The pickup truck has endured as a symbol of sexual independence and potency, especially in a Texas context.(Also, Jimmy Buffet does a song about "a white sport coat and a pink crustacean.":-) )

But I knew that I was out of luck The day the music died I started singing...
Refrain
(Verse 3) Now for ten years we've been on our own

McLean was writing this song in the late 60's,about ten years after the crash.

And moss grows fat on a rolling stone

It's unclear who the "rolling stone" is supposed to be. It could be Dylan, since "Like a Rolling Stone" (1965) was his first major hit; and since he was busy writing songs ex-tolling the virtues of simple love, family and contentment while staying at home (he didn't tour from '66 to '74) and raking in the royalties. This was quite a change from the earlier, angrier Dylan. The "rolling stone" could also be Elvis Presley, although I don't think he started to pork out by the late sixties. he-he! It could refer to rock and rollers, and the changes that had taken place in the business in the 60's, especially the huge amounts of cash some of them were beginning to make, and the relative stagnation that entered the music at the same time. Or, it could refer to the Rolling Stones themselves, many musicians were angry at the Stones for "selling out." I discovered that John Foxx of Ultravox was sufficiently miffed to write a song titled "Life At Rainbow's End (For All The Tax Exiles On Main Street)." The Stone sat one point became citizens of some other country merely to save taxes.

But that's not how it used to be When the jester sang for the King and Queen

The jester is Bob Dylan, as will become clear later. There are several interpretations of king and queen: some think that Elvis Presley is the king, which seems rather obvious. The queen is said to be either Connie Francis or Little Richard. See the next note. An alternate interpretation is that this refers to the Kennedys -- the King and Queen of "Camelot" -- who were present at a Washington DC civil rights rally featuring Martin Luther King. (There'sa recording of Dylan performing at this rally. The Jester.) The third interpretation is that the jester could be Lee Harvey Oswald who sang (shouted) before he was shot for the murder of the King (JFK).

In a coat he borrowed from James Dean

In the movie "Rebel Without a Cause," James Dean has a red windbreaker that holds symbolic meaning throughout the film (see note at end). In one particularly intense scene, Dean lends his coat to a guy who is shot and killed; Dean's father arrives, sees the coat on the dead man, thinks it's Dean, and loses it. On the cover of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," Dylan is wearing just such a red windbreaker, posed in a street scene similar to movie starring James Dean. Bob Dylan played a command performance for the Queen of England. He was *not* properly attired, so perhaps this is a reference to his apparel.

And a voice that came from you and me

Bob Dylan's roots are in American folk music,with people like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Folk music is by definition the music of the masses, hence the "...came from you and me."

Oh, and while the King was looking down The jester stole his thorny crown

Likely a reference to Elvis' decline and Dylan's ascendance (i.e. Presley is looking down from a height as Dylan takes his place). Consider that Elvis was is the army at the time of Dylan's ascendancy and a common Army marching song sings, "Ain't no use in looking down, ain't no discharge on the ground". The thorny crown might be a reference to the price of fame. Dylan has said that he wanted to be as famous as Elvis, one of his early idols.
or...
Lee Harvey Oswald being the jester who ended the reign of JFK and "stole his crown."

or...

A third interpretation is the quote made by John Lennon and taken out of context indicating that John felt The Beatles were more popular then Jesus. John and The Beatles took the crown from Christ.

The courtroom was adjourned, No verdict was returned.

This could be the trial of the Chicago Seven.

but its more likely to be...

The fact that no verdict was returned for the assassination of JFK because the assassin was killed so the court was adjourned.

And while Lennon read a book on Marx,
Or it could be be...
And while Lenin rean a book on Marx,

Someone has to introduce Vladamir Lenin, the father of Marxist communism, to the idealogy of Karl Marx.

I love the play on words here...

Literally, John Lennon reading about Karl Marx; figuratively, the introduction of radical politics into the music of The Beatles. (Of course, he could be referring to Groucho Marx, but that doesn't seem quite consistent with McLean's overall tone. On the other hand, some of the wordplay in Lennon's lyrics and books is reminiscent of Groucho.)The "Marx-Lennon" word play has also been used by others, most notably the Firesign Theatre on the cover of their album "How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All?" The Beatles "Here, There and Everywhere," for example. Also, a famous French witticism was "Je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho. " (I'm a Marxist of the Groucho variety).

The quartet practiced in the park

There are two schools of thought about this; the obvious one is The Beatles playing in Shea Stadium, but note that the previous line has John Lennon *doing something else at the same time*. This tends to support the theory that this is a reference to the Weavers, who were blacklisted during the McCarthy era. McLean had become friends with Lee Hays of the Weavers in the early 60's while performing in coffeehouses and clubs in upstate New York and New York City. He was also well acquainted with Pete Seeger; McLean, Seeger, and others took a trip on the Hudson river singing anti-pollution songs at one point. Seeger's LP "God Bless the Grass" contains many of these songs.

And we sang dirges in the dark

A "dirge" is a funeral or mourning song, so perhaps this is meant literally...or, perhaps, this is a reference to some of the new "art rock" groups that played long pieces not meant for dancing. In the dark of the death of Holly.

The day the music died. We were singing...
Refrain
(Verse 4) Helter Skelter in a summer swelter

"Helter Skelter" is a Beatles song that appears on the "White" album. Charles Manson, claiming to have been "inspired"by the song (through which he thought God and/or the devil were taking to him) led his followers in the Tate-LaBianca murders. Is "summer swelter" a reference to the "Summer of Love" or perhaps to the "long hot summer" of Watts?

The birds flew off with the fallout shelter Eight miles high and falling fast

Without a doubt this refers to the Byrds who helped launch David Crosby to super stardom. The Byrd's song "Eight Miles High" was found on their late 1966 release "Fifth Dimension." They recorded this song when some of the groups members were considering leaving (some of the groups members actually left the group because they refused to flyin an airplane). A fallout shelter was sometimes referred to as the fifth dimension because of the 1950's fascination with sci-fi and the futuristic appearance of a fallout shelter. This was one of the first records widely banned because of supposedly drug-oriented lyrics.

But...

Another idea considers The Beatles' "Helter Skelter."A line from the song reads, 'I'm coming down fast but I'm miles above you.' The similarity is pretty obvious.

It landed foul on the grass

One of the Byrds was busted for possession of marijuana.

The players tried for a forward pass

Obviously a football metaphor, but about what?It could be the Rolling Stones, i.e., they were waiting for an opening that really didn't happen until The Beatles broke up. With regard to the next idea, the players maybe other musicians who received the opportunity to shine when Dylan was injured.

With the jester on the sidelines in a cast

On July 29, 1966, Dylan crashed his Triumph 55 motorcycle while riding near his home in Woodstock, New York. He spent nine months in seclusion while recuperating from the accident. This gave a chance for many other artists to become noticed (see the next interpretation).

Now the half-time air was sweet perfume

Drugs, man. Well, now, wait a minute; that's probably too obvious (wouldn't want to make it easy). It's possible that this line and the next few refer to the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The "sweet perfume" is probably tear gas. It could be the fact the since Dylan was temporarily out of the picture, the future looked bright for many artists. The Stones, for example, may have been given a brief chance.

While sergeants played a marching tune

Following from the second thought above, the sergeants would be the Chicago Police and the Illinois National Guard, who marched protesters out of the park where the Convention was being held and into jail. Alternatively, this could refer to The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Or, perhaps McLean refers to The Beatles' music as "marching" because it's not music for dancing. Or, finally, the "marching tune" could be the draft. **(What did the Stones release in '66??)

We all got up to dance Oh, but we never got the chance

The Beatles' 1966 Candlestick Park concert only lasted 35 minutes. But at this point The Beatles were not "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (1967) Or, following on from the previous comment, perhaps she was considering the hippies who were protesting the Convention. They were known for playing their own folk music.

'Cause the players tried to take the field, The marching band refused to yield.

Some folks think this refers to either the 1968 Democratic Convention or Kent State. If the players are the protesters at Kent State, and the marching band the Ohio National Guard... This could be a reference to the dominance of The Beatles on the rock and roll scene. For instance, the Beach Boys released "Pet Sounds" in 1966 -- an album that featured some of the same sort of studio and electronic experimentation as "Sgt. Pepper" (1967). The album sold poorly because of The Beatles. The other Beatles reference here refers to the Monkees. The Monkees were merely actors (or players), they were not a true band but a fabrication attempting to replicate The Beatles. The players tried to take the place of the Fab Four but the band wouldn't step down. Or finally, this might be a comment that follows up on the earlier reference to the draft: the government/military industrial-complex establishment refused to accede to the demands of the peace movement.

Some people think this is a reference to the US space program, which it might be (the first moon landing took place in '69); but that seems a bit too literal. Perhaps this is a reference to hippies, who were sometimes known as the "lost generation," partially because of their particularly acute alienation from their parents, and partially because of their presumed preoccupation with drugs (which was referred to as being "spaced-out.") Being on drugs was sometimes termed -- being lost in space because of the TV show, "Lost in Space," whose title was usedas a synonym for someone who was rather high... I keep hoping that McLean had better taste. :-)

With no time left to start again

The "lost generation" spent too much time being stoned, and had wasted their lives. Or, perhaps, their preferences for psychedelia had pushed rock and roll so far from Holly's music that it couldn't be retrieved.

So come on Jack be nimble Jack be quick

Probably a reference to Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones; "Jumpin' Jack Flash" was released in May 1968.

Jack Flash sat on a candlestick

**The Stones' Candlestick park concert? (unconfirmed) Jack Flash is also a cockney slang term for pharmaceutical heroin. If you know how to use heroin, you understand the reference.

'Cause fire is the devil's only friend

It's possible that this is a reference to the Grateful Dead's "Friend of the Devil." An alternate interpretation of the last four lines is that they may refer to Jack Kennedy and his quick decisions during the Cuban Missile Crisis; the candlesticks/fire refer to ICBMs and nuclear war.

And as I watched him on the stage, my hands were clenched in fists of rage; No angel born in hell, could break that Satan's spell

While playing a concert at the Altamont Speedway in 1968, the Stones appointed members of the Hell's Angels to work security (on the advice of the Grateful Dead). In the darkness near the front of the stage, a young man named Meredith Hunter was beaten and stabbed to death -- by the Angels. Public outcry that the song "Sympathy for the Devil"(because of "satan's spell") had somehow incited the violence and caused the Stones to drop the song from their show for the next six years. This incident is chronicled in the documentary film "Gimme Shelter." It's also possible that McLean views the Stones as being negatively inspired (he had an extensive religious background)because of "Sympathy for the Devil," "Their Satanic Majesties' Request"and so on. This is a bit puzzling, since the early Stones recorded a lot of "roots" rock and roll, including Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away."

And as the flames climbed high into the night, To light the sacrificial rite

The most likely interpretation is that McLean is still talking about Altamont, and in particular Mick Jagger's prancing and posing and "climbing high" while it was happening. Or the bonfires around the area could provide the flames. The sacrifice is Meredith Hunter. (It could be a reference to Jimi Hendrix burning his Stratocaster at the Monterey Pop Festival, but that was in 1967 and this verse is no doubt set in 1968.)

I saw Satan laughing with delight

If the above is correct, then Satan would be Jagger.

The day the music died He was singing...
Refrain
(Verse 6) I met a girl who sang the blues

Ms. Janis Joplin, the lady of the blues.

And I asked her for some happy news But she just smiled and turned away

Janis died of an accidental (accidental my ass!)heroin overdose on October 4, 1970.

Or...

The girl might be Roberta Flack. Its rumored that she wrote, "Killing Me Softly (with his song)," in response to this lyric in his song.

I went down to the sacred store Where I'd heard the music years before

There are two interpretations of this: The "sacred store" was Bill Graham's Fillmore West, one of the great rock and roll venues of all time. Alternatively, this refers to record stores, and their long time (then discontinued) practice of allowing customers to preview records in the store. (What year did the Fillmore West close?) It could also refer to record stores as "sacred" because this is where one goes to get "saved." (See above lyric "Can music save your mortal soul?")

But the man there said the music wouldn't play

Perhaps he means that nobody is interested in hearing Buddy Holly et. al.'s music? Or, as above, the discontinuation of the in-store listening booths.

And in the streets the children screamed

"Flower children" being beaten by police and National Guard troops; in particular, perhaps, the People's Park riots in Berkeley in 1969 and 1970. It is possible that this refers to the Vietnamese children. Life magazine was famous for publishing horrifying photos of children in Vietnam during the Vietnamese War.

The lovers cried and the poets dreamed

The trend toward psychedelic music in the 60's?Or again the hippies who were both great lovers and poets who would then be crying because of the difficulties of their struggle and dreaming of peace.

But not a word was spoken The church bells all were broken

It could be that the broken bells are the dead musicians: neither can produce any more music.

And the three men I admire most The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost

Holly, The Big Bopper, and Valens -- or -- **Hank Williams, Presley, and Holly (check this) --or -- JFK, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy -- or -- or simply the Catholic aspects of the deity. McLean had attended several Catholic schools.

They caught the last train for the coast

Could be a reference to wacky California religions, or it could just be a way of saying that they've left (or died -- western culture has used "went west" as a synonym for dying). Or, perhaps this is a reference to the famous "God is Dead" headline in the New York Times. Some have suggested that this is an oblique reference to a line in Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale," but I'm not sure I'd buy that; firstly, all of McLean's musical references are to much older roots: rock and roll songs; and secondly, I think it's more likely that this line shows up in both songs simply because it's a common cultural metaphor.

The day the music died

This tends to support the conjecture that the"three men" were Holly/Bopper/Valens, since this says that they left us on the day the music died.

And they were singing...
Refrain (2x)


Page Three (Additional Thoughts) - Comments: James Dean, Waylon Jennings, The Beatles, and Bob Dylam

There were supposed to be four people on the plane. There was only room for three. The fourth person lost the coin toss -- or should I say won the toss. His name is Waylon Jennings. Jennings was the bass player for Holly's band at the time. Some people say that Holly had chartered the plane for his band, but that Valens and/or Richardson was to replace Jennings who was sick that night.

About the "coat he borrowed from James Dean": James Dean's red windbreaker is important throughout the "Rebel Without a Cause," not just at the end. When he put it on, it meant that it was time to face the world, time to do what he thought had to be done, and other melodramatic but thoroughly enjoyable stuff like that. The week after the movie came out, nearly every clothing store in the U.S. was sold out of red windbreakers. Remember that Dean's impact was similar to Dylan's: both were a symbol for the youth of their time, a reminder that they had something to say and demanded to be heard.

Some figure that if Holly had not have died, then we would not have suffered through the Fabian/Pat Boone era... and consequently, we wouldn't have "needed" the Beatles (I have strong arguments opposing that opinion). Holly was quickly moving pop music away from the stereotypical boy/girl love lost/found lyrical ideas, and was recording with unique instrumentation and techniques...things that Beatles would not try until about 1965 (although I still credit the Beatles with all the musical revolutions). Without Holly's death, perhaps Dylan would have stuck with the rock and roll he played in high school and the Byrds never would have created an amalgam of Dylan songs and Beatle arrangements.

by P. O'Brien

Comments and ideas??
Send them to: octopus@rareexception.com
Published -- 07/10/93
Revised -- 3/3/99