“Could have had give, could have had take. We could’ve made anything we wanted to make. So we made ‘Wheel Of Fortune’ and all the popular songs. We made a land where crap is king and the good don’t last too long..”
The group is Spock’s Beard, the album is “The Kindness of Strangers” and the song is “The Good Don’t Last.”
Ain’t it the truth.
You might be surprised to learn that “The Good Don’t Last” came out in 1998, right around the time out culture went over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Television had always been something of a crap factory, but the explosion of so-called “reality TV” beginning in the 1990s made it much worse.
Shows like “Survivor,” “Big Brother” and a host of others gave away to ones like “Jersey Shore” and the various “Real Housewives” shows. Esquire magazine purported to celebrate “Man at His Best,” but 21st Century culture — particularly television — could be described as “Welcome to the Monkey House.”
It is quite strange to me that while I have never seen even one minute of “Jersey Shore,” I know the names of at least three characters. You see, this stuff really is intrusive … and pervasive. How many of you never watched “Survivor,” but were perfectly aware of what it meant to be voted off the island?
To find a culture with more quality, you’ve got to go back to the days before television. To a time when people still read books and knew things. Listen to popular music from the 1930s and you’ll see what I mean. Cole Porter wrote “You’re the Top” for the amazing Ethel Merman to sing in “Anything Goes.”
Here are the cultural references in this one song:
The Colosseum, the Louvre, Johann Strauss, Henri Bendel, William Shakespeare, Mickey Mouse, the Nile River, the Tower of Pisa, the Mona Lisa.
Vincent Youmans, Mahatma Gandhi, Napoleon brandy, the National Gallery, Greta Garbo, Arrow collars, Calvin Coolidge, Fred Astaire, Eugene O’Neill, Whistler’s Mother, Dante’s Inferno, Jimmy Durante, Botticelli, Keats, Shelly, Boulder Dam, Mae West.
Waldorf salads, Irving Berlin, the Zuider Zee, Lady Astor, ushers at the Roxy.
I’m pretty good at cultural references, and I knew all but two.
Pretty sure a lot of people born recently (by comparison to my 1949) might not even know Ethel Merman or Cole Porter. I’ll guarantee that a lot of ordinary people who heard that song back when it came out knew most of those references.
I’ll bet they even knew who Henri Bendel and Vincent Youmans were.