Okay, so that’s a totally clichéd academic title: Strange Phrase: The Things I Will Discuss to Explain the Strange phrase. Anyway. . .
I won’t pretend to be an expert on occasional poetry, but I will bet that Pope did not perform “The Rape of the Lock” past his prime to a bunch of aging baby-boomers who want to party like its 1712. I’m thinking of anecdotal accounts friends once gave me upon seeing Modern English circa 1997. Of course they wrote and performed other songs besides “I’ll Stop the World (and Melt with You)”, but really, who wants to hear them? Also recall Homer Simpson on Bachmann Turner Overdrive: “They were Canada’s answer to CCR. Their big hit was TCB.” When he sees them perform not only can he not wait for “Taking Care of Business,” but he can’t even wait for “the workin’ overtime part.” But I digress, as neither of these examples get to exactly what I mean to discuss.
While we might dismiss the occasional as too rooted in a particular context and therefore not amenable to its own legacy, I would argue that this situatedness makes the occasional all the more important and, presently, all the more rare (which is to say impossible). According to Wikipedia, “Goethe declared that ‘Occasional Poetry is the highest kind.'” Likewise, Hegel had the following to say about it (I can’t believe I am about to agree with Hegel):
Poetry’s living connection with the real world and its occurrences in public and private affairs is revealed most amply in the so-called pièces d’occasion. If this description were given a wider sense, we could use it as a name for nearly all poetic works: but if we take it in the proper and narrower sense we have to restrict it to productions owing their origin to some single present event and expressly devoted to its exaltation, embellishment, commemoration, etc. But by such entanglement with life poetry seems again to fall into a position of dependence, and for this reason it has often been proposed to assign the whole sphere of pièces d’occasion an inferior value although to some extent, especially in lyric poetry, the most famous works belong to this class.
The occasional speaks to a specific moment, to something that had a specific historicity, a particularity, perhaps a singularity. It resists appropriation into a culture of sameness, or at least did. Well, perhaps it never did and I am merely romanticizing what the occasional was. Perhaps better to say that what the occasional could be is a fleeting moment in which representation touches materiality. If considered in an historical manner, the occasional thereby might offer some understanding of its occasion. That is most likely wishful thinking, but I throw it out there.
What the Modern English and Homer Simpson examples begin to demonstrate is the fact that the present United States can in no way deal with occasionality. I see this inability in student essays which rush to declare whatever they are about to be the “greatest poem/modernist poem/novel/postmodernist novel/song/album/etc. OF ALL TIME!” Everything has to be eternal, capable of transmitting meaning to everyone, everywhere, everywhen in the same manner, transparently and without regard to historical notions of reading, epistemology, etc. When we are confronted with something new, we try to make it something old. I think that this desire is a function of nostalgia, which dovetails with the fact that we don’t give a damn about anything Tony Basil has done since “Hey Mickey.”
To be a bit more academic about this issue, let’s just say it’s very much related to Jameson’s lament that postmodernism is bound up with a culture that can no longer think historically.
With that, a screed about contemporary music or, rather, a contemporary song and what it means in terms of contemporary culture.
While I do have some idea what happens in the world of music, I have no idea whether the things I know about are actually part of some kind of social vocabulary. I know Beyonce made one of the best music videos of all time, but I have no idea what the song sounds like. That said, I may be making mountains of molehills here.
That said, I have some issues with Jay-Z’s “Young Forever.” Before I begin, let me say that if Jay-Z wants to use the lyrics and music from an older song to make a million dollars, more power to him. I don’t care and would like to see copyright open up a bit for more of this kind of work (although, given the fact that his use of the song in question is almost certainly controlled by a mechanical license for covering the song and not sampling it, the issue of copyright is not really an issue here).
Nonetheless, because the 80s are on my mind constantly, and because I trace many contemporary cultural and political problems in the United States to that period, I take issue with the manner in which Jay-Z appropriates Alphaville’s 1984 song “Forever Young,” which, thank god, has no relation to the Rod Stewart song of the same name.
Here’s Alphaville:
What strikes me most about this song and video (or, rather, the combination of the two) is the utter lack of nostalgia. To contemporary ears, the title “Forever Young” reads as an ode to a better time, the right now/present when we are as beautiful, fit, and carefree as we will ever be. As I will argue below, Jay-Z seriously (perhaps willfully) misreads the song as such. Of course, it’s not surprising that he does so. A great deal of rock and popular music celebrates youth for one reason or another, and I know more than one person who thinks that The Ramones’ cover of Tom Waits’ “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” is some kind of punk rock anthem to youth and its fuck-all attitude. (It’s actually a late song that, like Twain’s Huck Finn, is performed by an older person/group who only understands what he/they had in his/their youth by virtue of no longer being youthful. That self-awareness is the price of maturity and exactly what destroys innocence).
evening redness 