Posted by Racer on December 5, 2002, at 13:46:06
Made you look!
Seriously, I found myself crying the other night in front of the TV set. The local PBS affiliate was showing a special on fundraising -- I mean on folk music! The Kingston Trio played Where Have All The Flowers Gone? and it made me cry to think of those earnest young people wanting so much to change the world and make it a better place. To offer hope, believing that the soldiers in the graveyards would one day be the source of the flowers the young girls would pick. That life is a constant cycle towards Springtime.
It is each generations duty to destroy the monuments of its parents, to make room for their own. And yet, haven't those same earnest young people really become a corporate Khmer Rouge in this country? All that earnest idealism, and they only succeeded in demolishing their own monuments in the end. It's heartbreaking. (As another singer once sang, "It's too late now, 'cause the rent must be paid and some bonds severed and others made...") What happened that the duty is only half paid? Our parents monuments have been razed -- but nothing is to replace them. Like the KR, the children have laid waste to the land, without the knowledge necessary to sow the next seasons crops.
Is it only an American thing, this nostalgia for folk music? My husband, who's from "out of town", runs and hides at the sight of The Weaver's Songbag on CD. He also gets very concerned that any song can make me cry (or movie: he thinks it's from the depression, rather than that cartharsis a good cry at Melanie's death can provide!) And, of course, that period of American history is really difficult to understand for anyone who didn't live through it.
Maybe I should just hide all the music in the house? Am I the only one who gets this way? Someone else wanna jump in and say you share my sentimental rue for the idealistic children now turned corporate weasels? (Yes, pop culture child I am, Scott Adams is our generations' answer to Adam Smith...)
By the way, for any Kingston Trio fans out there, ever listened to "Everglades" really closely? I love the song, but didn't notice this until I played it as an antidote for the other songs on the CD: if you know the song, you know they lifted an Everly Brothers riff for the beginning of each verse. The last part of the lyric is something like, "...living like a frog in the slimy bog/running through the trees from the Everlys.." Only part of why the song makes a good antidote!
This isn't a sign, I hope, that the depression is returning. Total stress overload around here, and at the time I've finally managed to withdraw from Effexor all the way, but I think I'm OK overall. Just take popular music too seriously, maybe?
Now, someone tell me it's true for a lot of us over "a certain age", 'K?
poster:Racer
thread:786
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/2000/20020724/msgs/786.html