[lbo-talk] Regression to Adolescence [was lumpen]

B. docile_body at yahoo.com
Fri Jan 27 18:45:14 PST 2006


Well, that guy at Ramparts is a dick for saying that. "Blue Suede Shoes" is a great song, written by Carl Perkins - FYI, from a sharecropping family in a public housing project in Jackson, TN, who really did learn to play guitar -- his first guitar was made from a cigar box, broomstick, and baling wire -- from an older black guy who worked in the cotton fields near him. In its own way it's class music (written about a poor guy whose only expensive possession was a pair of blue suede shoes he'd agonizingly scrimped and saved for). Maybe it's adolescent, I dunno, but it's also -- harmless fun. Even MC5 did a cover of Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" while they also did more, uh, "serious" stuff about the war in Vietnam. Who cares, there are good things about cutting loose and acting "adolescent" sometimes. The criticism of hip hop a la Wojtek's is is just way overwrought/overblown.

-B.

Michael Hirsch wrote:

"Quite right. A writer for Ramparts Magazine back in the day observed that the quintessential line in Rock music even then was 'Don't step on my blue-suede shoes.'"

Joanna wrote:

"This regression to adolescence only appears as a regression relative to other eras. In fact, the mindset of the adolescent captures the capitalist gestalt perfectly and represents its highest goals: you want what you want when you want it, never mind the cost, and fuck everybody. No sense of responsibility to anything except gratifying the instinctual or conditioned impulse of the moment. This is veiwed as 'freedom.' Pathetic and dangerous."



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