...a reprint of this piece previously posted in my diary, and somewhat representative of what we're shooting for here, except maybe a little more personal than we want.
Kitsch Army
You get that feeling that's a bit uncomfortable but every bit as enthralling as anything you've felt, you wonder if it's the gateway to wonderland or a rest stop, but for this moment you feel exciteable, like you're hearing a gorgeous preamble to something, you know the mystery will reveal itself soon and everything will be sorted out, and you'll find out that magic, or at least magick, is afloat, and for the moment you're feeling good as Nina Simone would say.
But for some reason it's Andy Williams singing at the moment.
You're down to three cigarettes and you know you'll have to get up in the morning and get more, but you feel you might even be able to survive without 'em if you have to. You're temporarily invincible.
You know there's great change afoot, and I use "great" in the superlative sense, the real sense, the kind Nina's talking about even as she's overcoming the usually sad minor key. She's "Feelin' Good" over A minor, or maybe it's E minor, and her overcoming that historically tragic key signature with such determination makes you believe she knows exactly what the hell she's doing, you believe it.
You asterisk these artifacts. Oh, hell, they come from moments when we were all too innocent. We didn't have the advanced technology we have now, we can't relate to it. But thankfully you come to your senses: Ah, bullshit, you say. We were rawer then, we had only limited means in which to express ourselves externally. So what if the horns weren't well-recorded? So what if we could dupe them on a MIDI device better than we could ever play them?
Ah, you don't really believe that.
Let's say you're listening to a primitive recording of Anthony Newley's truly brilliant "Idle on Parade," a casual song he tossed off for a British musical comedy in the late 50's. You know Newley went head-first into kitschland later -- even though you secretly admire that kitsch. "Idle On Parade" is horribly recorded; few if any solid first-generation copies exist of it. It's also an Elvis knock-off by a Cockney. But right now you want to bottle it if it makes you every bit as powerful as you feel now at the stereo -- you want to bottle it and transport it wherever you have to meet someone in person next, so you can reproduce its percussive, definite, gleeful, goddamn Cockney spirit in person with the next person you meet, the next friend, the next lover.
This is not bad for the guy who wrote the Willy Wonka score, ferchrissakes -- whose "Pure Imagination" is, incidentally, the most wonderful piece of kitsch ever recorded. Such is the great contradiction of kitsch -- you think it can't get kitschier, but it does. You think that emotion can't get more conveniently bottled, but it does -- effectively, swiftly, wholly. And when it does, it crosses over into some bizarre beauty -- and, as a result, stops being kitsch. Funny how that works.
For that moment in the 60's, when producers could do little more than apply an echo chamber or two and hope to hell the artist shows up sober -- well, we footnote those moments now. We were younger then. We may have been so young we didn't technically exist. These moments, when primitive ribbon microphones caught our waves, rather than transcribe them into easily interpretable 0's and 1's -- these moments, they're just hieroglyphics; they're primitive drawings.
They're from a past we practically have to excavate to get to now. So why are they the singularly most powerful moments we've experienced without an erection? Right now?
Right now, they're the prelude. Is it prelude to a disappointment, or the prelude to a dream?
Ah.
If the dream lasts only 16 more hours, you say, fuck it. It's a beautiful, beautiful dream. I'd rather have it now and drop it when I have to.
Whoops... I mean, that is, you would. You would rather have these moments now. Excuse me.
The background doo-wops are in time with your turn signals as you head onto the freeway. The strings turn the spokes of your wheels. You look outside the window and see wide stretches of land off the freeway, and despite your previous inclinations, you find Connie Francis's voice a perfect aural recreation of those spaces. Who the hell's gonna stop you?
You could have 16 hours to live this dream -- or 16 years, or 160. And right now, you're being given the ridiculous prelude -- the cheaply thrown together, almost comical pop songs of last century, to prepare you. There's no disappointment here. None at all. And you so don't want to be a disappointment anymore.
Well, Andy Williams is trying to help your dreams where Fred Durst can't.
It sounds ridiculous. No -- it is ridiculous. But this moment, this dream is being caught in a bottle right now, and it's being poured through your speakers. Live the dream tonight, extend it past tomorrow if you can. But by all means, live the dream for at least tonight.
And here's Neil Sedaka, teenagers, with his new smash hit "You Mean Everything To Me." #1 with a bullet.
