Cling To The Old Dreams

Much of "Pet Sounds" has always sounded *intensely* nostalgic to me.

For any particular reason, Robin? I don't know the record.

Ah now, Pinefox ...

FWIW I think Pet Sounds is a very good album which has nevertheless been overrated by many. My comment on nostalgia and yearning for days gone by was inspired by the sad, rueful melancholia throughout that album, which I think is absolutely fucking obvious if you *do* know it - it contains a song called "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times" for God's sake, many of the lyrics are looking back sentimentally to 1950s Californian adolescence, a world already vanishing in 1966, and the band's confused and baffled response to profound changes in youth culture was just round the corner. "Caroline No" especially is a lament for innocence lost which, for the most determinedly forward-thinking, is easy to be affected by but much harder to love.

Most of what I've said is boringly canonical, actually - Ian MacDonald and David Stubbs both said it in Uncut within a few months in 1999. But I admire you, Pinefox, for your resistence to such accepted ideas. We could do with more like you.

I finally have a new thing to say on this thread. I have heard Kathryn Williams' magical cover of Big Star's 'Thirteen' (don't know the original), and it seems to be a major instance of pop becoming nostalgic for pop.

I take it that 13 is the age of the narrator / addressee. And I have come to think that they are 13 in, say, 1966 (? hence 'Paint It, Black'). So the song seems to be miming, affectionately performing, a pop / youth attitude / experience (innocence) of a few years gone by.

It has got me thinking about that mode: the affectionate rendering of pop innocence. I have come to realize that this is a mode to which a lot of my own work has belonged. And I am wondering (again) whether the mode started around the time of the Big Star song (whenever that was exactly: 1970? I am not sure I have ever heard Big Star).

Isn't everything a rendering of pop innocence? But just faster and faster. Britney Spears a virgin - she's a tart - she had sex - she got married. The speed of communication is the problem and the answer.
This has everything to do with the invention of the phonograph, etc. - communication has changed everything. Soviet Communism fell. And now terorism reigns. Communication has changed a democracy into a meritocracy - you can't become president without a billion dollars. The average American is exposed to more advertisement than content.
But media is free - and the first amendment guarentees that this right be upheld.
What is my point? Oh, yeah, nostalgia is a commodity, one that I prefer buying from indepedent distrubutors.
Please don't package my life to me - eg "I Love The Eighties". Some important things happened - I don't want to be reduced to hair bands vs. new wave.
And I am sick and tired of my favorite, beloved things being coopted.
I am in a very hateful mood today.