Songs, The System and So Many Questions

 

I love songs so much that all my life I have wondered how songwriters construct them. 

Do lyrics come to a songwriter first, and then afterwards comes the idea for the music? Or is it the other way around? 

Seeing the mobs’ flag on the walls of the nation’s capitol scaled by lawless weightlifters, I felt the same sort of question form in my mind. 

What came first, the hateful fear-mongering rhetoric of cable’s bargain basement screaming heads programming, or was it the policies that led to the mob’s anger: the loss of good-paying jobs in the U.S. to countries whose workers are forced to work for lower wages? 

Or, as a card-carrying Chicana lesbian, I wonder, too, if the reason includes the changing features and shades on the faces of America’s family portrait?

I wonder also which came first, corporations’ higher profits and our collective reduced support for K- 12 education and colleges  or was it unregulated social media? 

Did new media’s rush for ratings and views blind us to the power shown yesterday of media’s impact and influence over people and their behaviors? 

Disenfranchised people who drank Trump’s Jonestown Kool-Aid and took to the streets at the behest of their leader yesterday sure gave us a show. What a show. 

And I ask were the rioters admitted onto the grounds by an  intentionally under-prepared capital police force? And when they were herded out without being arrested, where did the muscle men thugs go during a curfew to celebrate their failed coup d’état? 

I know this: They got their time on camera, their moment in the spotlight,  their 15 seconds of fame, taking selfies in an elected official‘s office and on the dias  of the senate chambers. Also, I know the system worked. The legislators did their job. The system worked.

 I remind myself that is what’s important. 

As we sat watching the legislators speak for five minutes each when they finally returned to work, we were thrilled with being able to listen to them and watch them. The system at work. They were going to do the job of certifying Biden’s election.

It was magical even if they were limited to five minutes to see their passion and hear their thoughts,  their speeches without interruption from commercials or interpretation. 

I realized it had been decades since I had been able to listen to a live speech! And as I followed on Twitter there were people there complaining about the length of time taken up leading to the final vote. Our collective attention span has reduced, mine included

Yet I thrilled at watching people who I read about for years but had hardly seen on TV.  Even if I didn’t agree with them, I saw their personalities and their passion and appreciated being able to see the system work, live and unfiltered. It had been bruised and battered, true, and we have years of work ahead of us. But the system worked.

Sloop John B's Gift That Keeps Giving

Today I learned that my nearly-all-time favorite Beach Boys song, Sloop John B has its origins far from where I've spent the past 55 years or so believing it originated. It's the only song on the epic Pet Sounds album that was not a Beach Boys' composition, according to Wikipedia . Sloop John B is based on a Kingston Trio version of a folksong from the Bahamas.

This discovery prompted me to think  about a history book I received from my mother in law, Francis McAtee for Christmas. It is David Johnson's In the Loop, A Political and Economic History of San Antonio. Dr. Johnson and I met some years back while taping an interview for a Heritage documentary segment for KLRN TV on the Mexican Revolution which I wrote and produced. His book reads like an adventure novel, complete with clashing characters and cultures and the shifting boundaries among countries extending from New Orleans to Mexico City. 

The way Johnson's book brought to life the massive changes in history and how they informed our city's development made me mindful of how I've enjoyed being a bystander to the history of media. 

As a college student and teacher in Communication, I have witnessed the shifting boundaries in our media and cultural landscape. It started with my witnessing as a consumer and becoming a content maker during the apex of mass media 1960's-1970's and the arrival of the Market Segmentation with cable's arrival in the 1980's, home video to the arrival of the home computer, digital technology and the Internet in the early 1990's.  

One possible way to describe what the scene felt like and sounded like during these shifts of culture and technology would be to envision a Victorian home's tidy somber living room parlor. Think lace curtains drifting with the wind from an open window. The furniture is stiff and ancient, highly polished. There are collections of travel souvenirs on the shelves. On the Victrola record player is a 33 rpm vinyl album bringing to life the voice of Janis Joplin, a rock and roll singer born in Port Arthur, Texas whose talent star scorched the Earth until it burned itself out in a heroin overdose. It was that stark a contrast in cultures. 

There, in that tidy parlor the record albums bought at record stores or through a record club subscription service and stored in the living room record player ranged from from those from artists as varied as Jimmy Hendrix to Marty Robbins, from John Gary to Eydie Gorme and the Trio Los Panchos, from Stevie Wonder to the Chambers Brothers, Roy Orbison to the New Christy Minstrels. I missed James Brown paired beside Johnny Cash or Sam and Dave's Hold On I'm Coming played on our town's radio station twice in a row by a disc jockey who liked the song that much! Petula Clark sang next to the Everly Brothers. Smorgasbord of music and a nation of across-the-board fans of it all. Maybe our country had fewer divisions when we listened to everyone's music. Just wondering'. 

The sounds on any car radio anywhere in the entire country were an even wider free-for-all celebration for all ages in their programming. This was the era where a radio station like KTSA in San Antonio showered all of South Texas with rock, country, soul and the occasional international hit like Sukiyaki or the novelty hit that made you chuckle. My all-time favorite example is Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah by Alan Sherman. Click on it! Now it's an ear worm for you today, too. You're welcome. 

In every other aspect of life, we may have been living at least part time in Grandma and Grandpa's world, but that era's movies, TV, magazines and books introduced to us tastes and examples of new and emerging talents on the world stage. Old, new, somewhere in between --all folded in together for our media mix during the 1960's and 1970's for a decade or so. 

Then came the arrival of new media such as cable and FM radio, where segmentation of our population into pop, country, soul, Tejano, etc., became the order of the day because it was lucrative. Segmentation had lasting effects in separating and dividing us. Maybe it's part of the reason we're as deep as we are in our own echo chambers of social media and news today.

Understanding this time  and what happened then is important, because like the parting of the Red Sea in the Old Testament, it was then that two important things happened. First, media content shifted from something-selected-for-us to something-selected-because-we-had-liked-it-before. In the prior model, content was selected by some for the many, in the style of William Shawn and the New Yorker. This is an amazing story of editors presenting to their readers what they the editors themselves would want to read. The latter model's market-driven programming paid homage to profits before art, innovation or novelty. Now it became advertising, polls and surveys based on ratings and sales that determined content. Content never "just happen". It happens for reasons and it's good to know them because media plays such a huge role in our lives, culture and as we've seen recently in our national dialogue. 

Knowing which model for content creation--quality v. quantity, style v. sales, is better or worse, backward or forward, right or wrong might be beyond my pay grade. I do, however, believe history of all kinds is worthy of our careful study.  Our perspectives can broaden, and more importantly, knowing how media evolved helps to set us on our present day journey better prepared to be both content consumers and creators.