Summer Man (6) the vexed yacht rock question

"Yacht Rock" is a great name for a genre of music. It's such a great name that you immediately want to be part of "the yacht rock scene" even though it's an imaginary genre. There is a problem though. The guys who came up with the name don't think Jimmy Buffett is yacht rock.

Lyons: We kept talking about the stories that we never got to tell, one of them being Footloose. And I hate Jimmy Buffett‘s music; I think it’s a soundtrack to date rape. I think it’s garbage music for people who have no interest in listening to anything good.

Ryznar: We portrayed parrotheads being brainwashed idiots. You kind of have to be if you’re into Jimmy Buffett. Or just want to be so tuned out of life, that like hey, whatever — kick back with flip flops, drink some margs, listen to some sweet Jimmy Buffett music and let him paint a rosy picture of a reality that does not exist.

Lyons: I always like that artists like Bertie Higgins, Rupert Holmes and Andy Kim have an authentic longing in their music. Buffett is a rich dude getting richer off of the lack of taste of the poor and stupid. He represents the lowest common denominator in music, even worse than country singers profiting off of 9/11. To summarize: I’m not really a fan.

Ryznar: You might be able to argue that Jimmy Buffett music is about escaping from a dark place, but there’s no soul in there. So we just wanted to make him an absolute idiot. Our good friend Vatche Panos, who is super funny, really hit a home run with that one.

Why is that a problem? It's their genre can't they can define it any way they want? Well, no. The problem is that words have meaning. The relevant word here is "yacht". If you found yourself forced the higher a skipper for a yacht that was going to sail through potentially dangerous waters and your only choices were the members of Steely Dan, The Doobie Brothers, or Toto or Kenny Loggins, David Foster, Jay Graydon or Jimmy Buffett, Buffett is the one to choose.

And the yachting crowd in the 1970s and early 1980s knew this. I was there. Even before he became famous, sailors packed Buffett's live shows. Any list of "yacht rock" compiled by people who actually were yachtsmen and women in the late 1970s and early 1980s would have included Jimmy Buffett.

I've written about this before and the issue has long interested me. I wouldn't say it has troubled me. I just had the feeling that there was something interesting hiding in the subject. Last week, I realized what it was. Amy and I were staying with some cousins of hers on the east coast and we spent a fair amount of time driving between various yacht clubs I'd visited when I was a kid growing up on the east coast. As we drove, I had a playlist of Steely Dan playing. I like Steely Dan. I like Steely Dan a lot. But it was just wrong in that culture. It didn't fit.

Inspired by their success with Yacht Rock, the guys had a podcast called "Beyond Yacht Rock". I say "had a podcast" even thought it still gets updated now and then. They have given up on the notion of creating more imaginary genres though. The lightning only struck once. If you listen to it, though, you'll begin to catch a sense of what really drove the genre: loserdom. Because these guys are, losers.

Not from the outside. Any objective observer would describe them as successful. But they don't feel like winners to themselves. And being a loser is a recurrent theme in the music they call yacht rock: "What a Fool Believes", "Deacon Blues", "After the Love is Gone", "Human Nature". Steely Dan were all about losers even bore they started making "Yacht Rock": "Do it Again", "Don't Take me Alive", "Dirty Work".  Here is a nice summary of the issues:

Yacht rock themes usually reflect the ennui of the era; the end of relationships, futile, fleeting hookups with pretty young things, drugs and booze, nostalgia for the simple pleasures of the early ‘60s, and longing to leave it all behind and escape to someplace warm and exotic. The Fool is the protagonist of many of the songs.

And that is a very accurate account of how that era felt for many people. It's especially accurate for for nerdy guys who were clumsy with women and spent a lot of time alone in their rooms listening to music and imagining "a better world where the sort of music they like would get its due".

I put that last bit in scare quotes not just because this "better world" would, like all imagined worlds, be more of a dystopia. The other problem is that I don't think they really like this music as much as they believe they do. Why do I say that? Because it's music that they think will buy them the status they don't feel they have in real life.

Yacht club kids didn't think that way. And you can hate me for this if you want but I know because I was one of them. To be continued ...

Summer Man (5): The Arrangements

"I have been watching my life. It's right there. I keep scratching at it, trying to get into it. I can't."

That's not from "The Arrangements" but from "The Mountain King" from season 2. That's not Don if you ask me. Yeah, he says the words and all and who am I to tell the people who created him that they don't understand their own creation. It just doesn't feel like him.

And yet, that's the Donald Draper we get for all of season 3. Except, that is, for the very end. In the last two episodes—"The Grown-Ups" and "Shut the Door, Have a Seat". In those Don (and Roger) take control by taking responsibility and they take action. You get a marvelous display of manly men doing what many men do.

But that can't be. So, instead, we get Don spouting lines that don't sound like him: "I have been watching my life. It's right there. I keep scratching at it, trying to get into it. I can't."

Thus, we get a painful scene in which Don and Grandpa Gene talk right past one another. Gene has Bobby out and shows him a Prussian helmet he brought home for the first war. He shows Bobby the hole where the bullet went. Bobby asks if he shot him and Gene says yes ... and then he qualifies it by saying he thinks he did. Why would he say that? Probably because he didn't. Unless he was a sniper, he just fired and hoped, or maybe he didn't. They had a tough time getting infantrymen to fire low in WW1. Too often they fired high out of fear of killing someone.

Gene's war experience is not that different from Don's. He has a helmet he isn't sure he deserves.

And there is something else. When Gene is telling Sally about her grandmother working as a draftsperson he lets slip a line about an engineer whom, he hastens to add, was no threat.

So we have two men who should be able connect not connecting.

And then there is the sleeping beauty twist. The sleeping beauty story is one of a girl who is left vulnerable to evil because her parents tried to protect her from it and left her helpless. It's an oft-retold tale and Betty seems like the latest iteration. Except that, she's a monster.

That's an interesting twist and one that is very apt today when we have a whole bunch of over-protected snowflakes who are, quite simply, monsters who unhesitatingly destroy lives to get what they want. Betty prefigures the type.

But what of Don?

One theory that has been discussed often here is that the best reading of Mad Men is an esoteric one. Now, "esoteric" can mean all sorts of things. What I mean is simply that the text does not mean what it appears to mean on the surface. Usually, when people talk about esoteric writings (or esoteric TV shows) they mean that the creators have intentionally hidden a real meaning under the apparently obvious surface reading. I don't think that is what happened here.

In this case, I think the creators started with two things: 1) a great character and 2) their interpretation of who the character was and what he needed to do to be happy. The problem is that they were just wrong on the second point. This created a tension that runs through the whole series. The great character demanded certain things in order to seem alive and compelling in the story that conflicted with the interpretation of the character the creators favoured.

I'm not the only one to see this. Here are some tweets about the finale culled from a contemporary newspaper article.

The first tweet recognizes that the finale was not a convincing whole. The second tries to get by that by reducing the whole thing to a cynical exercise in promoting Coke. The last blunders into the truth.

Here I make a weird digression to Ignatius of Loyola. While he was in the hospital recovering from a war would, Ignatius entertained two kinds of daydreams.. In the first, he dreamed of being a great lover in the chivalrous tradition. In the second type, he dreamed of being a saint. Bot daydreams gave him pleasure. The difference was that the second lingered while he quickly forgot about the first.

Dick Whitman doesn't really steal the real Don Draper's identity. He takes his name and his legal identity but he uses these to become someone new. He has a bunch of daydreams and some of them take root and others don't. The real Dick Whitman really is Don Draper, not the name or legal identity, but the one he created through his actions.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest. Thomas Carlyle

Swingin' with Dean!

He peered out at the audience at the Aladdin, spotted Dean Martin at a front table—and suddenly experienced what he would call "my nightclub epiphany."

That's from an old article about Richard Pryor on City Journal. How old? Nine years old. Old enough that Bill Cosby's opinions were still taken seriously.

Anyway, here's what Pryor thought looking at Dean Martin looking at him.

I asked myself, “Who’s he looking at, Rich?”

I couldn’t say.

I imagined what I looked like and got disgusted. I gasped for clarity as if it was oxygen. The fog rolled in. In a burst of inspiration, I finally spoke to the sold-out crowd: “What am I doing here?”

Then I turned and walked off the stage.

That's pretty impressive. Pryor doesn't unfairly attribute any racism to Martin as a modern social justice warrior would do. It's actually a straight reaction. He implicitly respects Martin. It bothers him that such a man as Dean Martin would see him in a way that he, Richard Pryor, knows to be false.

I knew I had some Dean in my collection. A quick search came up with 6 albums featuring him. Four were Christmas music and a fifth being a collection of cool, swingin' vocalists. The sixth was this one:




That's courtesy of Allmusic. The review says, " This Time I'm Swingin'! was a good, confident set by an artist who had figured out how to make competent albums without expending a lot of effort, which was a key to his charm."That's about right but it's an odd thing to say about an artist. Martin became a star because of his persona and not his talent and not because of his artistic vision, whatever that might have been. He was, and remained, a comedian, a great straight man, who happened to have a beautiful singing voice. That's who Richard Pryor saw.

This was not a man who was going to judge Pryor. He was cool with him. "You be what you want to be and I'll laugh because you're funny." Pryor reacted the way he did because he realized that he, Pryor, was unhappy with the who he was being for the crowd at the Aladdin.

I was one year old when that record came out. I think my parents owned a Dean Martin record but it wasn't that one. I'm sure they would have liked that one. The sort of effortless grace that stars Dean projected  in the 1950s was very much the style they aspired to. Here's my mother and me out in front of where we lived in Ottawa's Glebe that year.

"The Glebe" probably doesn't mean much to people from outside Ottawa. For years, it was the neighbourhood for people who aspired to be upper middle class in a cool way, as opposed to people who wanted to be part of the establishment. An insult from the time called people like my parents, people who came to the political capital to do good and stayed to do well. And there is something to that. They were young liberals who meant to change society in ways they thought for the better but they also some themselves as people who were among life's winners; they would end up, not rich, but comfortably well off.

That we lived where we did that year shows a rather brash confidence. Economically speaking, we didn't belong in the Glebe at the time. My parents were renting that year and probably paying more than they could afford. But they knew they belonged here. If they had been in a nightclub where Dean Martin was performing and he looked at them, their answer to Pryor's question, "Who's he looking at?" would have been positive. They wouldn't have been fully satisfied with what they would have imagined but they wouldn't have cringed either.

The next fifty years weren't easy but the overall trend was always up. After retiring, they moved to the east coast and there was an ocean view from every floor of their last house, even from the basement. They were never rich but they got to comfortably well off. They did well.

Neither was a terribly giving person. I don't blame them for that. They, in turn, had parents who were not very giving. That's understandable; they came from families that had climbed out of hardscrabble existence to become middle-class professionals. Much like the stars who created the cool style they emulated, there was actually a whole lot of hard work behind the outward "effortlessness" they projected. They'd learned to swim by being thrown in at the deep end and they had the contradictory goals of seeing their children achieve the same kind of success while sparing us from the trauma they had experienced. I'm tempted to say, "that didn't work" because looking at people I grew up with there is a lot of failure, especially marital failure. On the other hand, most of us ended up better off than our parents were at our age.

Something important has been lost. I can't imagine a rising comic looking at an aging pop star from the 1990s and having the sort of epiphany Richard Pryor had looking at Dean Martin looking at him happening today. The difference is not that Dean Martin was a great human human being and 1990s popstars weren't. Nor is it that the culture Martin came from was superior to that the 90s stars came from in every way. Look at a list of popstars from the 90s and you'll be struck by how many of them are women. But there was something about it that we've lost and would be worth getting back.

What is that something? I think the answer lies in the word, "swinging". Nowadays, that word means married people who live a lifestyle that involves having sex outside marriage. Back in the day, it meant a style of performance. More on that to come.

Summer Man (4): Souvenir

This is another episode I haven't watched since the first time. Looking at again, the reason is pretty obvious to me. This is a very anti-male episode. Don is in it as a guy things happen to. He has little agency.

A big part of the problem is the Conrad Hilton subplot. It was an interesting idea. Don, in a time of uncertainty for the company, uncharacteristically makes himself beholden to a powerful client. The problem is that, having opened the door, the show never went through it.

Consider the start of the subplot, Conrad meets Don at a country club. He takes a liking to Don but doesn't tell him who he is. And then he calls and instantly goes into this pattern of implausibly demanding immense amounts and giving nothing in return. The show gives us nothing. We get no sense of the struggles Don goes through dealing with this nor of how Conrad became so incredibly successful. He's just an irritant on Don's life ... and ours.

And then there is Betty. She is supposed to have studied anthropology at a serious university and now we find out she speaks Italian. How exactly did she learn this in the first place and how did she keep it up all these years? Do the people behind the show have any notion what it takes to learn and keep up a second language?

And why is Betty so unconvincingly sexual? Was this a deliberate decision on the part of the show's creators or is January Jones just not capable of it? If the first, again, the show opens the door and then doesn't go through it.I f the latter ... well, it's sad but not surprising—the world is full of women who are incredibly sexy so long as they don't actually do or say anything.

What we do see is that Betty is already planning her exit. In a dialogue with Sally, we discover that Betty thinks that a kiss is when you first really get to know someone. In one sense, that fits her character perfectly. Another thing that fits with the possibility that Betty's failure to be sexual is a deliberate choice is that no one falls in love with Betty; they all fall in love with an illusion. Henry merely repeats what Don has already done. Meanwhile, we get these odd glimpses of an implausibly educated Betty along with other glimpses into a very plausible Machiavellian Betty.  She says at one point, "When you don't have real power, you have to delay things." The problem is that the show doesn't do much with either. And how do you reconcile the Machiavellian Betty with the ditzy victim Betty.

Is there anything to take away from this awful episode? My wife has a helpful classification: "She/he is one of those people whom things happen to." Listen to people as they tell you about themselves. There are some people who describe themselves as driven by what happens to them. You might be tempted to feel pity for such people. That is why, in fact, they talk about themselves that way—it's all a bid for attention. Don't give it to them. Be polite and then manœuver your way away from them.  Otherwise you might end up becoming like them yourself.

Summer Man (3) "... their objectivity intensifies Steely Dan's natural nastiness"

That's Robert Christgau reviewing Steely Dan's 1976 album The Royal Scam. It hit me, as I read it, that I quite like their nastiness.

Christgau has something of a love-hate relationship with the band. If you look up his reviews at the link the quote in the headers comes from, you'll notice that the marks he assigns the music steadily decline over the years. He gives their first four records straight As and the last two Bs. As their music becomes more polished, he thinks less of them. That's the exact opposite of the way the band's biggest fans see things. Christgau believes in a special kind of nonsense that attributes "authenticity" to rough, unpolished music. He is far from alone in this.

In a sense, it was inevitable that fans of 1960s rock and roll would think that way. The first artists to mix rock and roll music with folk music chords and sensibilities had the market all to themselves from 1964 until 1967. It was inevitable, however, that other people would figure the trick out and it wasn't long before smooth and polished professionals started making records just like those produced by the big sixties artists only with much better musicianship.

There are all sorts of places I could go with this but most of them would be pointless boomer navel gazing. The exception is something else important about the band that Christgau correctly identifies even though he doesn't like it. He writes of their "'60s worldview (meaning early '60s worldview)". He was writing about a Donald Fagen solo record when he said that but it applies to the duo as well; Fagen was always the only adult in the room.

Which brings me to the Mad Men episode "My Old Kentucky Home".  I picked this episode because iTunes tells me it is the episode I haven't rewatched the longest time. This is possibly the absolute nadir for the show. It's dishonesty is staggering. I've written about what's wrong with the episode before. Is there anything right about it?

The two interesting interactions in the episode are the ones between Don and the man whom we will later find out is Conrad Hilton and the one between Don and Roger.

“Most Nice Guys believe that by repressing the darker side of their masculine energy they will win the approval of women. This seems logical considering the anti-male climate that has permeated our culture since the 1960s. […] As result, they often lose their sexual assertiveness, competitiveness, creativity, ego, thirst for experience, boisterousness, exhibitionism, and power. Go watch little boys on the playground and you will see these qualities. I am convinced they are worth keeping.” Robert Glover in No More Mr. Nice Guy 

Both men come across as weak.  Hilton can't even make his own drink. Roger is beholden to Jane. A lot is made of the similarity between Roger's decision to leave his wife for his secretary Jane and Don's later decision to marry his secretary Megan. And there are similarities. But there are also differences and they are important. Here are two I think worth focusing on.

1. Roger leaves Mona to marry Jane whereas Don has already been divorced by Betty.
2. Roger and Don both are attracted to their new partner because she has some quality their first wife lacked. In Roger's case Mona was no longer young and interested in sex. In Don's case, Megan was not neurotic.

A lot of people wanted Don to settle down with Faye Miller but when Don asks Faye to deal with Sally, she is helpless. Megan is good with the children, Don is a father. Furthermore, he was married to Betty and had to deal with her neurotic, self-centered interactions with their children. Faye has other, positive qualities but this one is a deal breaker.

You might, and I suspect a lot of people did, dismiss that as simple sexism, as an expectation that women should be good with children. But Don has children. He also has a past. He's seen Betty in action and his life experience tells him that the kind of helplessness that Faye and Betty show in a crisis is the marker for a bad partner. And he's not wrong about that.  The problem is that the mere absence of a particular fault does not guarantee the existence of other positive qualities.

What of Roger? Is lack of interest in sex a good enough reason to leave your wife? I tend to think not. I think both Roger and Betty should have tried to save their marriages. But even if we allowed that it were a good enough reason, why does he pick Jane?  He could have had Joan? The difference between the women is ultimately one of class; Jane had been to college.

Do both men make bad choices? Well, yes, in the sense that both marriages fail. Could Don have foreseen the problem? Yes. He should have paid a lot more attention to Megan's crazy family. THere is a vulgar expression in male circles, "Don't stick your dick into crazy." The point being, don't ever think, "It's just sex I want so the fact that she is unstable won't matter." The reason why this is a bad strategy is that it's never just about sex. A similar logic applies to women (and men) and their families. You are never entering into a relationship with just an individual, their entire family dynamic comes along with them . And when that family is crazy ...

Megan has a chance to fit into Don's life and she blows it. Beginning with the surprise party that begins season five to her foolish abandonment of the advertising world, which she has proven to be quite good at, for acting, which is a stupid child's dream and for which she demonstrates no special talent, Megan's failure is her own alone. But!!!! it's important to note that failure is triggered by her father and his crazy notions of following her dream, as we find out in "At the Codfish Ball".

A lot of Steely Dan's natural nastiness is a willingness to be critical of pieties about women. It's driven by bitter realizations that come out of bad relationships. That is a good thing.

Summer Man (2)

“People tell you who they are, but we ignore it, because we want them to be who we want them to be.”

“The Summer Man” is an episode I expect I’m going to need to revisit a time or 20 before I decide how I ultimately feel about some of its stylistic departures from the “Mad Men” norm – not just Don’s film noir voiceover narration from his sobriety journal entries, but other moments like the use of The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” on the soundtrack in mid-episode, or the camera showing Don’s world suddenly feeling very far away after he has a drink in the office. 

Okay, let's do that.  We'll start with "Satisfaction". If you take sixties mythology seriously, rock and roll and especially a song like "Satisfaction" was rebellious music running against the mainstream culture. And yet this episode begins with someone in the New York Athletic Club, a bastion of the establishment, listening to the song on a transistor radio.

I think that's both wrong and right. I suspect it's wrong because I doubt anyone brought a transistor radio into the locker room at the New York Athletic Club in 1965. It wouldn't have mattered what you were listening to, it wasn't done. In polite society, no one would submit others to their musical choices like that. On the other hand, I suspect it's right in the sense that men who went to the New York Athletic Club probably listened to the song on the radio, more likely the car radio than a transistor radio. Why am I so sure of this? Because everyone listened to Satisfaction in the summer of 1965. It was on the charts all summer long and almost everyone listened to the same top forty radio in those days.

That is worth lingering on. There was a common culture in those days. There was a big split brewing under the surface that would really hit home in 1968 but in 1965 it was still intact.

Looking around, I see that most of the commentary on Satisfaction focuses on two things: the sexual content and the anti-commercialism. Not much mentioned is that phrases to the effect of "I can't be satisfied" traces back to a number of blues songs, one of which would have been very familiar to Jagger and Richards.


 
This isn't a complaint but a selling point. That he he can't be satisfied is a challenge and a (sexual) promise. That is a long way from the smug superiority of 1950s liberalism and the whiny victim olympics of post-1960s liberalism. And that is pretty much what you get from Mick Jagger's lyrics, 1940s blues swagger mixed with anti-commercial folk music attitude that sounds like straight out of a Pete Seeger song. Like a lot of brilliant ideas, it seems ridiculously simple in retrospect. But it wasn't simple. The proof being that no one else had done it before. 

And that brings me to what I consider the central question about Mad Men. Scott Adams has suggested that the Trump era is characterized be a tendency to see two different movies on the same screen. I'm increasingly convinced that Mad Men anticipated that. There were two Don Drapers. One was the one the creators seem to have set about consciously creating and the other was the one a lot of fans of the show actually saw. There was something unintentional about him. 

By "unintentional", I mean that he sprang out of the way the ingredients that made up his character were assembled rather than out of what the creators planned. 

The conventional view of Draper is driven by what Paul Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of suspicion:

I liked the idea of Don writing a diary. What I don’t like so much is having Don read to us from the diary, in a voiceover. For starters, the device undercuts one of Mad Men’s greatest strengths, which is its use of irony and understatement to show how characters word and actions often belie their real thoughts and meaning.

On this view, the real Don Draper is always someone less impressive than the false and flattering account he gives of himself. The first thing to note about this is what a trivial observation it is. Is there any one whom that is not sometimes true of. The second, more important thing to notice, is that Don is a guy who doesn't talk about himself. And it's not surprising that he doesn't because bad things happen to him almost every time he does.

That's the movie TV show half the population watched or, at least, it's the show a lot of critics watched. In this version, the surface meaning covers another, less flattering account. Well, less flattering to the people being watched; it's immensely flattering to the clever people using their secret decoder rings to interpret "what's really going on".

The other movie is an esoteric one. It too has a hidden meaning but it's a hidden meaning that has to be concealed because it would be dangerous to admit to liking this message. It's a TV show that appealed to men in an era when being a man was to be the subject of suspicion. At the centre of all this is a man. A man of action. People who dislike him say, "a deeply flawed man", as if there was any other kind.

Final note, I said above that the anti-commercial attitude in Satisfaction sounds like it comes out of a Pete Seeger song. Take a closer look at the verse the show episode uses:

When I'm watchin' my TV
And that man comes on to tell me
How white my shirts can be
But he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke
The same cigarrettes as me ...

If you remember 1960s ads, you'll know how big a part the need to fit in played: the reason you needed a white shirt was so you wouldn't stand out. You needed a well-manicured lawn for the same reason. The song doesn't object to commercialism so much as it objects to conformism. It's a declaration of ... well, a declaration of what? The natural tendency would be to end that with "independence" but that's not where the song goes next.

I can't get no, oh no no no
Hey hey hey, that's what I say
I can't get no satisfaction
I can't get no girl reaction

Now there is a concept: "girl reaction". Is that what he sings or is it "girly action"? Either way, that ain't independence.