In my opinion the Beatles will survive this effect - at least what they made from 1965 on. Love the early stuff myself, but it's more a meme representing the '60s where the later stuff is pop as timeless art.
Not so sanguine about anyone else from the era. The Stones? Too tied to rock and blues, both of which are out of favour now. The Who? Too wild and improvisational - that's all out of vogue too. Hendrix? Too tied to the electric guitar, and most of his stuff's too abrasive and inaccessible for most listeners. Dylan? Extremely culturally important and innovative, but may well be remembered for historic rather than musical reasons ('Did you know there was a guy who wrote complex lyrics in the era *before* rap?').
These guys are all still respected, but they're not *worshipped* the way they used to be. It's always fascinating to me to read old articles and see just how venerated Dylan was by pretty much all the music writers of the day - they really thought each pronouncement came from a higher place and each new release signalled where the culture was going to go next. And he really was that influential at the time. But I'd argue that since his heyday his influence has been mostly indirect - he inspired people who inspire people.
It's a shame, because personally I love him just as much as all those Boomer writers of old.
I noted with interest that Ted didn't mention any groups... I think Led Zeppelin is another band to watch although the individual members won't linger in our memories.
Steely Dan. The Dan ( Donald Fagen and Walter Becker + the approximately one hundred different sidemen they've had ) are a classic, a thing unto themselves, as incapable of being successfully emulated as The Beatles were.
Want to feel old? It was some 20 years between the release of the first Led Zeppelin record and the release of Nevermind.
It has been some 30 years since the release of Nevermind.
Also interesting how the rate of change in pop culture appears to be slowing. The first Led Zeppelin record came out in late 1968, some 54 years ago.
There are still teenagers listening to Zeppelin today, but imagine a teenager in 1968 listening to the popular music from 55 years ago. That kid would have been seen as a freak, and not in a good way.
I was 13 in 1968, and I listened to a lot of Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, etc. My peers shared what they dug and I shared what I dug. Music listening was more open season.
As an Old Movie Weirdo, this makes me sad. I'm glad there are a few of us around to at least keep enjoying the old stars amongst ourselves.
I'm reminded of Robert Frost's "Provide, Provide" ("The witch that came (the withered hag)/ To wash the steps with pail and rag,/ Was once the beauty Abishag,/ The picture pride of Hollywood"). First time I read this as a kid, I thought "No way!" Now I believe it.
A few years ago I had the melancholy duty of helping somebody sell off her deceased mother's doll collection at an estate sale. There were Shirley Temple dolls from the 1940s through to a last gasp series in the late 80s or even early 90s, which were clearly aimed at adult collectors. I remember thinking that the old lady who had died was one of her final fans and I was watching the disintegration of the cultural memory of Shirley Temple in real time. I advertised the sale in all the big cities of Texas; we didn't sell any.
I came here to say that very thing! I wonder how much of a lift that seasonal song gave him. Mentions were on an upswing in the 70s, with a little bump around 1977 when the song debuted (though he also died that year, which gives a boost) and continued to go up.
Same! I was going to call it The Bowie Effect. Since this is based on mentions on the Internet, I'm sure he gets a huge bump every Christmas. Smart move on Bing's part!
Google's ngram tool says it is "a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books". I just worry that this tool over-represents the popularity of artists that are more likely to have appeared in books, as opposed to coming up in conversation, videos, social media, newspapers, stories on tv, etc.
I don't mean to discount the the point of the article which intuitively seems right. I just worry that the relative measurements between artists are going to be skewed by little things such as a lot of people write about the Beatles in books but the same may not be true for other artists, especially given how dominant other forms of media are.
Greta Garbo has a particularly memorable name (she was name-checked in Madonna's "Vogue"), which may account for some share of her persistence. Cf. Joe DiMaggio (name-checked by Simon & Garfunkel and Peanuts).
Also, with Williams, there is the astonishing fact that he lost five or six of what would have been his prime years to service as a Marine combat pilot.
I love the anecdote Bob Costas has told: it came to him one day when he was talking to Williams, and he blurted it out.
I suspect that the current crop of actors and musicians will have much shorter longevity than those of the 20th century and it has to do with how media is consumed these days. When I was kid back in the 1970s, one of my favourite things to do was to watch the double movie matinee on TV on Saturday afternoons. You didn't get to choose what you watched, you just got whatever was programmed. Hence I got to see a lot of films from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Sometimes the movies would be frivolous ones, like "Meet me in St Louis" but I also remember watching The Third Man, Citizen Kane and Gaslight. It was a really broad film history lesson. I knew well the work of Louis Armstrong, Mario Lanza and Gene Krupa. Hope and Crosby, Lewis and Martin, Spencer Tracy (man was he hot), Katherine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and so on, were all stars we knew, even though they weren't in the current movies of the day. Now, kids only get to watch films that are considered for kids, they receive video content from streaming platforms that tell them what they can choose from. I can't imagine an 8 year old clicking to watch Citizen Kane, but it was on TV on a Saturday arvo and I was riveted.
It's curious that we haven't seen any big publishing deals with Hipgnosis recently (great name, BTW). I think Springsteen was the last one that got my attention. Maybe these Hip dudes (I would love to see their record collections when they were twelve) have realized that most of these songs will be difficult to repurpose. How would -you- monetize "Maggie's Farm?"
Just curious, what do you think the half life of Frank Sinatra will be? The romantic in me hopes that he will last longer than most performers because I sense that most fans now will discover him later in life (which is my case).
What about Marilyn Monroe? She’s as famous as ever (incl. recent sensationalistic movies), and yet she never made it into the rarified art status like Louis Armstrong. Probably 99% of millennials could pick her out of a lineup. I guess there are always exceptions to the rule.
My father was 94 when he died in 2019. But near the time of his death, he didn't ask to listen to Tommy Dorsey or Bing Crosby. He wanted to hear Willie Nelson. Dad certainly remembered the names of 1940s musicians, but ONLY as names, not as something he wanted to hear any more.
Random thought: maybe Bing Crosby is lingering a bit because of White Christmas. It gets lots of play annually, and his distinctive tone could lead even kids to wonder, "who is that?"
Your timeline is probably correct because 80 years is slightly longer than the average lifespan of a human, therefore all we need to recognize is a name mentioned by a grandparent. If you play with the Google graphing toy enough you will likely find the same curves for sports stars, presidents, British monarchs, and automobile models (many of us have heard of the Edsel but few have seen one in the last half century).
Eventually everything and everyone is forgotten. This is part of the human condition.
How many composers of Gregorian chants can be named? The artists who made cave paintings are unknown to us. Likewise for the authors of important texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Be patient.
But these creators did have names and someone knew them. At some point the chain of passing down the information was broken. Wait long enough and the same will happen to Bach and the Beatles. It is naive to think that just because we now have digital files stored in thousands and millions of different locations that the content will survive for a thousand years. We were lucky the Rosetta Stone survived. We might not be so lucky with MP3 files.
I think that Bach has passed the 80 years test. But, once again, if we confine ourselves to "pop" culture, I doubt if anyone who's popular today will be celebrated in 80 years.
Your first sentence is a misapprehension. An example is that in regard to a later era, no one knows who wrote the vast majority of British Isles popular songs before the 20th century. And the "Barbara Allen" in one shire would be considerably different from the "Barbara Allen" in another shire. This is why Dylan is correct to defend himself against accusations of plagiarism by pointing out that borrowing, altering, rewriting are intrinsic to his approximate genre. Except the cases of weirdoes like Paganini, Liszt, maybe Wagner, Stephen Foster, no one paid much attention to such things before the 20th century.
I'm 70. There has always been a cult of celebrity during my lifetime, but it's become bizarre and torrential in the last forty years.
I’m not sure I want to jump down this rabbit hole because you are likely more savvy than I am on this topic. But here goes.
Just because nobody knows who first wrote “Barbara Allen” doesn’t mean there wasn’t a creator. The lyrics and music evolved over generations but, largely, the song is recognizable as “Barbara Allen.” Honest musicians acknowledge this on stage and on their recordings. My problem with Dylan — and others — is that he wrote the lyrics to “Masters of War” then glued them to the music of “Nottamun Town” without acknowledging he borrowed or was inspired by the traditional folk song. Any folkie worthy of the name knows that if you are looking for a tune to steal/borrow/be inspired by all you have to do is visit the archive at Cecil Sharp House. There, you can find music that is “new” to young ears.
The whole concept of copyright and “owning” a song is barely 300 years old. But where money is involved there are lawyers, and I suspect Dylan’s lawyers advised him more money was to be made by saying the words and music to “Masters of War” were his than to write on the label “Words by Bob Dylan, music Traditional.”
Last… the cult of celebrity goes back a lot longer than 40 years. Have you not seen the old newsreels of Chaplin being carried on the shoulders of an adoring crowd? Before we had photographic evidence there were written accounts of Dickens being mobbed by fans. Worshipping idols, whether they be religious or secular, is an ancient human affliction.
Anecdotally, Sarah Bernhardt lives on in many Jewish households, where generation after generation, the reaction to a dramatic child is, “you’re a real Sarah Bernhardt.”
Also, as the Beatles are at about the 60 year mark, what do you think will be their fate?
That's funny about Sarah Bernhardt. And comforting, somehow.
The Beatles should last. One of the several great things which made them what they were was their constant self - deprecation. This tends to appeal to the young.
But then, I live in a time in which an overwhelming number of Americans support the credibility of same sex marriage, and seem to be willing to be rather militant about it. The possibility of legal same sex marriage is the sort of thing the more daring comics like Dick Cavett, Woody Allen, and Richard Pryor would have used for fodder fifty years ago. But here we are. And maybe 15% of young Americans are having their transgender interlude.
Again, most people seem to think this isn't all that outre.
I'm convinced that the difference between Boomers like me and GenZers is far more remarkable than the difference between my generation and our grandparents'. I'm probably mistaken in thinking that kids will always be attracted to The Beatles. I can't possibly get a sense of them, of how they see things.
Have W.C. Fields and Groucho ( the other brothers' being annoying or boring ) lasted? I would think they might because they were so damned funny.
Ah, well, tastes do differ, but notice that in a Marx Bros. movie, the other brothers, usually along with the starlet and probably her beau, tend to have a couple of seven to ten minute long segments to themselves. Groucho just disappears. Otherwise, if Groucho is in a scene, the brothers are there usually to serve as foils for his one liners.
I think of these non - Groucho segments as being akin to filler music in great musicals: Groucho, as great as he was, could be just TOO MUCH if the audience weren't given respite from him now and then.
My father, born in 1910, used to do a lot of tax accounting in the 1950s and 1960s. He'd make house calls, and he said that all those old guys living as roommates in the Village should have been able to file joint returns and getting married rate. He didn't live to see gay marriage legalized, but he was in favor of it way back when. (Doing people's tax returns gave him a lot of insight to all sorts of people. The IRS didn't care who you were, just that you filed your return and paid your taxes.)
With the culture's having changed as much as it did between 1960 and 2010, civil unions might have been slightly less than antisocial, but marriage was created by God for the union of one man and one woman. If this is regarded as superstitious and I'm regarded as a fantasist, so be it. I'm a Christian. One of Solzhenitsyn's gifts to society was his vouchsaving the watchword, "Live not by lies" to us. "Same sex marriage" was condoned by the Supreme Court a mere seven and a half years ago, and look at all the hell which has broken loose upon the country since then. Really, was transgenderism even a significant issue before that? Preferred pronouns? Did we hear of "deadnaming," a word I like a lot, but which should refer to something noirish. ( I have unsubscribed from at least one newsletter which introduced its staff along with each member's chosen pronouns. ) Barack Obama ran for President in 2008 as an opponent of "same sex marriage."
I set it off with quotation marks because while I don't deny legal reality, I recall one of Hamlet's lines in the graveyard: Here is the pate of a politician, one who might have opposed God.
Let God speak for himself. An omnipotent deity should be able to post a comment here if he wants to. That's what omnipotence is all about.
If you read the Old Testament, you'd know that marriage was between one man and any number of women who could be married as wives or concubines. It wasn't a voluntary act. If your brother died, his wives, were now your wives. After Alexander stomped through the area, marriage was redefined as one man and one woman, but Alexander was not God though good luck convincing Alexander himself of that. There isn't very much about why the change was made in the Bible, but it's rather obvious. Marriage was defined by the local authorities and local mores and God never had much to say about it.
In Roman society, marriage was a public affirmation, and slaves couldn't marry. One of Christianity's big selling points was coming up with a way for slaves to marry. Christian's completely redefined marriage as a sacrament. All it took was a duly authorized priest and the right words. Not only could slaves get married, they could get married in secret. No wonder the Romans tried to wipe out the Christians. Now, Christianity makes a big deal of not letting people marry. It's like the Anglican church getting upset when Charles divorced Diana despite the whole church being created so that someone could get divorced.
An interesting bouillabaisse of comments. God has spoken for himself, and those who believe in his Son are obligated to do what little we can to try to explain to those who don't know him what he has said.
First, Adam and Eve are the pattern. Unfortunately, there was the Fall. I'm aware of the colorful ways of Old Testament patriarchs, and the rather byzantine quality which widowhood could have. ( At the moment, my pastor is teaching Leviticus. The elders have requested only that he be mindful to preach carefully about the unseemliness you find in Leviticus. ) You're right about the patriarchs, and no, the Bible doesn't have much to say about it.
But with the appearance of Jesus, his affirmation of the Old Testament moral law, then the coming of the Holy Spirit, things change dramatically. I doubt marriage is a sacrament, because if that were true, then a sacrament would necessarily be denied permanently or for many years, at least, to a lot of Christians, but you can't read especially the Pauline Epistles without being aware of the preciousness with which God regards it. St Paul sets forth the rigorous standards which a godly marriage must have: among other things, a man is to love his wife as Christ has loved the church, and to be prepared to lay down his life for her. Thank you for making a reference to the then -shocking regard which Christians had for the welfare of society's least powerful. Christianity's view of women exalts them by making them coequal with, if different from, men. Feminism would have us believe the opposite.
There isn't a hint anywhere in the Bible that same sex relations could ever be anything less than iniquitous.
I don't want to start a food fight with you Bobby. But I do want to bear witness to you about my daughter, who is a trans woman.
It is not an interlude. It is a "for life" thing. I know half a dozen other trans people. Same thing. It's the ... what shall we call it? ... psychological condition which is the least susceptible to changing, according to Martin Seligmanns (he was president of the American Psychological Association) book, "What You Can Change And What You Can't". Being trans came down as the least changeable thing in the book.
This is such an important fact, I felt I should bear witness about it to you.
Jay, I was referring to teenagers, especially to those in early puberty. But I don't doubt that for those adults who are so afflicted, it is very hard to change. I coupled it with same sex marriage because these two phenomena more than anything else mark a world which Baby Boomers like me could never have imagined we'd live into.
I'm a Christian, and yes, I see these as essentially spiritual problems, as I see lust, greed, the ache for power, and the yearning for fame. About sexual identity and attractedness, my sense is that for some people, maybe most, who have deviant ( intended to stun - it's a word which the Devil has been vigilant to see is practically lost to the vocabulary ) interests, change will always be extremely difficult. But then, it was difficult for me to learn to control my temper, not to hate people who had been predatory at my expense, to resign myself to my creaturliness and my lack of standing to challenge God, and several other things.
I think the flaw in your position, though unarticulated, is the implication that people who are beset with a sexual problem, whether transgenderism or the yearning to get something going with a woman who isn't a man's wife, should be indulged. What if the answer is the opposite, spiritual discipline and the denial of the self, such as the denials of my self which I alluded to in the previous paragraph? ( And those denials are imperfect at best, though thanks be to God, by his Spirit, I've made considerable progress. )
This would also apply to everything else which the Bible defines as sin. St Paul gives us a grisly list in Romans 1:18 - 32, but they're set forth in other passages of the Bible, also.
If one believes Christianity is true, then it becomes obvious that the only permissible sexual activity is that between a husband and his wife. Celibacy is never easy, but in the Before times, when far more people were dominated by considerations of truth and honor than is the case now, it was regarded as a necessary state of life for the unmarried.
There is a woman in my church who is in her 30s, and has same sex attraction. She knows that she can't fulfill this, and I'm sure she sees it as Paul saw his thorn in the flesh, as all Christians ought to see any suffering which doesn't yield to prayer, suffering which must be borne for the glory of God.
Such people have existed in every generation. In one of his letters, C.S. Lewis refers to an "elderly, pious homo" of his acquaintance, a man who, whatever his life's story had been before his conversion, was succeeding in his wish to please God by remaining celibate.
One of my favorite songwriters of the Great American Songbook, Hugh Martin, was homosexual. At age 60, he had an undoubted conversion to Christ. He lived into his late nineties, almost all of those years with a Christian couple who had befriended him. Martin never says so in his charming memoir, but the unavoidable conviction a reader gets is that Martin was desperate to escape acting on his homosexuality, and this remarkable couple were devoted to helping him in this. Would a 70 year old need occasionally stern "chaperones?" As a 70 year old, single heterosexual, it doesn't seem unlikely to me.
I realize that most readers will regard all of this as fantastically anachronistic, but if it's true that Christ has been raised from the dead, public opinion ought not to count for much in the way a Christian lives.
Also, though I know better than to assign a political label to you, the Left wants us all to know they "believe in science." They don't, of course, because if they did, they could not ignore the fact than an unborn baby is genetically unique, and not a part of a woman's body which she ought to have sovereignty over. Equally, your child will always be chromosomally male. Is it possible, as there seems good reason to speculate, that something happened to the unborn baby which caused him to feel otherwise?
Well, Bobby, I've been in a seminar room with several adult trans people who's contention was that "God made me this way". Not a spiritual affliction. A condition of existence which was immutable. Some cultures have considered trans people a gift from God (or their gods), because of the knowledge gained from their position.
The mistake you're making is the supposition that the yearning is sovereign, that if a person wants something that desperately, it must be right that he have it fulfilled.
Biological reality dictates otherwise.
I have no idea how old your son is, but the monstrous thing about the transgender imperative is that it afflicts many people in their early and mid - teens. It's never really been thought by thoughtful people that teenagers should always get their way. The truth that the brain hasn't fully matured until one's mid - twenties should be all the foundation the federal government needs to make any attempt to assist a person under 25 in a cosmetic gender change a federal crime.
And what do you say about all the ones who revert before the surgery, who have the sane perception that they're on the verge of a dreadful mistake? I don't know how old your son is, or if he's had the surgery. If he hasn't had the surgery, you need to do everything you can to try persuade him not to go through with it. If you don't, it isn't impossible that in ten years you'll find yourself and his mother are having to be defendants in a lawsuit which he has filed against you for parental negligence.
God didn't make your son transsexual any more than he made Ted Bundy a murderer or me prone to my sins. If you understand that it's a fallen world, you grasp reality. We're all sinners by fallen nature. And the answer to it all is the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Bobby, please don't presume to tell me the "mistake I am making".
I've been in a room with trans people professing faith that seems every bit as devout and genuine as yours. You do not have a superior knowledge of God's Will than anyone else does. We all see but through a glass darkly, after all.
If you want to respond and have the last word, you will, since this is all I'm saying.
That is surprising. Can you think of anything which might explain it? Is it possible that a lot of people do confuse Bernhardt with Sandra Bernhard? But Sandra Bernhard was A Big Thing which didn't quite happen forty years ago, so I'm baffled.
I wonder what the respective scores of George Gershwin and Vincent Youmans are? I'm too lazy to check. I would expect that quite a few people recognize Gershwin's name and hardly anyone Youmans.' This is a shame. Gershwin's work can be like a sugar overload. Really, I can't imagine ever wanting to hear a Gershwin song again, while Youmans is someone I never get tired of.
You have inflicted cruelty upon me. I will be gnawing away at my innards with the stress caused by trying to remember which Cole Porter song that is from.
In 2014, I made a stop at the cemetery in Peru, Indiana. Porter's grave is that lovely midwestern town's chief tourist attraction. It's the J.O. Cole family plot, and old man Cole's tombstone must be seven feet tall. He had ungodly awful taste, too. The stone is colored an unimaginably horrible combination of pink and yellow, as are the eight or ten headstones which lie supplicatingly in front of it.
I quickly scanned the ones to my right. No, then to the left. It was shocking, somehow, when I spotted it.
Bernhardt was considered the paradigm of overly dramatic acting, so people would say things like "Stop being Sarah Bernhardt" or "She was a regular Sarah Bernhardt. It was a synonym for what we'd now call a drama queen.
In my opinion the Beatles will survive this effect - at least what they made from 1965 on. Love the early stuff myself, but it's more a meme representing the '60s where the later stuff is pop as timeless art.
Not so sanguine about anyone else from the era. The Stones? Too tied to rock and blues, both of which are out of favour now. The Who? Too wild and improvisational - that's all out of vogue too. Hendrix? Too tied to the electric guitar, and most of his stuff's too abrasive and inaccessible for most listeners. Dylan? Extremely culturally important and innovative, but may well be remembered for historic rather than musical reasons ('Did you know there was a guy who wrote complex lyrics in the era *before* rap?').
These guys are all still respected, but they're not *worshipped* the way they used to be. It's always fascinating to me to read old articles and see just how venerated Dylan was by pretty much all the music writers of the day - they really thought each pronouncement came from a higher place and each new release signalled where the culture was going to go next. And he really was that influential at the time. But I'd argue that since his heyday his influence has been mostly indirect - he inspired people who inspire people.
It's a shame, because personally I love him just as much as all those Boomer writers of old.
I noted with interest that Ted didn't mention any groups... I think Led Zeppelin is another band to watch although the individual members won't linger in our memories.
For sure. If I was going to place a bet on any band from the '70s lasting it would be either them, Floyd or ABBA.
Great point about ABBA and, honestly, you've got to consider the Bee Gees. Staying Alive will never die.
The clue's in the name ;)
Good point, could well be Queen. So many strings to their bow, with both artistry and pop appeal.
Steely Dan. The Dan ( Donald Fagen and Walter Becker + the approximately one hundred different sidemen they've had ) are a classic, a thing unto themselves, as incapable of being successfully emulated as The Beatles were.
Steely Dan has already been forgotten. Sorry.
I doubt that.
Want to feel old? It was some 20 years between the release of the first Led Zeppelin record and the release of Nevermind.
It has been some 30 years since the release of Nevermind.
Also interesting how the rate of change in pop culture appears to be slowing. The first Led Zeppelin record came out in late 1968, some 54 years ago.
There are still teenagers listening to Zeppelin today, but imagine a teenager in 1968 listening to the popular music from 55 years ago. That kid would have been seen as a freak, and not in a good way.
I was 13 in 1968, and I listened to a lot of Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, etc. My peers shared what they dug and I shared what I dug. Music listening was more open season.
So will John Lennon airport in Liverpool never change its name?
Almost certainly
Gosh The Clash already wrote the lyric ,"phony Beatle mania has bitten the dust." ages ago !o!
As an Old Movie Weirdo, this makes me sad. I'm glad there are a few of us around to at least keep enjoying the old stars amongst ourselves.
I'm reminded of Robert Frost's "Provide, Provide" ("The witch that came (the withered hag)/ To wash the steps with pail and rag,/ Was once the beauty Abishag,/ The picture pride of Hollywood"). First time I read this as a kid, I thought "No way!" Now I believe it.
A few years ago I had the melancholy duty of helping somebody sell off her deceased mother's doll collection at an estate sale. There were Shirley Temple dolls from the 1940s through to a last gasp series in the late 80s or even early 90s, which were clearly aimed at adult collectors. I remember thinking that the old lady who had died was one of her final fans and I was watching the disintegration of the cultural memory of Shirley Temple in real time. I advertised the sale in all the big cities of Texas; we didn't sell any.
This feels like an especially poignant example of a huge star fading away.
Bing Crosby seemed relevant to me and my friends when we were kids because of his Christmas duets with David Bowie. Instant credibility!
I came here to say that very thing! I wonder how much of a lift that seasonal song gave him. Mentions were on an upswing in the 70s, with a little bump around 1977 when the song debuted (though he also died that year, which gives a boost) and continued to go up.
Bing Crosby will remain for a while if for no other reason than "White Christmas" being part of the popular Christmas music canon.
Same! I was going to call it The Bowie Effect. Since this is based on mentions on the Internet, I'm sure he gets a huge bump every Christmas. Smart move on Bing's part!
Ozymandias.....
Google's ngram tool says it is "a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books". I just worry that this tool over-represents the popularity of artists that are more likely to have appeared in books, as opposed to coming up in conversation, videos, social media, newspapers, stories on tv, etc.
I don't mean to discount the the point of the article which intuitively seems right. I just worry that the relative measurements between artists are going to be skewed by little things such as a lot of people write about the Beatles in books but the same may not be true for other artists, especially given how dominant other forms of media are.
For example, classical musicians fare pretty well over time: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Beatles%2CMozart%2CBeethoven%2CDebussy%2CLouis+Armstrong&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=0
Good point. Maybe the real story in ngrams is that books are dying, not just pop stars. What happened around 2007? (iphone?): https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Bob+Dylan%2C+John+Lennon%2C+Paul+McCartney%2C+Michael+Jackson%2C+ABBA%2C+Bruce+Springsteen%2C+Metallica%2C+Elvis+Presley&year_start=1960&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=0
Greta Garbo has a particularly memorable name (she was name-checked in Madonna's "Vogue"), which may account for some share of her persistence. Cf. Joe DiMaggio (name-checked by Simon & Garfunkel and Peanuts).
Who’s Simone Garfinkle? Is Peanuts his dog?
Also Gary Cooper was name checked in Puttin on the Ritz
True, but that song is almost a hundred years old, and as much as I like it, more people are likely to have heard of Gary Cooper than Irving Berlin.
Also, with Williams, there is the astonishing fact that he lost five or six of what would have been his prime years to service as a Marine combat pilot.
I love the anecdote Bob Costas has told: it came to him one day when he was talking to Williams, and he blurted it out.
"Ted! You're that guy John Wayne pretends to be!"
Williams: "Aww, I know."
There was a time when I said my name is “Wayne. Like John Wayne.” Now I say “Wayne. Like (rapper) Lil’ Wayne.”
My dog is named Ernie. A (much) older lady won my heart when she said, "Ernie Pyle!"
Before my time, even, but still.
I suspect that the current crop of actors and musicians will have much shorter longevity than those of the 20th century and it has to do with how media is consumed these days. When I was kid back in the 1970s, one of my favourite things to do was to watch the double movie matinee on TV on Saturday afternoons. You didn't get to choose what you watched, you just got whatever was programmed. Hence I got to see a lot of films from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Sometimes the movies would be frivolous ones, like "Meet me in St Louis" but I also remember watching The Third Man, Citizen Kane and Gaslight. It was a really broad film history lesson. I knew well the work of Louis Armstrong, Mario Lanza and Gene Krupa. Hope and Crosby, Lewis and Martin, Spencer Tracy (man was he hot), Katherine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and so on, were all stars we knew, even though they weren't in the current movies of the day. Now, kids only get to watch films that are considered for kids, they receive video content from streaming platforms that tell them what they can choose from. I can't imagine an 8 year old clicking to watch Citizen Kane, but it was on TV on a Saturday arvo and I was riveted.
It's curious that we haven't seen any big publishing deals with Hipgnosis recently (great name, BTW). I think Springsteen was the last one that got my attention. Maybe these Hip dudes (I would love to see their record collections when they were twelve) have realized that most of these songs will be difficult to repurpose. How would -you- monetize "Maggie's Farm?"
Just curious, what do you think the half life of Frank Sinatra will be? The romantic in me hopes that he will last longer than most performers because I sense that most fans now will discover him later in life (which is my case).
How does one monetize Maggie's Farm?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNMsiBnJN44
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Sinatra is a hardy perennial. My impression is that kids are at least aware of him and the position he occupies in cultural history.
What about Marilyn Monroe? She’s as famous as ever (incl. recent sensationalistic movies), and yet she never made it into the rarified art status like Louis Armstrong. Probably 99% of millennials could pick her out of a lineup. I guess there are always exceptions to the rule.
Bogart seems to have legs, too.
Monroe crosses the line from movie stardom to fashion icon, as does Audrey Hepburn. I suspect both of them will stick around.
I wonder if Jack Nicholson has legs?
How much of our own great-grandparents do most of us know?
My father was 94 when he died in 2019. But near the time of his death, he didn't ask to listen to Tommy Dorsey or Bing Crosby. He wanted to hear Willie Nelson. Dad certainly remembered the names of 1940s musicians, but ONLY as names, not as something he wanted to hear any more.
Random thought: maybe Bing Crosby is lingering a bit because of White Christmas. It gets lots of play annually, and his distinctive tone could lead even kids to wonder, "who is that?"
Your timeline is probably correct because 80 years is slightly longer than the average lifespan of a human, therefore all we need to recognize is a name mentioned by a grandparent. If you play with the Google graphing toy enough you will likely find the same curves for sports stars, presidents, British monarchs, and automobile models (many of us have heard of the Edsel but few have seen one in the last half century).
Eventually everything and everyone is forgotten. This is part of the human condition.
I don't think that's true of classical music composers, artists & writers, but if we limit it to popstars, I agree.
How many composers of Gregorian chants can be named? The artists who made cave paintings are unknown to us. Likewise for the authors of important texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Be patient.
There's more to music than the Gregorian chants, and you can't forget someone who's name you never knew.
But these creators did have names and someone knew them. At some point the chain of passing down the information was broken. Wait long enough and the same will happen to Bach and the Beatles. It is naive to think that just because we now have digital files stored in thousands and millions of different locations that the content will survive for a thousand years. We were lucky the Rosetta Stone survived. We might not be so lucky with MP3 files.
I think that Bach has passed the 80 years test. But, once again, if we confine ourselves to "pop" culture, I doubt if anyone who's popular today will be celebrated in 80 years.
I'm sure you're right. I can't think of anyone who is popular today being worthy of celebration right now.
Your first sentence is a misapprehension. An example is that in regard to a later era, no one knows who wrote the vast majority of British Isles popular songs before the 20th century. And the "Barbara Allen" in one shire would be considerably different from the "Barbara Allen" in another shire. This is why Dylan is correct to defend himself against accusations of plagiarism by pointing out that borrowing, altering, rewriting are intrinsic to his approximate genre. Except the cases of weirdoes like Paganini, Liszt, maybe Wagner, Stephen Foster, no one paid much attention to such things before the 20th century.
I'm 70. There has always been a cult of celebrity during my lifetime, but it's become bizarre and torrential in the last forty years.
I’m not sure I want to jump down this rabbit hole because you are likely more savvy than I am on this topic. But here goes.
Just because nobody knows who first wrote “Barbara Allen” doesn’t mean there wasn’t a creator. The lyrics and music evolved over generations but, largely, the song is recognizable as “Barbara Allen.” Honest musicians acknowledge this on stage and on their recordings. My problem with Dylan — and others — is that he wrote the lyrics to “Masters of War” then glued them to the music of “Nottamun Town” without acknowledging he borrowed or was inspired by the traditional folk song. Any folkie worthy of the name knows that if you are looking for a tune to steal/borrow/be inspired by all you have to do is visit the archive at Cecil Sharp House. There, you can find music that is “new” to young ears.
The whole concept of copyright and “owning” a song is barely 300 years old. But where money is involved there are lawyers, and I suspect Dylan’s lawyers advised him more money was to be made by saying the words and music to “Masters of War” were his than to write on the label “Words by Bob Dylan, music Traditional.”
Last… the cult of celebrity goes back a lot longer than 40 years. Have you not seen the old newsreels of Chaplin being carried on the shoulders of an adoring crowd? Before we had photographic evidence there were written accounts of Dickens being mobbed by fans. Worshipping idols, whether they be religious or secular, is an ancient human affliction.
Fascinating article, and interesting theory.
Anecdotally, Sarah Bernhardt lives on in many Jewish households, where generation after generation, the reaction to a dramatic child is, “you’re a real Sarah Bernhardt.”
Also, as the Beatles are at about the 60 year mark, what do you think will be their fate?
That's funny about Sarah Bernhardt. And comforting, somehow.
The Beatles should last. One of the several great things which made them what they were was their constant self - deprecation. This tends to appeal to the young.
But then, I live in a time in which an overwhelming number of Americans support the credibility of same sex marriage, and seem to be willing to be rather militant about it. The possibility of legal same sex marriage is the sort of thing the more daring comics like Dick Cavett, Woody Allen, and Richard Pryor would have used for fodder fifty years ago. But here we are. And maybe 15% of young Americans are having their transgender interlude.
Again, most people seem to think this isn't all that outre.
I'm convinced that the difference between Boomers like me and GenZers is far more remarkable than the difference between my generation and our grandparents'. I'm probably mistaken in thinking that kids will always be attracted to The Beatles. I can't possibly get a sense of them, of how they see things.
Have W.C. Fields and Groucho ( the other brothers' being annoying or boring ) lasted? I would think they might because they were so damned funny.
Chico and Harpo boring? Have a care, sir! Even Zeppo had his moments!
Ah, well, tastes do differ, but notice that in a Marx Bros. movie, the other brothers, usually along with the starlet and probably her beau, tend to have a couple of seven to ten minute long segments to themselves. Groucho just disappears. Otherwise, if Groucho is in a scene, the brothers are there usually to serve as foils for his one liners.
I think of these non - Groucho segments as being akin to filler music in great musicals: Groucho, as great as he was, could be just TOO MUCH if the audience weren't given respite from him now and then.
My father, born in 1910, used to do a lot of tax accounting in the 1950s and 1960s. He'd make house calls, and he said that all those old guys living as roommates in the Village should have been able to file joint returns and getting married rate. He didn't live to see gay marriage legalized, but he was in favor of it way back when. (Doing people's tax returns gave him a lot of insight to all sorts of people. The IRS didn't care who you were, just that you filed your return and paid your taxes.)
With the culture's having changed as much as it did between 1960 and 2010, civil unions might have been slightly less than antisocial, but marriage was created by God for the union of one man and one woman. If this is regarded as superstitious and I'm regarded as a fantasist, so be it. I'm a Christian. One of Solzhenitsyn's gifts to society was his vouchsaving the watchword, "Live not by lies" to us. "Same sex marriage" was condoned by the Supreme Court a mere seven and a half years ago, and look at all the hell which has broken loose upon the country since then. Really, was transgenderism even a significant issue before that? Preferred pronouns? Did we hear of "deadnaming," a word I like a lot, but which should refer to something noirish. ( I have unsubscribed from at least one newsletter which introduced its staff along with each member's chosen pronouns. ) Barack Obama ran for President in 2008 as an opponent of "same sex marriage."
I set it off with quotation marks because while I don't deny legal reality, I recall one of Hamlet's lines in the graveyard: Here is the pate of a politician, one who might have opposed God.
Let God speak for himself. An omnipotent deity should be able to post a comment here if he wants to. That's what omnipotence is all about.
If you read the Old Testament, you'd know that marriage was between one man and any number of women who could be married as wives or concubines. It wasn't a voluntary act. If your brother died, his wives, were now your wives. After Alexander stomped through the area, marriage was redefined as one man and one woman, but Alexander was not God though good luck convincing Alexander himself of that. There isn't very much about why the change was made in the Bible, but it's rather obvious. Marriage was defined by the local authorities and local mores and God never had much to say about it.
In Roman society, marriage was a public affirmation, and slaves couldn't marry. One of Christianity's big selling points was coming up with a way for slaves to marry. Christian's completely redefined marriage as a sacrament. All it took was a duly authorized priest and the right words. Not only could slaves get married, they could get married in secret. No wonder the Romans tried to wipe out the Christians. Now, Christianity makes a big deal of not letting people marry. It's like the Anglican church getting upset when Charles divorced Diana despite the whole church being created so that someone could get divorced.
An interesting bouillabaisse of comments. God has spoken for himself, and those who believe in his Son are obligated to do what little we can to try to explain to those who don't know him what he has said.
First, Adam and Eve are the pattern. Unfortunately, there was the Fall. I'm aware of the colorful ways of Old Testament patriarchs, and the rather byzantine quality which widowhood could have. ( At the moment, my pastor is teaching Leviticus. The elders have requested only that he be mindful to preach carefully about the unseemliness you find in Leviticus. ) You're right about the patriarchs, and no, the Bible doesn't have much to say about it.
But with the appearance of Jesus, his affirmation of the Old Testament moral law, then the coming of the Holy Spirit, things change dramatically. I doubt marriage is a sacrament, because if that were true, then a sacrament would necessarily be denied permanently or for many years, at least, to a lot of Christians, but you can't read especially the Pauline Epistles without being aware of the preciousness with which God regards it. St Paul sets forth the rigorous standards which a godly marriage must have: among other things, a man is to love his wife as Christ has loved the church, and to be prepared to lay down his life for her. Thank you for making a reference to the then -shocking regard which Christians had for the welfare of society's least powerful. Christianity's view of women exalts them by making them coequal with, if different from, men. Feminism would have us believe the opposite.
There isn't a hint anywhere in the Bible that same sex relations could ever be anything less than iniquitous.
Yeah, and we shouldn't be eating pork or shellfish.
As I said, let God speak for himself.
I don't want to start a food fight with you Bobby. But I do want to bear witness to you about my daughter, who is a trans woman.
It is not an interlude. It is a "for life" thing. I know half a dozen other trans people. Same thing. It's the ... what shall we call it? ... psychological condition which is the least susceptible to changing, according to Martin Seligmanns (he was president of the American Psychological Association) book, "What You Can Change And What You Can't". Being trans came down as the least changeable thing in the book.
This is such an important fact, I felt I should bear witness about it to you.
Jay, I was referring to teenagers, especially to those in early puberty. But I don't doubt that for those adults who are so afflicted, it is very hard to change. I coupled it with same sex marriage because these two phenomena more than anything else mark a world which Baby Boomers like me could never have imagined we'd live into.
I'm a Christian, and yes, I see these as essentially spiritual problems, as I see lust, greed, the ache for power, and the yearning for fame. About sexual identity and attractedness, my sense is that for some people, maybe most, who have deviant ( intended to stun - it's a word which the Devil has been vigilant to see is practically lost to the vocabulary ) interests, change will always be extremely difficult. But then, it was difficult for me to learn to control my temper, not to hate people who had been predatory at my expense, to resign myself to my creaturliness and my lack of standing to challenge God, and several other things.
I think the flaw in your position, though unarticulated, is the implication that people who are beset with a sexual problem, whether transgenderism or the yearning to get something going with a woman who isn't a man's wife, should be indulged. What if the answer is the opposite, spiritual discipline and the denial of the self, such as the denials of my self which I alluded to in the previous paragraph? ( And those denials are imperfect at best, though thanks be to God, by his Spirit, I've made considerable progress. )
This would also apply to everything else which the Bible defines as sin. St Paul gives us a grisly list in Romans 1:18 - 32, but they're set forth in other passages of the Bible, also.
If one believes Christianity is true, then it becomes obvious that the only permissible sexual activity is that between a husband and his wife. Celibacy is never easy, but in the Before times, when far more people were dominated by considerations of truth and honor than is the case now, it was regarded as a necessary state of life for the unmarried.
There is a woman in my church who is in her 30s, and has same sex attraction. She knows that she can't fulfill this, and I'm sure she sees it as Paul saw his thorn in the flesh, as all Christians ought to see any suffering which doesn't yield to prayer, suffering which must be borne for the glory of God.
Such people have existed in every generation. In one of his letters, C.S. Lewis refers to an "elderly, pious homo" of his acquaintance, a man who, whatever his life's story had been before his conversion, was succeeding in his wish to please God by remaining celibate.
One of my favorite songwriters of the Great American Songbook, Hugh Martin, was homosexual. At age 60, he had an undoubted conversion to Christ. He lived into his late nineties, almost all of those years with a Christian couple who had befriended him. Martin never says so in his charming memoir, but the unavoidable conviction a reader gets is that Martin was desperate to escape acting on his homosexuality, and this remarkable couple were devoted to helping him in this. Would a 70 year old need occasionally stern "chaperones?" As a 70 year old, single heterosexual, it doesn't seem unlikely to me.
I realize that most readers will regard all of this as fantastically anachronistic, but if it's true that Christ has been raised from the dead, public opinion ought not to count for much in the way a Christian lives.
Also, though I know better than to assign a political label to you, the Left wants us all to know they "believe in science." They don't, of course, because if they did, they could not ignore the fact than an unborn baby is genetically unique, and not a part of a woman's body which she ought to have sovereignty over. Equally, your child will always be chromosomally male. Is it possible, as there seems good reason to speculate, that something happened to the unborn baby which caused him to feel otherwise?
Well, Bobby, I've been in a seminar room with several adult trans people who's contention was that "God made me this way". Not a spiritual affliction. A condition of existence which was immutable. Some cultures have considered trans people a gift from God (or their gods), because of the knowledge gained from their position.
The mistake you're making is the supposition that the yearning is sovereign, that if a person wants something that desperately, it must be right that he have it fulfilled.
Biological reality dictates otherwise.
I have no idea how old your son is, but the monstrous thing about the transgender imperative is that it afflicts many people in their early and mid - teens. It's never really been thought by thoughtful people that teenagers should always get their way. The truth that the brain hasn't fully matured until one's mid - twenties should be all the foundation the federal government needs to make any attempt to assist a person under 25 in a cosmetic gender change a federal crime.
And what do you say about all the ones who revert before the surgery, who have the sane perception that they're on the verge of a dreadful mistake? I don't know how old your son is, or if he's had the surgery. If he hasn't had the surgery, you need to do everything you can to try persuade him not to go through with it. If you don't, it isn't impossible that in ten years you'll find yourself and his mother are having to be defendants in a lawsuit which he has filed against you for parental negligence.
God didn't make your son transsexual any more than he made Ted Bundy a murderer or me prone to my sins. If you understand that it's a fallen world, you grasp reality. We're all sinners by fallen nature. And the answer to it all is the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Bobby, please don't presume to tell me the "mistake I am making".
I've been in a room with trans people professing faith that seems every bit as devout and genuine as yours. You do not have a superior knowledge of God's Will than anyone else does. We all see but through a glass darkly, after all.
If you want to respond and have the last word, you will, since this is all I'm saying.
That is surprising. Can you think of anything which might explain it? Is it possible that a lot of people do confuse Bernhardt with Sandra Bernhard? But Sandra Bernhard was A Big Thing which didn't quite happen forty years ago, so I'm baffled.
I wonder what the respective scores of George Gershwin and Vincent Youmans are? I'm too lazy to check. I would expect that quite a few people recognize Gershwin's name and hardly anyone Youmans.' This is a shame. Gershwin's work can be like a sugar overload. Really, I can't imagine ever wanting to hear a Gershwin song again, while Youmans is someone I never get tired of.
You have inflicted cruelty upon me. I will be gnawing away at my innards with the stress caused by trying to remember which Cole Porter song that is from.
In 2014, I made a stop at the cemetery in Peru, Indiana. Porter's grave is that lovely midwestern town's chief tourist attraction. It's the J.O. Cole family plot, and old man Cole's tombstone must be seven feet tall. He had ungodly awful taste, too. The stone is colored an unimaginably horrible combination of pink and yellow, as are the eight or ten headstones which lie supplicatingly in front of it.
I quickly scanned the ones to my right. No, then to the left. It was shocking, somehow, when I spotted it.
Bernhardt was considered the paradigm of overly dramatic acting, so people would say things like "Stop being Sarah Bernhardt" or "She was a regular Sarah Bernhardt. It was a synonym for what we'd now call a drama queen.