Way back when, before there were a zillion broadcast networks and renting a videotape was a project, WPIX in New York used to run movies a few nights a week. Sixties and seventies stuff--not really "classic" movies, but fun, popular stuff you wouldn't otherwise see regularly. The kind of stuff TBS (or is it TNT?) runs now, but from a couple decades earlier.
Anyway, I always felt a little frisson when I saw the commercials for upcoming films: Whoever did the editing at PIX always chose a fun, funky song as background music. The two I remember: the Doobie Brothers' It Keeps You Running for Marathon Man (slo-mo clip of Dustin Hoffman hauling ass down the street) and (sigh) Becker and Fagen's Royal Scam for The Birds. I think I called everyone I knew when I saw that one.
Why was it a big deal? The networks were like mom and dad, or the phone company. You didn't expect them to know about secret teenage things, even stuff as fleetingly hip (and corporate, as I'm sure somebody's going to argue in the comments) as the Doobie Brothers or Steely Dan. It would be like my father sitting down and saying, "Ya know, Robert, VALIS really blew my mind."
OK, fast-forward a couple of decades. The other night I saw a commercial for some new doctor show with some techno-poppo music in the background. It took me a second to place it: a record I had just bought, a two-year-old record that I missed, mind you, that had been talked up all over the place as the cynosure of postmodern hipness.
And then I realized something, a feeling that had been building ever since I heard Pink Moon in a goddamn car commercial: Nothing is really hip anymore, in the sense of being removed from the broad mainstream culture. This may be because the culture has moved; or because hipsters are steering it; or because what used to be hip has become more palatable to the mainstream.
It's a small thing, what with the End Times being upon us and all, but I'm not sure what to think about it. Anybody got any interesting ideas?
@ 10:35:00 PM,
1 Comments:
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At 7:09 AM,
Rob L. said...
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Ronald Reagan reversed the rules regarding late night TV advertising & Ted Turner owns all those old movies & won't let anyone show them. It's their fault that there are no Late, Late Movies on TV anymore. To be fairm TCM is a good cable channel, however.
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