The website of Jonathan Bogart, writer and cartoonist.
Scene Three: Reach Up To Mars
Time shifts again; and we are in the unenviable position of attempting to document a sea change without having really taken stock of the sea first.
Scene Two: Oh Well Oh Well
Spike Jones & His City Slickers “Chloe”
(Neil Moret, Gus Kahn)
RCA 20-1654 • 1945
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In the ranking of aesthetic genres in which art music is held far above pop, the kind of comic song usually called “novelty” is seen as the lowest form of pop, forgettable bullshit which doesn’t even aspire to the classicism, danceability, or emotional resonance which pop at its best routinely evokes.
Act III: Everything But The Jerks
Scene One: Going East, Mister?
Very early on in these transmissions I promised (or warned) that I would be talking a lot about the relationship of Art, Pop, and Vernacular music in the recordings of the 1940s.
Scene Six: A Great NotionIt’s tempting to write the history of the folk music revival in America as a heroic narrative, in which clear-eyed, open-hearted men such as John and Alan Lomax, Moses Asch, and Harry Smith, dreaming of a world in which all of God’s children black men and white men Jews and Gentiles Protestants and Catholics would be able to join hands &c., bestrode the landscape with their lightweight alunimum disc recorders and fellow-traveler literature, giving to the huddled American underclasses yearning to be free a voice and a name, reaching past the shallow, cloying frippery of popular music into the real, honest American soil, where white laborers sing the blues and black preachers proclaim the brotherhood of man.Continue reading the essay here. >>
Scene Five: Good-Natured Clownin’
But first, a word about the blues.