Thursday, October 1, 2009

Light of my life, fire of my loins

As promised, a report on the opinion writing/blogging class' response to Lester Bangs' Humbert-Humbert-on-meth-and-Everclear (banned book Lolita being the source of today's title) devotional to Anne Murray

1) The question, to respond to one comment, was not whether students in 2009 would know who Linda Lovelace was (the question never arose, so to speak) but whether they would know who Anne Murray was/is. For those who had never seen her infomercial or who didn't have parents for whom "Danny's Song" or "Snowbird" was required listening every fracking day, I was able to cross the great divide with the equation Anne Murray:1973 :: Celine Dion:2009. (I should add that I was immediately corrected by one student, who informed us all that Celine Dion was far more "sluttastic" than Anne Murray...a not insignificant point for the review.) (And I do intend to use the word "sluttastic" again.)

2) And, to respond to another comment, the words beginning the discussion were: "Is this a joke?" I'm not sure we ever answered the question to the asker's satisfaction, but the conversation was spirited. As I expected, opinions diverged wildly from those morbidly offended to those who thought it absolutely rocked, and from those who found it a sarcastic joke to those who thought that he reallio trulio liked the album. (Which he did.) (And, in the backatcha category, Murray reportedly loved the review.) 

3) The best comment, though, was from one woman who was less than enchanted with the review: "This couldn't get printed today!" (Hello, Banned Books Week!) And she was right, in a way that went beyond her initial intent. We had spent the previous half-hour looking at reviews from USA TodayRolling Stone, Blender and Spin, the longest of which was 240 words and the most stylistically daring of which didn't use lyrics. We also looked at an online review of M. Ward's latest CD that demonstrated fully the great weakness of online reviews: the lack of an editor. Just in the decade in which I've offered this course, the decline in the quantitative measure of reviews, to say nothing of the qualitative measure, has been like watching the print equivalent of The Biggest Loser. So to have Lester Bangs roll in from 35 years ago, coked to the gills and ready to shoot his wad, figuratively and literally, in a 900-word piece that makes Anne Murray ferchristssake an aural porn goddess was something far more jarring than just his language would suggest. 

4) We followed that review, which was published in Creem in 1973, with a Bangs review of Brian Eno's Before and After Science from the 1978 Village Voice. The response to this Bangs piece was pretty much meh -- an interesting and enlightening comment on the way in which the audience shapes the review and the power of the reviewer. You have to work a lot harder to convince an audience of 19-year-old Pete Townshend wannabes that Anne Murray is the real deal than you do to sell an audience of downtown hipster doofuses on Eno. That might be something those of us turning to the Interwebs as a medium should think about more carefully.  

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