"Forever Young" and the politics of meaning
It’s funny how when you are writing a thesis, everyone seems to get involved. A friend of mine emailed me with this observation:
i was watching rage this morning and there were two versions of Forever Young in the top 40, one a europop version with a cartoon video and the youthgroup version with the video of teenagers in the eighties rollerskating. The cartoon video seemed to a superficial playful storyline with no specific meaning, which i suppose went along with the style of the music, giving a meaning to the song of ‘Here’s a lark, let’s stay young forever,’ while the youthgroup video has some pathos as the young people in the video would now be middle aged, giving a completely different meaning to the song, mourning the fact that we all grow old.
But there would be a lot of cultures who would miss the point of the video as they would not necessarily realise that this is newsreel from the early eighties. So obviously the cultural meaning of a song can altered purely through the song’s video.
Quite right. But there is something else going on here too: Simon Frith made the point a long time ago that rock music seemed to “matter” more than pop. Rock critics believed that rock’s political project elevated it above those genres that were merely entertainment. As left-liberal politics lost ground to neo-liberal/neo-conservative politics, so rock’s project was dismissed by the academy as false-consciousness that failed to notice its own implication within captialist industry, or worse, that it cynically manipulated its fans to hide its own compliance.
The academy doesn’t seem to have moved far beyond this fairly banal characterisation, but as my friend points out, the texts are embedded within complex cultural structures that are still capable of producing very real effects. That’s because like all cultural productions, what matters more than the author’s intention, or the means of production, are the structures of meaning that influence the reader’s understanding, and enable us to internalise and personalise the potential meanings of the text. So if the pathos of the Youthgroup version said something to my friend (he’s getting old, like me), its because the complex doubling of the text (positive lyrics, subverted by a contradictory clip) affords greater semiotic scope for interpretation.
So OK, the pop/rock distinction that privileged rock as politically progressive is well and truly debunked, but it is undeniable that some songs do “matter” more than others, and that sometimes, different versions can matter more than others too.
Your Comments
Glen writes:
hey i’ve been thinking about this particular refrain of ‘forever young’ and what it meant then compared to now. I see it almost everytime i go to the gym!!!!
one of the opening lyrics is:
heaven can wait we’re only watching the sky
hoping for the best but expecting the worst
are you gonna drop the bomb or not
let us die young or let us live forever
we still live in the shadow of the ‘bomb’, in the sense that nuclear weapons still exist, but it isn’t the utter dread of the cold war.
so what happens to this permanent fatalistic anxiety of ‘hoping for the best but expecting the worst’ when the sword hanging over one’s head is not an ELE? (to use a Deep Impact-Armageddonism)
i would lay me bets on the precarity of post-’welfare state’ insecurity. yep. I may be biased though.
Posted: 30 06 2006 - 00:08 | Permanent link to this comment
Lisa writes:
No, not biased. I think you’re absolutely right, Glen. I’ve been reading Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘Liquid Modernity’ lately and he writes extensively of the insecurity and anxiety that comes from living in a constantly changing society where risk and responsibility are privatised at an individual level.
The lyrics to ‘Forever Young’ that you quote, combined with the clip, do project a certain nostalgia for a time when the primary threat was external and needed to be dealt with by collective public action rather than individual effort.
I wonder to what extent the whole current revival of rock wannabe groups is part of the nostalic desire for a time when life generally was more secure? The height of rock (in my biased opinion at least) was primarily from the 1960s through the 70s, though in the 80s it often seemed to take on a more political edge, in the guise of groups like Midnight Oil, or occasional songs like Peter Gabrielle’s ‘Biko’ or Goanna’s ‘Solid Rock’. But having lived through the 80s, we still believed back then that we had some possibility of control over our world and really could change things, even nuclear proliferation, frightening though it was.
Is the ‘revival’ of rock groups, and the tendency of commercial radio only to play ‘classic hits’ part of this longing for security? Do we want our music to be familiar because everything else around us is constantly new and changing?
Posted: 12 07 2006 - 12:45 | Permanent link to this comment
John Gunders writes:
Lisa and I have been talking about this, and we noticed another thing on Rage this weekend: the similarity between the line, “Do you want to live forever?” and the drill-sergeant’s battle-cry from Starship Troopers: “Come on you apes. You want to live forever?”
Contra my friend’s original comments that this is “mourning the fact that we all grow old”, it can be read as mourning the fact that we all die: like the RSL Ode says, “They shall not grow old”.
So I’ll probably come down on the side of Glen’s reading…
Posted: 17 07 2006 - 09:25 | Permanent link to this comment
Nick Caldwell writes:
Testing – please ignore!
Posted: 20 07 2006 - 08:41 | Permanent link to this comment
Nick Caldwell writes:
testing again. something screwy is up.
Posted: 20 07 2006 - 09:48 | Permanent link to this comment
Nick Caldwell writes:
Posting for Laurie (due to technical problems)
Hey guys, I just waded through old emails and rediscovered Nick’s invite to have a look at this blog. My bad for not having done so many, many months ago.
Posted: 20 07 2006 - 10:04 | Permanent link to this comment
Nick Caldwell writes:
Laurie’s gone and written a comment that Textpattern can’t publish. How Freudian. Rest assured he had more of interest to say.
Posted: 20 07 2006 - 10:16 | Permanent link to this comment
John Gunders writes:
I will not stand for this censorship! Maybe Laurie should just wait for the return of the repressed?
(Hi Laurie)
Posted: 20 07 2006 - 13:35 | Permanent link to this comment
Catherine Howell writes:
Thinking about John’s post, and Lisa’s comment: yeah, I guess one way to read nostalgia in pop is as modern anxiety, channelled / neutralised into a commodity. Just as fashion gets nostalgic, sweet and “safe” during times of political / economic insecurity. Eg. the most irritating and (to me) cynical pop song of the UK summer was Sandi Thom’s “I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker”:
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair /
In 77 and 69 revolution was in the air /
I was born too late and to a world that doesn’t care /
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair…”
On a related note, it’s interesting to me how often pop nostalgia is mixed with anxiety around gender. That’s one reason why I always liked Cyndi Lauper’s subversive take on 50s music and style.
John – “some songs do matter more than others” – yes but to whom…? Maybe I haven’t understood what you mean by “rock’s project” (I thought that was to meet chicks – oh, and sticking it to The Man – or is that what you meant? anyway, roll over Kim Gordon ;-).
OK just for fun… “Friday On My Mind” (1966): working man’s brutally honest critique of the daily grind, or cynical depiction of men in thrall to their (temporary) release from the capitalist clock? Or just a song about looking foreward to seeing your gal after work? Hey it’s all of ‘em – agitpop is boring so we wanna have our cake and eat it too. Since it’s a Friday and all.
Posted: 22 07 2006 - 02:13 | Permanent link to this comment
Laurie Johnson writes:
Testing
Posted: 25 07 2006 - 15:28 | Permanent link to this comment
Laurie Johnson writes:
Well, looks like it worked this time. How bizarre! Anyway, I wanted to say a few words last time but it seems my thoughts may already be out of step with where the discussion has gone since I first tried to jump in (least of all because the discussion included your thoughts about my failure to post to the site!) ... alas, will see if I can get my thoughts back on track in the next post.
Posted: 25 07 2006 - 15:30 | Permanent link to this comment
John Gunders writes:
Hey Laurie, good to hear from you.
Don’t worry about the discussion moving on, because it can always move back! I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts…
Posted: 25 07 2006 - 19:49 | Permanent link to this comment
Laurie Johnson writes:
Thanks John. This is a really interesting discussion that touches on a number of issues that strike me as something of a dilemma for Cultural Studies, particularly CS which operates in finely tuned modes of analysis but without any fully developed conception about what kind of monster it understands culture to be writ large. I particularly like the song, although I am unfamiliar with the alternative version of the clip. My thoughts are that one of the reasons I like the song AND the clip is caught up in fact with this very idea of familiarity. [okay I am testing as I go because some parts of this post are being rejected and others accepted]
Posted: 26 07 2006 - 09:16 | Permanent link to this comment
Laurie Johnson writes:
[message contd] The sound is reminiscent not only of a simpler time by virtue of the fact that the melody is very simple, the vocals a bit ill-disciplined and the effect of echoes in the soundtrack creating a sense of an internal distance in the track, but I think it actually carries resonances of songs that were popular when I was that age and skateboards were abundant (which they are again in some pockets of the urban sprawl). The song and clip speak to that level of the individually familiar for a couple of generations worth of listeners.
Posted: 26 07 2006 - 09:22 | Permanent link to this comment
Laurie Johnson writes:
[message contd] As a critic (no, let’s be honest, as a cynic), I would hate to see the other clip and suspect that if I did see it I would be unable to listen to the tune in quite the same way again, since sound and image are so nicely fused in my own personal responsiveness to the tune and the clip I know. Yet the cultural theorist in me wants to recognise the licence enjoyed by artists, editors, distributors, etc. to make of a product what they will, to maximise its potential circulation and, yes, to maximise the profit margin. Am I able to enjoin my enjoyment of one version of the piece to my recognition of the larger circuitries through which it operates? Not yet. But one day, one day …
Posted: 26 07 2006 - 09:22 | Permanent link to this comment
Laurie Johnson writes:
Sorry about the broken message folks, I tried to submit a longer version of that but again got a rejection. Through trial and error, I managed to locate the problem: one phrase, which I cannot repeat here, even by association it seems (I have already had this post rejected twice in different versions)
Posted: 26 07 2006 - 09:30 | Permanent link to this comment
John Gunders writes:
Hey Laurie. This sounds like the old problem of whether you can enjoy a song (text, film, whatever) even though you know it is “inauthentic” because of its complicity with capitalism. While I don’t necessarily buy the old Fiske (and Hartley) line about the empowered consumer who resists capitalism by shopping (OK, a parody, but it’s not far from that), there are many forms of resistance other than a Certeauean notion of tactical opposition, and that can include (literally) buying into the structures of power and capital. For instance: I have been known to pay money for U2 albums (don’t tell Nick).
What I “do” with a cultural text (buy it; listen to it; rip it; share it with friends; etc) has more to do with the flux of meaning that accretes around the text in relation to my own experience and belief systems, than it does with the meanings that the producer tries to invest in the text, or the implications of its means of production.
Or does that just mean I’m selling out? Probably. But I think it also means that I now realise I have the cultural competence to make of texts what I will, and to resist the signification that tries to force its meaning out of my control.
Posted: 3 08 2006 - 19:43 | Permanent link to this comment
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