I dunno, ‘the semiotics of Sinatra’ still sounds rather silly to me.
For one thing, Sinatra was a himself a performer, he didn’t write his songs. Having said that, maybe the author meant “Sinatra(R)” {i.e. the brand name}, which reasonably could be analyzed like any other commodity which is mass marketed. That is, his tropes and figures were consciously chosen by a manager and himself to comport with the Sinatra brand.
The whole thing doesn’t work for poets (like Dylan) or composers (like Zappa); art should not be (IMO) analyzed as if it were the same thing as means of social control or social intercourse. Unless we are talking about commercial or totalitarian (i.e. “bad”) art. Of course some people are just in it for the money, like Alice Cooper. Or Justin Bieber. Like I said, ‘bad art’.
Alice Cooper was just in it for the money? Really? Seperating rock-‘n’-role and the counterculture from Brooks, Sinatra, and the rest what about this? Rock is essentially a revival of the ancient Dionysiac, Bacchic ritual. It has a relationship to the alpha rhythms of the brain. Some think it was cooked up by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in England, the USA’s Stanford Research Institute, and the Club of Rome. All of which are connected to political, financial, and intellectual aristocracy we call the 1%. The Beatles, the Grateful Dead and others came under their influence. Knowingly or unknowingly. Dylan was hip to the game and created a very different sound in protest.
Wait, I thought Dylan pissed off his audience of folky-types BECAUSE he turned on the amps and did rock-n-roll.
That and the seminal Elvis, was definitely NOT what Tavistock would have dreamed up. EVIL is not a good song for the establishment:
“I was born standing up,
and talkin’ back,
don’t take no kind of orders from no kinda man…
cuz I’m evil… just as evil as I can be…”
The other thing that happened was that those who got PhD’s in the 60’s went out and filled up all the tenured and tenure track jobs in academia, so by the end of the 70’s there were only a few jobs left for college teachers in humanities. A humanities graduate in search of truth and beauty was looking at a dead end.
Only in the last ten years has all that dead wood started to retire and die off to leave some vacancies. But now cutbacks are decimating college faculties and the only jobs are part time adjunct positions paying $1,500-$3,000 per course. This is how those humanity loving seekers are surviving while being ignored, mocked and derided by the pious snobs who managed to get jobs back when it was easy.
I dunno, ‘the semiotics of Sinatra’ still sounds rather silly to me.
For one thing, Sinatra was a himself a performer, he didn’t write his songs. Having said that, maybe the author meant “Sinatra(R)” {i.e. the brand name}, which reasonably could be analyzed like any other commodity which is mass marketed. That is, his tropes and figures were consciously chosen by a manager and himself to comport with the Sinatra brand.
The whole thing doesn’t work for poets (like Dylan) or composers (like Zappa); art should not be (IMO) analyzed as if it were the same thing as means of social control or social intercourse. Unless we are talking about commercial or totalitarian (i.e. “bad”) art. Of course some people are just in it for the money, like Alice Cooper. Or Justin Bieber. Like I said, ‘bad art’.
Alice Cooper was just in it for the money? Really? Seperating rock-‘n’-role and the counterculture from Brooks, Sinatra, and the rest what about this? Rock is essentially a revival of the ancient Dionysiac, Bacchic ritual. It has a relationship to the alpha rhythms of the brain. Some think it was cooked up by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in England, the USA’s Stanford Research Institute, and the Club of Rome. All of which are connected to political, financial, and intellectual aristocracy we call the 1%. The Beatles, the Grateful Dead and others came under their influence. Knowingly or unknowingly. Dylan was hip to the game and created a very different sound in protest.
Wait, I thought Dylan pissed off his audience of folky-types BECAUSE he turned on the amps and did rock-n-roll.
That and the seminal Elvis, was definitely NOT what Tavistock would have dreamed up. EVIL is not a good song for the establishment:
“I was born standing up,
and talkin’ back,
don’t take no kind of orders from no kinda man…
cuz I’m evil… just as evil as I can be…”
The other thing that happened was that those who got PhD’s in the 60’s went out and filled up all the tenured and tenure track jobs in academia, so by the end of the 70’s there were only a few jobs left for college teachers in humanities. A humanities graduate in search of truth and beauty was looking at a dead end.
Only in the last ten years has all that dead wood started to retire and die off to leave some vacancies. But now cutbacks are decimating college faculties and the only jobs are part time adjunct positions paying $1,500-$3,000 per course. This is how those humanity loving seekers are surviving while being ignored, mocked and derided by the pious snobs who managed to get jobs back when it was easy.
Take a look at this site: http://adjunct.chronicle.com/category/blog/