It's not so much that they don't say anything entirely new, it's that they don't take into account anything that's been said since 1971. Over the years, there's been a fair bit of criticism of sixties blues rock / heavy blues from all sorts of perspectives and a lot of questioning of how significant the psychedelic movement actually was if you weren't there and on drugs at the time, and I think the programme would have been a whole lot more interesting and thought provoking (for people who know almost nothing about the music as well as for people who can recite the words to The White Room backwards) if it had at least acknowledged that this sort of discussion existed rather than just trotting out all the usual self congratulation unadulterated.Is there even anything new to say in regards to the basic rock canon anymore? What could they instead focus on in these retrospectives... keeping in mind that it can't get too obscure for the average viewer? (I don't have an answer myself, as I couldn't be less interested in Hendrix or Clapton anyway, no matter what new light they possibly shed on them.)
I wish they had let us actually watch and hear more of Hendrix rather than the 5 or max 10 second clips they kept showing. A big problem with the attention-deficit monkies who seem to populate TV editing suits these days is they can't leave a piece of archive film running for more than a few seconds with out cutting to something else or putting some twat on voiceover.
Michael Harrington described the counterculture in 1972 as a massification of the bohemia in which he had spent his youth, an assumption of the values of Greenwich Village by the decidedly nonrevolutionary middle class. "I wonder if the mass counterculture may not be a reflection of the very hyped and video-taped world it professes to despise," he wrote.
Bohemia could not survive the passing of its polar opposite and precondition, middle-class morality. Free love and all-night drinking and art for art's sake were consequences of a single stern imperative: thou shalt not be bourgeois. But once the bourgeoisie itself became decadent—once businessmen started hanging nonobjective art in the boardroom—Bohemia was deprived of the stifling atmosphere without which it could not breathe.
[...]
In a famously cynical essay that appeared in Ramparts in 1967, Warren Hinckle pointed out that, for all the rhetoric of alienation, the inhabitants of the Haight-Ashbury were "brand name conscious" and "frantic consumers."
In this commercial sense, the hippies have not only accepted assimilation . . . , they have swallowed it whole. The hippie culture is in many ways a prototype of the most ephemeral aspects of the larger American society; if the people looking in from the suburbs want change, clothes, fun, and some lightheadedness from the new gypsies, the hippies are delivering—and some of them are becoming rich hippies because of it.
Oh my life. If anyone feels that they don't have enough anger in their lives, I'd strongly advise them to watch this programme.
the bbc 4 series on californian folk and country rock and singer songwriters from the late 60's to the 70s is much more successful, and astonishingly all the interviewiees, david crosby, mike davis the sociologist, david geffen, the eagles etc, all seem to be knowledgable, honest and cool people, i particulary loathe those kinda confessional singer songwriters that emerged after joni michell though, horrible stuff.
I guess if you hone into something and get to record it well you can create something worthwhile, david crosby seemed to be the dude back then, the best weed, a hot tub full of ladies, outspoken views.
ie- episode 2 conflated the Velvet Underground, psychedelia, glam, and prog- in a way which made absolutely no sense
so the bbc doesen't do music the way you would like it to. what of the top notch political documentaries, nature programmes, news programmes, websites and so on, would you retire your support for these things too? sometimes i think the bbc is wasted on britons.Further confirming to my mind why the BBC deserve absolutely no support whatsoever anymore.
so the bbc doesen't do music the way you would like it to. what of the top notch political documentaries, nature programmes, news programmes, websites and so on, would you retire your support for these things too? sometimes i think the bbc is wasted on britons.
I was a lot less annoyed by the second one than the first one
then again it could not. show me something like bbc jam, which was shut down on free market grounds. find something like 1xtra, for all its faults, nothing there either. no monetary incentive, perhaps?large swathes of output could substantially be met by the free market as effectively