[To kick off the
summer of 2016, a series AmericanStudying some famous summer texts and
contexts. Add your responses to these posts or other SummerStudying nominations
for a crowd-sourced post that’ll go down like a glass of iced lemonade!]
On what a summer
classic reveals about the voices of youth.
I listened to a
lot of early rock and roll growing up (something about having a couple baby
boomers for parents during the era that first defined the concept of
“classic rock” and produced countless “Best of the
1950s” type collections), and few songs stood out to me more than Eddie
Cochran’s “Summertime
Blues” (1958). I don’t know that any single song better expresses the clash
of youthful dreams and adult realities on which so much of rock and roll and popular
music more generally have been built, and I definitely believe that Cochran and
his co-writer (and manager) Jerry Capeheart
hit upon the perfect way to literally give voice to those dueling perspectives:
in the repeated device through which the principal speaker’s teenage desires
are responded to and shot down by the deep voices of authority figures, from
his boss to his father to his senator. (For my favorite performance of those conversational
exchanges, see Bruce and
Clarence, natch.)
Coincidentally,
Cochran himself died very
young, at the age of 21, in an April 1960 car accident while on tour in
England. Cochran’s death came just over a year after the
tragic plane crash that took the lives of three other prominent young rock
and rollers, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. There’s obviously
no direct relationship between these two accidents, nor would I argue that
these artists’ youthful deaths were the cause of their popularity (all four
were already popular prior to the accidents). But on the other hand, I think
there’s something iconic, mythic even, about rock and rollers dying young—or about,
more exactly, our
narratives and images of such figures—and I believe it’d be difficult to
separate those myths from the idealistic and anti-authoritarian attitudes
captured in Cochran’s biggest hit. That is, it feels throughout “Summertime
Blues” as if the speaker’s youthful enthusiasm is consistently being destroyed
by those cold adult responses—and melodramatic as it might sound, the loss of
childhood dreams can certainly be allegorized through the deaths of the kinds
of pop icons who so often symbolize youth.
Yet of course
most young people continue to live in, and thus impact, the world far after
their youthful dreams have ended (“Life goes on long after the thrill of living
is gone,” to quote another
youthful anthem), and in a subtle, unexpected way Cochran’s song reflects
that human and historical reality as well. When Cochran’s speaker tries to take
his problem to more official authorities, he is rejected by his senator for a
political reason: “I’d like to help you, son, but you’re too young to vote” is
the reply. In 1958, when “Summertime Blues” was released, the national legal
voting age was 21, and so the 20 year old Cochran could not vote; but over the
next decade a potent
social and legal movement to lower the voting age would emerge, in conjunction
with the decade’s many other youth and activist movements, and in 1971
Congress passed and the states ratified the
26th Amendment, which did indeed lower the eligible age for
voting to 18. Being able to vote certainly doesn’t eliminate all the other
problems of teenage life and its conflicts with adult authority—but it does remind
us that neither the gap nor the border between youth and adulthood are quite as
fixed or as absolute as our myths might suggest.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Other summer texts or contexts you’d highlight?
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