generations

Young People Scream

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Today’s post will combine a few things: there will be a link to a video of a new odd cover version of a song “Young People Scream,” written by someone who’s not Bob Dylan, and I’ll continue the behind-the-scenes story of how I’m making new musical pieces, but first I’ll explain why posts and interactivity from me has been low since the last part of June.

I’ve been sick for over a week with some kind of respiratory bug, and for a big chunk in the middle of it I was about as sick as I recall being for decades. At the worst, I was feverish and my stamina was very low — walking to the bathroom was a chore. I slept off on through a few days, and when awake I was foggy, unable to deal with any complexity.* Things have been improving over the past couple of days, though I still have a cough and tire easily. My wife preceded me with the same crud, and she’s still got her cough, so I’ll likely be dealing with that for a while yet.

I’ve been exploring some changes in how I record with my long-time friend, poet, songwriter, keyboard player, and alternative Parlando vocalist Dave Moore. A combination of things is suggesting those changes, part of which is that Dave’s playing skill-set has become constrained with age’s infirmities. I wrote last time that MIDI will give us new options to ground the pieces’ chordal cadences within modern computer recording software. Will this work, or do I even know exactly how I’m predicting it will work? Don’t know yet. I’m getting some more cabling next week that I’m thinking will offer some additional audio routing in my studio space for Dave, but today’s cover song recorded in June is an example of a way MIDI was used to shape a recording.

Super-quick intro: MIDI is a way to record things, but it doesn’t record audio. Typically, it records what actions happen when someone plays a controller — in Dave’s case, a piano-style keyboard. If Dave presses the C, E, and G keys on that keyboard, MIDI records when he pressed each of them, how hard he struck them, and how long they were depressed. The sound of that C Major chord we hear when those notes are playing together is created as a separate step. As he plays, a sound is heard, just as if he was playing an organ or conventional electric piano, but this sound is generated by software with only a small fraction of a second delay. An entirely conceptual composer could even play MIDI with no sound, but aside from Conlon Nancarrow humans naturally want to hear sounds when they use the controller keyboard.

As Dave played today’s piece live with me a few weeks ago, he heard a combo organ sound as he played and sang his part. There was a drum loop going to give us a time reference, and I played the electric guitar part you will eventually hear live with Dave and the placeholder drums.

Afterward I listened analytically to what had been played live. His without-a-net, one-pass vocal worked — and as I’ll talk about in the next segment, I discovered that I loved the song he chose to sing. My guitar part was meh, not good enough to feature, but not totally dire. That organ part? It had a few stumbles, but the greater problem was that the vocal had a nice laid-back groove, but the organ’s characteristic timing, attack, and timbre didn’t mesh with that feel. How to fix?

I extracted the MIDI from what Dave played, stripping things back to the chordal structure divorced from the sound. I used that chordal structure laid bare to guide an upright bass part, and using acoustic drum sample patterns I created a Jazzy-sounding drum set track. Having the drums, bass, and guitar grooving together, I used the program that extracted Dave’s chords for me to play that chord information derived from the live performance with a grand piano sound instead of the small combo organ Dave was hearing as he played them live.**

The resulting piece is here in this video.

.

Now what about the song that all this work was done to present? I suspect “Young People Scream” speaks to something some young people are feeling. Hell, I’m not young people, and I’m feeling this! Given that it was first released in 1982 by a still in his Twenties singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock, there’s a lot of ambiguity and context shifting when we experience the same song today — probably was so from the beginning too, because Robyn Hitchcock has a long career that I’ve admired of writing songs that are attractively elusive. He may do this using surrealism’s tactic, the remixing normal to seem strange, but in this one I sense asides to irony and satire.

Hitchcock’s own version on his Groovy Decay album was performed with a rock-a-billy arrangement. This would have been then a 30-year-old musical style, but one that had been revived by young musicians spinning off from the Punk and New Wave musical rebellion — and so, “Rock This Town” by the Stray Cats was a 1982 hit. Conscious or not, I suspect a certain slyness on Hitchcock’s observation and choice there: young people in 1982 using their parents’ youthful rebellion’s mode — a mode they’d largely abandoned with embarrassment as those thirty-something Boomers moved on to the modern Rock and pop sounds or the “Greatest Hits of the Sixties, Seventies, and the Eighties.” As the first verse has it, tweaking those younger rock revivalists by telling them “It all been done before” could get a “don’t care” reply.

Despite the upright bass in this current LYL Band version, it’s not hot-tempo rock-a-billy. Instead, I wanted to let the tension-releasing satiric vitriol delivered with a dry “just the facts” attitude by the singer come through. Even if he’s not literally screaming, I think the singer, to a degree of undercurrent, has to appear driven around the bend with their disgust at the older generation — and while I don’t know the author’s intent, I think Hitchcock’s words convey that indignation. The video ends with the on-screen statement it does because I’m “older people” and I’m disgusted, though my throat is still too sore to scream aloud today.

*It was difficult to read when awake, though I had some intense fever dreams while sleeping for entertainment. I did catch up on some episodes of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, which are outstandingly detailed and interwoven. If you like the surprising stories and unlikely connections I do here, and would like that sort of thing done at greater length and intelligent confidence within the world of Rock and popular music, you will like this too.

**The program I used for this, Toontrack’s EZKeys, does a pretty good job of automatic transcription. I’ve also used the Capo transcription app for this, but I think Toontrack’s chord detection may use some musical context information that Capo doesn’t in order to get closer to a useful chord sequence right off. Something that EZKeys clearly does: it allows one to apply music grooves or feels to the chord cadence it extracts, which saves considerable time. Those with good harmonic ears could of course do this by hand (with one’s ear? Musicians, we poets will dock you for mixed metaphor!)

I Pity the Poor Immigrant

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It occurred to me: should I try to sing a version of Bob Dylan’s “I Pity the Poor Immigrant?”  Afterall, I, without a plan, seem to be performing songs from Dylan’s 1967 LP John Wesley Harding  recently, and that song is one of the more noted ones from the album. And immigrants, and immigration, are currently a preoccupation of my country’s inept and callous administration.

Dylan might have been writing of his own family’s immigrant history in this song — being second-generation from his grandparents emigration from the Russian Empire and Turkey. Furthermore, he grew up in the iron-ore mining area of Minnesota, a place full of folks with wide-ranging immigrant backgrounds. Given Dylan’s, and folk-song’s in general concern for the underdog, one might expect this to be a song of empathy for these close-in immigrants.

Yet when Dylan sang his song in 1967, still a young man,* there’s a duality in its presentation. The immigrants within it are portrayed then as poor not only in wealth, but also in spirit. For all of Dylan’s genius, the voice that sings this song largely speaks about how the immigrants, who’d be the elders of his town and family, are stunted in their outlook. Dylan may be a genius, but this could be the disappointed vision of a young person who sees the faults and failures there. That’s what many young people, even those who aren’t geniuses, do, and it’s an important task.

His singing on this 1967 version is calm, not accusatory — at moments even sounding concerned as he decries the immigrants fallen state. If the harmonicas play the skeleton keys to the song’s interior, the passionate timbre of his playing on that instrument in the song may well be saying he feels sorrowful about the situation. The performance doesn’t lay any blame on poverty, exploitation, or the hard road of feeling the need to leave one’s homeland to find succor with strangers. Dylan, whatever he’s expressing here, likely knows these factors. Perhaps he assumes we do too.

I think Dylan’s aim was to confound the expected here — to write a great song instead of a good one, some mere piece of civic songcraft.

I’m not a young man, and I would have to go back to relatives I never knew, and who therefore can’t be blamed for imperfect mentorship or spiritual poverty. And I know from my life, and in my time, what immigrants contribute to my country. Some of course are noticeable success stories, but I think too of the many who do the hardest and least-rewarded work of the nation. I’m hesitant to pick a bone with the quality of their spiritual insight while they are trudging through unglamourous work — but even more so in 2025 when they also get slammed by disreputable politicians as criminals, scofflaws, swindlers, and parasites. I’m sure there are some immigrants who are those things, but I’m also quite sure that those slathering on those broad charges include in themselves a good measure of those failings — and are so eagerly pointing at immigrants to divert focus on that.

So, this is how I came to create this new performance of Dylan’s song, one for our time and situation. I changed only a few words, but by phrasing and refocusing my aim from Dylan’s original performance, I tried to illuminate those opposing scapegoating forces to the immigrant’s lot.** I may not even have made a (downgraded) good song of it, but I got some things off my chest I felt I had to say.

I can’t identify all the sources for the pictures used here. Alas, my stock photo library was bereft of any suitable pictures.

.

.

*When he wrote this, Dylan had only young children, ones not yet able to judge him and his generation’s failings. Has an older Dylan, now a grandfather, revisited this song? AFAIK, no. Expert Dylanologists may have more info, but Wikipedia says it was last performed during the latter legs of the Rolling Thunder tour many decades ago, and then as a bizarre rollicking up-tempo jaunt.

As I said recently when a reader/listener pointed out that I may have completely misread Blake’s “Holy Thursday,” my theories about what was behind Dylan’s creation of this song are in no way meant to be definitive. They are just what I hear in it, and feel free to think my new recasting of the song is a sacrilege. I’ll plead that one part of Dylan’s genius is that he sees fit to approach his own work in highly different ways, and I’m just doing what I learned from the master. You should feel something to sing a song, and this is what I felt. Feel different? Sing the song yourself.

**Even fewer words in my plan than you’ll hear in the video, as some other different words slipped in by accident while singing. Here’s a link to the original lyric. Changing the song’s concluding couplet is the only indictable premeditated felony, and the video underlines my approach to make the sins that Dylan’s 1967 performance directed at only the immigrants as more of a dialectic. An accidental, unintended, change that I regret in this version: “Shatter like a  glass” is inferior to the original “Shatter like the  glass,” and looses the possible intra-album connection with the glass that has fingers pressed up against it in “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.”

Segregated Neighborhoods in Time, Part Three

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

We left off last time in my Black History Month series this year, with a crumbling scrapbook filled with mid-20th century things someone had gathered. The scrapbook compiler was concerned with entertainment, particularly Afro-American’s in that role, and the largest number of items they’d pasted in focused on a somewhat obscure musical act: The Cats and the Fiddle. Was the compiler a fan or a musician themselves? Woah, we get ahead of ourselves. Let’s stay with the musical evidence we have for a little while longer.

Once I get out of bed in the morning, I grab a newspaper from somewhere in the vicinity of my front door and read it. This is antiquated behavior. I often linger in bed before or after sleeping reading near-instant news on a large tablet connected to the Internet before I later get to the morning paper’s headlines that were written yesterday, yet still I take comfort or distress from reading them printed on paper. This is memory/habit working. I’ve read a newspaper in the morning since shortly after I learned to read. I even delivered them door to door as a youth in my little Iowa town, a place where and when the newspaper might be the only way you’d find out about some things in any detail.

Though I compose music and operate various musical instruments constantly as part of this Project, I’m somewhat removed from the general life of a musician today though I read accounts, I observe. But all of us listen to music, experience it some way. I know of no culture anywhere that for any appreciable span of time has been without music.

In the 1940s and ‘50s world the scrapbook photos, magazine clippings, and ephemera collected would have overlapped my childhood, would have been my parent’s adulthood. I experienced music some from records, some from television or movies, and largely from radio.*  Music face to face? Church music once a week, and the school’s student marching brass band a few times a year. I enjoyed rock’n’roll cover bands just twice, at the Junior and Senior proms in my high school. Concerts? I once got to travel to the large auditorium at the state capitol to hear Handel’s Messiah  oratorio. But that’s a rural, small-town story within a family that had no special connection to music, played no instruments.

For other white folks in cities, and in other areas, music could have been more central, more direct. Step back a generation to my grandparents’ youth? Recordings, perhaps some, radio not yet broadcasting, movies silent. Non-commercially, there was the parlor and folk music of those whose neighbors or families played. Music at events meant musicians playing, making the entirety of the noise right there and then. Let me repeat: that era’s connection to music was almost entirely performer in the room or performance space — and so where you lived or traveled to impacted your music heavily, and overwhelmingly your connection to your music was as fully dimensional, occupying the same space at the same time with you.

Some who read this may be two full generations younger than me. Your connection to music will likely be more removed: streaming playlists, the soundtrack to video games, concerts that could be large TV screens over a distant stage of dancers and miming singers with microphones in their hands. Or it could be a sweaty basement or a club with a small stage at one side, or something you try to record on the ubiquitous computers surrounding us, to hopefully exist elsewhere momentarily on phones, like a brief, wrong-number phone call that each connected party, embarrassed, occupies briefly, and leaves. You may think: I decide how I experience music, or how I make music! Yes, you do have choice, even if you may, out the other side of your mouth, decry that most all others are dictated by culture and capital. The in-between truth is that you, musician or listener, and the musical audience and musicians in general, are still living inside a present culture that changes things. The older ones living now still remember past cultural contexts, a diversity of time.

Because Afro-American representation lagged in mainstream American culture, representation of their music in mass media was filtered out, shown behind a screen for much of America. A Black American circa 1930-1960 is going to make and experience music because of their contemporary cultural particulars, their landscape in time. How long this post would be for me to try to even outline or list those things I think I have a smidgen of understanding of: the divide of parochial cultural ignorance from non-Black folks can fill volumes, Black History Month a pitcher of a lakeful. Demeaning white superiority, colonial European cultural hierarchies, and minstrel show comic-fool stereotypes are the proscenium for Afro-American performers. Sometimes violence lurks at the meeting edges. A well-meaning paragraph in a blog post staggers to carry that weight.

So then, if a Black American was going to use music to relax, or as a balm against the absurdities of your life and times, how much easier is it going to be to find that in Black entertainers, in Black saturated places among fellow Black audience members. But also consider: your experience of music is going to be that fully-dimensional one most often. In the room. In the same time. You can smell the music, which you can’t on Spotify.

Think back to that short movie clip from the previous post in this series,“The Harlem Yodel.”   The Cats and the Fiddle and the Dandridge Sisters are dressed up for the Alps in the roomful of mirrors that we’re to know to be an indoor ski meet. It’s 1938. I notice as the Cats enter our frame at one minute into the video clip, they drop a short series of sour, single string plucks. Is that a musical Dada expression saying: we know this is ridiculous, but we’re getting to be in the MGM movies, even if it’s a B minus, undercard short-subject? One of the producers of the short, Jack Chertok, would work on more than 30 shorts in 1938. By the early 60s he’d be the producer of My Favorite Martian,  a half-hour TV sitcom about an undocumented extraterrestrial alien living incognito on a grey-scale Earth — not exactly Ralph Ellison, but some of the strangeness is intentional. In the movie, the audience is white.

Snow Gets In Your Eyes cast picture

White folks on the right: “What, we can’t even have segregation at an indoor ski jump competition?”

.

In the second music clip, “Killin’ Jive,”  the audience is black in the film and in the producer’s movie-house intent. It’s from one of a series of Westerns made for Black audiences, and the picture’s star (unseen in the clip) is the “Sensational Singing Cowboy” who was variously billed as Herb or Herbert Jeffries or Jeffrey. Wikipedia decided on Herb Jeffries, but I don’t know if the last name varied for carelessness or branding tweaks. His Wikipedia article goes on to write about the unsettled ethnic background of the man born Umberto Valentino, but he was clearly marketed at the time as an Afro-American. The band’s performance there is intense and uninhibited — can’t-top-this showmanship. This clip, and publicity photos, would mean that the Cats would need to do this live on club stages at some point in their sets. This song (like many in the Cat’s recorded repertoire) is by a member of the band, and “Killin’ Jive”  is, full of insider Jazz/Black slang. Here’s a link to the lyrics.

Clearly, it’s a song about marijuana intoxication, and it’s performed in a let’s-get-high-and-party manner. The lyrics, which as I said are written by one of the group’s founders, Austin Powell, can be read as adding an undercurrent to that performance. A line is refrained in the song “He’s a sad man, not a bad man,” and I expect “bad man” in Thirties Jazz argot could carry the same “formidable and unrestrained” (in this case, when high) Afro-American slang meaning as well as the mainstream cultural meaning of he’s not evil, he’s just depressed. There are lines too about “darkest days” and “got no rent” (not transcribed correctly in the link) If this were a Brecht and Wiell song from say The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,  we’d read these lines and expect Modernist irony. What do I expect? That Powell had a brain and a viewpoint and meant what he wrote.

CORRECTION: The “Killin Jive” song was actually performed in another Black-audience-targeting picture called The Duke is Tops.  They did appear in Two Gun Man from Harlem  too, I just trusted my memory more than double-checking my notes,

Two-Gun_Man_from_Harlem_FilmPoster

“All Star Negro Cast” in the film from which “Killin’ Jive” appears

.

In real life and not in front of Hollywood backlot cameras? I can’t say for sure what kind of places the Cats and the Fiddle played in, but as working musicians the places they performed in would surely be physical contexts in a segregated society. Los Angeles had its own Black musical scene and audience around the Central Avenue neighborhood, and they could have played there. In a following post in the series we’ll get into what I can figure out regarding their musical career and travels from supposition, elements in the scrapbook, and some new information I was able to gather this month. More to come here soon in this series.

For a musical note, here’s a Langston Hughes poem remembering time on the other side of the tracks. There should be an audio player gadget below, but if it’s been red-lined out for you, this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*Radio was more-or-less the streaming of my era, but it had the extra dimensions that you knew that others were listening to the same music you were listening to at the same time. When “your record,” the one you made, or simply the one you cared about as a listener, was played on the radio, you may have been alone in your room or your car, but you knew also you were one of some many in a simultaneous nexus. Music on television or in the movie house was most often a generation behind. I’m nowhere near a Jazz musician in skills, but I owe it to TV and movies of my youth that when I hear a Jazz take on a “Standard” I usually know the tune.

At Day-Close in November

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

See, just as my son predicted, we’re back with more old dead poets, this time English poet Thomas Hardy. Today’s poem sort of pairs-up with Dave Moore’s piece from last time. Dave directly addressed youth in his song in the context of the cycle of generations, with the newer ones sure they’ve figured out something the old generation hasn’t—which is sort of true, at least enough to allow them the audacity to change things.

Hardy, in this fall poem written late in his life, isn’t so sure, but then Hardy never is. In the Hardy poems I’ve presented he’s very aware of the cycles of things, and he barely accepts that those eternal circles could have any inclined plane to their returning paths.

Thomas Hardy close up

That’s a prodigious cookie duster you got there Mr. Hardy.

Here’s the full text of Hardy’s “At Day-Close in November”  if you’d like to follow along as I discuss how I experienced it.

Since we’ve done so many autumn poems this year, we can see Hardy checking in with some perennial fall poem tropes: shorter days, birds leaving, colored and falling leaves. Hardy, whose late career overlapped the Imagists, is immediate and unfussy with his images in a modern manner. The one personified natural image in it: the waving evergreens like waltzers, is still not too far from one used by pioneering Imagist Richard Aldington. Note to, there’s not a single interior emotional term used here. To sense what the poet/speaker is feeling we need to take in the images and events.

The second stanza increases the originality, even while using colored and falling leaves. The light-yellow beach tree leaves floating in the air are like relics of the sun in a gray noontime. And as some old guys will recognize Hardy is saying they are also like inter-ocular “floaters,” tiny clouds that develop in the fluid of some aging eyes and drift across vision. The final two lines tell us that the poet/speaker is old enough that he planted trees in his youth that are now tall enough to block the sky in places. There’s some parallelism here: the leaves, like specks in his vision, block some of the sky like the trees he planted in youth do also. The former is transitory, moving, changing, the later seemingly less so.

The last stanza adds some children, who also are moving through the scene. Here the poem does resort to a internal term, though not an emotional one: the children we’re told “conceive” that those tall trees must have always been there (something the poet/speaker knows is not so—I set those damn trees in the ground myself is the implied thought). So those trees are not permanent things, and so like the leaves, like clouds in an old man’s eye after all.

I at first encountered the last line as puzzling, even awkward sounding. There seems to be two versions of the text. The one I found first and used has the last line as: “That none will in time be seen.” Others seem to have it as “A time when none will be seen.” The second version is less awkward and has a parallelism with it’s preceding line “A time when no tall trees grew here.” I had trouble singing that first version, I might have used the second one if I’d seen it before the performance. But now I’m thinking that the awkwardness, even the sense that the poem has ended on a “What’d he say?” note, may have value.

This line’s “none” has a hazy antecedent. I think we’re to first think it’s the children, who are unaware of the transient nature of themselves (something the poet/speaker knows and they don’t). But in the sentence it appears in, the statement can be referring to the trees (which the poet/speaker knows weren’t there until he planted them) that are not permanent.

In what ways are the trees not permanent? Well the poet/speaker is old, he may expect he will not see either those children or the trees he planted for many more autumns. Nor are the trees permanent to the children, rambling through in play. They will grow up, perhaps not stay there, or be at work inside and not outside in the fall air by the trees. I know little about Hardy’s particular English countryside, but is he even foreseeing a modern future where the trees will be cut down for progress? And by extension, is Hardy, taking as is his wont the long view, saying that any work he did in his long life will be forgotten by those children?

Musically, Benjamin Britten has set this poem to music. I listened to two performances which reminded me the problems I sometimes have with art song settings of poetry as a listener: a complex melody makes it hard to inhabit the words with humanity and feeling, and therefore obscures their meaning and makes everything empty decoration. I persisted and found a couple where the singers somewhat overcame these issues with Britten’s setting. Here’s the best one I’ve found so far.


Of the performances I’ve heard so far, Mark Wilde is best able to illuminate the words through Britten’s filigree.

Now of course I don’t mean to knock the skills of Britten as a composer. I could claim that I write music that has a wider variety in some sense, but let’s be serious: I don’t have 1% of Britten’s musical knowledge, or the knowledge of any other reasonably well-known “serious” composer. And as a singer I have trouble rendering even simpler melodies and for this reason I don’t try to write art-song style settings because I have no one handy to sing them.

So, what’d I do instead with my music for this Hardy poem? A rock band with three cranked-up Telecasters wailing away. I suggest you listen to it loud too. The player gadget is below.

Surely You Could Do Better Than This

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

And now for something completely diff…Oh, Monty Python references may be lost on a good portion of the modern audience—and then today November 22nd is one of those dates that some folks remember, and some don’t. Someone older than Dave, George Bernard Shaw, once said “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.” Kurt Vonnegut said “History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.” And Ambrose Bierce who for all we know is still wandering around a Mexican border wall with a Sawzall and a book of poems by Du Fu, defined history as “An account false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.”

So how much should we care for all that? Well, as I often say here, my opinion is less important than yours. Today’s audio piece, written and sung by Dave Moore, says something like that too.

Note that in each case today I’m giving the opinions of humorists, the class of thinkers and writers who expect that whatever you attempt you’re going to fail at it a little or a lot. Maybe that’s the lesson of history: that every advance for humankind has been across a field of failure.

Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_(1568)_The_Blind_Leading_the_Blind 1080

This gives me a chance to include another Bruegel painting. And it’s a good thing it’s a painting, because sightless people cannot be offended by seeing it.

 

Use the player below to hear Dave backed by the LYL Band sing his song to those that will dance upon our graves. For those who’ve come here expecting poetry: as my son predicts, it’s likely we’ll be back soon with more of that dead poets society stuff.

 

Students Making Audio with the Wordsworths

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I do make something of an effort to look for other folks doing something interesting with poetry and music online, and to check out the blogs of folks who’ve commented or otherwise contributed here. I really should be more consistent in doing this, but particularly this month as I’ve attempted to ramp up production of Parlando Project pieces as part of the National Poetry Month celebration, I’ve fallen behind. Come May I’ll have a lot of blog reading to catch up on!

But this one caught my ear just after posting my own attempt at presenting a Wordsworth nature poem. A group of Keswick School students working with Durham University in England have posted a couple of audio pieces connected with William Wordsworth and his sister and collaborator Dorothy Wordsworth’s Lake District observation of nature and the resulting landmark poems. This one has the students speaking about the book of nature and some of Dorothy’s journal entries on the siblings walks. There some nice, spare music added to this one as well.

A second one has an audio piece using spoken word alone to convey William Wordsworth poetry combined with Dorothy’s prose. The blog talks about how the students have noticed new, modern diversions from the contemplation of nature:

As we read over the poems composed by the students, it was fascinating to see how many of them – the majority of the group, in fact – had fixated on the idea of more modern distractions from nature, and in particular, the role of smartphones in quite literally ‘filtering’ nature for us. While William’s poem admonishes its addressee to abandon books and ‘hear the woodland linnet’, the year ten pupils from Keswick School used their poems as a chance to reflect on the need to abandon their phones and enjoy nature in its own right.

I keep asking my middle-school aged son what his generation has decided the rapidly aging Millennials don’t understand and that his generation will have to fix. He looked at me funny when I asked him again this week

. “Is that some kind of Dad joke?”

Perhaps he just doesn’t want to divulge yet his generations secret plans to fix the worst mistakes of those who came before, or maybe he’s still formulating the answer. But one of the time-tested ways to look for answers or better questions is to skip back a few generations and see what someone observed and thought before those now running things made their decisions.

Stopping by a Woods with Bad Cellphone Service

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

For some time, I’ve disliked the way the idea of “generations” has been treated by the culture at large. Not the nugget of thought that’s in it, that cohorts of people in a particular time and place will share certain experiences, some of which will shape their outlook—but the nutty, pseudo-scientific way it’s been used. The balderdash that’s been added to “generations” includes the nonsense that there are some sharp and agreed on borders to them and that everyone inside of these sharp lines in time not only shares the same experience, but reacts to these things in the same way.

The crap labels we use like “Generation X” (Billy Idol and Richard Hell may have a lot to answer for, but let’s not hang this on them) or “Millennials,” (who could just as well be perennial grinders of grain for all the meaning I assign to that word) have become like unto the Sixties’ penchant for astrological signs. “Oh, you’re so Millennial” or “Members of Gen X think this way” have become the Moonchildren and Fire Signs of our age.

And of course, the borders of these deterministic generation containers are natural and inviolate—no, don’t look at them, as they will seem arbitrary and varied if you look too close. Are generations 12, 20, 30 years long? Don’t ask, as we don’t agree. And is someone born in 1946 exposed to the same set of experiences as someone born in 1963? Don’t look too close.

I bring this up, because this week I wrote a parody. And as humorists have been known to do, I went and used some generational stereotypes. I was pressed for time, those sorts of things are ready-mades, one or two people found it funny, if I use it humorously I’m making fun of it—Oh, I’m giving up. I’m ashamed.

Look, one of the good things about considering the experiences conveyed by writers whose words I use here, is that most have been dead for generations, no matter how long we define that term. Seems like they are each their own people, not clichés like “Victorians” or “the Lost Generation.”

New start. I had a serious thought as I started this. Earlier this month I revisited the well-known yet too-little-reconsidered Robert Frost poem “Stopping by a Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  As I thought about the experience Robert Frost was describing (if an actual country winter buggy ride, some think it occurred in 1909), I considered how different the night and the rural roadscape would have been then, compared to how we have informally remembered Frost’s poem. I thought the opening stanza of that poem, starting with Frost’s line that’s fallen into too-famous-to-think-about status: “Whose woods these are, I think I know,” could be describing a person who was lost in a darkening, rural pre-electric light, night—instead of a poet some of us remember as irresponsibly stopping to look at a well-lit Christmas-card pretty sight of a woods in snowfall.

I was thinking then: “Now I’d have not just the possibility of bright headlights, but a cellphone in my pocket that should tell me just where I am, no matter what poetic truth I’d be trying to express.”

And then I thought again about that phone. There are still areas, even in North America, without cellphone service. GPS signals don’t penetrate everywhere. Those maps in our apps are not without errors.

Cell Coverage vs Drake in Coat

Drake’s from Canada, but Minnesota and New England need cell coverage and warm coats too.

 

So, today’s piece, which I call “Stopping by a Woods with Bad Cellphone Service”  is actually a serious piece of winter travel safety advice, not a scurrilous piece of generational stereotyping, which I would never stoop to doing here.

Stopping by a Woods with Bad Cellphone Service lyrics

Here are today’s words, but you want to listen to the music don’t you?

 

But when you think of scurrilous, I hope you think of the LYL Band. It’s been awhile since I’ve had a piece that wasn’t created by that scrupulous and well-behaved group of musicians that is myself—recording it instrument by instrument, a track at a time. The LYL Band is an organization in the same way that a hockey fight or litter of kittens is organized, which is to say, barely, though we attack things with abandon playfully or otherwise. To hear us, use the player below.