I Just Wasn't Made for These Times
The Recap reflects on Music and Legacy
Music has always been a big part of the website, and with the loss of two legends over the past few months- Brian Wilson, and more recently Ozzy Osbourne- I’ve decided to make it the focus of most of this edition of The Recap.
Today is the Monday of Labor Day weekend, but let’s go back to the beginning of summer and the 4th of July. American music was on my mind, so I decided to watch Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music, a queer perspective on the history of American music from 1776 to 2016. I had discovered Mac and costume designer Machine Dazzle while reading Adam Moss’s The Work of Art, and was intrigued by both the concept and the interactive aspect of this production.
In 2016, Mac performed the show in Brooklyn in its entirety- all twenty four decades- with an hour devoted to each. The documentary condenses the event into less than two hours, but you still get a taste of what it must have been like to experience. Some moments that stood out for me- a lesson on the Yankee Doodle song from America’s early days; the behind the scenes interviews with Mac’s co-creators; a tribute to Walt Whitman; and a section when the theater transforms into a gay prom with the audience dancing to a reinterpreted version of Ted Nugent’s homophobic song Snakeskin Cowboys.
Beautiful, sad, funny, and at times informative, it was well worth a watch. The image above is of Machine Dazzle’s creation for the 1950s decade. The skirt he created uses a white picket fence, a symbol of suburban America.
White picket fences are also present in Kerry James Marshall’s wonderful 4th of July painting Bang, below, seen at Cleveland Museum of Art.
During the holiday weekend I also rewatched Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart’s visit to see the redwood trees stood out once again- this time in the context of America’s history. Looking at the rings of the tree and their historical markers, it reminded me- America is still a young country.
Novak’s gloved hand points to a ring and then another and says, “Here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you; you took no notice.” It’s such a haunting line. What and who will be important markers as time goes on?
Seeing those trees also reminded me of the fires in California that not only caused the loss of so many homes, but also so many trees. I thought back to watching The Salt of the Earth, the 2014 Wim Wenders documentary about Brazilian photographer and photojournalist Sebastião Salgado. After many years abroad capturing so much suffering, he needed to do something different. He and his wife Lélia decided to create the organization Instituto Terra in 1998 which focuses on planting trees and restoring Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. The project began on his family’s farmland and the transformation is astounding (pictured below, before and after from the film).
Salgado sadly passed away at the end of May, but what an incredible legacy to leave behind.
Betye Saar has taken the planning of her legacy into her own hands. The California artist, who turned 99(!) on July 30th, has assembled a group of curators to form the Betye Saar Legacy Group, whose purpose will be to “help ensure that museums, art historians, and critics wanting to know more about the artist can continue to do so in the decades to come.” This is wonderful news and well deserved.
Ozzy Osbourne and Brian Wilson have been documented extensively but there always seems to be something new to discover, and rediscover, in their work. Although very different in both their music and the use of their talents, they both found ways to use the pain of difficult childhoods to fuel their creativity.
Ozzy’s stage presence, personality, and unique vocals led to him to fame with an impressive longevity- he performed live just a few weeks before his death. His career was sometimes overshadowed by his antics and reality television show, but watching videos of him in Black Sabbath, you can see what made him a star. Black Sabbath’s influence on rock music cannot be denied, and so much of that was because of him. He’s also a highlight of the second installment of the Penelope Spheeris documentary trilogy, The Decline of Western Civilization, that focuses on metal bands in the late 1980s.
While reading about Ozzy, I also found this delightful xylophone version of Crazy Train, played by the children’s group, the Louisville Leopard Percussionists.
Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds was an album I discovered many years after it was made, but it became one I revisit often. The Beach Boys were “oldies” when I was growing up, but the energy captured in their music, especially in songs like Good Vibrations, creates a strange feeling of nostalgia in me for a time I didn’t live in. (Turns out there’s a word for that- anemoia.)
Wilson was an innovative writer, musician, and producer, and became famous for using the studio as an instrument in itself. His influence, and that of The Beach Boys, is present in recent music- like Panda Bear’s Praise, which appears on May’s playlist, and also in older work by artists like The Ramones, Cayucas, and R.E.M.
In happier music news, Noel and Liam Gallagher finally ended their feud and reunited for the Oasis Live ‘25 tour on July 4th in England. They will be playing in this week on Sunday, 9/6, at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the brothers’ surliness- here’s Noel talking about the problems with the music industry tailoring things for the customer-
Below is The Beach Boys song I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, which captures a familiar feeling for most of us at some point, and maybe now more than ever. But we are all ultimately made for exactly the time we are living in- Wilson and Osboune couldn’t have made the music they did, certainly not in the same way, if they hadn’t had the experiences of the times they were born into, and now that music continues to live on into the future.
Until next time- I’ll be spending time checking out more music, past and present, and thinking about this Taylor Mac quote from the documentary- “I want to believe that an artist’s job is to dream the culture forward, to look at the things that aren’t working in society and think about how they could be better.” A good goal for us all to have, I think, even on a small scale.