All right. If you want to play that way, how about recognizing that the song was the theme to the television show? Not their record albums, their television show?
And what did their television show have to say?
It was the first show in the history of television in which young people (read teenagers, even if they were technically older) lived by themselves without any adult supervision or even an adult mentor or guiding spirit. Do you have any conception of how revolutionary that was for 1966? How many shows to this day have featured teenagers on their own in our society?
The television show was radical for the day, hidden, as much good radical comment often is, under a guise of humor to make it acceptable.
Did the show have something to say? Absolutely. More than Dylan said in 1966.
This is all true despite the farcical aspects of taking one phrase, written by other people, out of context from a television show theme song and applying it to a group’s entire career without looking at a single line from any other song they ever did. That doesn’t rise to the level of an argument, even by the standards of the internet. I’m hoping that you don’t mean a word you say, but are just making some point so obscure that it’s eluding the rest of us.
You seriously miss how a band who more encapsulated the phrase “the medium is the message” than any other band in history attempts to co-opt a phrase used of more serious artists from a couple years before them could make me just as contemptuous of their music as the faux-angsty “outcasts” of the mid-90s second generation grunge did to Kurt Cobain?
No analogy is perfect. But true story. My sociology-major roommate did a report on the Mighty KC and said that it was the fact that the wrong people took his music the wrong way and his message didn’t resonate anymore with the ones he was trying to reach was a factor in his suicide. I dismissed this when I heard it since I did not think that Nirvana particularly spoke to me, a disaffected college student.
Then, years later, me: :eek: :smack:. My roomie was right, about attitudes at least, which isn’t to say I had any more right to appreciate good music than your average frat boy, just that KC might have felt that way. [/end hijack]
Everyone: I know my hatred is sort of irrational, but I was always annoyed at the Monkees theme song (just as I was when I was young and did not know that I was not to think that Pepsi took its slogan “Pepsi Generation” 100% seriously, after all, it did not speak for me, what was it trying to prove?) but I did not know how to crystallize it in words until I saw the Dylan special, even though he wasn’t referring to the Monkees in particular.
No, that when he said that Cobain was really affected by the “wrong” type of people liking his songs and the “right” type of people dismissing him, and I dismissed this theory since I thought that he was not really speaking to me with his music, I was one of those people who was dismissing him, I just didn’t realize that for awhile. (Doesn’t mean that most of their stuff still doesn’t speak to me, I prefer the less aggressive indie stuff, but when I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit on college radio, before it became a mega-hit, I thought it was okay, but not doing too much to stand out from the rest of college radio at the time. Then I made the mistake of dismissing them just because they were overplayed and popular. But they rise layers above their imitators (in production and lyrics if not always melody) by the simple fact of not sucking.)
Suicide occurs rather frequently among people who have no work for the public to respond to, especially among those who have had an extensive history of personal difficulties, mental illness, and drug abuse. Trying work public reaction in as something significant buys into the “tortured genius” nonsense as well as undermining suffering on the part of non-geniuses.
That, and I wouldn’t be surprised if both Bob Dylan and Kurt Cobain had written some lyrics somewhere that I might disagree with or piss me off. That wouldn’t make me hate them.
I really liked the 1996 album, Justus. But I understand that after that there were numerous personal, financial, and artistic disputes between the members of the Monkees that preclude another reunion. Does anyone have the dirt on what happened?