Posted on 03/13/2009 2:49:49 AM PDT by Rummyfan
Do you remember The Matrix? It was big a couple of years ago. I think I quoted it in this very space — something about red pills, blue pills, and how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. It was part of the lingo for a while. But the dogs bark and the pop-culture caravan moves on. Anyway, a while back an interview in the Guardian with the film’s composer happened to catch my eye. Usually, when an interview with a guy who’s big on the electronic “dance music” scene catches my eye, my eye promptly glazes over, but not on this occasion. Rob Dougan, an Aussie who lives in a cool loft on the south bank of the Thames in London, had been asked post-Matrix to remix some Sinatra tracks for today’s market — add some hip-hoppish electronica here and there. Unfortunately, he liked the records pretty much as they were. He took a crack at “That’s Life” and was told his remix was not “modern” enough. So it was back to the old drawing board. And then Mr. Dougan observed:
In Sinatra’s time it was really cool to be 50, to be a man. You put on a hat and a suit and you keep on going until you die. Now you get 50-year-old guys in sleeveless T-shirts, going to the gym and desperately trying to fix their hair, and you think: “Whatever happened to real men?” Well, maybe they had hormone treatments. Victor Davis Hanson recently concluded that “the generic American male accent” was dying out and had been replaced with something affectedly “metrosexual” with “a particular nasal stress, a much higher tone than one heard 40 years ago . . . a precious voice often nearly indistinguishable from the female.” As for the old-school males, wrote Professor Hanson, “I watched the movie Twelve O’Clock High the other day, and Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger sounded liked they were from another planet.” Diana West has written a whole book on this theme: The Death of the Grown-Up. But it rings more plaintive coming from Rob Dougan, a cutting-edge type with his own pop-cult cred on the line. I suspect he may be thinking of Sinatra circa 40 more than 50, but in a way that makes his point: If you look at almost any movie from what we might call the old days, the guys appear older than they are. Almost all the leading men — Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, William Powell — seem designed for eternal middle age: You put on a hat and suit and you keep going until you die.
Now we have youth culture: what’s young, what’s hip, what’s hot, what’s now. The folks who commissioned those Sinatra remixes won’t care if they sound squaresville two years from now, just as all the hep cats ABC demanded as “special guests” for Frank’s 80th-birthday salute in 1995 are now Trivial Pursuit answers. (Salt N Pepa? Hootie and the Blowfish?) Who cares if your hot young act cools off? Something even younger and hotter will be along in a moment.
But what if it’s not? I write a lot about the demographic decline of the Western world, and readers often respond, “So what? Tokyo’s pretty crowded. It’d be kinda nice to have 20 percent fewer people.” Maybe. But the 20 percent who aren’t around won’t be the coots and codgers; the missing folks will be the children who were never born, and the few who were but decided they didn’t want to spend their lives in a joint so tilted toward the geriatric. The eternal adolescence of contemporary pop culture is merely the most obvious example of how society’s self-image is invested in its youth. In star movie roles, everybody’s young. Not necessarily ridiculously young, like Dr. Christmas Jones, the nuclear physicist played by Denise Richards a couple of Bond films back. But young nevertheless. Because young people go to the movies and they don’t want to look at old people.
Ping!
bookmark
Good ping. The old cult and code of the American male has been under assault for 40 years, by some women, women’s groups, universities, etc. We are getting as generation of males who are men only anatomically; they have no idea what it means to be a man. The culture doesn’t tell them, their girlfriends or significant others don’t tell them, and their parents don’t tell them. Sad, really. They’re unmoored, adrift, and unhappy for reasons they don’t understand.
Who cares if your hot young act cools off? Something even younger and hotter will be along in a moment.Elvis and the Beatles were declared passing fads, too. Yes, most popular culture is stupid and fades away, but there's just so much of it that a steady trickle of classics emerges. Another swing and a miss for Steyn.
Good ping. The old cult and code of the American male has been under assault for 40 years, by some women, women’s groups, universities, etc. We are getting as generation of males who are men only anatomically; they have no idea what it means to be a man. The culture doesn’t tell them, their girlfriends or significant others don’t tell them, and their parents don’t tell them. Sad, really. They’re unmoored, adrift, and unhappy for reasons they don’t understand.
"Men?" Oh, why didn't you say so! You mean males! </sarcasm>
Rob Dougan wasn’t the composer for THE MATRIX, that was Don Davis. Dougan contributed a song to THE MATRIX and one or two to RELOADED, and maybe something to the third.
Just FYI.
Clint Eastwood...no metrosexual he...
Gran Torino in 10 minutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtk7U-9bUJQ&feature=related
My son is 25 years old and he wears a hat everyday. Today he is undoubtedly wearing Kevlar like he does everyday in Iraq. There are some real men left, and they will be needed more and more.
I think about this a lot now that I'm in my 40's. I look at the current movies and the "men" all seem like boys to me. Leonardo DiCaprio has to be in his 30's now, and he seems like a teenager. The rest are all buffed and have nice hair, but they seem like pre-adolescent girl's ideas of what a man is like, not real men.
If my sarcasm meter was running, I’d say, Ah, case in point....
G-d bless your son! and all the members of the US Military!
Black culture is celebrated 24/7. Relentlessly. And since most of it is what it is, and since whites are denigrated at every turn, we’re becoming a nation of black adolescent wannabes. If that doesn’t scare everyone, including blacks, it should.
I've never come up with a satisfactory candidate.
Another swing and a miss for Steyn
“I write a lot about the demographic decline of the Western world, and readers often respond”, “So what?
“Whatever happened to real men?”
“the missing folks will be the children who were never born,”
“Diana West has written a whole book on this theme: The Death of the Grown-Up”
In some of Steyn, one has to look a little deeper for the recurring themes on why America is on a steep slide into the historically charted territory of cultural disaster, destruction, and extinction.
It’s true, middle aged and accomplished and competent has been jettisoned for simple vulgarity and cookie cutter style.
The suits are all silk now and the drinks are all coffees..
Kurt Russell? Harrison Ford?
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