Word: musics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...anniversary of Woodstock arrived and waned, much like the first time around. It was mostly a convenience for the media, a way to get a handle on an upstart pop phenomenon. For music, a fan remembered, all the festival symbolized was a washout. Lysergic mud and bad amplification. The rest was a fairy tale...
...Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show. He thought Jerry Lee Lewis on Steve Allen's TV program was the wildest and altogether greatest thing he had ever set eyes on. When Chuck Berry showed up on American Bandstand, one young world got jolted into a different orbit. The music was that strong. All velocity and no drag...
...questions went deeper than chronology. Rock wasn't just the sound track for the '60s. It spurred on and helped shape a whole culture. It was central to change in a way that nothing -- certainly no music -- has been since. Rock was always a music of turbulence, and history, for a while there, caught the beat. Woodstock was a dodge, a growth industry that tie-dyed much that was fierce and righteous in the music into something stuporous and evasive. The seeds of nostalgia were planted in those sodden, trodden New York State fields before the festival was over. Memories...
Nostalgia was the only dirty word in the rock vocabulary. This music had never looked back before. But history could walk away from rock once it had been put snugly into that Woodstock pasture. Rock reacted by turning inward, to the softer personal speculations of the '70s singer-songwriters, then reacted again, first by exploding (punk), then by chilling out into the cerebrations of the New Wave bands like the Talking Heads and the slick, slightly spooky amusement-park soul of Michael Jackson...
...heard it right away. The Stones still have the stamina, but there's always at least a hint of strain in the music too, a self-consciousness about the energy, as if they were the oldest guys at the gym and trying to look good on the Nautilus. Rock 'n' roll may be their life -- and their business. It may come naturally to them still, but it sure doesn't come easy. That's what's different. That old winning smugness -- their magisterial self-assurance -- is gone. There's a lot of sweat in these songs...