Word: proto
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Beach Boys, seemingly mere proto-Fonzes, have in fact done as much for America's sound as Elvis, as long as you listen around. The cool kids in middle school have their Backstreet Boys, the keen kids at Harvard have their Belle and Sebastian. And everyone has the Beach Boys...
...more exciting as an artistic maneuver on Beck's part than as a long-term fixture in a CD-changer. It's the most straightforward (and final) track, in fact, that will probably become Midnite Vulture's best-remembered track. "Debra" is a funk-love send-up; its proto-cheesy sound is so robust that all irony melts away. It's got joy, like the joy Beck had when he was so suddenly confident of "Where It [was] At." The rest of the album approaches the clarity of "Debra," as if Beck is trying on mask after mask until...
...irony, of course, is that the affliction of adolescence is traditionally marked by a pronounced sense of isolation. At some critical moment in every proto-adult life comes a lonely, anguished, heartfelt plea: "Nobody understands me!" How can today's teens truly experience this tortured rite of passage when marketers seek them out relentlessly and programmers understand them so well? And with all those Hollywood talent scouts and Silicon Valley headhunters hunting them down and signing them up, why would they even care if their parents understand them at all? Even the lonely losers of yesteryear are no longer locked...
...fight to win the vote for women was actually a kind of religious movement. Theorist Stanton and tactician Anthony transposed an evangelical fervor into a social one, moving, via moral causes like temperance (embraced by proto-feminists to stop domestic abuse), to a lifelong devotion to women's liberty and the vote, an objective neither lived to see achieved. The four-hour double profile does well by focusing a decades-long movement on this symbiotic friendship...
...pursuing an anti-homophobic politics, I find the quest for homosexuality's origins completely uninteresting. If queerness is biological, homophobes will abort proto-gay fetuses or correct "gay genes" and enlarged hypothalami; if it's constructed, they'll send their proto-gay children to therapy...