Word: rocke
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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THERE is an ironic appropriateness in the nickname of the Gramophone Awards that will be given out tomorrow night: the Grammies. First, there is the transparent crsatz casualness typical of that most transparently crsatz industry, the rock 'n' roll business. The name oozes bogus familiarity, a no-big-deal chumminess, as if millions of carefully watched dollars didn't stand or fall by the success of each nomination...
Second, more subliminally, there lies embedded within the semantics of the world the awful truth that there is something old and decaying, something like an aging seductress sagged beyond appeal, something grandmother-like, in the whole sick thing called rock 'n' roll...
...Rock 'n' roll will never die" is a phrase that has been on the lips of more than one rock singer over the course of the last 30 odd years, and it will probably prove true. But the future looks to hold something for more ominous than the death of rock 'n' roll: its preservation. Not preservation in youthful splendor, like Dorian Gray, but in arrested decay--never improving but merely slowed in its collapse to an infinitisimal slouch, like Joan Collins on collagen-fiber complex, showing remnants of past sexiness and vitality but long past the capacity for excercising...
...savor here. Names lifted from other Hawthorne novels (Blithedale, Pyncheon) crop up in unexpected contexts; as Sarah seeks her karma in the Sunbelt, she has reason to resent "my old-fashioned Puritan conscience." But Updike's use of such references should not be taken too somberly; the stern, rock-ribbed moral universe of The Scarlet Letter serves here as a subtle counterpoint to a comic vision of anything-goes ethics in mid-1980s America...
...hipsters know, can also mean good. But when it comes to Michael Jackson, a lot of music fans think Bad is positively the worst. In a poll of 23,000 readers released by Rolling Stone this week, the Gloved One hit rock bottom in eight categories, including "worst male singer," "worst dressed," "worst album ((Bad))" and "worst single ((Bad))." The backlash has more to do with the singer's quirky personality than his music, says Rolling Stone Music Editor David Wild: "People are responding negatively to his image and to the hype. The category he should have won is 'worst...