Joe Doakes emails:<\/p>\n
My iPod collection is eclectic. Jefferson Starship\u2019s \u201cWe Built This City (On Rock-and-Roll)\u201d just played.<\/p>\n
It occurs to me that if you\u2019re talking about San Francisco, that\u2019s probably true; Haight-Ashbury typifies that burg.<\/p>\n
But New York or Cleveland? They weren\u2019t built by rock-and-roll. They were built by Big Band and Swing, the music of the people who won The War and made American manufacturing the greatest force in the world throughout the 1940\u2019s and 50\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Rock-and-roll was the Baby Boomers music. Rock-and-roll didn\u2019t build those cities, it killed those cities, and many more. Detroit was Mo-Town when the old folks ran it; with Baby Boomers in charge, it\u2019s Mo-Handout-Town. The fortunes of iron-ore-mining town Hibbing waned exactly as home-boy Bob Dylan\u2019s waxed.<\/p>\n
Okay, it\u2019s only a song and not a very good one at that, not some great philosophical commentary on society.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Joe is too tactful. \u00a0Starship’s “We Built This City” is perhaps the worst song in Top Forty history, rivaled only by Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight”.<\/p>\n
But that actually reinforces his point:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Still, I wonder how much difference it would make if popular culture turned away from \u201cif it feels good, do it\u201d and back to \u201cStars and Stripes Forever.\u201d<\/p>\n
Joe Doakes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Tangential thought: what does it say about either the music or the city that Minneapolis’ “Wedge” neighborhood (from Franklin to Lake between Hennepin and Lyndale) is exactly the same pompous, pretentious, overpriced wanna-be-artist’s-garret toilet now as it was before the Replacements’ heyday?<\/p>\n
Speaking of which:<\/p>\n