This is a continuation of a previous music diary. At any rate, I wanted to add something to the thesis I set out in the first diary, which was that the popular music of today has important origins in the Sixties and Seventies given the convergence of technologies, drugs, politics, and the zeitgeist of those times.

Popular music in the Sixties and Seventies was, then, primarily important for its now-and-then innovation in addressing its publics. In that bygone era, the biggest market for popular music (I am assuming) was the United States. Today, I'm assuming, the biggest market for anything is China, throwing in Russia, India, and the Gulf states for good measure, while the US and Europe are being consumed by billionaires, a common shadow government, and Project Ukraine.

Don't get me wrong: it's nice that the US had a heyday. I feel privileged for having participated in it, even though I was very young and awkward when it happened. It sucks, of course, that the US went from heyday to acquiescence in the neoliberal Hell of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, and so at some later point we should see something like this happening:

In understanding the later decline of the US, one reflects upon the economist John Maynard Keynes' remedy for the stagnation that overtook the capitalism in the Great Depression of 1929-1932: increased circulation, by which was meant increased circulation of money, goods, and services. Indeed the Keynesian view of the capitalist economy was that participants in that economy didn't have to be anything in particular, as long as they participated in the circulation which kept the economy prosperous. And so, to an increasing extent, they aren't anything in particular. Working people are this necessary nuisance, from the perspective of the owners, and so (to some extent in America) they behave as such, and so you had -- and have -- the endless spread of cultural wasteland. And circulation is faked these days, so we don't even have that to lean on today. What's the George Carlin line?

At any rate, given the general need for sophistication in addressing life under capitalism, we might evaluate popular music as regards its sophistication, its attempts to move the masses upward on the learning curve, to educate them. The main reason jazz great Gil Scott-Heron said "the revolution will not be televised," I assume, was that the revolution will not be made by people zoning out on the boob tube. (The resultant wisdom might also be applied to those of today obsessed with looking at their cellphones.)

Or more positively, from Ohio native Chrissie Hynde:

To a certain extent, this means pointing out the existence of "political" music. Sure, people generally don't care about the political drift of music, and so the concept is flawed in that way: Donald Trump, for instance, liked the music of Roger Waters, whereas Waters thought that Trump was an idiot. But, at some hard-to-identify point, the politics of music matters.

At any rate, here are some more brief critical theories, along the lines of those I presented in the first diary:

The Rolling Stones. This was the group that supposedly competed with the Beatles (which I discussed in Part 1) for popular revenues in the Sixties. And, as long as they were held in that Sixties spell, the spell of the Golden Age of Capitalism, their collective cynicism was meaningfully fun. Pop music about Satan? Sure, why not.

Otherwise you might wait a decade or more to enjoy John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten, icon of the Sex Pistols, who famously (while onstage) asked the audience to throw money at him. The Rolling Stones, then, were a symbol of the nascent financialization of the economy in the Seventies, when the disappearance of the Beatles left them in an even better owning-class position. Perhaps Dumenil and Levy listened to the Stones when writing their famous volume "Capital Resurgent."

The Doors. Their biggest success was in their initial album; here one remembers Jose Feliciano's cover of "Light My Fire." One also remember that the jam in the middle of "Light My Fire" was more or less borrowed from the John Coltrane Quartet's performance of Mongo Santamaria's "Afro-Blue."

At any rate, The Doors, having charmingly borrowed their name from Aldous Huxley's essay "The Doors of Perception," an essay which more or less adopted a panpsychic attitude, then proceeded to create a band around Jim Morrison, whose primary talent was the occasional composition of some rather stark poetry.

Unfortunately, Morrison was also an army brat whose favorite drug was in fact ethanol, and he died in 1971. He did, however, popularize (or perhaps pickle) some nicely brainy stuff while both he and the zeitgeist were still alive.

Jimi Hendrix. Frank Zappa once famously said about Hendrix that maybe he could be paired up with someone who could transcribe his ideas onto sheet music so they could be adapted to other instruments than electric guitar. Unfortunately, Zappa's suggestion would only be worthwhile for some of Hendrix's songs. "Machine Gun" for instance, a rather effective antiwar anthem (though one that can't be duplicated), might benefit from transcription:

The shining counter-example is "Hey Joe," an annoyingly puerile song both in tune and lyrics, which Hendrix more or less impressively repurposed. Hendrix, then, was mostly able to play some rather simple stuff in a manner so thoroughly different that he became Paul McCartney's favorite guitarist, and for that we need neither lyric sheet nor guitar tabs. Hendrix, then, was a shining example of a member of a designated underclass made good, someone with both revolutionary meaning and quotidian substance. He died in rather quotidian fashion in 1970.

This is enough for one diary. There will be a Part 3.