Woodstock 50th Anniversary Releases

[felser]

I think that pretty well explains why I don't listen to much of anything on the pop music front from the last 30 years, don't watch any TV shows (just news and sports), see less than a half dozen new movies each year.   Pop Culture sees me as a relic of the past, so that's what I will be.

[JSngry]

7 minutes ago, felser said:

  Pop Culture sees me as a relic of the past, so that's what I will be.

If Pop Culture sees you/us at all, it's as a Wallet Waiting To Happen^tm for a 2 Billion CD/DVD/Holograph Combo of the Woodstock festival.

And I'm totally ok with that. My withdrawal was as gradual and natural as it was inevitable and welcome.

[Scott Dolan]

2 hours ago, JSngry said:

Lash on, bro, LASH ON!!!

maybe YOU'RE the target market for a twerking teenager growing up right before our eyes (although, if Miley has Daddy issues, maybe you unwittingly actually are), but I'm not sure I'd advertise that on this part of the internet!

Otherwise, yeah, 40-something white guys drive pop/youth culture. SURE they do.

 

Lose previous point, move the goalposts. And hey, since it’s you, why not throw in a straw man for good measure? Classic Jimmery. 

Who said anything about “driving” pop culture? I didn’t find Madonna’s antics particularly entertaining back in the day. And according to your self-imposed rules for all, that was a relevant opinion since I was well below the age cutoff. So I’d really love to hear your explanation as to why my disdain for the “shock ‘em at any cost” approach was relevant then, but not now. Because age ain’t cutting it. No sir, it is not. 

This isn’t about twerking, this is about complete image. 

And honestly, it would be nice if you were self-aware enough to realize that speaking for an entire age group, gender, and race comes across as extreme insecurity. 

1 hour ago, felser said:

I think that pretty well explains why I don't listen to much of anything on the pop music front from the last 30 years, don't watch any TV shows (just news and sports), see less than a half dozen new movies each year.   Pop Culture sees me as a relic of the past, so that's what I will be.

That’s too bad, as some of the best shows in tv history have come out in the last 20 years. Breaking Bad and The Wire immediately come to mind. 

[JSngry]

13 minutes ago, Scott Dolan said:

Lose previous point, move the goalposts. And hey, since it’s you, why not throw in a straw man for good measure? Classic Jimmery. 

Dude, pay attention. I know it's Friday, but still...

My comment was about Miley Cyrus. You inferred that to refer to "music". I corrected you misassumption and pointed out that no, point not about music, point about pop culture. Music is but one component of pop culture, possibly the least significant part of it, actually. But anyway, I commented, you misunderstood, I clarified, and now you're still Angry Clown-ing. Not my problem.

For some reason, you act like you want to believe that your demographic is still a driving factor in pop culture. That's understandable, because you still have kids at home. But time will do what it do, and the older they get, the more you'll see that whatever interaction you have with it becomes increasingly from the POV of a spectator. And then at some point, really, there will be a generation or two removed pop culture equivalent of today's Miley Cyrus and you will SO not give a fuck about any of it unless you're a professional sociologist or something like that. Otherwise it will just be weird.

[Scott Dolan]

One

More

Time

Find someone to read this out loud and explain it if necessary. 

I SAID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT DRIVING POP CULTURE. 

Are we clear? That is a straw man of your own creation. I’ve actually never “driven” pop culture, nor have any of my comments been relevant TO pop culture.

And you didn’t answer my question, because if you do then your foolish argument goes up in flames. 

[JSngry]

47 minutes ago, Scott Dolan said:

I didn’t find Madonna’s antics particularly entertaining back in the day. And according to your self-imposed rules for all, that was a relevant opinion since I was well below the age cutoff. So I’d really love to hear your explanation as to why my disdain for the “shock ‘em at any cost” approach was relevant then, but not now.

Hell, maybe you were a weird kid. Plenty of them around, then and now. With a few exceptions, I was completely out of "rock" from about 1969 on. so I was an outlier within my own demographic. But my demographic most certainly was driving the pop culture the day.

"Pop culture" by definition deals with input and output geared towards a mass entity, a bulk value. If there's more outliers than not, it's not pop culture. So, if you were an outlier to the whole Madonna thing in your day, of course you would not be a part of driving pop culture. But that's you specifically. Your bulk demographic certainly felt otherwise. 

Just because you're engaged in elements of today's pop culture, don't mistake that for actually being a part of what's driving it. If it makes you feel good, hey. Just saying, Miley Cyrus, no matter how much you like her, is not looking at you or your demographic as her most important audience, nor is the industry around her. She might pivot, like Gaga, to accommodate her own aging, but just remember - you had your chance with Madonna and Madonna will always be closer to your age than you are to Miley Cyrus.

And at some point, they'll all be old.

 

[Scott Dolan]

So what drives pop culture? 

[JSngry]

Pop!

Seriously, though. "Pop Culture" is just what it says - the culture of all things in and around "pop". Not popular, because then Branson would be a hub of pop culture, right?

Pop, with it now, people wanting to belong to the same now as "everybody else", belonging first, discernment later (if ever). There's a default to a lack of maturity (as distinguished from immaturity) that is built-in to being young, pop culture scouts, signs, glorifies, and then releases as needed. Few surivive, few are supposed to. Disposability is built in, the only real anecdote is nostalgia, which is not pop culture, that's a thing unto itself.

[Scott Dolan]

Is Game of Thrones part of pop culture? 

[JSngry]

Now, if that means something different to you than it does to me, ok. I'm not hear to mindfuck your vocabulary. But I do think its one of those things that everybody likes to think they belong to, but really, they don't. "pop" is by definition (imo) always in front (the better to collect the money and rotate the product), and at some point, it's is truly meet, right, and salutary for people to get out of all that mess, they got their own place to go to.

And that, to me, is the mindfuck of nostalgia culture. It's pop culture for people who no longer are pop but still want to be marketed to.

And yes - The Wire is one of the greatest shows ever. But if you come to it later (and I did), forget about it being pop culture. It's now just history.

Just now, Scott Dolan said:

Is Game of Thrones part of pop culture? 

Right now it is, hell yeah. I'll be damned if I can talk to anybody under 35 who is not talking about it ALL the time.

And I've yet to watch an episode. someday, maybe. After its history!

[Scott Dolan]

So, the second largest demographic for GOT is 30-44y.o. 

Can they speak with any relevance? 

Point being, pop culture may be largely driven by a younger demographic, but there is a lot of help involved.

[JSngry]

I'd think that a lot of people 30-44 would be familiar with Miley Cyrus. She's been in the spotlight in some form or fashion since 2006. If nothing else, their kid sisters would have watched Hanna Montana. Dude, if you bought ANYTHING for a teenager damn near ANYWHERE back in those days, that Hanna Montana shit was inescapable. 13 years is a long time when you're young.

GOT first went on the air in 2011 - 8 years ago. So move that core demographic back to 22-36. 36 is still that "young-ish" age, around the time where you start getting middle-aged but think you're not. Or at least HOPE you're not. Seriously, depending on when/if you've started a family, things evolve (and they should).

And of course there's a "lot of help" involved. There's a multi-billion dollar industry built around it, most all of which ends up putting money in must-assuredly not young people's pockets. But that's the Man Behind The Curtain Syndrome. Pop culture itself gleefully seizes on the moment as where it finds it and never looks behind the curtain until it's too late. That man stays ahead of them, always.

Of course, I kinda keep an eye on things, just because old habits die hard, and partially because my kinds are still young enough to be into it in the way that only truly young people can be. It was my son and his wife (then girlfriend) who were in on GOT from the git-go. They're both 33 now, so do that math. And they DO have an opinion about Miley Cyrus, which is that they don't really want to see her ever again.

But - they've seen her in the context of a real-time, that's ALL they know baseline that people who are older just don't get any other time except at that time of their life. Their dislike is SO much more relevant than my indifference. And as they have their own adult lives and relationships, I can see them already losing interest in fads and such. Whoever the next Miley Cyrus is, they won't care at all. The one AFTER the next one, they might well be the parent of a kid who cares. And so it goes.

And fwiw, my indifference doesn't mean that it's not interesting to watch her evolve, nor that it won't be fun to watch her continue to evolve. But it does mean that when that when she's not on center stage any more and the only people who still care start filing in from the Nostalgia Culture lobby, I'll either be dead or will have not noticed her absence. That's gonna be somebody else's party.

I dunno man, maybe It's A Grandparent Thing And You Wouldn't Understand. at this time. With any luck, in time you will.. 

 

[Scott Dolan]

All fair enough. 

Can you explain the Gaga phenomenon? The cats that got me to even pay attention to her were my age or older. 

I don’t care about “real time” or “baselines”, I just want to know what the fuck you really think is going on. Because while I don’t subscribe to your notion of what “drives” pop culture, I’m at least open to what you have to say. God help me...

[JSngry]

Gaga's really not about music, that's what I think.

She's very intelligent, artistic even, but she's not really about music, not as an end to itself. She's about a total product, package, image, concept. Singing is included, but I've heard some live things that show her to be somebody with good raw tools, but not at all developed. But that's ok, for what she's up to, that's ok. IMO, she's state-of-the-art as far as actively engaging in pop culture in a knowing way. And if I think she's state-of-the-art, that almost certainly means that somebody's already coming up behind her that I just don't know about yet.

She knows what she's doing, pretty much exactly. As did Madonna. Madonna worked it really well at least until she was about 45 or so and then kept going without totally losing cred. Gaga seems to be setting her sights on that same sort of path/career arc, and so far she's doing just fine at it.

But here again - the youth were into Gaga first. The people I knew who were really into her at first were all kids of my friends. THEY got their folks (usually dads) into her. I noticed her pivot from pure youth culture to a more "mature" angle when she hosted SNL a few years ago, she did a skit about how when she was old, nobody would remember her and shit like that. She played herself older. Pretty self-aware, which is where the longevity is in a pop icon's survival. KNOWING that you're a product and rolling with it, owning it. IMO.

But dude, guys your age (what did you say you were, 46?), hey, she's got a killer body from top to bottom, is not afraid to use it as a prop, and she's 15 or so years younger than y'all. Whatever the intellectual appeal (and I'm not minimizing the potential for that)....just sayin'.  It's not a new story, she knows that, and she's working it like a virtuoso. And that is a compliment, seriously. She knows how to get your attention, and then hold it. Not just anybody can do that at the level she does it.

That's what I think, to the extent that I care. I'm more than willing to neither care nor try to. And my opinion is really NOT relevant. It's NICE to be irrelevant about stuff like this, really, it is!

[Scott Dolan]

48, less than a month away from 49. And she didn’t lure me in with her body. My first exposure to her was the video for Bad Romance. I actually found her to be a bit of an ugly duckling, but thought the song was fantastic. So if she was actually trying to be sexually alluring, it definitely wasn’t working for me, but the talent was glaringly obvious. 

So for years I kind of admired her from a distance, but when Joanne was released I was all the way in. And then her turn in A Star Is Born showed what a great actress she is, and how downright beautiful she really is. 

 

 

 

[jazzmusicdepot]

Our home office is located 5 miles from the original Woodstock site. Now Bethel Woods. I'm glad the Watkins Glen concert was cancelled. There will still be a  smaller scale celebration locally. Where it should take place! 

 

Aside from promoting Jazz I am also a UPS driver and years ago I was the regular driver at Bethel Woods. One Friday afternoon in 2009 I was delivering to the dock and was very annoyed that another truck was taking up the dock for 20 minutes.  So I went up to the dock and decided to give them some hell. The truck driver said that it will be awhile so I went inside to complain.  Standing in the office was Greg Allman and Oteil Burbridge. They laughed and said if the UPS guys leaves you wont have t shirts to sell. As I had them in my truck. They got 6 or 7 stage hands to come out and unload for me by hand.

Just a a story I wanted to share that I will never forget.

 

 

[RiRiIII]

20 hours ago, jazzmusicdepot said:

Our home office is located 5 miles from the original Woodstock site. Now Bethel Woods. I'm glad the Watkins Glen concert was cancelled. There will still be a  smaller scale celebration locally. Where it should take place! 

 

Aside from promoting Jazz I am also a UPS driver and years ago I was the regular driver at Bethel Woods. One Friday afternoon in 2009 I was delivering to the dock and was very annoyed that another truck was taking up the dock for 20 minutes.  So I went up to the dock and decided to give them some hell. The truck driver said that it will be awhile so I went inside to complain.  Standing in the office was Greg Allman and Oteil Burbridge. They laughed and said if the UPS guys leaves you wont have t shirts to sell. As I had them in my truck. They got 6 or 7 stage hands to come out and unload for me by hand.

Just a a story I wanted to share that I will never forget.

 

 

Great, thanks!

[Matthew]

Well, back to the original topic: I would've have loved to get the whole 38 cd, etc., set, but at $800.00, what. the. heck. That's over $20.00 per cd, so I'm out. I'm just a an old hippie, I guess.

Also, looking at the track list, I see Richie Havens is down for eleven songs, and I remember he did an interview where he said he spent hours on stage singing because no one else was prepared to go on. Hmm...

[Rooster_Ties]

4 hours ago, Matthew said:

Well, back to the original topic: I would've have loved to get the whole 38 cd, etc., set, but at $800.00, what. the. heck...

I'd love to borrow someone's complete 38-CD set for a couple months, listen to it all -- and then I'd (probably) never have.. to or want to... hear practically any of it ever again.

I hope it's possible to stream the whole thing in some way, eventually.  But if I never get to hear any of it (beyond the Hendrix DVD that I already own), that's OK with me too.

It'd be fun to hear a lot of the more obscure stuff, but I know I'd be tempted to FF through a bunch of it too.

[bertrand]

1. So the problem with the Hendrix tunes is Larry Lee singing?

2. I thought the Grateful Dead hated their Woodstock set and did not want it released?

[felser]

13 hours ago, bertrand said:

1. So the problem with the Hendrix tunes is Larry Lee singing?

Well, that's one of the problems.  Hendrix is just lost musically with the people he had on hand (I won't call it a group).    

21 hours ago, Matthew said:

Well, back to the original topic: I would've have loved to get the whole 38 cd, etc., set, but at $800.00, what. the. heck. That's over $20.00 per cd, so I'm out. I'm just a an old hippie, I guess.

Also, looking at the track list, I see Richie Havens is down for eleven songs, and I remember he did an interview where he said he spent hours on stage singing because no one else was prepared to go on. Hmm...

I'm not going $800 either, pre-ordered the 10CD set from importcds for $109.   If you ever saw Havens live (I did three times), he did a LOT of talking between songs (charmingly so) telling long stories and such, and at an event like that, given the various circumstances, that was probably even more true, so I could see him filling a few hours with 11 songs. 

[Rooster_Ties]

33 minutes ago, felser said:

Well, that's one of the problems.  Hendrix is just lost musically with the people he had on hand (I won't call it a group).

Yeah, the biggest plus (maybe only plus) of Hendrix at Woodstock is that it was an outdoor concert filmed during the day (daylight hours).

Musically it's really all over the place.  I'll never not love hearing him do "Spanish Castle Magic", and "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" is always pretty powerful, and the two very guitar-centric instrumentals at the very end (between "Purple Haze" and "Hey Joe") are pretty darn lovely.   And of course the Star Spangled Banner is about as sonically iconic as it gets.

But other than that, there's little about Jimi's set to write home about -- other than the chance to see some pretty good footage, with daylight "lighting" for a change.

I wouldn't call it a 'group' either -- other than Mitch and Billy, of course.  But the others just drag the whole thing down, more often than not.

[felser]

This is where I most often go for my live Hendrix (plus "Machine Gun" from 'Band of Gypsies')

[jazzbo]

15 hours ago, bertrand said:

1. So the problem with the Hendrix tunes is Larry Lee singing?

2. I thought the Grateful Dead hated their Woodstock set and did not want it released?

It's already been released at least in large part on the blu-ray.

[gvopedz]

the Woodstock 50 team announced that it has enlisted the help of Oppenheimer & Co. to complete financing for the three-day event to take place in August.

https://www.vulture.com/2019/05/woodstock-50-is-back-on-maybe.html