What Happened to Rod McKuen?
slate.com
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I've often thought of and lamented the former idea. That the serendipity of the algorithms is less serendipitous than browsing a local record store. But what I've not considered much is that we, digital age folk, leave nothing behind. When I was young my mom had a pile of 45 rpm records. It was great browsing through those as a kid, knowing what my mom was into as a teenager. What do we leave our children? Our Spotify account? It's just not the same. Records have character. Worn dust jackets, scratches. A physical human held and cared for these. It's a snapshot of a point in time. Newspaper clippings, ticket stubs, it's all going away. They can look at a long-dead iPhone 3G and wonder what music or videos I played on it.
I plan to do the same, but about 3-4x more stuff.
And if my kids response to that is anything like mine to my mother's music, they will barely ever listen to any of it.
I think this is more of an issue with headphones than with the inability to inherit digital files. (Which, as you note, doesn't exist.)
When I was small my mother would play CDs on a home stereo system. So if she was listening to music, I heard it.
This means that I'm familiar with and like some of her music. If she left me a pile of CDs I'd never heard, I would most likely not bother listening to them.
What I get now is how he used his albums to travel back in time to re-live glory days of when he was seeing the world and watching the effect his voice would have on people in different ports. Using your voice to make music is such a personal form of expression.
Understanding the music choices of your parents is one way of knowing who they were, often to some surprise after they are gone. I'm left with his albums now and they help me make that connection with the past and a renewed love for music back from the time when I was first learning it singing with him.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/your-kids-dont-wa...
Of course, there are always a few exceptions in the form of sentimentally- or actually-valuable objects that your children have expressed a specific interest in.
> Records have character. Worn dust jackets, scratches. A physical human held and cared for these. It's a snapshot of a point in time. Newspaper clippings, ticket stubs, it's all going away.
Yep. What works well for me is to KonMari that shit — reflect on it, express your gratitude, say goodbye, and let it go.
Personally, I find it incredibly fascinating to come across those kinds of breadcrumbs that give an insight in how a life was lived decades ago. Be it from my parents or even from more distant people.
I came across a personal office ones that was long abandoned, complete with decades old wall calendar, magazines, wrappers of old snacks etc., and it just had a certain magic.
I, too, lament how much of the "physicality" of life has been taken away, and enjoy the little mementos that I kept from both my own life and my family's.
McKuen put a semi-handsome face and a semi-pleasant voice to it and so lasted quite a while.
He's really easy to hate though. I hated him before I even knew his name. He wrote the lyrics to "Seasons in the Sun". Fuck you, Rod McKuen.
> Jacks released his version as a single in 1973 on his own label, Goldfish Records. "Put the Bone In", an original composition about burying a deceased pet dog, was included as the B-side.
— Wikipedia
Ouch. That's damning of you. BTW I don't know if being interesting is strongly correlated with IQ anyway.
Or maybe stretch armstrong (they (lol) pulled him)
I don't miss feelings. ("Feelings, wo oh oh feelings Wo oh oh, feel you again in my arms")
Went down the Wikipedia rabbit hole and learned that McKuen just translated them from the original French lyrics by Jacques Brel. Terry Jacks rewrote that translation for his popular rendition, which I'm guessing is the version most people hate^H^H^H^H are familiar with.
You can hear McKuen's translation of the original lyrics in The Kingston Trio's version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CnxktZzjD4
While I'm not defending McKuen, if you are going to be a critic at least be an interesting critic. To quote the linked article:
> Even the critics who weren’t quite so overtly snobby clearly disdained McKuen’s fans for the crime of merely being ordinary. Hentoff witheringly describes the crowd at Carnegie Hall as “contingents of thirtyish women who might have come from the airline offices, the telephone company, innumerable typing pools.” Future Hollywood writer Nora Ephron wrote a McKuen takedown in Esquire, called “Mush,” that observes the audience at a D.C. show: “You won’t see any of your freaks here, no sir, any of your tie-dye people, any of your long-haired kids in jeans lighting joints. This is middle America.” When Nora Ephron calls you middlebrow: sheesh!
That at least is at interesting.
> He's really easy to hate though. I hated him before I even knew his name. Fuck you, Rod McKuen.
Hating on something easy to hate - how dull and vapid.
Try - instead - hating on the faux-intellectualism of HN or its even more explicit intellectually snobby brethren (looking at you lesswrong). Criticism of easy targets with few defenders is as forgettable and boring as the material it seeks to attack.
A bit later, I noticed that the same magazine would now and then pick out some other figure--the columnist Lewis Grizzard or the singer Robert Goulet--for a good beating that seemed out of proportion with the space they took up in the readership's psyches, perhaps out of proportion with their demerits. Do we need figures to think poorly of to reassure ourselves of the value of our positive judgments?
I imagine also that some of the critics who looked down on McKuen had good words for singers and writers equally forgotten now.
"What to make of Rod McKuen?"
In fact, it's a much more interesting read.