Ah, they don't teach the classics any more. Some people just look blankly at you when you invoke "The Three Little Bops." Everybody knows a few great Looney Toons, but those spoiled by grad school often rattle off a slightly wrong list of cartoons, the half-consciously arty later work of Chuck Jones. Nothing wrong with Jones; he brought Daffy himself to his peak, and there's no higher praise than that. His fans are simply wrong. I don't mean wrong about some particular matter; I mean wrong people, wrong in the aestheto-fascist sense, as in, "This is a wrong person, so please stand him/her up against the nearest pockmarked wall, will you, Lieutenant?"
Of course, I'd have to be stood up against that same wall, about a thousand times over. People like me simply should not be allowed to talk about Looney Toons. We ruin everything we mention. It's the basis of the academic profession, ruining anything decent.
But here I am, alive and yapping despite all the probabilites, so let's commence the contamination.
"The Three Little Bops" is part of the l0ng and glorious series of Looney Toons using the most common fairy tales for a bassline. Nearly all of these are great, but "Bops" is one of the best and for some reason the least known. It's one of those perfect products of California just as it was about to be swamped, the era of Philip K. Dick's early novels and the San Francisco movies of Hitchcock.. Pre-rock, pre-hippie, something autumnal about the music and the style. "Bops" makes the three little pigs into jazz musicians--and I hate jazz. Bart Simpson put it best, explaining why cartoons are the only native American art form: "I don't include jazz, because it sucks."
And the three little pigs look jazzy: one has a pork pie hat, another a beret. I winced at the picture. But the music they play isn't jazz at all. It's got a beat, it's simple and insistent, and in fact to my pop ear sounds exactly like the tune of "Rock Around the Clock." That was such a relief that after enjoying the cartoon for the tenth or eleventh time, I looked up the musicians on the credits. The musical director is Shorty Rogers, credited with a big influence on "the West Coast sound." Which I'm guessing means, "Sneaking an actual tune and a decent beat into the musical wanking called jazz."
6 comments:
I'll always remember your rendition of a Loony Tune tune at your farewell from U of O.
That autumnal sense of things before the hippies crashed in on the scene, reminds me a little of the same sense over here before the big towns swallowed the little towns. When there used to be a town called Kelso (a town in West Otago that no longer exists because it never recovered after a flood.)
You should keep writing in this, as I enjoy reading your writing. Especially the book recommendations, as I've found them very fruitful.
The obvious, Exile-style answer to this is "fuck you, pay me", which of course I'm not going to do except possibly in flattery, with no promise that I flatter well. But there's that.
Response to John Dolan article on Tennessee shooting...
I take umbridge with this author's outrageous racist, bigoted and highly uneducated remarks:
"Ulster America founded by violent sectarians who moved westward again and again, from Scotland to Northern Ireland and then to the southern United States, then again westward into the American continent."
Why is it that so-called "liberals" believe it is perfectly okay to make blanket racist and bigoted statements against an entire culture of people, in this case my ancestors from Scotland, just as long as their skin is not dark?
And his version of U.S. history is grossly innacurate; there were plenty enough violent people from practically every culture represented in the so-called "taming" of the wild, wild West to go around. Just consider our violent founding-fathers themselves, including the slave-owning Tom Jefferson, who sent out Louis and Clark to explore the vast unknown; hardly a Scotsman among them.
Why would he single out the Scots? Imagine the outcry from AlterNet readers if he had made the same absurd blanket statement against Natives, Latinos or African-Americans or even the mostly non-violent Swedes and Mennonites who helped populate "Ulster" America.
What a load of horseshit! People are violent from all over the place, regardless of skin tone or national or cultural origin. Human history is full of violent people from every culture, every ethnicity and every nation. This author needs to open up a history book and Bible or two and otherwise, keep his head out of the vast sewer of prejudicial iniquity. We have enough problems here in Tennessee without this author adding to the great human garbage heap of bigotry and hatred.
My grandfather, who immigrated to the U.S. from Aberdeen, Scotland, was among the most intelligent, non-prejudiced and least violent of all human beings who every walked on God's slowly browning earth.
WHY IS IT OKAY TO POST THIS LOAD OF RACIST BUSH-APPLE PROPAGANDA ON ALTERNET, OR ANYWHERE ELSE IN AMERICA?
yo keep updating dog
Mr. Aberdeen, there is one important mistake in your comment. John Dolan is not a liberal.
Dr. Dolan,
I used to work at AUI-S July-Oct '09 and I would love to get in contact with you. You mentioned an incident involving me in one of your articles.
carlajo18@gmail.com
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