little boxes Malvina Reynolds
I think my (Silent Generation) mother objected to "Little Boxes" because it ridiculed everything she valued in life--home, family, education, a good job. I realize it was meant as a corrective to the unexamined values of the Eisenhower Era, but in retrospect it does seem pretty smug. Who does it speak to? Those who feel hipper and more enlightened than everyone else? How in the world was it ever popular?
Even the folk movement had it's cookie-cutter element. Maybe it attempts to clean house by speaking to them selves as well.
Then too the inner city attitude had it's own reason and place :
"During the 1950's and 1960's, Urban decline and the lack of construction of new affordable inner city housing led to increased
activity on the part of tenants to organize in the hope of halting evictions and to plan rent strikes. Tenants' movements emerged
in various U.S. cities. In this song Malvina Reynolds shows how dripping faucets, landlord greed, tenant suffering, rent control
laws, and dry reservoirs are all part of a single system. The New York Times reported on 29 July 1964 that "water leaks in one out
of every six apartments in New York City."
Yeah, it's a lame song, but what did the culture it critiques produce? The "Great American Songbook" of mid-century rarely gets beyond chasing sex (or, when it's "sophisticated", drunken sex). The lefties at least had a few other themes. Imagined superiority, moral or intellectual, is a fallback position the powerless may assume, and a slight salve for our alienation. The kicker is that these Movement songs were convincing enough to have a big impact on both high and low culture. The right is still whining about it, and using every opening (like the present "war") to attack the moral achievement of the left.
Irving Berlin is dead (God Bless America notwithstanding).
It might be suggested that Malvina is just a book-learned imitation of the jinuine article: Sarah Ogan Gunning, who wrote such lovely ditties as I Hate the Capitalist System.
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- bill 1-03-2002 6:42 pm
I think my (Silent Generation) mother objected to "Little Boxes" because it ridiculed everything she valued in life--home, family, education, a good job. I realize it was meant as a corrective to the unexamined values of the Eisenhower Era, but in retrospect it does seem pretty smug. Who does it speak to? Those who feel hipper and more enlightened than everyone else? How in the world was it ever popular?
- tom moody 1-03-2002 7:11 pm [add a comment]
Even the folk movement had it's cookie-cutter element. Maybe it attempts to clean house by speaking to them selves as well.
Then too the inner city attitude had it's own reason and place :
"During the 1950's and 1960's, Urban decline and the lack of construction of new affordable inner city housing led to increased activity on the part of tenants to organize in the hope of halting evictions and to plan rent strikes. Tenants' movements emerged in various U.S. cities. In this song Malvina Reynolds shows how dripping faucets, landlord greed, tenant suffering, rent control laws, and dry reservoirs are all part of a single system. The New York Times reported on 29 July 1964 that "water leaks in one out of every six apartments in New York City."
- bill 1-03-2002 10:51 pm [add a comment]
Yeah, it's a lame song, but what did the culture it critiques produce? The "Great American Songbook" of mid-century rarely gets beyond chasing sex (or, when it's "sophisticated", drunken sex). The lefties at least had a few other themes. Imagined superiority, moral or intellectual, is a fallback position the powerless may assume, and a slight salve for our alienation. The kicker is that these Movement songs were convincing enough to have a big impact on both high and low culture. The right is still whining about it, and using every opening (like the present "war") to attack the moral achievement of the left.
Irving Berlin is dead (God Bless America notwithstanding).
- alex 1-04-2002 1:10 am [add a comment]
It might be suggested that Malvina is just a book-learned imitation of the jinuine article: Sarah Ogan Gunning, who wrote such lovely ditties as I Hate the Capitalist System.
- alex 1-04-2002 6:47 pm [add a comment]