Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive. Johnny Mercer. 1944.

The world I was born into in 1966, the world that gave rock and roll its temporary home, began sometime in the early days of August, 1945. It was a period of epic cruelty, culminating in the twin blasts of nuclear energy that signaled the start of yet another gory wave of American triumphalism. Mankind had entered into the twentieth century bloody and death-obsessed, hurtling now towards annihilation at speeds inconceivable to preceding generations. Musical tempos favored by American jazz artists—many of whom had either direct or indirect knowledge of the modern savagery—echoed the chaotic urgency of industry and resonated with pop audiences who were now teaching themselves how to live within the shadow of the threat of world destruction; but a new aggression, less refined, openly sexual, and cathartic, would soon find its way into music. This aggression, steeped in multi-generational years of indigent survival and preternatural strength, transitioned out of the musical tradition that jazz artists from the pre-rock era had always relied upon as a primal, inspirational source when infusing their music with the mysterious human quality of need: the devil’s music, American blues. That blues, along with Johnny Mercer’s patrician southern upbringing, is written into this recitation of his own lyric, music by Harold Arlen. It’s a sexy, masculine performance, and it endures because of the way it seamlessly, seductively, combines its influences, defining pop music now for over three quarters of a century. My mother became a teenager late in the summer of 1945 and felt the allure of blues-influenced pop music, allowing herself to be taken in, and used, by it. It was at odds with her Hispanic, Roman Catholic upbringing, but the ghostly eroticism of masculine, feminine voices giving life to her fantasies charged her adolescence with a sense of humanism that she couldn’t get from religion alone or the sacrificial work ethic her Mexican immigrant parents espoused. When my grandmother Cenobia resolved to pull my mother out of school to use as domestic help, my mother fought her over the choice, determined to go to high school and experience her teenage years unyoked to her parents’ working class, migrant expectations, and to become that most precious global signifier, a young twentieth century American. Her richly sensual interior life was now robust with distinctly American appetites, and the modern world rumbled around her with dangerous promise. She was ready for fulfillment.


May 28 021

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