my power pop addiction, no. 116 (188)

Emitt Rhodes yesterday, Badfinger today. This must be the week of damaged lives and the first wave of Beatles simulacra. Badfinger were the first of the bands trying to sound like a band trying to sound like the Beatles, if that makes sense. The Byrds were obviously influenced by the Beatles on their first few albums, but they took the Beatles’ sound and made it their own by injecting folk into the mix, whereas with Badfinger (and with Emitt Rhodes as well, I suppose), the relationship to the Beatles was more purely mimetic. They took a lot of shit for this. My cursory survey of reviews archived on the internet revealed that critics tended to find the blatant imitation to be grating. Robert Christgau, for example, in his Consumer Guides review of Badfinger’s Straight Up, wrote that he was “forced to wonder whether [he] wouldn't like this record if it were by the Beatles. But without mentioning what the question says about the group, which is called Badfinger, the answer is that the Beatles couldn't have made this record. Except for ‘Day After Day’ and ‘Perfection,’ not one of these unabashedly tuneful tunes has any magic to it, which isn't simply a matter of cautious tempos and harmonies--it's a matter of magic.” My sense is that critics had yet to come to terms with the postmodern condition as the age of aesthetic simulation. And, to be fair, it would have been difficult to do so at that time as postmodernity was only beginning to assert itself unevenly in the culture at large. Things are very different today. It has long been the case now that it’s virtually impossible to talk about music, literature, fine art, cinema, etc. without reference to what/who it sounds, reads or looks like. So then the question becomes, if all art is now necessarily derivative and always already engaged in a chain of reference, is any of it any good? That’s a little heavier than what I feel capable of at the moment, so let’s bring it down a few notches: Are Badfinger any good? Do they fill you with inspiration and creative energy, or do they merely engender a kind of depressed fatigue in marking the start of a prolonged age of cultural exhaustion? In other words, how do you feel when you come to the realization that there’s no longer anything new under the sun?