Sentimentality

[poliphilo]

So what's the problem? Why is that word still used as a put-down? We all like a good cry, don't we?  Speaking for myself I love it when Dickens emotes over a dead kiddy or Richard Curtis makes amends to Van Gogh. I don't find such moments embarrassing. I don't find them cheap. Life is sad and tears are the proper response to a lot of what goes on in it.  Is making people weep any less respectable than making them laugh?

We've all been intimidated by Oscar Wilde- and his bon mot about Little Nell. He's made it uncool to be moved by fiction. And yet Wilde was the most sentimental writer going. Have you read the Selfish Giant or the Happy Prince? He makes Dickens look stoical.

Wilde- and the twentieth century opinion makers that followed him- had daddy issues with the Victorians.  Their mockery isn't thought through. It's instinctive and defensive. The Victorians were sentimental, therefore sentimentality is bad.  But it's the Twenty First century now,  the Victorians are our great-great-great grandparents- and it's time we dropped our great-great grandparents feud with them.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think rock music is dead and gone- or should be. It had a great, few decades in the middle of the last century, but it's a limited form and it's got nothing new to say- and it's really time to move on. "Screw you, daddy!" makes sense coming from an angsty teen with a 1950s paterfamilias but not a lot when the paterfamilias used to be a rocker himself- or the singer is a grandfather (like Mick Jagger).

One reason the Beatles have lasted so well is because they transcended the genre.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I'd be hard-pressed to call a lot of (or even most of) the Beatles's oeuvre "rock and roll." Things like Norwegian Wood and Across the Universe are some genre, but they're not rock. Or maybe they're no genre at all... maybe they're just music.

I do find it astonishing to come back to bands decades later and hear them singing the same kind of music they did when they were 18 and angry. It sounds rather ridiculous coming out of married men with children and sometimes grandchildren.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

You're right about the Beatles. There are rock 'n' roll numbers in the mix- but a lot of what they did was something else entirely. Mind you, I think they thought of themselves as rockers.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

i think by the standards of the time they were. We forget how tame the sixites were in some regsrds

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It was, after all, the decade that made Englebert Humperdinck (sp) a huge star.

[mokie]

It may have nothing new to say, but each generation brings it someone new to say it to.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I suppose. I have to admit I'm terribly out of touch, these days.

[mokie]

Same here. I don't know that what's playing right now can rightly be called rock'n'roll, but we seem to wobble reliably between happy dance tunes and grumpy rebellious music. I'm guessing once Gaga wears off, the angry kids will pipe up and someone will dub it rock.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm waiting for the watershed- the Elvis Presley moment- when the music scene will be purged- and something completely new will take over. I reckon it's overdue.