Sam Smith Feels Love for Summer

Sam Smith has released a cover of the disco classic, “I Feel Love”:

It’s just a coincidence that it also showed up in Target’s new Christmas ad, right?  Right?

Of course, Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte’s original version is the greatest disco song, and one of the greatest pop songs of all time, period:

 

Wrapping the Lower East Side in Nostalgia

The debate over Target’s awkward attempt to appropriate CBGB’s enduringly cool brand is not really about who will define the neighborhood’s present (the developers have already won that fight), but who will define its past.

In the Village Voice, urban preservationist Jeremiah Moss described Target’s CBGB wrapping as “an entire Potemkin East Village,”* but this was actually the reverse. A Potemkin village creates a false-front to mask the old, or non-existent, to give an appearance of a new and thriving city. Target, however, placed a temporary sheath on a new building to evoke (a carefully sanitized version of) the old, like those “renovations” that save a building’s façade, but build an entirely new building behind it.

Target was clearly seeking to capitalize upon nostalgia.  And I understand why some people were upset by this commodification of their past, especially since the chain’s arrival is a later wave in the gentrification that priced CBGB out of the neighborhood in the first place, but the naysayers are promoting their own brand of nostalgia, albeit of a different kind.

Svetlana Boym, author of The Future of Nostalgia, distinguishes between two types of nostalgia. “Restorative nostalgia” attempts to revive or reconstruct a slice of the past, some supposed “golden era” a person or group misses, often based more on myth and vague childhood memories than historical reality, and in the process “make (fill in the blank) great again,” emphasis on the again. Target literally reconstructed an idealized version of the neighborhood’s past.

“Reflective nostalgia,” however, is steeped in melancholy and longing for a piece of the past that now stands in ruins, focusing on what might have been. These are the 1980s East Village ruins reflective punk nostalgics like Moss mourn, . . .

. . . here described by Jean Michel Basquiat, filmed in 1980-1981 (though not released until almost two decades later):

New York City came very close to declaring bankruptcy in the mid-’70s:

Artists of various sorts moved into the ruins of the East Village, SOHO and Alphabet City for the cheap rent in the remaining partially to completely abandoned apartment buildings and, especially, former factory spaces in SOHO. There were artists such as Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz (featured in a current exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art), Hannah Wilke, Nan Goldin and Sue Coe, along with “Pictures Generation” artists like Sherry Levine, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman; performers such as Karen Finley, Ann Magnuson, Laurie Anderson and Eric Bogosian. Then there were the musicians, punk, jazz, no wave, minimalist and beyond, who flocked to the lower east side.

Of course, these divisions were nowhere near so distinct in practice. There was a lot of overlap, with artists such as Richard Prince and Robert Longo performing in bands, while designing record covers for still other bands, with musicians like John Lurie providing soundtracks for films, etc.

Publications such as Just Another Asshole (1978-1987), Bomb (1981-present), Raw (1980-1991) and the East Village Eye (1979-1987) were launched to feature all of this work outside the mainstream. Galleries and clubs opened for the artists to show their work, White Columns (1970-present), Colab (1977-present), especially its influential Times Square Show in 1980, the New Museum (1977-present), Club 57 (1978-1983) and Mudd Club (1978-1983). And CBGB (1973-2006). Many of the musicians who played these spaces also performed on the public access cable show TV Party (1978-1982), co-hosted by writer Glenn O’Brien and Blondie’s Chris Stein.

The neighborhood also served as the background in numerous indie films. The ghost town was the setting for Amos Poe’s The Foreigner (1978):

With no working streetlights, the no man’s (or woman’s) land provided the nightmarish setting for Abel Ferraro and frequent collaborator Nicholas St. John’s exploitation film Driller Killer (1979), in which a painter is driven mad by the band practicing next door:

The opening of Jim Jarmusch‘s Permanent Vacation (1980) contrasts the nearly deserted East Village with the still thriving business district:

Downtown 81, The Foreigner, Permanent Vacation and Smithereens mostly just follow one character walking around the empty streets of the East Village.

Soon enough, though, all tomorrow’s parties began to pall for many. At the end of Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation, Allie departs the city for France. Wren spends much of Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens (1982) trying to gather enough money to move to Los Angeles with punk rocker Richard Hell, but is last seen alone, walking across the bridge to the New Jersey she had hoped never to return to:

Club 57 and the Mudd Club both closed in 1983. The following year Emily Listfield published her novel It Was Gonna Be Like Paris:

Note the past perfect tense and the wistful sentiment of the title, reflecting nostalgically upon what might have been, not what was.

Is it a coincidence that 1984 also made a best-seller of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, in which Robert Longo’s suited “Men in the Cities” slum it in bohemian clubs?

That year was also the terminal date the Grey Gallery placed on the scene in its 2006 exhibition, The Downtown Show: 1974-1984.

It is only after a scene fades that nostalgia can take complete hold, no longer having to compete with reality. Instead, nostalgia relies on carefully curated memory.

Writers like Stewart Meyer, friend and onetime chauffeur for junkie laureate William S. Burroughs, and Stephen Paul Cohen reveled in the dirt and drugs of Alphabet City in their novels The Lotus Crew (1984) and Heartless (1986), as did Sarah Schulman in After Delores (1998). (Alphabet City was also the title of a 1984 Amos Poe film about a drug dealer.)

Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck Up was initially self-published in 1992 under the aptly named imprint Hey Day Publications (with some very nice German Expressionist woodcut style illustrations by Kim Kowalski as chapter headings), . . .

. . . but was later reprinted by Akashic Books, which describes its contents as:

No simple tale of psychopathic yuppie greed, The Fuck-Up is a thriller with a literary soul set in the pre-chic Lower East Side. The narrative follows a nameless hero from the girlfriend who kicks him out for a most minor infidelity, . . . As he makes this emotional and socioeconomic odyssey through New York’s colorful if uncaring landscape, rarely with more than enough change for a cup of coffee at a Blimpie, he becomes embroiled in affairs and relationships built on mutual deceit and predicated on misinformation. The result is a descent into the world of the truly fucked up, a semi-delirious and amnesiac wandering that finds an end not in some predictable and cuddly redemption but in the solace of shared disillusion.

This novel is a, sometimes literal, crawl through the muck. It embraces a third kind of nostalgia, nostalgie de la boue (literally, nostalgia for the mud), which, as Tom Wolfe explains, “tends to be a favorite motif whenever a great many new faces and a lot of new money enter Society.” By the late ’80s, “a great many new faces and a lot of new money” were entering the East Village, so much that “The SOHO Effect” became the official title and model for the artists reviving abandoned, “bad” neighborhoods only to be priced out and forced to move on by gentrification pattern of urban development.

Now nothing’s left but the memories. But which memory will ultimately define this particular place and time for posterity? Will it be corporations’ nostalgic reconstructions, urban preservationists’ nostalgic reflections or novelists’ nostalgic wallowing in the mud?

But as Johnny Thunders, who helped define the East Village scene with the New York Dolls and, later, as the leader of the Heartbreakers, warned:

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* Moss goes on to claim that, perhaps more than CBGB, he mourns the loss of stoops where building occupants hung out, interacting with their neighbors and passersby. I would counter that air conditioning probably had a far bigger impact on people staying indoors during the summer than the loss of stoops.

This Ain’t No CBGB

Several blocks uptown on Bowery (and notably, north of Houston), Target opened its new East Village location with a temporary storefront emulating that of the long shuttered “birthplace of punk,” CBGB.

Playful homage or sacrilege? Personally, I think it’s the former, but many, including the blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, believed, “they have committed what might be the most deplorable commodification of local neighborhood culture I’ve ever witnessed.”*

Has punk rock become so sacred that it is now heresy to toy with one of its historical sites? How un-punk is that?

It’s not like CBGB itself has not long commodified itself. Just months after closing CBGB at 315 Bowery in late 2006, owner Hilly Kristal opened a storefront a few blocks away at 23 St. Marks Place to sell CBGB merchandise, including the ubiquitous CBGB t shirts, along with baby bibs, doggie clothes and even shower curtains. In 2005, the last full year the club was open, Kristal sold over $3 million of merchandise. (I have my t-shirt, bought at a friend’s band’s gig there, and belt buckle, bought long after it closed.) Although retaining the outward appearance of a historical marker, the current CBGB website exists primarily to sell club merch (alas, the shower curtains are no longer available).

Cue the outrage, even from the Old Gray Lady, hardly an early supporter, never mentioning CBGB, or even punk rock, until 1980, long after the club opened in 1973 and started booking (soon to be labeled) punk bands in 1974.

But wait, there’s more! Kristal initially planned to move CBGB, lock, stock and urinal, to Las Vegas:

We want to take a lot of this stuff with us, and I think we’re going to move to Las Vegas. . . . [The Vegas CBGB] won’t be the same size or the same shape, but I am going to have all the things that matter there. I am taking the bars with me, I am taking the stage — I’m taking the urinal that Joey [Ramone] pissed in with me. I’m going to take a lot of things — anything that makes this place CBGB.

I’ll make it CBGB, and even more so.

The simulacrum would become more real than the real.

That never happened. Instead, John Varvatos moved into 315 Bowery, preserving, under glass, the club’s, let’s call it, “distressed” decor.

The urinal ended up in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s New York Annex, just outside the museum’s real bathroom. Marcel Duchamp must be smiling.

I’m not sure where the fixture ended up after the Annex closed just over a year later.

Has anyone checked the restrooms at Newark Airport, where the CBGB LAB (Lounge and Bar) opened in 2015?

(Gotta love the generic EDM-lite Holt Construction Corp chose to showcase their recreated punk club.)

The bar and lounge has got a pretty lousy Yelp rating. How punk!

That’s a pretty amazing legacy for a club that never intended to book punk rock in the first place. Those initials on those CBGB OMFUG t-shirts stand for Country, BlueGrass, Blues, and Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers.

In an upcoming post I will look at the idea of punk in museums overall.

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* Target played it safe and issued an apology:

We often host a one-day celebration that shows the neighborhood how excited we are to be part of their community. We sincerely apologize if some eventgoers felt it was not the best way to capture the spirit of the neighborhood. We always appreciate guest feedback and will take it into consideration as we plan for future opening events.

Dynamite Song

A new Target ad features Alice Russell‘s “Dynamite” cover . . .

. . . of Brenda Lee‘s 1957 single:

Target Gets Lucky?

Any chance Target told Brando Christoph they wanted a song like Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” for their new “Pinata” ad?

Who you gonna call?  Ghostbusters?

And Now a Song from Our Sponsors

Target has added two more ads featuring “music room” covers.  The first is “Eye of the Tiger” . . .

. . . while the second seems to morph from halting scales to “Single Ladies”:

Shazam could not identify the song in this Nokia Lumia ad:

But last week a helpful commenter identified it as Chinawoman‘s “Russian Ballerina”:

Unfortunately, I still can’t track down the song in the “Flashbulbs” ad for Lexus:

Can anyone help?

Right on Target

Target‘s “School Shopping” ads began to appear several weeks ago, before summer was even half over.  The first featured a Casiotone version of Salt-n-Pepa‘s “Push It”:

Several more have recently joined that ad in rotation.  All feature covers of old songs, most from the ’80s, that sound like they were recorded with instruments found in a public school music room.

There is Queen‘s “Another One Bites the Dust” . . .

. . . Queen’s collaboration with David Bowie, “Under Pressure” . . .

. . . and Outkast‘s “Hey Ya”:

Apparently, the music was supplied by human ACOUSTICS™, which features slightly longer versions of these songs (along with numerous remixes of other songs) on their YouTube page:

These ads are certainly a huge improvement over last year’s campaign featuring various tone deaf teachers singing lists of school supplies to the tunes of various ’80s new wave hits.  My only question is why Target always uses old songs (even if they are reimagined) in their back to school ads instead of the Shazamable hip new songs featured in the rest of their advertising.  Maybe because they are targeting parents who can’t wait to send their kids back to school with their new shiny supplies, not the kids who do not even want to think about returning to class?