The Like, He’s Not A Boy (2010)

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I am liking The Like. (This song, anyway.) Way cool how these girls are acting out something like the Mod era fantasia of my youthful dreams.
 
Also, it is indeed most odd that this video is set in a law library! I must sadly report that few if any actual law libraries feature cute girls in vintage mod clothing go-go dancing, which is really a shame.
 
(Still, as cute as it is, this is a pastiche. The songs from the actual era 1965-66 are infinitely better than this. This is an era of cultural decline.)
 

13 thoughts on “The Like, He’s Not A Boy (2010)”

  2. Everything is retroeverything nowadays. A digital mixtape of popculture. Kids were keds, kids bob their hair, kids wear headbands, kids to mohawks, kids tattoo and wear combat boots and dippity-do hairdos right out of the fifties.

    If only they’d pull their damn pants up.

    Respectfully, I disagree with the musical cultural decline thing. Have you forgotten Lisa Hannigan and Camera Obscura so quickly? Remember the song French Navy?

    And the National, and Air, and all those French electronic ambient ambiance bands and PHOENIX PHOENIX PHOENIX!!!!

    I could go on and on and on and on and on….

    There is a very interesting early 90s garagy vibe going on right now, along with the retro 90s fashion theme hitting the mall. Buy your flannel scarves at the Gap now, and overpluck those eyebrows girls. Get a pixie or bob haircut and paint your lips with Lancome Mica**. It’s retro.

    *The song sounds like Nancy Sinatra, anyway. Time winnows about the weak pop culture chaff so that we remember the past more cleanly than it was.

    Well, opinions differ I suppose :)

    **I love Lancome Mica, or I did. Wanna know what I’m talking about? Look at Elaine on Seinfeld circa 1997 and that’s the lip color. Okay, back to reading about more serious stuff like Afghanistan 2050 although I just made Joseph Fouche’s point didn’t I?

    – Madhu

  3. Are there still books in law libraries? They were such wonderful places, like a tangible immersion Google where subjects never disappeared. But I figured by now they would be on a subscription set of cds.

  5. Thanks David for letting me know about this.

    I don’t know too much about American law, but although the sixties clothes, hair & makeup look pretty authentic, some of those law reports look like they date from the 1980s. This happened in MadMen as well, I think they had a scene in Don’s office where one of the books shown on the shelves had actually been published five years after the date on which the scene was supposed to be set.

  6. There are plenty of good things going on now.

    But if what you want is a three minute pop song, the Golden Age already happened.

    Most art forms have golden ages. And all golden ages are short. See Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization.

    That does not mean that no one ever does anything good again. It just means that for that form, or that medium, for that style, the standard has been set, the canon established, the best has been achieved.

    For the stuff I like best, that has already happened.

  7. Oh, I get it now Lex. It’s like me and books. Not into the contemporary American or Brit novel. Just not into it. I’d rather read Dickens.

    For music and me, though, it’s the opposite. I really like the late 90s-early aughties “little golden age” because I like chill out music and ambient stuff and all the funny Lollapalooza type bands out there right now.

    – Madhu

    PS: The internet is good that way because it allows you to make up your own little cultural dream world. It’s also bad that way too.

    @ Joseph Fouche: It is some sort of pop culture win and you’re right – no one knows what it means. Alas.

  9. Lexington, I agree with your general point — even though I play in a garage revival band, I know that what I’m doing is on some level rather like the RenFaire scene (and as a medievalist, that chills my freaking blood.) We can’t listen to this stuff with 1966 ears, any more than I can read Chaucer with 1386 eyes.

    At the same time, I think there may be a few atavistic young groups out there that play this style without winking. If you haven’t already, you might want to check out Better than Before, the first album from The Singles. Thanks for passing this along.

  10. Professor, it is indeed possible to play that music and not be an oldies act. You have to play, how to say this? You play through all the history so that you reach something like the place where the original guys were. You play as if you were waiting backstage at the Ready Steady Go! Show, with Jackie DeShannon on stage and the Stones up after you, and you don’t know or care about the years before and after but only about the minutes and seconds of each song as you play it. Transcend irony and pastiche by not trying to be one of our heroes from the day, but aim at the same place they were aiming at. Don’t have 1966 ears, have the timeless ears of the Rock Valhalla where the Ramones are forever about to release Rocket to Russia and the Who are playing at the Marquee Club and the Prime Movers are coming on stage at the Rat in Kenmore Square. It is all here and now and forever at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and even in a basement or a backyard in front of twelve people you are opening for the Velvet Underground, with the Modern Lovers up before you, and Brian Jones is in the audience. Play for him. There is always the Grandeur of Rock, even if you are the only guy in the room who can glimpse it. Go get it.

  11. LG: “This is an era of cultural decline.”

    Allow me to take a different tack. While I agree with the statement, irony is not lost that the same observation was made by folks in their late-30’s and beyond about the arrival of modernized “pop” in the 60’s.

    I believe the meaning derived from music is based on the the person listening and all of their accumulated experiences and knowledge (where knowledge is comprised of facts we “believe”—whether history or tradition). If one were to examine market demographic in macro of “modern pop” (and most modern music) I wonder “what” the listeners truly “believe.” Belief beyond the emotional is becoming a rare commodity, as we reap the consequences of moral relativism. The preponderance of violence is some modern genres of music can be traced to a distinct lack of “beliefs.”

    Sorry to ramble, but your sentence gives one much to consider—as we’re “part” of the culture.

  12. Lexington, we need to start a band. That’s precisely the attitude I try to take to this stuff when I play it. I’m gonna make mistakes, but I’ll mean them.

  13. It was said of my old band, these guys never tried to be good, they just wanted to be great. We were usually neither, but sometimes we left our claw-marks on greatness and made other see it too. Mistakes made from under-commitment, under-aggressiveness, under-belief, under- confidence, under-faith in the possibility of greatness are the worst kind, in life, in romance and most of all in ROCK.

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