This clip of a rock festival from a Soviet cartoon must surely be anti-Western-decadence propaganda.... It couldn't possibly be meant to be attractive and exciting? Could it?
It's from Sergey Yutkevich and Anatoliy Karanovich's "Mayakovsky Laughs," which also has a scene involving drugs and hallucinations
The rock festival bit reminded me of Lemmings by National Lampoon - a 1973 stage show as well as a record, mocking the mindless squalor of the mass gatherings of the era
Also reminded tangentially of this Whistle Test spoof from Rutland Weekend Television
Then there's this, which actually rocks, despite the parodic intent
Any more for any more?
Yes there's Neil the Hippy, and there's Rock Follies - particularly interested in Old Wave excess recoiled from with a crypto-conservative squeamishness
I think "Yellow Submarine" had an devastating impact on Soviet animators:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdwRbNoVPiQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id-_4dq2Mgw
But as for rock ugliness, there's The Tubes, Plasmatics, Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, Neil Innes generally, Cheap Trick, Hipgnosis, and that's just off the top of my head.
The Tubes - especially the character Quay Lewd - counts for sure.
ReplyDeleteDid Neil Innes and Bonzo do many rock parodies?
Cheap Trick are for real surely. And yes Hipgnosis could be hideous but their intent was serious. I'm thinking specifically of people from outside the genre / generation making fun of it, and seemingly thinking it's decadent garbage that's actually damaging the culture.
Yes Контакт and Контракт - weird that your two examples have such similar titles! - are definitely Yellow Submarine influenced. There's a dude in Контакт with a beard and tache that's a dead ringer for Lennon in Submarine.
ReplyDeleteThere's quite a range of 1970s Soviet animation though, I'm not sure I would say YS devastated the genre. (And I love Yellow Submarine so I don't mind more of that in the world. Never understood why the Beatles didn't do the voices, I wonder if they kicked themselves afterwards when it came out. At that point they probably wanted to leave behind pop and child things altogehter. It's the only thing that mars the film for me, the faux-Liverpudlian accents).
Cheap Trick weren't a parody act, but "Surrender" fits, especially the lyrics about "Mom and Dad rolling numbers, got my Kiss records out." (Someone will do a cover where Mom and Dad are popping percs and xans while streaming the kid's Playboi Carti playlist.)
ReplyDeleteHow about Alberto y Los Trios Paranoias?
Surely, there must be a great deal of Christian "rock is evil, let's make fun of it" material out there.
I think you're moving the goal posts a bit there, because National Lampoon, Monty Python and Cheech and Chong were all part of the counter-culture. Nearly all the mockery was coming from within the culture, and not from reactionaries. Possibly the prime example:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdbLirsZ_4Q
But conservative/reactionary parodies. I dunno, that 's a more difficult ask. By the way, have you seen this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EbePb31fi4
Certainly, early '80s American TV gave us some reactionary parodies of punk, like the infamous QUINCY episode with Mayhem's "Next Stop Nowhere": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjHV9wQv6u8&ab_channel=marathonpacks100
ReplyDeleteFrom CHIPS, Pain performing "I Dig Pain": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBnyaWt9V24&ab_channel=ronnyber
The Not The Nine O’Clock News punk parody Gob On You rocks pretty hard: https://youtu.be/-5N3q0lGi4w?si=VdRaNFO3W3LrcnaX
DeleteAnd then from the other end of the telescope, when the punks have become the establishment, this is one of my favorite SNL sketches: https://youtu.be/nd-_UwzSSvQ?si=xJOZduDdB2ItKcMp
DeleteI mean, Spinal Tap is right there, isn’t it? Certainly you could say it is at least semi-affectionate, but some of the shots really land.
ReplyDeleteI think the conservative/reactionary barbs tend to be against youth culture more generally, like the villain (Scorpio?) in Dirty Harry. Electra Glide In Blue is another example of crazy/dangerous hippy youth, although I think it's a great film. I have vague memories of crazy hippy kids erupting into some of the later Carry On films (Carry On Camping?).
ReplyDeleteThere a lot of that in Sixties and early Seventies films - of the protagonists suddenly chancing into the unfathomable youth culture, or the youth culture chancing into them. Classic example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSJGEn4FDys
Classic example 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOpaC2akaAE
It's a trope!
Two immediately spring to mind - on the purely condemnatory side, there's the infamous 'Blue Boy' episode of the late 60s Dragnet revival: https://www.avclub.com/dragnet-1967-preyed-on-parents-worst-fears-about-the-d-1798251861
DeleteOn the other, trying to understand side there's the fascinating wreck Skidoo, which is best explained by this very qualified defense by Jonathan Rosenbaum:
https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2023/12/the-curiosity-of-skidoo-tk/
Spinal Tap is sort of an extension of National Lampoon, isn't it? The guy who plays the manager was part of the Lampoon crew.
ReplyDeleteFor some reason I think of Lampoon as having a bit of conservative-backlash aspect to it, but that might just be because of P.J. O'Rourke.
There's so many examples offered, I'll do a follow-up post.
There's a whole episode of The Goodies that is a rather good send-up of punk.
Monty Python as part of the counterculture? Kinda - the counterculture liked them, George Harrison especially. But I think they are bit normie, nice liberal-ish middle class boys, possibly SDP at core. I love them - they changed my life. I practically wanted to be Michael Palin at one point. I think of them as rock-adjacent but not really of it.
ReplyDeletePeter Cook and Dudley Moore are also rock-adjacent - Cook hosting Revolver, being on the Godley + Creme album. The Derek and Clive albums coming out on Virgin and Island. But Dudley's music is jazz... and Cook's poison is booze, not drugs. Their own closest version of rock satire is that hilarious spoof on blues bores, patronizing the authentic voice of blackness - the one that A Guy Called Gerald sampled on "Voodoo Ray".
Yeah - I blew my mind a bit when I realised where the Voodoo Ray sample actually came from.
DeletePython and Cook & Moore were all products of Oxbridge - which still seems to dominate British comedy (and the rest of the media) to this day. Perhaps even more so than in the 60s.
There was definitely a class split between the musicians and the comedians - at least in terms of art school vs uni.
I tend to agree with David Stubbs in his Different Times book... that British comedy is inherently conservative leaning. The Brit comedian is mocking the extremes of all kinds - the reactionary and the radical - from a normative position in the middle of everything. Common sense. That's what The Young Ones is about - the parade of past youth subcultures get the piss taken out of them, as adolescent posturing. Comedy generally has a problem with seriousness and intensity. It's default position is "come on! lighten up!"
ReplyDeleteThat clip with Bill Wyman and Stanley Unwin is amazing. I see there's a longer, live version they did together onstage.
ReplyDeleteAlso in this territory: the Comic Strip spoof NWOBHM band Bad News, recently releasing a posthumous song Beatles-style thanks to Nigel Planer: https://www.kerrang.com/bad-news-new-song-axogram-nigel-planer-rik-mayall-adrian-edmondson-comic-strip
ReplyDeleteRe. Old Grey Whistle Test parodies, here's a pretty late entry (from 2014) from Harry and Paul's Story of the 2s, a really fun parody doc made by messrs Enfield and Whitehouse for BBC2's 50th anniversary:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx_C28G_Hs4
Eric Idle's Bob Harris just seems rather too jolly for a parody of Bob Harris. Bob Harris always looked completely cheesed off, like someone had eaten all the biscuits in the staff canteen, and he'd been really looking forward to a chocolate digestive all afternoon.
Another late parody (2001) of that era (focusing on glam rock this time) is Playground Bang-a Round from Brass Eye's paedophilia special:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHxGyJp0_5I
Worth noting that both of these clips are blessed with the presence of the actor Kevin Eldon, a prince among men.
The Brass Eye one is amazing - a subgenre of a subgenre nailed in 13 seconds
DeleteIntra-counterculture critique was an established phenomenon - see contemporary underground comics, for instance - and some of this does fall under that. National Lampoon played both sides of that aisle depending on the writer in question, only decisively turning to the right under O'Rourke's editorship - you could position parts of Lemmings as self-critique, but when you've got a Joan Baez analogue singing 'Pull The Triggers, N******' (tastefully amended to 'Pull The Tregroes, Negroes' on the label at the record company's request), you've got at least part of a foot in the reactionary camp, if only out of 'offend everyone' comprehensiveness.
ReplyDeleteI think identifying any reactionary sentiment as automatically being outside the counter-culture is a bit dubious anyway, as all revolutionary movements have their own inner reactionary instincts in order to keep them on track. Lenin and Trotsky were forever warning about the dangers of the "far left", and you see that critique in later Leninism and Trotskyism (e.g. in Ted Grant's The Unbroken Thread)
ReplyDeleteGiven that the counter-culture was very much capable of going off the rails (Manson, Altamont etc.), some kind of boundary policing was inevitable. Revolutionary to reactionary is more of a spectrum than a binary, in this respect.
I might quibble with your last examples, since both were at least partially due to exacerbating outside and/or peripheral forces - Altamont was star worship and the Hell's Angels; Manson was Dale Carnegie reading ex-cons, suburban runaways, and (depending on who you ask) the CIA - but your general point is well taken.
ReplyDeleteAnother facet - the eternal liberal-left hobby of mocking hypocritical/disingenuous liberals and leftists
Delete