Hitting a little too close to home

[jducoeur]

I like the Fourth of July. I've enjoyed it for many years -- certainly since before the year that goldsquare and I camped out overnight to stake out primo space for the Barony in front of the Shell. And I know that, as the Boston celebration has grown and commercialized, it's lost a certain something. But this year -- this year kind of bugged me.

(Caveat: I was at the rehearsal yesterday, and caught the end of today's telecast. These impressions are composited from those parts.)

It was a bunch of little things that got to me. First, one of the anthems got an arrangement I can only describe as Disneyfied -- sweet, inoffensive and to my mind wholly inappropriate for patriotic music. It was a comfy musical blanket, lulling you to sleep. The tone was entirely wrong, to my mind. Patriotism is dangerous, dammit, and should always demand that you think about it. Anyone who paints it as safe and comfortable is deliberately handing a loaded shotgun to a five year old.

Then there were the guest performers. All perfectly decent but, y'know, three country music acts just doesn't exactly strike me as representative of Boston. This, more than anything I've seen before, drove home that this concert has now been carefully marketed for the national audience. Indeed, there was an odd note of, "Please don't hate us because we're a Blue State" echoing past me throughout the whole thing.

Finally, there was that atrocious medley they did at the end, grabbing "patriotic" phrases seemingly at random and smushing them together -- a stock phrase from the Constitution here, the beginning of the Pledge of Allegiance there, resulting in a sort of lumpy Patriotism Stew. I'm sure that the idea was to make it all super-patriotic, but instead they wound up with Nutrasweet Patriotism -- it sort of tastes right, but there's no substance to it and it leaves an unpleasant aftertaste. (And it's bad for you in large quantities.)

For all my cynicism, I consider myself a patriot, and take that seriously. But the past decade has made me very sensitive to the difference between patriotism and jingoism, and this evening's entertainment came just a step closer to that line than I like. In any other broadcast I would just shrug it off as the times, but this is *Boston*, dammit. This is my city, and a concert that has long been close to my heart. Those sour notes are harder to ignore when they're coming out of my home...

Comments

[new-man.livejournal.com]

I'll agree with oakleafmirror that this is no longer Boston's party. The Pops describes itself over and over again as "America's Orchestra".

I don't particularly care for COuntry/Western music, but I have to say that their performance had more to do with the Fourht of July than David Lee Roth singing an anemic version of "Jump" last year. At least Rich, Ken, and Jennie Gsrth made an attempt to do something patriotic. One of the things I appreciated about their performance, which I think may have been lost on people who heard nothing but their genre and their accents (I'm not saying this of you, by the way) was their message was a very un-Red state one of "Love everyone". They said it explicitly several times (I think it's their catch phrase), and the 'patriot stew' including quotes from MLK's "I have a Dream" speech, as well as "...all men are created equal" from the Delcaration of Independence. They could have selected "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" or "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed", but they didn't. I think as far as performers trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, I'd much rather see the liberals from the South that the presented, than conservatives from the Northeast.