Page 12-'Wednesday, December 12, 1979-the Michigan Daily; (Continued from Page 11) Art has always been about com- munications systems. Whereas it once could be thought of as a brain or a shiny IBM computer-two centralized sour- ces of information that happily spit out information upon request-art now is set up more like a walkie-talkie. The walkie talkie doesn't store up infor- mation, it just passes on what it already has to eveybody else. Today, art doesn't come from anywhere ... the network creates it. Get the message? Pop art has always depended on the artist and the audience hitting it off. In the 70s, high art more and more went the same route. Modern composers such as George Crumb and Phillip Glass sought new ways to pull their audiences into their compositions. Glass, among other things, weaving in- tense tapestries of dense minimal melodies and Crumb working more in a chamber music vein. The German ar- tist Joseph Beuys creates an art that is really only accessible if the viewer knows some of the particulars of Beuy's German background. After the 70s, it will seem hard to think of the artist as someone incredibly magical; the artist, we are being taught, is all of us. especially when we work together. "It's hard to tell where you leave off and the camera begins A Minolta 35mm SLR makes it almost effortless to capture the world around you or express the In today 's art, I'm a star, you're astar world within you. It feels comfor- table in your hands. Your fingers fall into place naturally. Everything works so smoothly that the camera becomes a part of you. You never have to take your eyes from the viewfinder to make adjustments. So you can concentrate on creating the picture. . . And you're free to probe the limits of your imagination with a Minolta ... MINOLTA When you are the camera and the camera is you"-advertisement, 1976. Nowhere does a community of art- followers mingle more closely with the artists than in the realm of pop art. And in the 70s, pop art gobbled up large chunks of high art. Not only were the arts merging with people's lives, but they were combining with each other as well. Although Star. Wars seems on one level a throwback to every western and Buck Rogers flick ever made, the truth is that the film was too perfect to have been made in any decade but this one. It took the high-tech, post-turbulence-of- the-60s mind of George Lucas to paste together in a film such elements as the Bible, Casablanca, Nazi propaganda films, comic books, and pulp magazines, and The Wizard of Oz. The genius of Lucas as that such com- binations, once considered taboo, now appeared so commonplace and natural as to make them invisible. And the mixing of the arts is everywhere. In the 70s we had rock bands like Television quoting 19th cen- tury poets, and Ornette Coleman and Milton Berle sharing the stage on an episode of Saturday Night Live (Uncle Miltie furnishing the snappy racist pat- ter, no less.). "Relax, Jack. Nick, put on some background music to sooth the ner- ves. A little Billie Holliday and Judy Garland-they'll do wonders for you-even make you forget we got nuclear fallout screwing up our air, yeah, and even on the grass and get- ting in our milk. Hurry up Nick-get little Judy on there, singing her heart out. Boy am I glad she's not here to see what it's coming to. The world, I mean, Jack-the world!!"-Scorpio to Nick Fury, No. 48 Defenders Comics. In The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, one of the unnoted classic films of the mid-70s, there is an unforgettable scene in which the protagonist falls into a vat of molten chewing gum and then gets coated by a stampede of gumballs. People are like that today-encrusted, weighed down to the grouind by teeming, brightly-colored diversions. The voices of those calling for an art that has a thrust, even an art that is moral, are rising. It's a question today of 'now that we have art, what are we going to do with it?' Our wait for the answer to that one seems to have only begun. -R. J. Smith Music: To hate it is to love it T HE LAST THING the people of this country probably agreed on was Richard Nixon. His' name has become synonymous with the sort of pure Evil generally reserved for Hitler-like dic- tators and mass murderers. But for all its extremism, Nixon-loathing is still the paradigm of this decade's reigning personal credo: In the 70s, you're defined by what you hate. No one much bothers denying that about politics anymore (name the last election that wasn't a letter-of-two- evils affairs), but it sweeps over into popular culture as well, shaping the ways we listen to music and the demands we make of it. Just as the 60s kids gathered like sheep under the um- brella of "The Movement" eventually splintered into a thousand dissociated sub-species, the rock messiahs of the 60s-Dylan, Jagger, Lennon-gave way to the rigid musical cultism of the 70s. These days, to borrow from Bob Dylan, you gotta hate somebody. You may think Disco sucks or that we should Knuke the Knack. If you're a hard-line New Waver you probably think the mainstream pop-rock goulash is gar- bage. And if you're a post-New Waver, as far as you're concerned, groups like Talking Heads and Blondie sold-out when they landed hit singles, FINDING SOMETHING you can call your own the lasst few years has been like trying to escape the cosmic suction of a black hole. Whether you liked Saturday Night Fever or not didn't matter much-except that you had to Iirewith it, on the radio, at parties, on television, in magazines, at the movies. After awhile, it wasn't enough to turn one's back on mass tastes. Some had to make a show of it, striking out publicly against all that homogenized masses. And so-we got Chicago DJ Steve Dahl leading a horde of anti-disco crusaders onto the Chicago White Sox baseball field to light bonfires and detonate disco albums; Elvis Costello stinging his adoring liberal media following by calling Ray Charles a "blind, ignorant in the process. The result was the per- fect dessert for kids who wanted to have their cake and eat it too: They got "punk" without the catharsis or malevolence or alienating weirdness. A decade of performers on campus (from bottom to top): Leon Redbone at Hill Auditorium, Harry Chapin at Hill, B.B. King at Hill, Santana .at Hill. Patti Smith at Second Chance, and John Denver at Crisler Arena. nigger"; and Sid Vicious, ex-Sex Pistol, and all-around bad boy, doing a scouring-pad rendition of "My Way" and firing a gun into the audience. When Johnny Rotten caught the eye of the media in 1977, everyone either thought the punks would take over the. world (by blowing it to smithereens, of course) or whither away into oblivion, like the crusty remains of some freshly popped pustule. In the spirit of 70s homogenization, what happened was something in between. To a degree, punk was co-opted, and artists like the Cars and Joe Jackson proved how one could straddle the mainstream and New Wave and sell millions oft albums Even disco had to undergo some sub- tle refinement before getting plugged into the circuit of mass tastes. It took music like "Stayin' Alive" and "Night Fever" to make America disco-crazy. They were songs that eschewed Moroder-like rhythmic drone for an irresistible blend of disco, mellow pop, and rock and roll gutsiness. After that, it was no revelation when groups like " Blondie and Roxy Music came out with quasi-disco material. Just as punk had gained some respectability in the eyes of high school kids who didn't want to get their hands dirty, it was suddenly OK by musical asethetics- (and their Bible, the previously discophobic Rolling Stone) to like disco. BUT AMERICA'S disco-madness took its full toll. Black music, one of the seminal cultural influences of the 60s, was sumsumed into the disco fortree it had helped build, watered-dowh to sounds like Donna Summer's icy rock- disco and the passionless soul of the Commodores and Peaches and Herb. The black music producing jewel of the 60s-Motown Records-exists now in name only. The company itself is merely one of many L.A.-based labels, shurning out anonymous formula music and selling the product with slick, Day- glo packaging. The most successful of the 70s rock/R&B-based black musicians-Earth, Wind & Fire's Maurice White and Parliment/Funkadelic's George Clin- ton-have expanded fairly standard forms into vehicles for creative pur- poses. But perhaps the only artist to ap- proach the awesome freedom of the Motown classics was Stevie Wonder, whose-fresh sounds were a revelation of innocence next to the plain, passion-less soul-disco that dominated black music. What, then, are we left with? A few fractions that will probably fight them- selves into an early grave, a dance- style (and lifestyle) that's here to stay, and a handful of performers with enough passion, guts and flash between them to keep rock-and-roll alive in the decade to come. Artists like Bruce Springsteen, Graham Parker, Elvis Costello, the Clash, Neil Young, and Blondie are in it for more than the money. What puts these artists over the edge is their endless balancing act bet- ween an honest doubt and fear about the world they have inhibited, and a proud, hard-assed belief in themselves and rock-and-roll. Of course, some of the bedrock performers are still around, and dumping away a lot harder than they peed to after fifteen years of ser- vice. In "Badlands," a late .70 call-to- arms, Bruce Springsteen sings, "keep pushing till it's understood, and these Badlands start treating us good." That's a hell of a challenge. But when you hear Bruce's bristling guitar solo written through that song, it's one you want to live up to. a -Owen OGIlbermcn Supplement to The Michigan Doily Ann Arbor, Mi 'gon=-Wednesday, December 12. 1979 < .,.