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Bad Horse


Beneath the microscope, you contain galaxies.

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Dec
27th
2013

Private stories, songs, & movies · 2:42am Dec 27th, 2013

Before the 20th century, music was performed live, for large groups. So people wrote only songs that large groups could admit to enjoying. You could write songs about being blue or poor or overworked (“Old Man River”, “Sixteen Tons”), or the humiliation of defeat (“I’m a Good Old Rebel”), or losing a family member or a man or a woman. These were all common sorrows that everyone already knew everyone else in the audience experienced, so there was no shame in liking them.

But there were no songs about intensely private and embarrassing emotions. It was much later, maybe 1960, before vinyl records and transistor radios were cheap enough that people had them in their bedrooms and could listen to music in private—no performer, no other people listening and watching you, just you and the music. Then musicians wrote songs about things you couldn’t admit to in public—abuse (“Luka”), issues with your parents (“Mother” by Peter Gabriel), rage, depression (“Paint it Black”), suicidal despair (“Goodbye Cruel World”, “Suicide is Painless”), and more.

As far as I know, nothing like those songs had ever existed, anywhere on earth, except in poems, which you could read in private (“Richard Corey”, 1897). I'm tempted to speculate that the open-mindedness and nonconformity of the 1960s happened because for the first time in history the masses suddenly had mass-produced, commodified & advertised, shared, pop-culture access to the most private parts of their psyches.


If I’m right about these kinds of songs not existing prior to private playback, the same thing must have happened with stories. Before the printing press, they were told only to groups, and there were always at least two people present: the teller and the listener. There should be a category of personal, intimate stories that didn’t exist until the 15th century.

So what are those stories? Lolita is probably one. (Yes; I know marrying 14-year olds was cool in the middle ages. I mean the culture-equivalent of Lolita.) (Readers: I'm looking to you for answers. Suggestions?)

Songs are basically first-person, while stories are often third-person, so you can tell or listen to a story about someone else experiencing humiliation, rage, or self-loathing without letting on that you’ve felt that way too. Does that mean there is no such historical division in story types?

I think Camus’ The Stranger couldn’t have existed before print. The exploration of the inner mind of a sociopath wouldn’t make a good social activity. That story had to be told in first person. How about third-person stories? I’m trying to remember whether “The Yellow Wallpaper” was in third person.

Movies were always meant for large audiences, until… now. We had only movies for mass audiendes, and TV shows, usually for families, but in any case relying on mass appeal and on someone to be in the mood to watch the same kind of thing at the same time every week. Are people making new kinds of videos that couldn’t have been made before YouTube because they require a private audience? Say, willhundredpercent’s The Secret Life:

But there’s also less you can’t admit to in public anymore. As far as I can think at this moment, openly displaying contempt for mainstream society by dressing as a greaser, hippy, punk, or goth, is a new thing that didn’t happen anywhere in the world ever before James Dean. I feel like it must have—in Paris or Berlin, maybe—but I can’t think of anything. The closest I can think of is Oscar Wilde & Lord Byron. And now you can go to a Cannibal Corpse concert, or whatever the 20-teens equivalent is, and listen with a large audience to music that you’d never have been caught listening to in front of your neighbors a hundred years ago. Modern transit has an effect, too—you can attend a concert or a movie a dozen miles away from home, with hundreds of people you don’t know and will never see again. So perhaps we were already attending our concerts and watching our movies “in private” before YouTube.

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Comments ( 28 )

30s Berlin had a definite counterculture Jazz scene, so that gets you a bit before James Dean, at least.

1651490 Wouldn't it have been more like the US 20's flapper scene (which it came out of), or the Roman 0000's orgy scene, which were hip and trendy but were often participated in by the elite who controlled society? There's always been a "decadent" option for the rich, but that's not a protest movement.

1651512

No, it was definitely a counter-culture thing--direct opposition to the Hitler Youth, mostly populated by teenagers. There's a brief wikipedia article that jives with what I remember, if you like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_Kids

As far as I can think at this moment, openly displaying contempt for mainstream society by dressing as a greaser, hippy, punk, or goth, is a new thing that didn’t happen anywhere in the world ever before James Dean. I feel like it must have—in Paris or Berlin, maybe—but I can’t think of anything.

The idea of the "bohemian" has been around since at least the 1840's, so you can go back at least that far. If you wanted to include religious movements you could go back to ancient Rome, but those might be slightly different (though I don't think they're really that different.)

Also, I'll point out that many things that were too "risque" or personal for first person songs were told in story songs, which have included sex and suicide since some of the earliest ballads. Similarly, opera includes some first person songs that deal with those private emotions... basically, one could admit to liking them if it was veiled in the third person, as part of someone else's story.

I don't know about fiction, but I would say certain parts of nonfiction was a big deal only after the printing press. Famous men whose names I sadly forget used books to spread ideas like freedom to own land in the 16th and 17th centuries, then you have works like Machiavelli's Prince, Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, and even Hitler's Mein Kampf (though to a much lesser extent) can be seen as extensions of this "privacy" that printing presses afforded to readers. Before printing presses, a lot of ideas were either forced on people or common in the people. Books helped spread revolutionary ideas into people and change them without forcing them to. My two cents, anyway. :eeyup:

1651606 "Bohemian" was the word I was trying to think of. That's something similar... I'm just going to redact that part from the blog now because I'm confused about it. I think movements like that couldn't exist before the age of democracy because "mainstream culture" had no power.

I'm thinking back to the epics: Gilgamesh and Herakles and the Mahabharata. (especially the last, that story has a little bit of everything), and I'm wondering about the third person.

The legend of Herakles is about, essentially, PTSD. The whole reason for the trials was that Herakles killed his family in a fit a rage, and that rage was because he had gone to war. The idea that we now name PTSD was a known thing even back then: and an intensely personal experience. I could also talk about the shame and hubris of Oedipus, or the grief of Demeter, or the madness of Narcissus, or any of the other deeply personal struggles the gods and heroes of Helles faced.

The Romans learned stories from the Greeks, but the Greeks learned from the Egyptians and the Assyrians and the Judeans and they all learned from the Sumerians (who themselves traded tales with Egyptians from before even Gilgamesh's time)

The Norse speak often of fate and how to face it. But they also talk of greed and pride and pettiness and strange people doing strange and evil things; perversions to their eyes.

If we look at Indian and Chinese epics and books from back then, we find that the only taboo topic is "what's wrong with the King."[1] Every aspect of sex, psychology and social pressure was explored and commented upon. Often deconstructed, to an extent.

[1] At least the stuff that got written down; we don't know what tales were told at the public house when the sheriff wasn't around.

The folk heroes of the middle ages (Till Eulenspiegel, Robin Hood, Reynard the fox) were subversions: they fought against the fools in charge and won with wit and cunning. They were the peasant's hero: not strong but smart.

But they did not tell these stories in the first person. Is that significant? I'm not sure, honestly. If you can understand Herakles's rage, then there's no need to believe that the teller does. You do. And it's possible that that's all that matters.

1651640 I think there's an important difference between old "Person X has rage, and that's a bad thing," and post-1960 "I have rage!" songs. The former tells you to suppress these emotions; the latter lets you admit them to yourself.

But there were no songs about intensely private and embarrassing emotions.

What do you consider "intensely private?" What, "embarrassing?"

They flee from me that sometime did me seek,
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle tame and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
And therewith all sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?"

It was no dream, I lay broad waking;
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness
And she also to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

--Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)

How hey, it is non les [lies],
I dare naught seyn, whan she seys "peace!".

Yong men, I warne you every one,
Elde wyves tak yw non,
For I myself have on at home ;
I dare naught seyn, whan she seys "peace!".

When I com fro the plow at noon,
In a reven dycsh myn mete is don,
I dar not askyn our dame a spoon ;
I dar naught, etc.

If I aske our dame bred,
She takyt a staf and brekit myn hed,
And doth me runnyn under the bed ;
I dar naught, etc.

If I aske our dame neych [whey?],
She brekyt myn hed with a dysch ;
"Boy, thou art not worth a rish "
I dar, etc-

If I aske our dame chese,
"Boy," she seyt, al at ese;
"Thou art not worth half a pese."
I dare naught seyn, whan she seys "peace!". .

--Sloan Ms, 2593, anonymous English 1400's

Now, to questions you actually asked me:

There should be a category of personal, intimate stories that didn’t exist until the 15th century.
So what are those stories? (Readers: I'm looking to you for answers. Suggestions?)

Songs are basically first-person, while stories are often third-person, so you can tell or listen to a story about someone else experiencing humiliation, rage, or self-loathing without letting on that you’ve felt that way too. Does that mean there is no such historical division in story types?

I think you might find a historical division in story types, just not a genre division, if that makes sense. There are stories that probably couldn't have been told before (The Yellow Wallpaper, Catcher in the Rye) but we don't see them as anything different, today, because they've just been a part of "books" for as long as books have existed.

But I do think they've gotten more popular in the past 100 years or so. Part of the reason for this gradual invasion of personal stories probably has to do with the gradual popularity of literacy. Remember, between the 15th and late 19th centuries, reading was often still public story telling because not everyone in a household could read (and even when they could, there was no television or radio to be shared entertainment.) So the popularity of stories that one wouldn't read out loud advanced slowly, and may not have hit its stride until the late 19th century.

1651628

I think movements like that couldn't exist before the age of democracy because "mainstream culture" had no power.

Words, words, words:

"Francois Villon"

"Carmina Burana"

"Goliard"

:twilightangry2:

1651628
One thing that might be relevant here, is that the further back you go, the fewer reliable records of the period that continue to exist. It gets increasingly difficult to discover passive resistance to mainstream society, as that kind of thing is more likely to be simply not recorded, or at least not recorded as such.
For instance, how would you even read about Old Kingdom Egypt bohemians? What would consist of said individuals? It may even be that their concept of a social rebel would be unrecognizable to us. Maybe worshipers of Set? (Though, Set as a villainous deity actually was a later development. For a long time he was worshiped as any god, and chaos was not seen as inherently evil, it simply was. The change occurred, I believe, as a means of strengthening the Pharaoh.)

It is an interesting idea. Without knowing much about the history of literacy, I'd guess, however, that it mostly has to do with what was recorded and has survived, versus what was created.

1651669 That's probably the most important point, that at some point the focus shifted from heroes and villains (who aren't really people, after all) to introspection. Whether that was a shift in authors or in readers (meaning, whether the works changed or just the interests of the audiences and thus which works are remembered), is hard to say.

1651627 This is another good point. We have various manifestos and treatises and essays popping up constantly through history, well before mass publication, on stuff like philosophy and sociology and politics and such. A person's thoughts on these types of things are extremely personal, and you can tell how important they are by the fact that many of these nonfiction works took their authors' entire lifetimes.

Somehow I have this mental picture now of a group of cave teenagers hanging out together down by the creek bed and dressing in animal skins to freak out their naked parents. These young bohemians would then gather together in a cave to sing in front of pictographs on the walls, detailing their intensely private moments in bellowed melody to their peers... before being eaten by a bear.

Good times. :pinkiehappy:

1651679 There's stories and songs about henpecked husbands, and all varieties of trouble in love, but in my mind these fall under "exemptions":

- Being fairly common problems and not really secret
- Being told in a comedic manner. Anything could be told in a comedic manner.
- Being poems that were written down.

Find a folk song from Europe in the middle ages about a man who's married but longs for his gay lover. That might exist! I'm sure you could find one such from the first several centuries AD, but it wasn't frowned on so much then.

Now, there /is/ some existential angst in Ecclesiastes, and probably Song of Solomon and Psalms, which might count as exceptions if they were sung.

1651627 (oops, ignore my original first sentence in reply)

- King David wrote pretty personal autobiographical stuff, circa 1000 BC, but it wasn't really embarrassing--and David had some things to be plenty embarrassed about, which he didn't write down. And he didn't embrace or accept his negative emotions; he was ashamed of them.

- Augustine wrote the first personalized autobiography (one revealing his embarrassing emotions) of the Roman era in 398. Things written in a confession are not quite what I mean, though, since the author is admitting to having had those feelings, but is renouncing them.

- Literature and music were both written anonymously during most of the middle ages. Hildegard of Bingen was the first non-anonymous composer in Europe since Roman times (~1100)

- Montesquie wrote the first post-Roman personalized autobiography in 1580

So there was a big gap, about a thousand years, in which people did not write down their feelings and claim them publicly as their own. So just from the timing, we can't say whether it was the printing press, or changing social norms, that let people start doing that.

1651734 Can you elaborate, instead of sending me spelunking through Google hits?

ADDED: I see your points, but these were all written down as poetry, and some appear to have been comedic. The Goliards might have been a counter-culture? But if they were just a religious minority, with specific views of their own, or the general view that the existing Church was corrupt, we've always had those.

1651796 Set was their war god, too. We have half a story, where he goes off to fight a great sea monster, and get to the shore and then h–

We don't know what he did, exactly. But we know that there was a time when Set was kind of a big deal, and then later became the enemy. Which just goes to show that your point (we don't know about a lot of old stories) may go back a long ways.

Overall, I'm not entirely convinced of the significance difference between prose, poetry, and song here.

1653781

But if they were just a religious minority, with specific views of their own, or the general view that the existing Church was corrupt, we've always had those.

I see you've read their Wikipedia entry which, like a kipper, is small, and stinks.

For one thing the Goliards were not a protest movement, except only occasionally. They were a sprawling counterculture found throughout Europe for about two centuries. That culture was comprised of the dropouts and kickouts of the great Universities as well as their wannabes and camp followers. It dates from those institutions' foundings and never really died out, being subsumed into (and perhaps defining) the general Western student culture of drinking, blowing off studying, trying desperately to get laid and talking smack to cover up the fact that you didn't. Imagine 200 years of Animal House only instead of being an engineering genius, Stork wrote the Carmina Burana. Of course they did do a good deal of STICKIN IT TO DA MAAAAAN in their poetry and songs but I doubt that was really the point: when a bunch of college student say they're all about booze and sex and partying, you can generally take them at their word.:pinkiehappy:

For another the article conflates the Goliards with the Narrenfest/Mass of the Ass/Feast of Fools rituals which may have been influenced by Goliardic culture but were entirely different, being not a subculture but a tradition, something like Mardi Gras, of periodic license within the ecclesiastical calendar. This tradition had varying degrees of sanction in various places at various times but it did in fact have sanction, which the Goliards did not. For more info on the Feast of Fools, as well a selection of music both delightful and bizarre, I recommend the album by the New London Consort as lead by Phillip It Will Never Get Well If You Pickett

(Fun fact: the Feast of Fools was held right around this time of year, usually on New Years' Day, the tradition being that this was about the time of Christ's circumcision. There's a funny story about how one monastery was supposed to have the relic of this event, which one killjoy pointed out would tend to invalidate the Doctrine of Bodily Assumption:twistnerd:).

1653756

So there was a big gap, about a thousand years, in which people did not write down their feelings and claim them publicly as their own.

Oooooooooh....

This...this...it's like you're saying we never went to the Moon.:twilightangry2:

No, in fact, there was a huge multicentury medieval tradition, massively documented, of people composing lyrics about personal feelings and wandering around the countryside singing them in order to make a living, and often doing quite well at it in addition to enjoying enough critical accaim to get their verses written down--thousands and thousands of them. They sang in intimate settings, in courts and halls and in the market-places. These people were called the troubadours in Occitan (and by other names elsewhere--trouvères in northern France, minnesangers in German-speaking countries), and their lyrics included such classifications as the:

Alba (morning song)— the song of a lover as dawn approaches, often with a watchman warning of the approach of a lady's jealous husband
Enuig— a poem expressing indignation or feelings of insult
Serena— the song of a lover waiting impatiently for the evening (to consummate his love)
Descort— a song heavily discordant in verse form and/or feeling
Comiat— a song renouncing a lover,
Salut d'amor— a love letter addressed to another, not always one's lover

Noted troubadours and composers in the troubadour style of highly personal lyrics meant for public, musical performance (for while usually just the lyrics were written down, troubadour lyrics were written to be sung), included:

Adenez-le-Roi (1240-1300),

Bernart de Ventadorn (1130/1140 – 1190/1200) ("He composed his first poems to his patron's wife, Marguerite de Turenne. Forced to leave Ventadour after falling in love with Marguerite..." :pinkiegasp:--private and embarrassing enough for ya?)

Arnaut Daniel (fl 1180-1200), inventor of the sestina, and

Beatriz del Dia (fl 1175) ("...she was married to William of Poitiers, but was in love with and sang about Raimbaut of Orange." Interesting I must say :raritywink:)

...*pant*...*pant*...(okay Ed, inhale...exhale...inhale...exhale)...so...you see my point? People have always written lyrics about intensely personal and difficult emotions and sung them, in bowers or private chambers, in audience halls or market-crosses, to or about those who occasioned those emotions. This did not stop during the thousand years of European history we are pleased to call the Middle Ages, and in fact its efflorescence was one of the salient aspects of the era.:moustache:

1654245
I always thought of song (lyrical song, not just music) as being basically poetry with a melody. This is a GROSS simplification of course, but then again I am utter rubbish with poetry, so perhaps it's not surprise I do that.
Also, better be careful, unless I start incessantly babbling about ancient Egypt. I have a bit of a weakness for that particular encient culture. (Ancient Greeks can suck a nut.:derpytongue2:)

1654417 You are totally right that people did that in the 12th century, and my "thousand years" is too long, bcoz I had a brain fart and picked the Montaigne date instead of the Hildegard date.

But note I said the first non-anonymous composer I could find was in 1100, and all your examples are post-1100. What I have been told, and what you can verify or deny as your knowledge of history is probably much deeper than mine, is that people did not put their names on stories or compositions before about 1100.

1654417 "He composed his first poems to his patron's wife, Marguerite de Turenne. Forced to leave Ventadour after falling in love with Marguerite..." :pinkiegasp:--private and embarrassing enough for ya?)

No, we've always had songs about people being unfortunate in love in many different ways. We haven't had, as far as I know, songs like you'd find on a Pink Floyd or Depeche Mode album, or even The Who's /Quadrophenia/. Songs that admit to feelings that good people aren't supposed to have at all. It could be my ignorance speaking. But I'm pretty confident we didn't have such songs in the first half of the 20th century. If we had them in the middle ages and then lost and regained them, that would also merit some explanation.

1655123

Songs that admit to feelings that good people aren't supposed to have at all.

The guy's rich, powerful and can kill you on a whim. And you want to have sex with his wife.

Your husband's rich, powerful and can lawfully dispose of you as he does his livestock. And you want to have sex with some other guy.

In such a social context--how are these feelings that good people are not supposed to have?

Even today it would seem wise, before recording "I Wish That I Had Jesse's Girl," to determine whether Jesse owns any firearms.:unsuresweetie:

But alright, that's just "being unfortunate in love?" Fine, how about a poem about pimping your girlfriend's fat ass:

Come wind, hail, or ice, my bread is baked.
I’m a dirty old man and a slut’s what suits me.
Which one is worse? We’re a match,
like unto like: bad rat, bad cat.
Filth is our calling and boy does it call us;
Virtue runs when it sees us, and we run from it,
in this old whorehouse where we hold court.

1655094

But note I said the first non-anonymous composer I could find was in 1100, and all your examples are post-1100. What I have been told, and what you can verify or deny as your knowledge of history is probably much deeper than mine, is that people did not put their names on stories or compositions before about 1100.

[EDIT: I see now your main concern was with documented authorship. Authorship and attribution are often quite different in pre-1100 works. Why that is I don't know; any theory of mine would rest on a rather small sampling of personal or self-revelatory lyrics from the British Isles from that period. I am unaware of any such lyrics from the Continent before 1100. Continuing on...]

There could be any number of reasons for this. It could be that:

1) Such songs were not being sung
2) They were sung, but not written down
3) They were written down, but the manuscripts did not survive (A thousand years of northern European climate take a toll, even on vellum, and as well there was a lot of tumult attendant on the breakup of Charlemagne's Empire and the concurrent Viking invasions).
4) The manuscripts survived, but modern historians haven't taken much interest in them.
5) Modern continental historians are interested, but English-speaking historians haven't done any translations of their works.
6) There may be good English translations but I'm not aware of them.

Now I have to say that 1-4 seem unlikely because, over in the British Isles, we do have a good supply of pre-1100 lyrics--and not just court poems but personal poems, folk-charms (what might even be called folk-songs) and riddles. Many are not found in manuscripts from that period, but we can tell from the language that they were copied over from pre-1100 MSes.

Yet there does seem to be a great flowering of such lyrics in the 12th century. My theory--which has all the authority of this barstool I'm sitting on--is that such lyrics required the wide availability of portable, durable, fully-chromatic stringed instruments, so the singer could accompany him- or herself. And these instrument only really became popular after the First Crusade because they are essentially Eastern. Of course the Welsh and Anglo-Saxons had the harp (in one form or another), which is stringed and portable. However the handheld harp is not fully chromatic, it is finicky to tune (and goes out of tune easily), and can only be made from particular sorts of wood--not just particular species of trees, but particular parts of particular trees that have grown in a certain way.

(DISCLAIMER: I hold a Bachelor's in Engineering, read no foreign languages, and most of my sources are popular books on the subject from the 70's and 80's. If symptoms persist, consult an archaeologist :twilightsmile:.)

1655832 The guy's rich, powerful and can kill you on a whim. And you want to have sex with his wife.
Your husband's rich, powerful and can lawfully dispose of you as he does his livestock. And you want to have sex with some other guy.

No, that's not what I'm talking about at all. There's nothing humiliating or taboo about wanting to have sex with the wrong person, unless the wrong person is your blood relative.

Maybe a better way to delineate what I'm trying to say is that people sang only songs that could give them higher status in some framework. That could be signalling that they are brave, risk-takers, highly sexualized, things like that, sure. Whereas The Police's "Mother" says, "I'm a grown man who still has a weird attachment to and terror of his mother", and there is no context in which singing that can help you get laid or make friends.

1652554

These young bohemians would then gather together in a cave to sing in front of pictographs on the walls, detailing their intensely private moments in bellowed melody to their peers... before being eaten by a bear.

"Ogg brother eaten by CAVE bear! Ogg brother into being-eaten-by-bear while it still UNDERGROUND!"

I shall stop now :pinkiesad2:

There should be a category of personal, intimate stories that didn’t exist until the 15th century. So what are those stories? (Readers: I'm looking to you for answers. Suggestions?)

I don't know about personal and intimate, but opposing religious and political viewpoints seem to have gained traction at around that time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/95_theses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Peasants%27_War#Luther.27s_Reformation

I think it's important to note that the early printing presses didn't provide any more anonymity for readers or writers than what already existed. I'm not familiar with the middle ages, but people wrote, copied, and exchanged scrolls before the fall of the Roman Empire.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_in_the_ancient_world

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