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 Tue Jan 08, 2008 20:57 pm Challenge: Spot the culturally significant lyric |
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| Jamie (K) wrote: | Here is a "music video" from the days before music videos, sometime in the late 1960s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7b9Zk2PJwY
The song is rather stupid, and so is the movie, but there is one sentence in the lyrics that is of anthropological significance and shows how Americans' behavior has changed in the past half century.
Can you spot that line? It's got nothing to do with an outdated dance or music style, and if you haven't noticed it by the middle of the movie, you've missed it. |
An allusion to teenage car races in American small towns? Fords chasing Mercuries?
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Ralf
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| Tue Jan 08, 2008 22:52 pm Challenge: Spot the culturally significant lyric |
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| Ralf wrote: | | An allusion to teenage car races in American small towns? Fords chasing Mercuries? |
Nope. That hasn't changed. |
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Jamie (K)
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| Tue Jan 08, 2008 23:18 pm Challenge: Spot the culturally significant lyric |
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| Jamie (K) wrote: | | Ralf wrote: | | An allusion to teenage car races in American small towns? Fords chasing Mercuries? |
Nope. That hasn't changed. |
Hmm, I thought James Dean style bird dogging in hot rods had vanished off the face of American road surface. I'd love to see this baby chase this aul' sportster, though...
Or pick up some choir girl in this pick up
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| Wed Jan 09, 2008 1:08 am Challenge: Spot the culturally significant lyric |
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Gas is expensive now, and cars are so complicated to work on these days that you don't see kids in hotrods cruising up and down the street just for recreation, but there are still people who like to get older, simpler cars and soup them up.
Hotrod life has been ritualized in the Woodward Dream Cruise every August. You can see pictures of it here.
http://www.dreamcruisephotos.com/
My side of town has one called Cruisin' Gratiot. |
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Jamie (K)
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| Sat Jan 12, 2008 6:42 am Challenge: Spot the culturally significant lyric |
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Guys staying in line to take her out?
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NinaZara
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| Sat Jan 12, 2008 11:45 am Challenge: Spot the culturally significant lyric |
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| NinaZara wrote: | | Guys staying in line to take her out? |
Nope! No cigar yet, Nina. It comes before that.  |
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Jamie (K)
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| Sat Jan 12, 2008 13:56 pm Challenge: Spot the culturally significant lyric |
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Maybe it's this line:
"She knows what to do when the band plays 'Twist And Shout'". Do teenagers nowadays know how to dance twist?
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Torsten
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| Sat Jan 12, 2008 14:22 pm Challenge: Spot the culturally significant lyric |
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| Torsten wrote: | Maybe it's this line:
"She knows what to do when the band plays 'Twist And Shout'". Do teenagers nowadays know how to dance twist? |
I said it had nothing to do with outdated music or an outdated dance.
It's something that indicates a really thorough change in American behavior and attitudes.
One more serious try, and I'll give the answer. |
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Jamie (K)
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| Sat Jan 12, 2008 14:28 pm Challenge: Spot the culturally significant lyric |
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This:
She's the kind of girl who know what "the in crowd" means?
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NinaZara
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| Sat Jan 12, 2008 15:06 pm Challenge: Spot the culturally significant lyric |
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| NinaZara wrote: | This:
She's the kind of girl who know what "the in crowd" means? |
Oh, so close, but no cigar!
Here's the answer: It was the very first line: "She goes downtown in a pair of old blue jeans."
Why mention it if it wasn't something unusual?
In the early 20th century, Americans used to dress up to go to the office, to go to church, to fly on airplanes, to take long train trips, and just to go downtown. Just watch American movies from the 1930s and you'll see in how many common situations the boys wore jackets and ties and the girls wore nice dresses. When I was a child, close to the time this song was made, if my father took me downtown for anything -- a puppet show, a visit to his bank, whatever it was -- I had to wear a jacket, a tie and perfectly shined shoes. I had to look "respectable".
When the earliest baby-boomers got to be teenagers, they started to rebel against formality and wear "disreputable clothes" anywhere they went. So, if "Little Miss Go-Go" went downtown in a pair of old blue jeans, that meant that she was a very rebellious girl who defied convention and did the opposite of what authority figures expected of her.
Now that the baby-boomers have grown up and they are the authority figures, Americans hardly dress up for anything -- not for the office, not for church, not even for court! |
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Jamie (K)
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| Sat Jan 12, 2008 15:43 pm Challenge: Spot the culturally significant lyric |
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I thought people that time dressed up like that on TV only. I didn't know people in America actually dressed like the ones I saw in Casablanca.
By the way, because of my tendency to like anything 'old' or 'antique', I always thought I was born in a wrong time but after seeing the clip, I was relieved I wasn't born at the time the same girls on the clip were. The fashion, oh disasterous! If there was a fashion police, they would have been locked up. The dance too, they looked like they were having a seizure!
No offense intended, seriously and of course fashion is a matter of opinion. 
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NinaZara
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| Sat Jan 12, 2008 15:52 pm Challenge: Spot the culturally significant lyric |
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That reminds me of the job I had during my high school and university years. I worked for "Ma Bell" during the summer and Christmas breaks back then. "Directory Assistance" was the official name of the job I did. I was in a large office with about 50-75 other directory assistants, who were almost exclusively women. When people couldn't find (or were too lazy to look for) a telephone number, they dialed 411 and got one of us. We'd physically look in a phone book and find the number they wanted. (Gosh, things were old-fashioned then!) Even though no customer ever saw us -- customers only heard our voices -- we were required to wear a skirt or a dress to work. The third year I worked for the phone company, they relaxed the dress code and allowed us to wear slacks (but not jeans!) to work on weekends. I really don't know what the logic of this change was. Customers never saw us on weekdays or on weekends, and I really don't think that what we were wearing had any influence on our voices or on our ability to look up phone numbers.
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Yankee
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| Sat Jan 12, 2008 19:18 pm Challenge: Spot the culturally significant lyric |
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| NinaZara wrote: | | I thought people that time dressed up like that on TV only. I didn't know people in America actually dressed like the ones I saw in Casablanca. |
They dressed like the people in Shirley Temple or Andy Hardy movies.
| NinaZara wrote: | By the way, because of my tendency to like anything 'old' or 'antique', I always thought I was born in a wrong time but after seeing the clip, I was relieved I wasn't born at the time the same girls on the clip were. The fashion, oh disasterous! If there was a fashion police, they would have been locked up. The dance too, they looked like they were having a seizure!
No offense intended, seriously and of course fashion is a matter of opinion. |
Those girls were dressed for hanging around the beach.
We now find that dancing comical, but you'll be amazed to know that what looks like a seizure actually is several different dances with distinct movements that kids could recognize at the time. I think that toward the end the girls are doing The Chicken.
Do you like this dancing any better?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tm74WPLxALk |
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Jamie (K)
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| Sun Jan 13, 2008 3:24 am Challenge: Spot the culturally significant lyric |
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Hilarious!
But I like this one better
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NfSRdb2HAo
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