Livin' Thing

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Electric Light Orchestra, "Livin' Thing" (download until 1/8/09), from "A New World Record."

ELO would be a guilty pleasure if they weren't actually really good. I should qualify this: ELO put out a number of really fantastic tracks when I was a little kid, and as I aged and in particular once one could purchase individual tracks via internet (yes, I do purchase things) I went back to listen to "Turn to Stone" and found that indeed it was great.

I suppose this is one of the marks of someone my age and background. We had good music to listen to when we were kids but the music industry had already turned to crap. The crap that we got, though, was made by musicians, thoroughly derivative, who had enough sense and talent to rip off the seriously great musicians of the decade before. I have a really clear memory of REO Speedwagon on some talk show from when they had their hit going on--the guy with the black, curly mullet--about how important Lennon and McCartney were to them as a band and as people. You can hear it in everything except the actual musical quality of REO Speedwagon. But it does mean that--and I actually didn't care for REO Speedwagon when I was a kid, like I did ELO--we as kids had a certain type of melodicism ground into our skulls by the machine.

The skull-grinding wasn't a good thing, but the melodicism was, and to a great extent I think young people today who rely on only what the industry feeds them miss that. ELO gets no respect, in hindsight, largely because they don't deserve it. Jeff Lynne gets respect for facitilating the Traveling Wilburys, George Harrison's 9th-inning renaissance, and seeming to be a decent-enough guy (and his stuff with Tom Petty was really good, too). But, honestly, if ELO never existed, what would it change? Not much, honestly. None of the tricks they played, musically, were their own. A bunch of Beatles references, which more than one critic--critics justify their jobs by stating the obvious--cracked semi-wise about the fact that Lynne hooked up with Harrison.

However: the tune's great. I don't think that having the Beatles, who really did make great music, in my life when I was a kid was in the least sufficient to impart in me a real sense of melody or anything else. What worked was that putting stuff like the Beatles on top of a hill of stuff that was a high grade of mediocre--things like ELO, later XTC, and probably all kinds of other acronyms, even things like the Bee Gees who if nothing else created undeniably hummable stuff--put me as a kid in a really good musical position. The floor, so to speak, of musical quality was lower than the ceiling, but it wasn't bottom-basement.

This should be drawn out into a larger principle that governs all social and cultural developments--possibly even economic and political ones: the key average is not the mean, but the mode. How low is the mode, and how much is beneath it? Is a person surrounded by mediocrity or complete crap? The one surrounded by mediocrity is in a vastly, vastly superior position.