If It Didn't Take so Long...

I'd go back to school and get a Ph.D. and not have enough to do, like our 300-hating prof from a few days ago and like these guys.

According to them, you see, our nostalgic concept of "The Fifties" was invented by the revival group Sha Na Na. Yes, Bowzer is responsible for Richie Cunningham. Our authors the Leonards, well-armed with scare quotes around words like "history" to let you know they know those aren't really words like everybody since Noah Webster thought they were, but are actually sociological constructs, suggest that the Columbia University a cappella group The Kingsmen are the direct ancestors of American Graffitti, Happy Days and probably Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love."

The Kingsmen changed their name before a show focusing on 1950s pop songs, including "Get a Job" by The Silhouettes with its "sha da da" chorus (and because a combo up in Seattle had a hit under that name), and thus a phenomenon was born. Before Sha Na Na's appearance at Woodstock (wonder what the folks who'd dropped acid thought when they showed up on stage), "Americans" "remembered" the 1950s as the decade of Joe McCarthy, A-bomb drills and tortured beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg.

Which makes sense -- you may remember how often Elvis had to call Ginsberg and beg him to be allowed to play before the poet went onstage to read before thousands of screaming teenagers. "Don't be cruel, Allan, just a song or two. I need the work. Thank you, thank you very much."

Here's some more fun -- the article I linked to riffs off of two books written by still other professors.

One of them, about which the word "bold" is used for no reason that the article authors go on to elaborate, is called Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics by Daniel Marcus. Mr. Marcus suggests politicians pick and choose from among past events in order to communicate their message. I just saved you $62 plus shipping.

The other, Retro: The Culture of Revival by Elizabeth Guffey, takes a look at how old trends and fads become new again, then old again, then new again. At least, I think it does. One of the reviews of the book says it does this:

Elizabeth Guffey considers retro's resistance to modernist progressive cheerleading and, in fact, its rewriting of modernism itself.

I have a feeling that, even if I read Guffey's book, I still won't be able to say whether or not the review quote was accurate because I have no idea what it means.

Anyway, the authors of our article note that both of these books point out the role Sha Na Na had in the creation of '50s nostalgia. I don't know if the books touch on this, but the article omits one of our main cultural nostalgia-drivers: The baby-boomer desire to stop time and keep alive the era when they were young and thus -- in the eyes of a youth-obsessed culture -- important.

After all, that's why we spent a lot of our 2004 presidential election fighting over what two men in their 50s, who had held a couple of our nation's highest offices, had done when they were 22 and why that was the best indicator of their fitness for the presidency. It's why commercials talking about retirement planning show senior citizens surfing instead of playing with grandkids or relaxing in a rocker on the front porch.

And it's why people who spent thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of their lives obtaining advanced degrees will devote time and serious scholarship to talking about a time when they dressed up like James Dean and sang "At the Hop." Yes, the authors of the article that suggests Sha Na Na created '50s nostalgia and spawned Happy Days, Grease and the rise of Ronald Reagan are, in fact, two founding members of Sha Na Na.

Go figure.