7Ages.
Down here in the beach shack we do a lot of laying about on the couch. And when the weather and sunspots align right we can pick up 4 snowy channels on the old TV, we’ll watch whatever is most visible as a rule. So it came to be last night that we saw the first of a BBC doco series, “The Seven Ages of Rock”.
I realise that once having a great civilization or empire and then having it no longer can be hard for a society to process no matter how much time passes. Often you’ll see the more nationalist elements using the great legacy as a rallying call for a return to supremacy, Italy during the Mussolini years or Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge years for instance.
For Britain this tendency gets acted out most noticeably through the BBC, its world spanning ubiquity an echo of empire. The documentary productions especially follow the intrepid British explorer model bringing insight and a civilising influence to the world. Always the authoritative voice pronouncing whatever is before them as the biggest, oldest, deepest, hungriest, most dangerous thing in the known world.
And so it was with the 7 Ages program which proclaimed Rock to have started in 1965 and to be invented by English people by combining an African American legacy unknown to clueless Yanks with native British ingenuity. As well as ignoring every other part of the world, the only American featured as a bit player in the Rock story was Dylan, portrayed as a minor folkie until being galvanised by the electric sound of the British invasion.
It continued on with the Boomer history of the 60s we’ve seen thousands of times, intercutting Vietnam, etc. While trotting out the usual suspects as talking heads (though I’m always entertained by Keith Richards). I wonder where they go now from here constructing a British history of popular music, the next episode previews with Pink Floyd & Bowie featured heavily point the way forward, the sun never sets on the BBC.
