I know that something very strange has happened to my brain.
I’m either feeling very good or else I am insane.
The seeds of doubt you’ve planted have started to grow wild
And I find the need to yield before the wisdom of a child.
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I would like to say something contrary about the Monkees, so if you’re one of those people who subscribes to the hagiographic rendering of the band’s importance to rock history, I suggest you you stop reading now.
I honestly should have.
But, and this is an old post and maybe this person got a lot more knowledge about The Monkees and their influence as both a TV show and for the music. Nothing about the show is mentioned, Head is never mentioned, and neither is the fact they had a popularity ‘spike’ and reappraisals that put them in the position to play this game of straw-man.
This reminds me of a conversation How Was Your Week? podcaster Julie Klausner had with Rachel Lichtman, who was involved with much of The Monkees post-Davy Jones reunion tour production, and also her talk with Eric Lefcowitz, who wrote a book on The Monkees. In both conversations it boils down to this: The Baby Boomer generation was too full of itself insisting on authenticity, dismissing much of the early, ingenious pop for the more psychedelic, free love music that dropped Motown for blue-eyed soul and 12 minute drug-fueled guitar solos. Their versions of authenticity is the same version of how some record producer made The Byrds, who did mostly accessible folk pop covers (which was lost on this user), were folk. It is all really false pretenses. The Monkees were always upfront on who they were and they actively fought against it in an era where so many musicians and singers had so little ownership of their songs and even their own voice. Acting like they had unique privileges when the fact was The Monkees were making absolute shit from their show and barely covering living expenses touring is a major oversight on the careers.
This user gets insight on The Monkees from Baby Boomers. This is arguably one of the worst places to find any insight. The band was a joke— for The Baby Boomers. Why did The Monkees have such a great pop culture comeback? A lot of came from the next generation of Gen-X and Millennial viewers who watched a lot of The Monkees re-runs. In a post-MTV sense, The Monkees rise in popularity and respectability is not shocking at all.
No generation should get to tell their own cultural story, mainly because there are a lot of talented artists from that era get shitted on or ignored. Most Baby Boomers were done with The Monkees when their film, Head, an underrated- sorry if this is a dirty word for the user- film that works as a testament to everything they represented, flopped. Then the following generations saw what the show was built on in terms of selling a band and a song and band members in a narrative. They found the songs to be good and also of artistic merit in finding artists like Boyce and Hart, Gerry Goffin, Carole King, Harry Nilsson, and even band member Mike Nesmith writing these songs. They found out that Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Jack Nicholson, who did so much for New American Cinema in the late 60s and 70s, were tied to the show and also the film Head and found aesthetic merit to much of the show beyond it being ‘just for kids’. I cannot even comprehend anybody who watched The Monkees, particularly Season 2 of The Monkees, and think this was made for strictly for children. Y’all realize Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson were high as kites in writing the screenplay for Head, right?
They were not just popular because they were a knock-off of The Beatles. If that were the case, so many other knock-offs of The Beatles would have the same cultural standing and The Rutles, an Eric Idle comedy music outfit, would have been just as popular as Monty Python or… as popular as The Monkees.
The Monkees did innovate, or were part of innovations in the collaborative process. Head on its own is an incredible pop-art movie that is so much smarter than its surface readings, much like Easy Rider in predicting shit about to hit the fan for the counter-culture and a final testament to their own careers. In fact, I daresay Head is up there with the documentary Gimme Shelter in terms of serving as a film testament and document to when the 60s were about to have this hard turn into the 70s.
But let us go back to the television show and the band itself.
The Monkees kind of evaporated in the 70s. They were forgotten and in some cases for the good, Harry Nilsson and Carole King finding successful singing careers after being mostly songwriters for outfits like The Monkees, but mostly for the bad, with the proliferation of network variety shows that in retrospect are an interesting look back at the Greatest Generation trying to get with the youth market. Then these people either became parents or died and their kids grew up and the TV re-runs of that period began to pop up. MTV had just happened and music videos were becoming a cultural staple. Sooner rather than later a distinction was made in terms of what made a great music video than just taping a band ‘playing’ a song. Major directors of the time and in the future were behind these videos. There were narratives. There were arguably mini-movies. It became a new hook in the discussion of music and artist.
Consider again, how to an MTV generation finding this program why seeing something dismissed by their parents actually seemed cool. In a sense, something so extreme in what it is, a very transparent pop music front, and so ‘uncool’ becomes looked into at after dismissals and has a new renaissance for the next generation after reappraisals. It is why ABBA survives not just in its accessible pop but the fact the backlash to ABBA was so severe they ended up having a lot of people on the punk scene into ABBA because in a way, liking something that transparent about exactly what it is becomes more refreshing than an ethos that ascribes to some odd puritanism and phony authenticity.
It is much like today. There are still many singer-songwriters going and while you can tell me that is more authentic or much more virtuous than a Rihanna or a Beyoncé, I will just fundamentally disagree. It is a matter of just thinking the music is good no matter how many people were involved in the collaborative process. I am ignoring The Beatles distinction altogether. I accept they are the greatest regardless of how much they are part of a Jann Wenner machine of over-saturating pop culture with out of date rockist bunk. I enjoy their music, but nobody should be shamed for thinking they like The Monkees a little more or find The Monkees to be an important band or find that The Monkees, even today, get so easily dismissed for unoriginal surface-level observations.
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