"Everybody knows that" doesn't stay true

[vakkotaur]

Last night I was listening to another CD in the Spike Jones box set I bought this past Saturday. There was a tune I heard on the Dr. Demento show, but had forgotten the title. This tune, Black Bottom has no vocal but it does have a joke of sorts in it. The joke depends on knowing one way that a record can fail or be damaged. There is a point where a bit of the music repeats several times fairly quickly, and then there is a *thump* like someone hitting something, and then the tune proceeds. When that was recorded the joke worked because everyone knew what it was.

People of a certain age (I don't know the limit on that) will get joke immediately upon hearing it. I suspect that some people now might never have encountered that problem and might not have picked up on it from cultural references and wonder what that was all about. If that's not the case right now, I expect it will be in not all that long a time.

I've read a few older (well, they're older than I am) books, which I generally find more informative than many recent books. But sometimes an assumption is made that "everyone knows that" which throws me as I, several decades later, have no idea what is really meant since I'm missing that critical "common knowledge."

Another example is a bit in some old movies. One bit that I recall seeing was someone hearing a shot, except it wasn't a shot. It was a light bulb breaking. Today, that doesn't make much sense. Sure, if you broke a bulb it would make a noise. But you wouldn't mistake it for a shot. The technology changed is what happened. For some time now, light bulbs have been filled with gas. With the pressure about the same inside the bulb as outside, if they break, they just break. Those early bulbs weren't gas-filled but held vacuum. When they broke, the atmospheric pressure pressing in caused a sharp implosion. That implosion is as good as an explosion as far as the kind of sound it made.

Those sort of things makes me wonder what I'm missing or not getting because of the "everyone knows that" assumption not working. I also wonder what that is taken for granted now will seem oddly unexplained in the future.

Comments

[wordslinger.livejournal.com]

We'd tell ya, but then we'd have to kill you, kiddo.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

<rant>I really, really, REALLY hate that stupid line. It's never been amusing. Not even the first time.</rant>

[melskunk.livejournal.com]

S'like watching ol' WB cartoons, innit? Before they removed a lot of the content, I used to assume ending up with pointy-out hair, a black face and white lips was simply what happens when you smoke and exploding cigar or get a rifle shot in the face, had no idea until a few years ago that it was blackface.

[keeper1st.livejournal.com]

Even stuff they didn't cut out is full of topical references. "Open the door, Richard!" for example, or references to ration cards, or any number of things.

Heck, even Animaniacs and Tiny Toons would come across as dated already. The former, especially, was full of topical humor -- where the celebrity "cameos" are concerned, most notably. In that regard, it gets dated more quickly than the classic cartoons' celebrity cameos. Stars who were famous then have remained famous, for the most part (OK so maybe one or two of the crooner singers, like Rudy Vallee, may not be household names anymore nor be recognized by sight), but today, fame is much more fleeting, and there's so much new entertainment out that things fade into obscurity quite easily, even when they were hugely popular at the time.

In fact, things that do become hugely popular today end up becoming hugely UNpopular and quickly (and intentionally) forgotten. (Macarena, anyone?) That's not unheard of in the past, but was quite rare, it seems. The tune "Hiawatha" from 1901 is the earliest example that I know of. Hugely popular (every band played it -- Sousa said it was the biggest hit his band ever had, even bigger than his own marches), but soon began being resented. Vaudeville acts began doing parody song versions ("There's Higher Water over here, my dear / We never thought we'd see / So much of you!"), or skits involving annoyance at the tune. It ended up accidentally spawning a whole new genre of music -- the "Indian Intermezzo" -- even though its bass rhythm actually was meant to represent a train rather than native drums... It was bandleaders and percussionists not knowing the tune was about Hiawatha, Kansas (a railroad hub), who caused that. But eventually everyone was writing Indian Intermezzos. Then they were so popular, people got tired of hearing them, so thye switched to Chinese, Arabic, Mexican, real Indian -- whatever "exotic" culture they could think of.

Hmm, couldn't find a decent MIDI file of Hiawatha. Found one that wasn't too awful but was far slower than it's supposed to be. I've fixed the tempo here: http://www.armory.com/~keeper/hiawatha.mid

Composer is Chas. N. Daniels (using the name Neil Moret). Although this tune was a huge hit, it almost never got off the ground. Daniels had sent it to Sousa (he'd had a hit with Daniels' march "Margery"), but Sousa refused to play it, because he figured audiences only wanted to hear marches and ragtime, and this "Summer Idyll" was neither. Eventually, Daniels got Sousa to agree to play it once, and, as I said, Sousa wired Daniels saying that "Hiawatha" was the biggest hit he'd ever had. All the "Indian Music" you hear on cartoons was inspired by this and the genre of music it spawned. But, again, it's really about a train ride to visit his girlfriend in Hiawatha, Kansas! Go fig!

crack POP!

[whiffert.livejournal.com]

Well, the lightbulb thing in movies has always been a comic exageration. Still, you are right about the 'common experience' and changing times. I am old enough to know about skipping records, milkmen, bottlecaps that didn't twist off, dial telephones and a host of stuff that has gone by the wayside.

Its still possible to become literate in bygone culture... in fact it makes life a lot more fun. I have been listening to Old Time Radio for a few years now, and I have been amised to no end to hear the original gags that WB listed from radio to use in their Looney Tunes.

I don't hold so much with 'everyone knows that' even though I'm sometomes on the wrong side of a phrase. I just use.. 'that was before your time' instead. Sometimes I explain, but explaining sometimes just makes the situation more confusing ;)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Two examples that I still run into: dial telephones and analog clocks.

Kids do not understand either one. They can't tell time on the old big hand/little hand clock face, especially not if it has Roman numerals or (goddess forbid) no numerals at all, just dots.

Confronted with a dial telephone, they have no idea what to do. None whatsoever. This actually makes the dial telephone a safety hazard in some situations I guess.

Not only do I remember dial telephones (and still have one or two at home) but I remember dialless telephones. Where I live right now, as recently as the 50s, you picked up the phone and the operator answered. You told her the number, or often the name of the person you wanted to talk to. She would put your call through. Or, sometimes, she'd say "Oh, he's not at home, I just saw him go into the barber shop. Should I ring there?" :) We won't go into the party line. I had one of those, too. Our ring was two shorts and a long.

This can extend into terminology as well. My father referred to the refrigerator as the "ice box" until he passed away in 1993. My grandmother called the stereo a "Victrola."

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

My uncle has a story about his son asking if he could call someone. Permission was given and the son told he could use the phone in the basement, where they both were. He stared at it a moment, then asked it worked. Yep, it was a dial phone.

I recall the family being on a party line, but not for long. Either the folks didn't put up with it for long, or it was just replaced by the now-standard private line as the phone company phased out the party lines.

For a while the phone in the garage had a cracked dial that could catch a fingernail. Having listened to the click pattern, I decided to see if I could "dial" by keying the switch-hook. I was quite pleased to find that I could do that. I don't know if I can still do that, though. Maybe some line are DTMF only now.

I also remember my grandfather calling the fridge the "icebox" as well.

pulse dial frequency

[(Anonymous)]

The standard rate for pulse dial is 10 pulses/sec., though there is some phone equipment that does double-speed dialing. The old Strowger switches probably only had some delay ceiling past which it figured you were dialing the next digit, though I don't know what that bound is, so on at least some (now ancient) phone switches you probably wouldn't have to keep up 10 hits/second on the switch hook.

[irpooh.livejournal.com]

At the risk of sounding like my father... back in my day... I have a feeling that offspring produced in the 70's will be among the last to "get" the record joke. Of todays youth, only those with an interest in historical comedy will have an interest in the answer. I recall a conversation not long ago relating a reallllly funny plot they had seen on a TV sitcom (name escapes me now) and as the sweet youngster related the tale, I realized it was three Vaudeville sketches (two of which I had performed once in a musical review) expanded and pieced together. And as the tale progressed I started interjecting the punch line or slap stick bit. My youthful friend stopped midsentence and said, "I thought you said you didn't watch (whatever the show)" I replied that I didn't, and explained the plot had been around since 30 years before I was born. The look on their face was truly priceless.

So, I guess the way to not "miss" is to keep up on your history... which has made me think of something I want to go post in my journal... bye

[michaelmink.livejournal.com]

"Black Bottom" was actually a very well known song from the mid-1920s, which I have on my iPod. It was so well known that a few years later, in the song "Crazy Words, Crazy Tune," the phrase is used by a ukelele player that's annoying the narrator of the song. I'd have to listen to SJ&HCS' version to see if it's the same song.

As for the bulb explosion, look at "Yankee Doodle Mouse," the Tom & Jerry short that won the Oscar for 1943. Jerry "bombs" Tom with light bulbs, which make small bomb-like explosions, nicely illustrating your point.

[keeper1st.livejournal.com]

I heard a 78rpm record of Crazy Words, Crazy Tune a while back. What a fun song. It's like the epitome of the do-de-o song. It made me think of the Dodo from the WB cartoon.

"Black Bottom" is a name used for several things. Earliest I know of is Jelly Roll Morton's "Black Bottom Stomp" from 1919. There also was a "Black Bottom Dance" and even a stage revue called "Black Bottom".

OK, doing some research, I find a reference to a neighborhood of Detroit called "Black Bottom" as early as 1900... it was demolished in 1950.

The "Black Bottom" dance became all the rage in about 1927, replacing the Charleston as the vogue dance of the times.

Outdated references...

[(Anonymous)]

In my blog (http://agingnerd.blogspot.com/; should I pick up and move to LiveJournal?) I wonder about one of those: in the Association's song "Six Man Band" is the line "We got the seventeen jewels that dictate the rules..." which is a reference to the jewels that are used as durable bearings in an analog watch movement, i.e. the band is under the thumb of their tour schedule. How many people nowadays would understand the reference?

[timmowarner.livejournal.com]

I've often wondered why the effect of music stopping and the sound of a needle scratching over a record is still used to indicate a comic reversal in movie trailers. Does everyone still understand what the effect is supposed to indicate, or is it just a funny sound effect?

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Maybe it represents a record played being accidentally kicked or jostled, and thus metaphorically any big "oops" moment.

[timmowarner.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's what it is, but do people still know that or do they just think it's a funny sound effect?

[shelbystripes.livejournal.com]

It's just a sound that means (or at least meant) "oops" whenever it was heard. You bump into a record player, it scratches like that, you go "Oh shit!"

There's a lot of cues in movies that we now kind of take for granted, but were actually created at some point. For instance... I'm not sure exactly how it started, but because filmmakers during the Hayes Code era weren't allowed to depict people actually making out, they would do a fade and show the people with some of their clothes removed or undone or messed, and smoking. It's not like, back in the 30s and 40s, it was the social norm to reach for a cigar after sex; it was done as a symbolic way to let the audience know what happened. Somehow, the audiences managed to pick up on these cues, and they stuck.

In fact, in Casablanca, there was a big fuss about this, because the studio censors got ahold of the script, got pissed about the filmmakers planning to do that, and started going, "We don't care WHAT you do, Rick does NOT remove his trenchcoat in the latter half of this scene!" That was particularly offensive because it would've indicated that (*gasp*) he slept with a married woman. The filmmakers ended up leaving Rick dressed at the end of the scene, but still used the smoking bit, and audiences still got it anyway.

Somehow filmmakers just use these things and audiences understand them, and often there isn't an easily traceable watershed moment for why. It just happened once and then got borrowed, because borrowing an established device is a lot easier than inventing a new one. Which is why that scratching-record thing is *still* used--audiences still know it, and probably will continue to do so from its consistent use, long after record players are gone.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I wonder if rap might prolong cultural knowledge of phonographic turntables, thanks to the image of a DJ with two turntables, doing beatmixing or "scratching" (moving the record back and forth under the needle, making that woopa-woopa-woop sound).

I've been confused by a few references to old machines in cartoons, such as gags where one character spritzes another with ink by playing with a lever on the side of a fountain pen. I've never had a pen with a lever on it!

Then there are some old things that I'm used to the idea of... but only from cartoons; never seen them in real life. Like the crank on the front of a car, or picking up the phone and talking to an operator.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. I remember all of these. Fountain pens with a lever that squeezed a rubber bladder inside to evacuate and fill them; cars that could be started with a crank (though by my time the crank was kept in the back with the spare tire and only used in emergencies if the battery went dead); and definitely talking to the operator (see my note above.)

Fountain pens that you fill from an ink bottle are still around. I own and use several. But today's precision manufacturing allows them to have a rigid cylinder with a little piston that screws up and down instead of the old lever and rubber bladder (which inevitably ended up leaking after some length of time.) I think the other two have gone the way of the dodo.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

When I went to school in Switzerland, we used fountain pens. But instead of refilling it from an inkwell, you refilled it by putting a plastic ink-filled cartridge inside. In fact, the body of the pen could hold two ink cartridges: the one in use, and a spare.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yep. All of mine can use cartridges if you prefer that. I like writing with a fountain pen. It's more expressive and takes a little more control and practice than other pens.

Using bottled ink is traditional, and gives you a choice of more colors usually. I choose between blue, black, green, and purple ink depending on my mood and the occasion. You replace the cartridge with a little gadget called a converter that has a transparent body and a piston mechanism operated by a little knob on the end.

[shelbystripes.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this in more general terms for a while, concerning phones and connectivity... I'm wondering if, in the near future, people will forget what it's like to be truly "unavailable".

I mean, this is a standard plot device in film; someone goes on vacation, there's a crisis, they're the only person that could easily solve it, and they're unreachable. Or other examples along the same vein. Nowadays... most people have cell phones. Everyone in my family has a cell phone. And this is even more prevalent among the younger generation, who tend to get their own phone line anymore before they're at an age where they're allowed to wander around on their own.

Will we reach a time when people refer to being unavailable, and at least the younger generation can't imagine it?

[timmowarner.livejournal.com]

"Jack Ryan isn't answering his cellphone and he's the only one who can save us!"

"He must be in a movie theatre!"

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I hope not. I'm puzzled by the way some people are jittery and uncomfortable when out of reach of a telephone or computer, but not everyone suffers from that. I don't carry a cell phone, lap top, or pda and hope never to do so. I'm not alone, nor are others who agree with me all my age or older.