bobov (imported) wrote: Sun May 22, 2005 10:14 pm When I was a teen, my friends and I made a cult of scorning Lawrence Welk. He wasn't rock. He wasn't classical. His was the music our dreaded parents liked. All the out-of-it old farts who were scared by the Beatles and bored by Bach liked Lawrence and those bubbles. Despising Lawrence Welk became a touchstone of our generation. He was said to symbolize all the decaying retrograde sentiments of the rotten civilization we golden youth were going to replace at any moment.
Well, now that I'm an out-of-it old fart, I have the courage to ask why Lawrence Welk deserves to be so demonized. He played popular old tunes in a square straightforward style, plus bubbles. Sophisticated? No. Revolutionary? No. Complex? No. It was plain music for plain folk. It was working-class music for average joes after a hard week at the "plant." (Strange, in retrospect, how important it was in the "60s" to overthrow working-class values with upper middle class values.) Well, so what? Music was never as important as we made it out to be - the supremacy of Mick Jagger over Lawrence Welk didn't change the world. Our "revolutionary" tastes in consumption were just the basis of a new business. (Note that Welk performed on free tv; to be "revolutionary," you needed to buy albums, stereos, etc., with money provided by your Lawrence Welk-loving parents.)
After all these years, I've got to ask - so what if our embarassing prole parents enjoyed Lawrence Welk and his simple renditions of familiar tunes? You don't have to like Welk yourself, but a little tolerance for others (a liberal value!) might be in order.
My brother David enjoys watching the reruns of the Lawrence Welk Show. I father stopped supporting public television, when his local PBS stations stopped running the old shows. My mother misses them. I hope that I do not demonize either Mr. Welk or his performers. However, I hate the program. I do not know why. My rejection is immediate and intense. It seems that Mr. Welk never appreciates the music for itself but as something to use as a mere commodity. My parents never watched the show when it first played. They acquired their taste for it in their later years.
Maybe, my brother and mothers hear and my father heard the music in a way that they never had in the first place. Maybe, they grew into it. Apparently, I did not grow mature with age. Obviously, You are blessed to appreciate why people enjoy Mr. Welk. Good for you. I appreciate your insight.
A-1 
