How Fleetwood Mac Won the Classic Rock Wars by Jill Mapes
For years, there was no more reliable album to find in used record bins at an affordable price than Rumours. It made sense. The 1977 blockbuster from Fleetwood Mac sold a ludicrous number of copies in its initial run, so there was plenty of supply as people cleared out their collections for various reasons. Now, nearly fifty years later, the album is purchased in new copies at an astounding rate. As Jill Mapes notes in this article, it has taken up permanent residence in the upper reaches of the Billboard album chart. That’s just one data point in the amazingly long-running and wide-ranging cultural dominance of Fleetwood Mac (at least the versionof the band that included relatively late arrivals Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham). This piece on the phenomenon is well-observed and terrifically entertaining. It is published by Hearing Things.
The Discourse Is Broken by Charlie Warzel
Sydney Sweeney is a good actress. Her performance in Reality deserved more awards attention than it got, and her inventive emotional honesty and starry charisma go a long way towards elevating the romcom hit Anyone But You to more than the sum of its shaky, rehabbed parts. (I’ve also been informed by my most reliable horror film evaluator that Sweeney admirably goes for it all in the horror flick Immaculate.) She’s also at the center of an astounding number of cultural firestorms, mostly because she has an almost mystical ability to cause right-wingers to lose what little is left of their poisoned minds. Writing for The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel evaluates how the hot take machine that is the new Sweeney-starring ad campaign from American Eagle is definitive proof that tempered reactions to cultural moments, events, and artifacts are vanishingly rare.
Yes, Trump Firing the BLS Commissioner Is Bad. Really Bad. by Nitish Pahwa
Republicans have been actively revolting against reality since at least as far back as the Reagan Revolution, which insisted, in direct opposition to basic logic and clear evidence, that tax cuts for the wealthy really helped poor people the most. The current crew of evildoers in the White House are taking that denial of truth to radical new levels. The rash, petulant dismissal of the government employee who uses only data — and is properly unconcerned with the propaganda needs of the president — to determine monthly job numbers is only the latest example of the impulses of these miscreants that are actively destructive to the whole nation. Nitish Pahwa writes about the flagrant irresponsibility of the move for Slate.
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Fleetwood Mac’s standing (at least the Buckingham-Nicks FM) amongst generations younger than Boomers now is pretty astounding. When I was a teenager and getting into grunge/alternative music, FM’s popularity and position in the rock canon was probably at their lowest, especially since in the early ’90s there was an effort to escape the shackles of Boomer music in general and their sweet California sound was the antithesis to punk. It didn’t help that Fleetwood Mac was in another wilderness zone in between Buckingham stints: Vito and Burnette (and even Dave Mason!) are fine enough guitarists, but they ain’t Lindsey. So I’m glad that younger generations don’t have the same hang-ups about music as I did, and can get into a wide variety of artists from different genres and eras.
One bummer about the Boomer Shakespeare is how the Buckingham/Nicks version of the band has almost erased any memory of other versions of the band. Yeah, the less said about the Vito/Burnette/Mason era, the better, but the band was together for almost a decade before Stevie and Lindsey joined. You might get the acknowledgement of founder Peter Green’s work, but that middle period between when they were just another British Blues Boom Band and the world-conquering monster they became might as well not exist. That’s a shame, because there’s some good stuff on the five Bob Welch era albums from 1971-4. And they were already exploring a softer, more pop, more “California” sound then (and Bob was the first Californian in the band!) Plus, there are some great Christine McVie songs in there too.
One thing I found interesting in Jill Mapes’ piece is how some of those big classic rock bands that still held sway on youth 20 years ago don’t anymore. I can understand how the Stones and maybe The Who don’t appeal to fifteen year olds anymore, but I’m sure that there’s still some youths getting into Pink Floyd, The Beatles, and especially Led Zeppelin. Yes, their personal lives may be questionable, but Zep is just the perfect band for a thirteen year old getting into music.
I reckon the vast majority of people who plunk down their dollars for new pressings of Rumours would be stunned to learn it’s the eleventh album credited to the band. It genuinely feels like such a different act when Buckingham and Nicks show up one album earlier that it would be truer advertising if they’d changed the name to something else.
Although it’s a little weird that pop music is so stagnant that material from decades earlier can still seem so completely relevant today (there’s a Steve Albini quote I think of all the time that addresses this), I agree with you that it’s a net positive that young music fans don’t sullenly dismiss anything that’s older. If they find it and they like it, it’s new to them and that’s good enough. I work with college kids, and I can attest that you’re right: there are other artists from that era and before that they also connect with, the Beatles chief among them.