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Doug Fieger - Source: Reuters
Writing a song that sells a million copies is no small achievement, so the news and wire services dutifully marked the passing of Doug Fieger, singer/songwriter with American band The Knack from brain and lung cancer.
His song, My Sharona, will be instantly familiar to anyone who was listening to the radio in 1979. Describing this ditty, I won't extend the already-stretched arsenal that typically accompanies any writer's descent into the Valley of Cliches that is contemporary music criticism, but you can hear the thing here , and make up your own mind. Other versions are available, but the poor quality of this one somehow contains more energy.
My Sharona was about pursuing a much younger woman. George W Bush once listed it as a favourite. That tells you nothing more than it was extremely catchy.
Fieger was variously reported as being 57, or 58. Let's pick the latter, even though it may be wrong and allow Mr Fieger an extra year of living.
Because Doug Fieger expired on Monday, Valentine's Day here in the United States, a cute note was inserted in NME.com by the song's subject, Sharona Alperin about the appropriateness of the day of his passing. Apparently Doug Fieger was all about love; an assertion I won't dispute, except to add that when people die we often search for something to be happy about.
As I idly flicked through the comment section of the New York Post's report on Fieger's death, I found that one diehard, the revanchist rump of the punk movement, sounded pleased that Fieger had died. The Knack had ripped off the Ramones (or Romones, as it was spelled), and the Beatles. Good riddance, was the sentiment.
Call me a conservative, but there is something instantly suspect about people who can't even spell the names of a band whose honour they're supposed to be defending. The former charge, however, may have been true. The Knack wore black ties, white shirts and black jackets (a group uniform, but also the uniform of American post punk in those days), and were often compared to the Beatles for the immediacy of their success. When they failed to justify this hype, they were called one-hit wonders.
But the comment reminded me of an era when music was something worth dying for, or at least sentencing others to death for. If someone liked The Knack, they were as questionable as someone who didn't like, say, UK punk band The Stranglers.
If a person liked mainstream moneymakers Journey then there was no hope for them at all. They would live in ignorance, and perish in shame, or at least that's how it felt. The aesthetic was moral.
But as the margins expanded to accommodate all comers, outliers cleverly occupied the middle. So proclaiming Madonna's virtues as a cultural icon became dangerous, a counterintuitive argument that, while evincing some good sense and a large amount of democratic goodwill (no more sneering at the hoi polloi), also destroyed the idea that there might be a cognoscenti in music, and that they might choose different stuff to love than those who bought music with the same discrimination they applied to buying junk food.
Which is why Doug Fieger served another purpose, one as necessary as writing an immensely popular song: He gave a generation something to loathe, and forced their stylistic descendants into a position in which the only cool option was to love everything.
And if everything is cool, nothing is.
