After watching Troubadours (BBC4, Friday) for about ten minutes, I was close to gibbering with rage. People liked this stuff? Worse, I liked it. I used to play James Taylor, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and even Carole King’s mope-a-thon album Tapestry. I played them a lot. So, by way of apologising to myself for my past, I grabbed a copy of Balsamic Dreams by Joe Queenan, a magnificent 210-page rant against the Baby Boomers — he’s talking about m’m’m’my generation.
Here’s what he says about Tapestry:
The astonishing popularity of King’s LP (it eventually sold more than 15 million copies) provided incontrovertible evidence that at heart the boomers were as sappy and corny as their parents…it introduced three themes — general lameness (‘You’ve Got A Friend’), communal nostalgia for the extremely recent past (‘So Far Away’), and incessant and incorrigible repackaging (‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’ — a gruelling reworking of a hit King had co-written years earlier, now performed at catatonic speed).
Now, to be fair, ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’ was a great pop record, as performed by the Shirelles.
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