One person’s view: “What we have is yet another boring ballad with acoustic guitars and a harp and generic love song lyrics that might as well have been written in the 50s.” – Nerd with an Afro
The public’s view: 2.56 / 5.00
Individuals named Oliver have been undermining the establishment since the time of Cromwell. The most famous Olivers of my lifetime are a filmmaker known for his unorthodox conspiracy theories and a Marine Corps colonel who was the central figure in an actual conspiracy. Then there was Cousin Oliver, the duplicitous tyke who infiltrated the Brady Bunch as part of an evil conspiracy. He forced the cancellation of the sitcom, thereby ending the TV empire of Sherwood Schwartz and ushering in the age of Garry Marshall. A singer named Oliver might be expected to have a similar revolutionary impact on popular music, but his sleepy ballad “Jean” was perhaps the most boring hit song of 1969. You have to dive into the surrounding context to find anything controversial about it, and that’s just what I intend to do.
“Jean” was the theme song for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. This film was set in Scotland, so the music needed to have a British feel. The task of writing the theme was nonetheless given to poet and composer Rod McKuen, who was about as British as In-N-Out Burger. He surmised that the song should use the word “meadow” to achieve the necessary level of Britishness, because England and Scotland are absolutely teeming with meadows. (Meadows are less common in other countries. Anybody who spots one in the U.S. is encouraged to report it to the local zoning board so that it can be paved.) McKuen also needed to date the song to the era in which Miss Jean Brodie was in her prime: the 1930s. I bet he listened to “Danny Boy” a bunch of times before writing this lesser version of it to fulfill his contract.
The lyrics are vague enough that we don’t really know the narrator’s intentions with respect to Miss Jean. Maybe she truly is young and alive, and he is attempting to wake her out of her half-dreamed dream so that they can have sex in the meadow. Or maybe she is now well past her peak years, with her mind possibly fading, and he is trying to remind her of better days in which she frolicked in the meadow (and probably had sex in it too). Either interpretation is plausible, as the Jean Brodie in the film was both a vibrant, attractive woman and a tragic figure whose hubris ultimately led to her downfall. And here’s what makes her truly special: she was a Fascist with a capital “F”.
Miss Jean Brodie proudly displayed a picture of Mussolini in the classroom where she taught, and told her students of her fondness for his policies. She encouraged one young lady to travel to Spain and fight in the civil war on behalf of Franco, resulting in the girl’s death. In the Muriel Spark novel on which the film was based, Miss Jean eventually decided that the Italian and Spanish Fascists weren’t effective enough and that the German ones were more to her liking. Maybe that’s why the singer implores Jean to come out to the meadow. He is corralling people there to send them to the camps, and he wants her help. Just watch where you goosestep, Jean, because the sheep like to graze there too.
In all fairness, a lot of working class people believed in Fascism in the 1930s. Mussolini famously made the trains run on schedule, unlike his less competent imitators of today who are more apt to clumsily break the Newark airport. Some folks were willing to barter away their freedoms as long as they got to Rome in time for Pius XI’s acoustic set at the Vatican Troubadour. In Scotland, however, Fascism never took root except among a handful of individuals who were motivated more by anti-Semitism than by any legitimate concern for the railroads. It was not a good look for Miss Jean Brodie, nor for Muriel Spark’s real-life teacher who inspired the character.
It is also not a feather in the cap for “Jean”. This may be the only top 10 hit in history that expresses fondness for a Nazi sympathizer (except, of course, for Kanye West’s odes to himself). Perhaps it does so only satirically, but the meaning is so ambiguous that any attempt at irony is going to be lost on most listeners. It’s probably for the best that it isn’t a very good song, so it has not survived into the age of social media. We really don’t need any memes involving “Jean”, Roman salutes, and Cousin Oliver. However, I can imagine an entertaining Brady Bunch episode in which the Brady family invades and annexes Poland so that they can have enough living space for a second bathroom. Heil Marcia.
My rating: 3 / 10
No comments:
Post a Comment