{"id":6608,"date":"2011-04-04T14:10:18","date_gmt":"2011-04-04T18:10:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=6608"},"modified":"2011-04-04T14:10:18","modified_gmt":"2011-04-04T18:10:18","slug":"scott-pilgrim-vs-the-world-and-the-evolving-rock-n-roll-landscape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/scott-pilgrim-vs-the-world-and-the-evolving-rock-n-roll-landscape\/","title":{"rendered":"<em>Scott Pilgrim vs. the World<\/em> and the Evolving Rock &#8216;n Roll Landscape"},"content":{"rendered":"<iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/O-z9gg341VY?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><p>I finally saw the movie <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/index.php\/ipod-dive\/\" target=\"_blank\">Scott Pilgrim vs. the World<\/a><\/em> last night. It was so good, so sweet, so true to a time in life that I&#8217;d bet\u2014cultural and technological changes aside\u2014a lot of Townspeople can identify. The whole family dug it, and my wife and I took great, snobbish pleasure in explaining to our boys why the film couldn&#8217;t have been the massive popular hit and Academy Award winner it clearly would have been had more of the world been more like us.<\/p>\n<p>This morning I&#8217;m thinking about some of the key cultural developments since my teen years (that would be the mid-1970s into early 1980s, kidz) that have worked their way into the modern-day rock &#8216;n roll youth culture. For instance, the history of rock &#8216;n roll through my teen years was framed by the ubiquitous landscape of <strong>cars &amp; girls<\/strong>. There was a good chance that a rock &#8216;n roll artist in the early days of the genre, such as <strong>Chuck Berry<\/strong>,\u00a0through bands like <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/index.php\/ipod-dive\/\" target=\"_blank\">Loverboy<\/a><\/strong> was going to sing about &#8220;cars and girls.&#8221; <strong>Drugs<\/strong> and <strong>alcohol<\/strong> would join the mix, but cars and girls were long the driving force, no? I wish I could explain it better; would it make sense if I said cars and girls were key to the <em>mise-en-sc\u00e9ne<\/em> of rock &#8216;n roll? (My apologies to film buffs and the French, if I&#8217;m using this term incorrectly.)<\/p>\n<p>If it wasn&#8217;t clear enough to me, thanks to my Swing Era\u2013loving, &#8220;gamer&#8221; teenage son whose love of\u00a0<strong>The Mills Brothers<\/strong>, <strong>Dean Martin<\/strong>, et al has been furthered by the soundtrack to his favorite video game,\u00a0the <em>Fallout<\/em> series, <em>Scott Pilgrim vs the World<\/em> drove home the point that video games have replaced cars in the rock &#8216;n roll\u00a0<em>mise-en-sc\u00e9ne<\/em>. For that matter skateboards have eclipsed cars. What fun would there be writing about a Toyota Camry?<\/p>\n<p>Girls are still essential to the landscape of rock &#8216;n roll, but <em>boys<\/em> are included too, and not just in &#8220;Girl Group&#8221; songs written by highly frustrated, compensating, domineering\u00a0dudes.<\/p>\n<p>Video games, skateboards, boys&#8230; <em>What else might be new to the rock &#8216;n roll landscape since you moved beyond its core demographic?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I finally saw the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World last night. It was so good, so sweet, so true to a time in life that I&#8217;d bet\u2014cultural and technological changes aside\u2014a lot of Townspeople can identify. The whole family dug it, and my wife and I took great, snobbish pleasure in explaining to our <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/scott-pilgrim-vs-the-world-and-the-evolving-rock-n-roll-landscape\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[34],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6608"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6608\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}