[HN Gopher] What Happened to Rod McKuen?
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What Happened to Rod McKuen?
Author : footest
Score : 16 points
Date : 2022-10-14 20:03 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slate.com)
| deckard1 wrote:
| > The Spotify algorithm, Amazon's recommendations, they'll never,
| ever show you Rod McKuen. Those are designed to direct you
| towards things that other people like right now. But thrift
| stores, used bookshops, and Goodwills are, accidentally,
| perfectly designed to show you things that people liked decades
| ago, then stopped liking.
|
| I've often thought of and lamented the former idea. That the
| serendipity of the algorithms is less serendipitous than browsing
| a local record store. But what I've not considered much is that
| we, digital age folk, leave nothing behind. When I was young my
| mom had a pile of 45 rpm records. It was great browsing through
| those as a kid, knowing what my mom was into as a teenager. What
| do we leave our children? Our Spotify account? It's just not the
| same. Records have character. Worn dust jackets, scratches. A
| physical human held and cared for these. It's a snapshot of a
| point in time. Newspaper clippings, ticket stubs, it's all going
| away. They can look at a long-dead iPhone 3G and wonder what
| music or videos I played on it.
| mynameishere wrote:
| What happened to "Life's little instruction book"? What happened
| to "Don't sweat the small stuff (and it's all small stuff)"?
| Every so often some "nice" but vapid book or fad comes along and
| makes a lot of money from people in that literate but dull IQ
| range of 104-106 and while it's never fun to smilingly fend off
| recommendations from well-meaning friends ("You should read this!
| It's really inspiring!") it's all pretty harmless.
|
| McKuen put a semi-handsome face and a semi-pleasant voice to it
| and so lasted quite a while.
|
| He's really easy to hate though. I hated him before I even knew
| his name. He wrote the lyrics to "Seasons in the Sun". Fuck you,
| Rod McKuen.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| That song sucks.
| m463 wrote:
| What I miss is the ronco egg scrambler, that would scramble
| eggs in the shell.
|
| Or maybe stretch armstrong (they (lol) pulled him)
|
| I don't miss feelings. ("Feelings, wo oh oh feelings Wo oh oh,
| feel you again in my arms")
| googlryas wrote:
| Just shake it like a maraca, that's what I do for hard boiled
| scrambled eggs.
| [deleted]
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _He wrote the lyrics to "Seasons in the Sun"._
|
| Went down the Wikipedia rabbit hole and learned that McKuen
| just translated them from the original French lyrics by Jacques
| Brel. Terry Jacks rewrote that translation for his popular
| rendition, which I'm guessing is the version most people
| hate^H^H^H^H are familiar with.
|
| You can hear McKuen's translation of the original lyrics in
| _The Kingston Trio_ 's version here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CnxktZzjD4
| zasdffaa wrote:
| > dull IQ range of 104-106
|
| Ouch. That's damning of you. BTW I don't know if being
| interesting is strongly correlated with IQ anyway.
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