Wednesday 1 February 2017

the pre-fab four

At a time when popular culture and entertainment in flush with reprisals and reboots, many of which are not deserving of our nostalgia and really defy explanation other than derivative vehicles for some marketing tie-in, it was refreshingly discordant to come across this appreciation of fifty years since the debut of the Monkees.
Like the narrator, I realised that I probably had not really spared a thought for the band for years until that moment but being confronted with the intimately familiar repertoire again, I found myself thinking that these numbers were actually really well performed and not just the floss that I had always dismissed them as. Maybe it was that TV show theme that haunted the group—who were originally conceived as a sitcom about an aspiring group of musicians to be like the Beatles—and how both arms of the franchise unfolded concominently, making the music literally incidental. No faulting the band for what they label expected them to do, but it’s strange how I was compelled to hold one opinion—with some conviction and made me think of the Berenstein/Berenstain phenomenon, which is the manifestation of a false or alternate memory—sometimes known as the Mandela Effect as significant portions of the population swore and still possibly maintain that they have vivid, shared memories of Nelson Mandela’s funeral years prematurely.