"That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be": Baby Boomers, 1970s Singer-Songwriters, and Romantic Relationships
2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/97.3.682
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoOn August 4, 2003, Dick Ebersol of nbc placed the winning bid of $50,000 at a charity auction to learn the identity of the preening playboy featured in Carly Simon's 1973 hit, "You're So Vain." For thirty years, the "mystery" (Simon's word) of which of her many paramours was the song's inspiration prompted a "nationwide guessing game." A Los Angeles disc jockey asked his listeners to vote; their choice was the musician (and Simon's former lover) Kris Kristofferson. On the club circuit, the comedian Martin Mull joked that maybe "Carly will write another one about me." Mull was not in the running as the song's inspiration, but the surprise backup singer Mick Jagger was a common guess, as were Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Cat Stevens, and James Taylor, each of whom had been linked to the singer.1 The public obsession with the origin of "You're So Vain" reflected a society—and a generation—confused about love. The 1960s were years of social turmoil, but it was only in the 1970s that ordinary people assimilated once-radical ideas into their personal lives. By then, traditional authority had lost its influence, especially over the younger generation, driving them toward a host of new experts with real-world credibility. Simon and her ilk, singer-songwriters who wrote autobiographical songs and lived in the public eye, provided middle-class youths with some compelling models of modern gender, romance, and sexuality. "Joni Mitchell is the woman who taught your cold English wife how to feel," Emma Thompson's character tells her husband in the 2003 film Love Actually. Like Thompson's character, a lot of American youths in the 1970s learned from singer-songwriters to think differently about love.2
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