posted 05/01/02 01:01 PM Central Time (US)     no email address given

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An interesting article in today’s (May 1) Wall Street Journal, pg. B1. It talks about how difficult it is to market 20th century celebrities to today’s kids. It appears that even the Beatles are in trouble, with less than half of 1% of people aged eight to 24 years old naming the group among their favorite performers...Some exerpts:
* “Young people show almost no interest in legends from previous generations” youth marketers say. For people under 30 they’re dead brands.
* “It’s hard to understand why people don’t love the things you love, but young people haven’t shared your experiences, and they have different needs and heroes.”
* Dead stars “resonate most vividly with the generations that knew them as performers.”.. * “Generations x or y don’t need their parent’s and granparent’s idols, because there’s so much in their present.”
* “One in three young people now is non-white For them, there’s a cultural distance from white males like Babe Ruth.”

I think it's up to real music fans who seek out all different forms of music and are not put off by older material to keep this stuff alive. Bing's never going to be pop or appeal to a young audience on any meaniful scale. It's just not Bing's time anymore. As frustrating as it can be, I guess we should be glad that Bing is remembered around Christmas time. I think the best way to go about keeping the Bing-flame alive is to appeal to the real appreciators / collectors who already like classic pop (Sinatra, Martin, etc.) and jazz (Armstrong, Fitzgerald). Bing needs to be placed more firmly in that cannon.

posted 05/01/02 06:07 PM Central Time (US)     contact the author directly

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Harley, Thanks for that very interesting article from the Wall Street Journal. It brought to mind a talk I heard this past week on Book TV about a famous television icon of the Fifties - Bishop Fulton Sheen. His name will be familiar to many readers of this Board, but(just to illustrate your point) many will have never heard of him..It is impossible today to imagine a bishop in full episcopal attire, armed only with a piece of chalk and a blackboard, gaining the attention of an entire nation. Yet, Sheen competed successfully with "Mr. Television" himself, Milton Berle, often surpassing him in the ratings..In his first year on TV, Sheen won an Emmy for the most Outstanding Television Personality defeating Lucille Ball, Arthur Godfrey and Edward R. Murrow in the process. Predictably, he made the cover of TIME among other magazines. Dr. Reeves, who gave the talk, explained how Sheen devoted 35 hours preparation to each half hour talk. He then tested it out in Italian on a professor friend of his; next in French on another hapless victim. By the time he got to the English version, he had it polished to the nth degree and invariably got the timing exact to 28 minutes. No notes, no cue cards, just chalk and a blackboard. Once at an award ceremony attended by Berle and others, he followed their example and thanked his script writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It was close enough to the truth. A populist with a brilliant mind(he was the first American to get a post-doctoral degree at Louvain; it was such an amazing performance that Oxford immediately contacted him though he returned to work in a slum parish) he surely was one of televisions icons. Yet, he is completely forgotten by the media today. Reeves could not even get his biography reviewed.

Association of ideas here, but Perry Como was another icon from the same period who commanded huge ratings in his day. His passing last year went almost unnoticed in the press. Gilbert Harding who was almost synonymous with the BBC of the 1950s was barely remembered within weeks of his passing. The day he died, Madame Tussauds took down his wax effigy and melted it. Sic transit Gloria Steinem...Bearing all that in mind, Bing is not doing too badly, considering. As a friend of mine reminded me not long ago, "The time will soon come when not only will we not be remembered, but all those who knew us will themselves not be remembered."