Poetry and Pop


Page 12



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Introducing a social context for his music-related experiences, and looking beyond pop music's self-promoting myths, Jarman sees what  Joni Mitchell
later called "the star-making machinery behind the popular song." As
pop music historians point out, behind the image of The Supremes, circa 1965,
were the managers, promoters, and record company executives who, after making the
group, would soon destroy it by forcing personnel changes (Florence Ballard would
be fired), and accentuating Ross's role by changing the name of the group from
"The Supremes" to "Diana Ross and the Supremes." Further,
Jarman's poem is aware that while white groups were publicly worrying about
selling out their countercultural status in the mid-sixties, for most black
performers -- who had not yet been allowed to buy into the American Dream --
selling out wasn't an option. 




Introducing a social context for his music-related experiences, and looking beyond pop music's self-promoting myths, Jarman sees what Joni Mitchell
later called "the star-making machinery behind the popular song."
 






The final stanza of "The Supremes" acknowledges that pop music's
former meanings are "frail and frozen." Reviving them means
understanding their power in relation to the present. The song The Supremes sang
on TV that day in Ball's Market, like all of the group's early music, was
seemingly free of political or broad social meanings. But for Jarman, writing in
the mid- eighties, this song by The Supremes --"Stop! In the Name of
Love" -- takes on new meanings. If previously the song seemed to embody only
the romantic fictions of adolescence, now the title seems to have been a caution
with larger implications. Unable to deny ("Stop!") time's passing, 



we vanished, too, parting like spray--

Ball's Market, my friends and I.

Dredgers ruined the waves,

those continuous dawn perfections,

and Ball sold high to the high rises

cresting over them. His flight out of L.A.,

heading for Vegas, would have banked

above the wavering lines of surf.

He may have seen them. I have,

leaving again for points north and east,

glancing down as the plane turns.

From that height they still look frail and frozen,

full of simple sweetness and repetition.



"The Supremes" concludes with a statement that may be read as an
ironic tribute to the myth of childhood innocence. For while the last lines of
the poem monumentalize the past, they do so knowingly, and from a distance
("From that height"). Finally, Jarman's appropriation of a phrase
commonly used to describe both adolescence and the music of The Supremes
("full of simple sweetness") is both a nod to memory's sentimental
tendencies and a wink at its totalizing myths. 






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