What Dick Clark REALLY Gave US

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio & Transcript – It’s interesting that Dick Clark the entertainer is not known much for being Dick Clark the entertainer.   He’s known primarily as either A, Dick Clark the great equalizer, because he broke that color barrier down on television, or allegedly broke it down, and B, because of all the bands that he discovered.  Just imagine what a rotten, sucky, crappy world it would be had Dick Clark not discovered Madonna, Janet Jackson, or (insert other Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee here). We live in a world where we are constantly bombarded by a rock and roll drumbeat, we can’t go have sushi without it, and, in large part, we have Dick Clark to thank for it. Thanks, Dick.

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  So all the remembrances or eulogies or epitaphs that I saw or heard about Dick Clark yesterday, they’re one of two things.  Like Ryan Seacrest was, and I only heard this on Fox & Friends this morning, Ryan Seacrest was, “He got me into the business.  The guy was a titan.  If it weren’t for Dick Clark, American Idol wouldn’t be on.  He would probably say, ‘Okay, Ryan, shut up and get back to the show.’”  He said, “Yes, boss.”  They range from that to Stuart Varney.  Sitting in for Neil Cavuto this week, Varney — gosh, it seemed like it went on for hours.  The continual reference to the first thing Dick Clark did was break down the racial barrier on American Bandstand, he brought rock and roll music to the television, he was America’s oldest-living teenager and this and that and the other.  Then this morning, I had to suffer through Zoraida and Kate Baldwin on the Clinton News Network pretty much walking through the same thing and bringing people on that were remembering the first time they saw Janet Jackson and all that.
It’s interesting and I think noteworthy that Dick Clark the entertainer is not known much for being Dick Clark the entertainer.   He’s known primarily as either A, Dick Clark the great equalizer, because he broke that color barrier down on television, or allegedly broke it down, and B, because of all the bands that he discovered.  Just imagine what a rotten, sucky, crappy world it would be had Dick Clark not discovered Madonna.  When I heard that, I went, “Okay, I know what I’m doing this morning.  I know what I’m doing when I get into the radio studio.”  What a crappy, bleep-ass world it would be had Dick Clark not brought Janet Jackson to us.  What an awful world it would be had Dick Clark not discovered, insert Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee here.

This comes up every now and then here on this program.  It’s a current event.  Let’s talk about it for just a moment here.  We live in the era of the nonstop, rock and roll drumbeat.  Thanks, Dick.  We live in the era now where rock and roll and the perverted, pornographic lyrics that it almost all contains are now just an everyday part of every fourth grader’s life.  Thanks, Dick.  We live in an era where you can’t even get into an elevator or go enjoy some sushi on a Thursday afternoon without rock and roll being piped into the Bose speakers above your head.  Thanks, Dick.  I could go on and on, but I think you see the point of the exercise.

I’m not trying to vilify Dick Clark.  He didn’t do this singlehandedly.  When someone is the magnitude of the rock era, as Dick Clark passes on, this is almost like losing a president.  Hell, it may be more important than losing a president.  It’s certainly more historically and culturally important than losing a president.  Why is that?  Why is it that so much is invested in the culture of our bragging rights that we made rock and roll and we are rock and roll?  There’s an answer to this.  Yesterday we spent a lot of time talking about the GSA.  I have to tell you, this is just becoming a farce.  You don’t get Fox and Friends early, do you?
AG:  I keep it tuned into Willie Geist.

 

Mike:  Is he on at 5:00?  He doesn’t come on till 5:30, though.

 

AG:  Yeah.  They just do a news rundown from 5:00 to 5:30.  I stick with that versus the fluff necessarily at Fox.

 

Mike:  Well, the bubble-headed, bleach blonde came on at 5:00.  She didn’t have Steve Doocy.  She had the son, Peter Doocy.  Today’s Peter Doocy live report from Washington, D.C. was, [mocking] “The GSA scandal gets thicker and deeper and more outrageous.  Why, we learned yesterday” — seriously, this was a big news item.  [mocking] “We learned yesterday that hot tub man” — what’s hot tub man’s name?  Marvel Comics ought to do a comic book about this guy.  The western regional dude that was photographed, it’s on the tip of my tongue now.  This is how closely I’m paying attention to the intricate details of the GSA scandal.
Hot tub man’s wife apparently obtained a parking pass to be used at a federal building in San Francisco.  [mocking] “Those parking passes are reserved explicitly and exclusively for government employees.  That winch, that thief, that cheater, she got one.”  Man, that’s like the famous woman and her cow that famously started the Chicago fire.  You’ve heard that story, right, how the Chicago fire was started?
AG:  Yep.

 

Mike:  So the lady that obtained the parking pass, this was big, hysterical news this morning, the outrage, the indecency of it all.  A parking pass?  We spent some time yesterday talking about the cultural decline, and so did Dana Milbank.  He was writing about how this is as good as it gets.  This is the best we have.  Wait a minute, ladies and gentlemen.  It’s 24 past the hour here on the Mike Church Show on the Sirius XM Patriot Channel.  [discussing technical issue with phone]
You can partially explain away some of the government miscreants.  The appropriately titled headline to Milbank’s post yesterday was “Debauchery: An American specialty.”  You can at least partially tie some of what’s happening inside the general government to the cultural decline.  It’s what I talked about yesterday.  This is about as good as it gets, folks.  Garbage in, garbage out.  This is not just a problem with the GSA or the Secret Service, this is just an American problem.  This is just the way it is and what do you expect?  Weren’t the Secret Service agents doing what they needed to do to get their own reality TV show or to be introduced to Kim Kardashian?  If you were listening yesterday, you know all about this.

When the news about Dick Clark broke and I started hearing the, [mocking] “Where would we be if we hadn’t had this band had they not been discovered by Dick Clark?”  I started thinking, as I always do in these instances, to what I think is probably the best analysis of the perverted decline from the American style of music one would have heard prior to 1958 or till the arrival of the British invasion, 1964 or what have you, to what we have here today.  That’s to refer to Professor Allan Bloom’s great book Closing of the American Mind.  I won’t bore you with the book because it is an absolutely insufferable read, although I think you should slog through it.  It’s in the library at MikeChurch.com.

I usually refer to the brilliant Mark Steyn’s take on it.  I reread it this morning, and it’s only five paragraphs, but it’s totally relevant to the over-the-top remembrances of Dick Clark.  Please don’t get me wrong about Dick Clark the broadcaster.  There’s no denying the Titanic stature of Clark and his command of television and radio airwaves.  Don’t misunderstand any of this.  It’s not so much about Dick Clark.  It’s about that wave that he apparently was swept up in, or maybe he started or helped the wave along, that ultimately becomes today what we call our popular culture.

End Mike Church Show Transcript