Rocky, the Rust Belt, and Grease:
How Stallone and Travolta Sabotaged the Four Seasons
Under Construction
Those of us who remember the original stage production and its specific references to Italian and Polish working class Chicago in the 1950s can only marvel at its successful transformation into an Edenic, sitcommed, Los Angelized Fiddler On the Roof.
Nixon, and his Southern strategy helped make disaffected white Southerners stand in for all patriotic whites with class (and race) resentments. Country music became the favored format for beleaguered patriots.
Nixon’s strategy worked up to a point. He was able to sell himself to the Grand Ole Opry and Country music produced some excellent resentful patriotic music. But in the long run Country couldn’t speak for northern urban whites because its regional resignation didn’t fit the circumstances of living inside of multilayered, fluid, but existent economic classes. Newark , New Jersey didn’t lose the Civil War, it lost the Sixties.
The Four Seasons could have fit into the “Motown Frame” if it had continued to develop and expand to represent the stories of the other migrations to Northern cities. But that frame cracked after LBJ split apart the country by embracing both the Civil Rights Movement and the War in Viet Nam, and then fractured as the economy bifurcated and Motown abandoned Detroit to the Rust Belt and moved to LA.
