The Cowsills In Books





Learning Environments: Readings in Educational Psychology
by Patricia A. Chesebro, James J. Johnson, William J. Gnagey
Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1972

Book

on Page 167:
Another way of preceiving the microbopper would be to understand his apparatus - the way in which he communicates. The microbopper speaks a new language.

The use of the phrase "new language" is not entirely journalistic and oracular rhetoric. nonverbal: part gesture, part tone, part assumption, part telepathy and part words. They express themselves to each other. Conversation is highly animated, almost theatrical. Small talk is not part of their world; communication between two close friends becomes esoteric, multileveled and intricate, and to us, incomprehensible. Where we use gestures to support words, they use words to support gestures. They have been called post-literate.

One magazine editor described the micro bopper telepathy this way:

Just before their song was announced as No. 1 on a New York hit parade, the preteen members of the Cowsills, a family music group adopted by MGM Records and supported by a $250000 publicity campaign, were moving aimlessly around their agent's office eerily communicating with each other in this fashion: their own album provided background sound; they sang snatches of their music, touched one another, pushed and pulled, gradually through movement, filling the office with themselves. Words were not strung together in sentences, they were used to punctuate gestures. To one of us not an understandable statement was made in twenty minutes. Yet, they seemed to be talking to each other. They were.

It is not that microboppers are inarticulate; they do not choose to talk. Anthropologist Ted Carpenter swwa their communications techniques as akin to that of primitive languages which utilize polysynthetic forms .....





Email Me Home