Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Melody Maker
Great writing about rock and roll is alive and well.
It’s also 20 years old.
I discovered this on a recent trip to the Library of Congress. I had gone there to look up old issues of Melody Maker, the British music magazine that folded in 2000. I was in college in the mid to late 1980s when Melody Maker - “MM” - was at its creative peak. A gifted journalist named Allan Jones had been hired to helm the magazine in 1984, and he would hire some of the best writers in rock criticism or any other field - people like Chris Roberts, Steve Sutherland, and Simon Reynolds. A recent conversation with a friend about the terminal state of popular music writing made me pine for the days of MM; a trip to the Madison building of the Library of Congress lead me to the entire run of the magazine.
I soon realized that I didn’t need to go through the entire run of Melody Maker to prove my point that rock music writing today is clichéd, soporific, unreadable. I only had to read one month of the weekly. I decided to start in January 1987, a date that marked the middle of my college years. I figured I could start there and move my way backwards and forwards, plucking any gems I found to create a compilation of greatest hits.
I never got out of January. There was, in those thirty days, so much rich material that I used up all the money - $10 - I had put on my copy card. One of the first pieces I saw was from January 3, 1987 - a review, by Chris Roberts, of a live show by punk godfather Iggy Pop. Here’s its first paragraph:
It’s in the white of my eyes. The rest of the world, if there still is one, can lie down and die. Tonight Iggy is the strongest, the loudest, the dirtiest, the best, the worst, the fittest of the survivors, and the most powerful propaganda for LIFE I’ve seen on a stage since the Good Luck Theatre Company’s Sam Shepard perspective. Iggy’s been reading a lot of Sam recently, and some Edward Albee….He never stops moving.
It’s more than two decades old, yet still ignites off the page. It is passionate, literate, free of cliché, and charged with a sense of adrenaline and fun. You can tell Chris Roberts loves the music, with a love that explodes the crustaceous tropes that have come to signify rock writing. He takes it seriously as art, and yet also feels its joy, its thrill. Roberts’ piece is more vital, readable and powerful than the reviews that appeared in my copy of today’s Washington Post.
The formula for rock writing these days is very simple, and more conservative than a Republican barbecue in Texas. First, the rock writer must convey a sense of aloofness - he’s the judge, after all, and can’t get too carried away. Second, he must seem knowledgeable, so it’s necessary to toss in some facts about the artists. But he’s also lazy, so most often these facts are cribbed from a bio sheet provided by a record company. Third, he must be liberal, awarding bands extra points if they grumble or seethe with resentment about Republicans and conservatives. And lastly, he must employ the arsenal of rock clichés so expertly itemized in small book The Rock Snob’s Dictionary. Music is must be “atmospheric.” Something isn’t loud, it’s a “rave-up.” A guitar riff is “coruscating“ or it “jangles.“ Great albums are “seminal.“ And, of course, lifeless descriptors must be used - “indie rock,” “alt-country,” “trip-hop,” “post-punk.”
Breaking out of these formula, using different references or simply getting so carried away - by a music whose charm is, as U2 Bono once put it, is that it makes you “abandon yourself to it” - is unthinkable. All while covering one of the most exciting art forms in the world.
Here are some reviews from today’s Washington Post. A new album by Amos Lee: “Last Days at the Lodge” opens with a burst of Dylanesque swagger, a reminder that singer-songwriter Amos Lee once toured with the folk-rock legend. But soon Lee moves on to what he does best: smoothly evoking his R & B and soul influences in ways that seem far more heartfelt than derivative.” Another piece calls Alejandro Escovedo an “alt-country-deity-cum-mainstream curiosity.” And here’s Paleolithic rocker Joe Cocker - “when he sings Stevie Wonder’s ‘You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” writes Post veteran Geoffry Himes, “Cocker isn’t revisiting ‘60s radical chic; he’s channeling genuine anger about today’s politics.”
Of course. If there’s one thing that will give any modern rock musician a pass with critics, it’s liberalism. Indeed, the deduct points if a musician is not fully committed to the cause. In his review of Coldplay Viva La Vida, Rolling Stone’s will Hermes deducted points because the band, whose opinions are just to the left of the Daily Kos, was not sufficiently anti-Republican. “There's something troubling about his lack of clear political messages,” Hermes notes, adding that “the title track seems to be about the end of an empire. But its rousing chorus — ‘I hear Jerusalem bells a-ringing/Roman cavalry choirs are singing’ — feels like a rallying cry for a Christian empire. Where's an Arabic violin break when you need one?” This kind of useful idiocy can reach levels of self-parody. John Cougar Mellencamp’s Life, Death Love and Freedom is, according to Rolling Stone’s Mark Kemp, something of a downer: “There’s not a bright, catchy riff or fist-pumping anthem to be found among these brooding, low-key songs about growing old, sick, lonely an pessimistic.” So why the four stars? Well, “it’s unlikely that the Republican candidate would find anything useful for his campaign on Life, Death, Love and Freedom.
While the writers for Melody Maker were hardly RNC members - or rather Tories, as it was a British paper - they never hesitated to gore rock and roll sacred totems. In one series called “Pop! The Glory Years” they marked John Lennon’s descent into nutty self-importance, concluding that even years before his death “he just didn’t martyr anymore.” They ran lists of “The Ten Worst Band in the World,” and included Led Zeppelin - “revile them always” - and, yes, the Beatles: “Loveable mop tops, my back passage.” Editor Allan Jones, writing about Los Lobos, examined their songs as elegy for modern America - and concludes that they indeed are, but that in the band the band concludes that “in the end there is only prayer.” This is honest, full-bodied criticism, not beholden to any agenda but the writer’s own expansive honesty and intelligence.
In 1987 MM writer Simon Reynolds went to a show of gloomy rockers The Jesus and Mary Chain and indicted not only the band but the audience: “Of course the fans - a sad-eyed sea of black clothes, black dye, leather and hair gel - were satisfied. But then these people will be here in 1997, wanting the same things from rock, the same ritual.”
In 2007, 2008 and 2009 as well.
It’s also 20 years old.
I discovered this on a recent trip to the Library of Congress. I had gone there to look up old issues of Melody Maker, the British music magazine that folded in 2000. I was in college in the mid to late 1980s when Melody Maker - “MM” - was at its creative peak. A gifted journalist named Allan Jones had been hired to helm the magazine in 1984, and he would hire some of the best writers in rock criticism or any other field - people like Chris Roberts, Steve Sutherland, and Simon Reynolds. A recent conversation with a friend about the terminal state of popular music writing made me pine for the days of MM; a trip to the Madison building of the Library of Congress lead me to the entire run of the magazine.
I soon realized that I didn’t need to go through the entire run of Melody Maker to prove my point that rock music writing today is clichéd, soporific, unreadable. I only had to read one month of the weekly. I decided to start in January 1987, a date that marked the middle of my college years. I figured I could start there and move my way backwards and forwards, plucking any gems I found to create a compilation of greatest hits.
I never got out of January. There was, in those thirty days, so much rich material that I used up all the money - $10 - I had put on my copy card. One of the first pieces I saw was from January 3, 1987 - a review, by Chris Roberts, of a live show by punk godfather Iggy Pop. Here’s its first paragraph:
It’s in the white of my eyes. The rest of the world, if there still is one, can lie down and die. Tonight Iggy is the strongest, the loudest, the dirtiest, the best, the worst, the fittest of the survivors, and the most powerful propaganda for LIFE I’ve seen on a stage since the Good Luck Theatre Company’s Sam Shepard perspective. Iggy’s been reading a lot of Sam recently, and some Edward Albee….He never stops moving.
It’s more than two decades old, yet still ignites off the page. It is passionate, literate, free of cliché, and charged with a sense of adrenaline and fun. You can tell Chris Roberts loves the music, with a love that explodes the crustaceous tropes that have come to signify rock writing. He takes it seriously as art, and yet also feels its joy, its thrill. Roberts’ piece is more vital, readable and powerful than the reviews that appeared in my copy of today’s Washington Post.
The formula for rock writing these days is very simple, and more conservative than a Republican barbecue in Texas. First, the rock writer must convey a sense of aloofness - he’s the judge, after all, and can’t get too carried away. Second, he must seem knowledgeable, so it’s necessary to toss in some facts about the artists. But he’s also lazy, so most often these facts are cribbed from a bio sheet provided by a record company. Third, he must be liberal, awarding bands extra points if they grumble or seethe with resentment about Republicans and conservatives. And lastly, he must employ the arsenal of rock clichés so expertly itemized in small book The Rock Snob’s Dictionary. Music is must be “atmospheric.” Something isn’t loud, it’s a “rave-up.” A guitar riff is “coruscating“ or it “jangles.“ Great albums are “seminal.“ And, of course, lifeless descriptors must be used - “indie rock,” “alt-country,” “trip-hop,” “post-punk.”
Breaking out of these formula, using different references or simply getting so carried away - by a music whose charm is, as U2 Bono once put it, is that it makes you “abandon yourself to it” - is unthinkable. All while covering one of the most exciting art forms in the world.
Here are some reviews from today’s Washington Post. A new album by Amos Lee: “Last Days at the Lodge” opens with a burst of Dylanesque swagger, a reminder that singer-songwriter Amos Lee once toured with the folk-rock legend. But soon Lee moves on to what he does best: smoothly evoking his R & B and soul influences in ways that seem far more heartfelt than derivative.” Another piece calls Alejandro Escovedo an “alt-country-deity-cum-mainstream curiosity.” And here’s Paleolithic rocker Joe Cocker - “when he sings Stevie Wonder’s ‘You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” writes Post veteran Geoffry Himes, “Cocker isn’t revisiting ‘60s radical chic; he’s channeling genuine anger about today’s politics.”
Of course. If there’s one thing that will give any modern rock musician a pass with critics, it’s liberalism. Indeed, the deduct points if a musician is not fully committed to the cause. In his review of Coldplay Viva La Vida, Rolling Stone’s will Hermes deducted points because the band, whose opinions are just to the left of the Daily Kos, was not sufficiently anti-Republican. “There's something troubling about his lack of clear political messages,” Hermes notes, adding that “the title track seems to be about the end of an empire. But its rousing chorus — ‘I hear Jerusalem bells a-ringing/Roman cavalry choirs are singing’ — feels like a rallying cry for a Christian empire. Where's an Arabic violin break when you need one?” This kind of useful idiocy can reach levels of self-parody. John Cougar Mellencamp’s Life, Death Love and Freedom is, according to Rolling Stone’s Mark Kemp, something of a downer: “There’s not a bright, catchy riff or fist-pumping anthem to be found among these brooding, low-key songs about growing old, sick, lonely an pessimistic.” So why the four stars? Well, “it’s unlikely that the Republican candidate would find anything useful for his campaign on Life, Death, Love and Freedom.
While the writers for Melody Maker were hardly RNC members - or rather Tories, as it was a British paper - they never hesitated to gore rock and roll sacred totems. In one series called “Pop! The Glory Years” they marked John Lennon’s descent into nutty self-importance, concluding that even years before his death “he just didn’t martyr anymore.” They ran lists of “The Ten Worst Band in the World,” and included Led Zeppelin - “revile them always” - and, yes, the Beatles: “Loveable mop tops, my back passage.” Editor Allan Jones, writing about Los Lobos, examined their songs as elegy for modern America - and concludes that they indeed are, but that in the band the band concludes that “in the end there is only prayer.” This is honest, full-bodied criticism, not beholden to any agenda but the writer’s own expansive honesty and intelligence.
In 1987 MM writer Simon Reynolds went to a show of gloomy rockers The Jesus and Mary Chain and indicted not only the band but the audience: “Of course the fans - a sad-eyed sea of black clothes, black dye, leather and hair gel - were satisfied. But then these people will be here in 1997, wanting the same things from rock, the same ritual.”
In 2007, 2008 and 2009 as well.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
When the rejection letter arrived, it wasn’t much of a shock. An adventurous editor at a very conservative Catholic magazine had asked me to write a piece explaining why right-wingers should embrace rock ‘n’ roll. As I expected, the other editors at the magazine liked the idea about as much as gay marriage, and the piece was spiked. When the editor who had commissioned the piece called with the bad news, he sounded shell shocked. "I’ve never felt so alone in there," he stammered, referring to the editorial meeting where my essay had been trashed.
I told him to get used to it. American conservatives – a group to which I plead guilty of membership – can offer the most erudite and nuanced arguments deconstructing affirmative action or the tax code, but when it comes to pop music, we’re like Forrest Gump at a NASA convention. This is unfortunate, because if the right took time to listen to rock ‘n’ roll and examine its history, they would discover that the entire myth of rock ‘n’ roll as anti-establishment rebellion is more than a little bogus, and might even win more arguments with liberal rock fans.
Like most Americans, the right unquestionably accepts the basic narrative of rock ‘n’ roll history proffered by Rolling Stone, MTV and other liberal outlets.
Once upon a time, the rock myth goes, America was an innocent, socially cohesive place where children were seen and not heard. Then in 1956, the sky cracked open, and down came Elvis Presley. Presley was sexual anarchy loosed upon the world, the prime mover in the 40-year rebellion against crushing middle-class values. According to The Rough Guide to Rock, a large book that advertises itself as compendium of significant rock records, Elvis "appeared fully formed" from out of the earth. Defiantly wiggling his hips at staid, bourgeois America, he was "the first to present rock ‘n’ roll not as a dance party but as the soundtrack of alienated youth." This story is part of the gospel of the rock establishment, and has been bought whole hog by conservatives; on page one of his jeremiad Slouching Towards Gomorrah, conservative hero Judge Robert Bork mentions Elvis along with James Dean and the Beats as "harbingers of a new culture that would shortly burst upon us and sweep us into a different country."
This is a compelling story. It’s also entirely wrong. If Elvis simply conjured the music he played out of whole cloth, then so did Sinatra. What Elvis played was simply his own version of jump blues, which had grown out of swing that Elvis had grown up hearing in Memphis. If anything, Elvis was a product of the past, not a harbinger of the future. According to James Collier’s Jazz: The American Theme Song, Elvis’ music has its genesis in 1936, with a Chicago group called the Harlem Hamfats. The Hamfats were two brothers, Joe and Charles McCoy, who had grown up playing the Mississippi blues. However, in 1936 swing was on the rise, and the McCoys’ manager decided to bolster their sound by backing them with a hard-swinging New Orleans jazz band. The result was a hard-driving style that was so ebullient that soon other groups began playing "rhythm and blues" style, most famously Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five and Bill Haley of "Rock Around the Clock" fame. (Despite the Rough Guide’s assertion, this was, perhaps first and foremost, music for dancing.)
From jump blues, it was just a small step to Elvis: "The line from the jazz-based music of the Harlem Hamfats to Elvis Presley," writes Collier, "is astonishingly direct." This fact was verified by Elvis himself in 1956, when he mulled over why what he was doing was causing such a fuss: "The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin’ it now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in their shanties and their juke joints, and nobody paid no mind ‘til I goosed it up."
Of course, there is no denying that Elvis caused rumblings in white racist America, which had an irrational fear of black music. Yet because the rednecks of the 1950s didn’t appreciate rhythm and blues does not make those who reject Marilyn Manson similarly repressive or unenlightened. For one thing, even when Elvis was playing the most secular jump blues, there was a performance ethic that is completely foreign to many contemporary rock bands. Even when a blues musician was singing about lust, alcohol and prison, there was a certain musical restraint in his playing, as well as a respect for the audience that seems almost quaint among rock stars today. Unlike sullen, sulky pop stars like Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, blues and jazz musicians played the hits to please the audience, craved popularity and appreciated fame. B.B. King recently commented that it used to appall him when he saw young rock ‘n’ rollers smash their guitars. The guitar, said B.B., was the musician’s "bread and butter," and destroying it was an act of profound contempt and stupidity.
There was another important similarity between Elvis and the musicians he imitated: the Christian Church. As Steve Turner notes in his absorbing Hungry for Heaven: Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Search for Redemption, Elvis, when growing up, had frequently visited East Trigg Baptist Church where he saw Marion Williams, Mahalia Jackson and other gospel greats. (Another regular visitor was a young boy named B.B. King.) Elvis himself was a member of the Pentecostal church, as was Jerry Lee Lewis. Other "pioneers" of early rock ‘n’ roll were also Christians: churchgoers. Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Little Richard were Baptists. Of course, this doesn’t mean that any of these men were the most pious members of the congregation, or even that they went to church that frequently.
Moreover, the secularization of gospel was often bitterly resented by gospel singers. Four months after Elvis recorded "That’s All Right, Mama," Ray Charles recorded "I Got a Woman." By fusing the gospel song structure of the black Baptist church with secular lyrics, Charles crossed a barrier that left many in both the blues and gospel communities uncomfortable. Blues singer and preacher Big Bill Broonzy said, "He’s mixing the blues with spirituals. I know that’s wrong. He should be singing in church." The success of Charles led to a deluge of Baptists and Pentecostal blacks who parlayed their church experience to gain pop fame – Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Lou Rawls.
Yet despite the frictions caused by the crossover artists, there has always been a tight connection between sacred and secular American popular music that stretches back to the first days of the Republic. The earliest immigrants to America brought their music traditions to the New World with them, whether they were New England Protestants singing British hymns, Irish-Catholics enjoying Celtic folk songs or slaves from Africa and the West Indies performing the polyrhythmic drumming remembered from their motherland.
The place where these styles came together was New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, New Orleans was a city of 10,000 – half black and half white. Having been owned by the Spanish and the French, the official religion was Catholic, but the black population practiced a hybrid of Catholicism and voodoo, which they had brought with them from Africa and Haiti. Indeed, many practitioners had icons of Catholic saints in their homes, and often interchanged them with their African gods – thus, Legba, a god of the crossroads, luck and fertility, easily was associated with St. Anthony because in pictures both were depicted as old men in tattered clothes. Unlike the Protestant settlers who would arrive in New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase, the Catholic leaders in the city did not prohibit drumming and dancing. According to Marshall Stearns, the founder of the Institute of Jazz Studies and the author of The Story of Jazz, when the steady rhythm of African drumming clashed with the European tradition of the marching band, jazz was formed.
While this was happening, another popular music form, the blues, was also being born, although the roots of the blues are more difficult to uncover than those of jazz. Blues historians have traced the form all the way back to the "griots" of Africa, men who served as musical storytellers for their community. As with jazz, blues formed when black and white musical styles met. Slaves who were brought to America adopted not only the language, but musical styles from the South, Appalachia and Europe – not to mention European religions. As Richie Unterberger writes in The All Music Guide to the Blues, "gospel music afforded the African-American community opportunities to sing with committed fervor. The harmonies and solo vocal styles on black music to this day, including the blues." Indeed, as blues historian Albert Murray points out in his seminal book Stomping the Blues, at times there was virtual osmosis between sacred and secular music: "In point of fact, traditionally the highest praise given a blues musician has been the declaration that he can make a dance hall rock and roll like a downhome church during revival time. But then many of the elements of blues music seem to have been derived from the downhome church in the first place."
So if the popular music of the 1950s wasn’t quite the revolution it’s cracked up to be, when did the music change? How did we go from "Rock Around the Clock" to gangsta rap?
The best answer is provided by Martha Bayles, whose Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music should be required reading for every rock critic and MTV urchin. According to Bayles, the Elvis phenomenon wasn’t as much about American teenagers busting out of the hypocritical and unnatural constraints of their parents – although she does concede that Elvis represented an acceptable version of a black entertainer, and that this was groundbreaking for its time – as about dancing. By the time Elvis came along in the mid-1950s, the swing bands had been largely replaced by crooners like Bing Crosby, Perry Como and Doris Day, and the kids wanted to dance. Any cursory examination of the experience of Elvis’ first fans will reveal that none of them were interested in overturning social mores as much as they just wanted to have some fun on the dance floor.
Bayles also recaptures the Christian roots of rock ‘n’ roll from the modern rock academics. She dissects the work of Greil Marcus, the Berkeley professor who is one of the most respected wags in rock’s critical establishment. In Mystery Train, his book on Elvis Presley, Marcus repeats the contemporary rock myth of Elvis as ur-rebel. He claims it was a "secret revolt" against puritanism that erupted in Elvis’ hips, and sinfulness [that] brought [Elvis] to life." Elvis, apparently, represented the hope that joy and abandon can last "as Saturday fades into Monday."
This is pure, anti-Christian hooey, as Bayles notes: "Typically, Marcus restructures the week so that Saturday fades into Monday instead of Sunday, the day when enthusiasm gets put to nonhedonistic uses. Ruled out of bounds is the possibility of an enthusiasm that subsumes or transcends the erotic." According to Bayles, the real shift in American popular music didn’t come in the 1950s, with Elvis, but in the 1960s. It was in that decade, writes Bayles, that the positive, funny, sensual and spiritual idioms of the African-American tradition collided with "perverse modernism."
Bayles defines perverse modernism as "the antiart impulses of the European avant-garde, which gave rise historically to such movements as decadence at the end of the nineteenth century; futurism at the start of the twentieth; dada in the 1920s, surrealism and the theater of cruelty in the 1930s; and postwar retreads of these movements, such as happening and performance art in the 1950s and 60s." These influences came into rock ‘n’ roll when young Britons who were the products of that country’s art schools began playing American roots music. The most famous practitioners were the Rolling Stones, who began as a third-rate blues cover band and quickly gained fame as the dirtier and more menacing alternative to the Beatles. The Stones quicky gained fame through their rudeness to their own audience, iconoclastic behavior toward authority and bourgeois values, and Mick Jagger’s crossdressing antics that are regarded as part of rock’s grand tradition but in reality had nothing to do with the positive spirituality of American pop-music forms.
Other bands followed suit: Led Zeppelin, which took the subtlety of the blues and regurgitated it as pounding, nightmarish heavy metal; Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, who excelled more in sarcasm than in scales; and the Velvet Underground. The Velvet Underground was less a band than a theater troupe. The playthings of Andy Warhol, who hired the band to play at a 1966 happening, its members were a poet, an avant-garde musician, a drummer and a German model. While the band’s music was insipid, by this time music was beginning to be beside the point – especially when you were being compared to Berlin cabaret, as the Velvets were. While all this was going on, soul and rhythm and blues were losing their spiritual core. They began to fetishize sexual conquest, then were devoured by disco.
While the Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records, their impact on popular music has been incalculable. One of their admirers was Malcolm McLaren, a young English fashion shop owner who had been to no fewer than six art schools. In the mid-1970s McLaren formed the Sex Pistols. The Pistols were based both on the neo-Marxist French "situationism," which advocated the use of mass media for revolutionary purposes, and punk rock, a marginalized form of rebel music being played in New York City. Punk was a reaction to the blandness of disco and the increasingly arty pretension of rock, with bands like the Ramones playing fast, loud and short pop songs, but when co-opted by McLaren it became some thing else: an all-out assault on the senses.
While at the time it was considered a freak accident by the mainstream rock establishment, punk did not stay underground for long. Indeed, it became the inspiration for an entire new generation of musicians. Elvis Costello, the Jam, the Clash (English Marxists who named an album Sandinista!), the Dead Kennedys and scored of others all adopted punk’s confrontational sneer, even if some groups mixed the attitude with softer and more traditional forms of pop songwriting called new wave. Then, in 1991 the dam burst: a punk band named Nirvana came out with an album, Nevermind, that went on to sell millions of copies. Punk, now called "grunge" or "alternative," was king.
In one sense, the punk revolution was welcome. By the mid-1970s, rock had grown corpulent with self-satisfaction and phony, drug-induced mysticism, and one of the benefits of punk’s sandblasting was that one of its prime targets was the narcissism of the hippies. Yet the downside was worse: much of the music was intolerable, and as punk gained in dominance, young music fans began to forget that popular music has once been about something other than transgression. Their amnesia was encouraged by the rock press and elite, who defended the Sex Pistols’ spitting on their audience by claiming that it was just the next chapter in the tradition that began with Elvis shocking the audience on Ed Sullivan’s show. And spirituality, which had been so central to pop music since its inception, was obliterated: "I am the Antichrist," Johnny Rotten spat in the punk anthem "Anarchy in the UK."
Today, the "revolutionary" changes wrought in the 1960s have become the status quo, its rituals boring and predictable. When a young misanthrope smashes his guitar onstage at a punk show, it’s about as shocking as a saxophone solo during the big-band era. Rebellion and alienation are the common stances – so common they have all but run out of targets for their rage.
In short, what has happened to popular music is what happened to visual art in the 20th Century. In the spring 1997 issue of The Public Interest, critic Roger Kimball describes that transformation of art from a medium grounded in spirituality and beauty to a political forum whose only purpose seems to be transgressing every moral and esthetic boundary. Kimball documents the rise of modern art from the margins of the counterculture to the dominant model of artistic expression: "The avant-garde has become a casualty of its own success," he observes. "Having won battle after battle, it gradually transformed a recalcitrant bourgeois culture into a willing collaborator in its raids on establishment taste."
However – and this is a crucial point that conservatives can’t seem to grasp – there is good pop music that offers an alternative to bad, just as there are good paintings and bad. As British rock critic Simon Frith explains in his interesting, if overly long and academic, tome Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, the world isn’t only divided into those who like pop music and those who don’t, but into champions of esthetically and morally engaging pop and those enslaved by the dour gloom of the majority. "There are obvious differences between operas and soap operas, between classical and country music," Frith writes, "but the fact that the objects of judgment are different doesn’t mean that the processes of judgment are different." Or as Steve Turner sums it up in Hungry for Heaven: "[Conservative critics of rock] tend not to discriminate between a fourteen-year-old sitting in the front row of a Guns ‘N Roses concert and a thirty-five year old listening to Van Morrison."
Turner’s using Van Morrison as an example is apt. In the last 10 years no artist in pop has produced a body of work as vital and spiritually alive than Morrison, a 52-year-old Christian Irishman. According to the rock elite, Morrison is a dinosaur stranded on the fringes of pop. In reality, his music has more to do with rock ‘n’ rolls original ethos than anything topping the charts.
Turner wrote a biography of Morrison, Van Morrison: It’s Too Late to Stop Now, in which he recounts how Morrison grew up surrounded by American popular music. His father was a fanatical record collector, and the Morrison home in Belfast was filled with the sounds of American jazz, blues, folk and gospel, as well as the Celtic music and Protestant hymns of his homeland. Morrison claims to have experienced a feeling of "spiritual ecstasy" when he was a toddler and heard the gospel legend Mahalia Jackson on the phonograph. "It forged an indelible link in his mind between music and a sense of wonder," writes Turner.
Morrison’s allegiance to what Martha Bayles would call the "Afro-American music tradition" has placed him far outside the pop mainstream – or rather, has made him seem to fade as the center shifted to anger, gloom and art. Morrison’s 1994 live album A Night in San Francisco is a breathtaking record, both for its musicianship and the spirituality that once fueled American pop music. When Morrison is performing "In the Garden," his paean to the wonders of nature, at one point the piano and bass get lighter and lighter, and the song seems to be ending. Then Morrison starts to sing: "Sam Cooke is on the radio/And the night is filled with space/And your fingertips touch my face/Singing ‘Darling, you send me.’" Then, taking the cue, one of the backing singers begins to sing Cooke’s "You Send Me."
It is a numinous moment. As most of today’s rock fans undoubtedly don’t realize, Cooke was the son of a Chicago preacher and a gospel singer before he started performing pop. It’s as if Morrison intends to singlehandedly put religion back into the center of pop, where it belongs.
To conservatives, Morrison might as well be Nine Inch Nails, the rebarbative gothic techno band that Judge Bork erroneously refers to as gangsta rap. Such obvious fumbling of the basic terms doesn’t bode well for conservatives who want to make a cogent argument about pop; it makes it unlikely that they would be able to hold up artists such as Crowded House, U2, Chris Isaak or Joe Jackson as alternatives to alternative.
Still, if the right can’t be bothered to make distinctions among contemporary bands, there’s always the past and the great American pop-music idioms – the blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul. Just imagine it – after gangsta rap or heavy metal has spawned some act of mayhem, Ted Koppel puts a liberal and conservative before the American people. The liberal launches and old argument: rock ‘n’ roll’s about rebellion and sex, man, and it always has been. Just listen to the blues. The conservative smiles, produces a piece of paper from his pocket, and hits him with this quote from Hole in Our Soul, in which Bayles describes the difference between blues and modern rock:
"The controlled vocalism of genuine blues suggests power, intensity and energy being harnessed – as opposed to repressed. The runway instrumentalism of early rock suggest a lot of blocked, undifferentiated energy being released, in an uncontrollable rush. Blues performers know how to stop and take a breath, even in the midst of apparent ecstasy. They never lose their ability to address the audience, either by singing, playing or talking. It is here that we find the sexual connotation. The capacity to communicate, even in the midst of passion, is what separates human lovemaking from dehumanized sex. Thus, even at their saltiest, blues performers always maintain a sense of reciprocity with their audiences. The guitar virtuosos, by contrast, lose themselves in a masturbatory fantasy. This contrast in performance styles parallels the distinction between eroticism and obscenity – a distinction . . . lost on the youthful avatars of rock."
Just imagine Koppel’s face after that.
I told him to get used to it. American conservatives – a group to which I plead guilty of membership – can offer the most erudite and nuanced arguments deconstructing affirmative action or the tax code, but when it comes to pop music, we’re like Forrest Gump at a NASA convention. This is unfortunate, because if the right took time to listen to rock ‘n’ roll and examine its history, they would discover that the entire myth of rock ‘n’ roll as anti-establishment rebellion is more than a little bogus, and might even win more arguments with liberal rock fans.
Like most Americans, the right unquestionably accepts the basic narrative of rock ‘n’ roll history proffered by Rolling Stone, MTV and other liberal outlets.
Once upon a time, the rock myth goes, America was an innocent, socially cohesive place where children were seen and not heard. Then in 1956, the sky cracked open, and down came Elvis Presley. Presley was sexual anarchy loosed upon the world, the prime mover in the 40-year rebellion against crushing middle-class values. According to The Rough Guide to Rock, a large book that advertises itself as compendium of significant rock records, Elvis "appeared fully formed" from out of the earth. Defiantly wiggling his hips at staid, bourgeois America, he was "the first to present rock ‘n’ roll not as a dance party but as the soundtrack of alienated youth." This story is part of the gospel of the rock establishment, and has been bought whole hog by conservatives; on page one of his jeremiad Slouching Towards Gomorrah, conservative hero Judge Robert Bork mentions Elvis along with James Dean and the Beats as "harbingers of a new culture that would shortly burst upon us and sweep us into a different country."
This is a compelling story. It’s also entirely wrong. If Elvis simply conjured the music he played out of whole cloth, then so did Sinatra. What Elvis played was simply his own version of jump blues, which had grown out of swing that Elvis had grown up hearing in Memphis. If anything, Elvis was a product of the past, not a harbinger of the future. According to James Collier’s Jazz: The American Theme Song, Elvis’ music has its genesis in 1936, with a Chicago group called the Harlem Hamfats. The Hamfats were two brothers, Joe and Charles McCoy, who had grown up playing the Mississippi blues. However, in 1936 swing was on the rise, and the McCoys’ manager decided to bolster their sound by backing them with a hard-swinging New Orleans jazz band. The result was a hard-driving style that was so ebullient that soon other groups began playing "rhythm and blues" style, most famously Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five and Bill Haley of "Rock Around the Clock" fame. (Despite the Rough Guide’s assertion, this was, perhaps first and foremost, music for dancing.)
From jump blues, it was just a small step to Elvis: "The line from the jazz-based music of the Harlem Hamfats to Elvis Presley," writes Collier, "is astonishingly direct." This fact was verified by Elvis himself in 1956, when he mulled over why what he was doing was causing such a fuss: "The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin’ it now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in their shanties and their juke joints, and nobody paid no mind ‘til I goosed it up."
Of course, there is no denying that Elvis caused rumblings in white racist America, which had an irrational fear of black music. Yet because the rednecks of the 1950s didn’t appreciate rhythm and blues does not make those who reject Marilyn Manson similarly repressive or unenlightened. For one thing, even when Elvis was playing the most secular jump blues, there was a performance ethic that is completely foreign to many contemporary rock bands. Even when a blues musician was singing about lust, alcohol and prison, there was a certain musical restraint in his playing, as well as a respect for the audience that seems almost quaint among rock stars today. Unlike sullen, sulky pop stars like Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, blues and jazz musicians played the hits to please the audience, craved popularity and appreciated fame. B.B. King recently commented that it used to appall him when he saw young rock ‘n’ rollers smash their guitars. The guitar, said B.B., was the musician’s "bread and butter," and destroying it was an act of profound contempt and stupidity.
There was another important similarity between Elvis and the musicians he imitated: the Christian Church. As Steve Turner notes in his absorbing Hungry for Heaven: Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Search for Redemption, Elvis, when growing up, had frequently visited East Trigg Baptist Church where he saw Marion Williams, Mahalia Jackson and other gospel greats. (Another regular visitor was a young boy named B.B. King.) Elvis himself was a member of the Pentecostal church, as was Jerry Lee Lewis. Other "pioneers" of early rock ‘n’ roll were also Christians: churchgoers. Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Little Richard were Baptists. Of course, this doesn’t mean that any of these men were the most pious members of the congregation, or even that they went to church that frequently.
Moreover, the secularization of gospel was often bitterly resented by gospel singers. Four months after Elvis recorded "That’s All Right, Mama," Ray Charles recorded "I Got a Woman." By fusing the gospel song structure of the black Baptist church with secular lyrics, Charles crossed a barrier that left many in both the blues and gospel communities uncomfortable. Blues singer and preacher Big Bill Broonzy said, "He’s mixing the blues with spirituals. I know that’s wrong. He should be singing in church." The success of Charles led to a deluge of Baptists and Pentecostal blacks who parlayed their church experience to gain pop fame – Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Lou Rawls.
Yet despite the frictions caused by the crossover artists, there has always been a tight connection between sacred and secular American popular music that stretches back to the first days of the Republic. The earliest immigrants to America brought their music traditions to the New World with them, whether they were New England Protestants singing British hymns, Irish-Catholics enjoying Celtic folk songs or slaves from Africa and the West Indies performing the polyrhythmic drumming remembered from their motherland.
The place where these styles came together was New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, New Orleans was a city of 10,000 – half black and half white. Having been owned by the Spanish and the French, the official religion was Catholic, but the black population practiced a hybrid of Catholicism and voodoo, which they had brought with them from Africa and Haiti. Indeed, many practitioners had icons of Catholic saints in their homes, and often interchanged them with their African gods – thus, Legba, a god of the crossroads, luck and fertility, easily was associated with St. Anthony because in pictures both were depicted as old men in tattered clothes. Unlike the Protestant settlers who would arrive in New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase, the Catholic leaders in the city did not prohibit drumming and dancing. According to Marshall Stearns, the founder of the Institute of Jazz Studies and the author of The Story of Jazz, when the steady rhythm of African drumming clashed with the European tradition of the marching band, jazz was formed.
While this was happening, another popular music form, the blues, was also being born, although the roots of the blues are more difficult to uncover than those of jazz. Blues historians have traced the form all the way back to the "griots" of Africa, men who served as musical storytellers for their community. As with jazz, blues formed when black and white musical styles met. Slaves who were brought to America adopted not only the language, but musical styles from the South, Appalachia and Europe – not to mention European religions. As Richie Unterberger writes in The All Music Guide to the Blues, "gospel music afforded the African-American community opportunities to sing with committed fervor. The harmonies and solo vocal styles on black music to this day, including the blues." Indeed, as blues historian Albert Murray points out in his seminal book Stomping the Blues, at times there was virtual osmosis between sacred and secular music: "In point of fact, traditionally the highest praise given a blues musician has been the declaration that he can make a dance hall rock and roll like a downhome church during revival time. But then many of the elements of blues music seem to have been derived from the downhome church in the first place."
So if the popular music of the 1950s wasn’t quite the revolution it’s cracked up to be, when did the music change? How did we go from "Rock Around the Clock" to gangsta rap?
The best answer is provided by Martha Bayles, whose Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music should be required reading for every rock critic and MTV urchin. According to Bayles, the Elvis phenomenon wasn’t as much about American teenagers busting out of the hypocritical and unnatural constraints of their parents – although she does concede that Elvis represented an acceptable version of a black entertainer, and that this was groundbreaking for its time – as about dancing. By the time Elvis came along in the mid-1950s, the swing bands had been largely replaced by crooners like Bing Crosby, Perry Como and Doris Day, and the kids wanted to dance. Any cursory examination of the experience of Elvis’ first fans will reveal that none of them were interested in overturning social mores as much as they just wanted to have some fun on the dance floor.
Bayles also recaptures the Christian roots of rock ‘n’ roll from the modern rock academics. She dissects the work of Greil Marcus, the Berkeley professor who is one of the most respected wags in rock’s critical establishment. In Mystery Train, his book on Elvis Presley, Marcus repeats the contemporary rock myth of Elvis as ur-rebel. He claims it was a "secret revolt" against puritanism that erupted in Elvis’ hips, and sinfulness [that] brought [Elvis] to life." Elvis, apparently, represented the hope that joy and abandon can last "as Saturday fades into Monday."
This is pure, anti-Christian hooey, as Bayles notes: "Typically, Marcus restructures the week so that Saturday fades into Monday instead of Sunday, the day when enthusiasm gets put to nonhedonistic uses. Ruled out of bounds is the possibility of an enthusiasm that subsumes or transcends the erotic." According to Bayles, the real shift in American popular music didn’t come in the 1950s, with Elvis, but in the 1960s. It was in that decade, writes Bayles, that the positive, funny, sensual and spiritual idioms of the African-American tradition collided with "perverse modernism."
Bayles defines perverse modernism as "the antiart impulses of the European avant-garde, which gave rise historically to such movements as decadence at the end of the nineteenth century; futurism at the start of the twentieth; dada in the 1920s, surrealism and the theater of cruelty in the 1930s; and postwar retreads of these movements, such as happening and performance art in the 1950s and 60s." These influences came into rock ‘n’ roll when young Britons who were the products of that country’s art schools began playing American roots music. The most famous practitioners were the Rolling Stones, who began as a third-rate blues cover band and quickly gained fame as the dirtier and more menacing alternative to the Beatles. The Stones quicky gained fame through their rudeness to their own audience, iconoclastic behavior toward authority and bourgeois values, and Mick Jagger’s crossdressing antics that are regarded as part of rock’s grand tradition but in reality had nothing to do with the positive spirituality of American pop-music forms.
Other bands followed suit: Led Zeppelin, which took the subtlety of the blues and regurgitated it as pounding, nightmarish heavy metal; Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, who excelled more in sarcasm than in scales; and the Velvet Underground. The Velvet Underground was less a band than a theater troupe. The playthings of Andy Warhol, who hired the band to play at a 1966 happening, its members were a poet, an avant-garde musician, a drummer and a German model. While the band’s music was insipid, by this time music was beginning to be beside the point – especially when you were being compared to Berlin cabaret, as the Velvets were. While all this was going on, soul and rhythm and blues were losing their spiritual core. They began to fetishize sexual conquest, then were devoured by disco.
While the Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records, their impact on popular music has been incalculable. One of their admirers was Malcolm McLaren, a young English fashion shop owner who had been to no fewer than six art schools. In the mid-1970s McLaren formed the Sex Pistols. The Pistols were based both on the neo-Marxist French "situationism," which advocated the use of mass media for revolutionary purposes, and punk rock, a marginalized form of rebel music being played in New York City. Punk was a reaction to the blandness of disco and the increasingly arty pretension of rock, with bands like the Ramones playing fast, loud and short pop songs, but when co-opted by McLaren it became some thing else: an all-out assault on the senses.
While at the time it was considered a freak accident by the mainstream rock establishment, punk did not stay underground for long. Indeed, it became the inspiration for an entire new generation of musicians. Elvis Costello, the Jam, the Clash (English Marxists who named an album Sandinista!), the Dead Kennedys and scored of others all adopted punk’s confrontational sneer, even if some groups mixed the attitude with softer and more traditional forms of pop songwriting called new wave. Then, in 1991 the dam burst: a punk band named Nirvana came out with an album, Nevermind, that went on to sell millions of copies. Punk, now called "grunge" or "alternative," was king.
In one sense, the punk revolution was welcome. By the mid-1970s, rock had grown corpulent with self-satisfaction and phony, drug-induced mysticism, and one of the benefits of punk’s sandblasting was that one of its prime targets was the narcissism of the hippies. Yet the downside was worse: much of the music was intolerable, and as punk gained in dominance, young music fans began to forget that popular music has once been about something other than transgression. Their amnesia was encouraged by the rock press and elite, who defended the Sex Pistols’ spitting on their audience by claiming that it was just the next chapter in the tradition that began with Elvis shocking the audience on Ed Sullivan’s show. And spirituality, which had been so central to pop music since its inception, was obliterated: "I am the Antichrist," Johnny Rotten spat in the punk anthem "Anarchy in the UK."
Today, the "revolutionary" changes wrought in the 1960s have become the status quo, its rituals boring and predictable. When a young misanthrope smashes his guitar onstage at a punk show, it’s about as shocking as a saxophone solo during the big-band era. Rebellion and alienation are the common stances – so common they have all but run out of targets for their rage.
In short, what has happened to popular music is what happened to visual art in the 20th Century. In the spring 1997 issue of The Public Interest, critic Roger Kimball describes that transformation of art from a medium grounded in spirituality and beauty to a political forum whose only purpose seems to be transgressing every moral and esthetic boundary. Kimball documents the rise of modern art from the margins of the counterculture to the dominant model of artistic expression: "The avant-garde has become a casualty of its own success," he observes. "Having won battle after battle, it gradually transformed a recalcitrant bourgeois culture into a willing collaborator in its raids on establishment taste."
However – and this is a crucial point that conservatives can’t seem to grasp – there is good pop music that offers an alternative to bad, just as there are good paintings and bad. As British rock critic Simon Frith explains in his interesting, if overly long and academic, tome Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, the world isn’t only divided into those who like pop music and those who don’t, but into champions of esthetically and morally engaging pop and those enslaved by the dour gloom of the majority. "There are obvious differences between operas and soap operas, between classical and country music," Frith writes, "but the fact that the objects of judgment are different doesn’t mean that the processes of judgment are different." Or as Steve Turner sums it up in Hungry for Heaven: "[Conservative critics of rock] tend not to discriminate between a fourteen-year-old sitting in the front row of a Guns ‘N Roses concert and a thirty-five year old listening to Van Morrison."
Turner’s using Van Morrison as an example is apt. In the last 10 years no artist in pop has produced a body of work as vital and spiritually alive than Morrison, a 52-year-old Christian Irishman. According to the rock elite, Morrison is a dinosaur stranded on the fringes of pop. In reality, his music has more to do with rock ‘n’ rolls original ethos than anything topping the charts.
Turner wrote a biography of Morrison, Van Morrison: It’s Too Late to Stop Now, in which he recounts how Morrison grew up surrounded by American popular music. His father was a fanatical record collector, and the Morrison home in Belfast was filled with the sounds of American jazz, blues, folk and gospel, as well as the Celtic music and Protestant hymns of his homeland. Morrison claims to have experienced a feeling of "spiritual ecstasy" when he was a toddler and heard the gospel legend Mahalia Jackson on the phonograph. "It forged an indelible link in his mind between music and a sense of wonder," writes Turner.
Morrison’s allegiance to what Martha Bayles would call the "Afro-American music tradition" has placed him far outside the pop mainstream – or rather, has made him seem to fade as the center shifted to anger, gloom and art. Morrison’s 1994 live album A Night in San Francisco is a breathtaking record, both for its musicianship and the spirituality that once fueled American pop music. When Morrison is performing "In the Garden," his paean to the wonders of nature, at one point the piano and bass get lighter and lighter, and the song seems to be ending. Then Morrison starts to sing: "Sam Cooke is on the radio/And the night is filled with space/And your fingertips touch my face/Singing ‘Darling, you send me.’" Then, taking the cue, one of the backing singers begins to sing Cooke’s "You Send Me."
It is a numinous moment. As most of today’s rock fans undoubtedly don’t realize, Cooke was the son of a Chicago preacher and a gospel singer before he started performing pop. It’s as if Morrison intends to singlehandedly put religion back into the center of pop, where it belongs.
To conservatives, Morrison might as well be Nine Inch Nails, the rebarbative gothic techno band that Judge Bork erroneously refers to as gangsta rap. Such obvious fumbling of the basic terms doesn’t bode well for conservatives who want to make a cogent argument about pop; it makes it unlikely that they would be able to hold up artists such as Crowded House, U2, Chris Isaak or Joe Jackson as alternatives to alternative.
Still, if the right can’t be bothered to make distinctions among contemporary bands, there’s always the past and the great American pop-music idioms – the blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul. Just imagine it – after gangsta rap or heavy metal has spawned some act of mayhem, Ted Koppel puts a liberal and conservative before the American people. The liberal launches and old argument: rock ‘n’ roll’s about rebellion and sex, man, and it always has been. Just listen to the blues. The conservative smiles, produces a piece of paper from his pocket, and hits him with this quote from Hole in Our Soul, in which Bayles describes the difference between blues and modern rock:
"The controlled vocalism of genuine blues suggests power, intensity and energy being harnessed – as opposed to repressed. The runway instrumentalism of early rock suggest a lot of blocked, undifferentiated energy being released, in an uncontrollable rush. Blues performers know how to stop and take a breath, even in the midst of apparent ecstasy. They never lose their ability to address the audience, either by singing, playing or talking. It is here that we find the sexual connotation. The capacity to communicate, even in the midst of passion, is what separates human lovemaking from dehumanized sex. Thus, even at their saltiest, blues performers always maintain a sense of reciprocity with their audiences. The guitar virtuosos, by contrast, lose themselves in a masturbatory fantasy. This contrast in performance styles parallels the distinction between eroticism and obscenity – a distinction . . . lost on the youthful avatars of rock."
Just imagine Koppel’s face after that.
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