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Introduction: My Favorite Waste of Time
In 1971, while making the rent as a professor of rock and roll at the newborn California Institute of the Arts and pursuing my muse as a scantily paid Village Voice music columnist, I was treated to a backhanded compliment by a slightly younger Cal Arts colleague, a Marcuse translator just out of grad school. In the course of a disagreement about a movie, or film, she declared, "You're really very intelligent." Then she added: "Why do you waste your time on rock?" I'm just lucky that, refined as she was, she didn't continue, "Grow up, willya?" After all, I was pushing twenty-nine. But I already had grown up. The trouble was, as the Rolling Stones had put it before I or any of them was twenty-five--in a different context, but recontextualization is a way of life in this music--that I'd grown up wrong. I'd been easy to fool when I was in school. But I'd grown up all wrong.
That June an experimental CUNY program brought me back to New York, where in 1972 Newsday proffered a gig and in 1974 the Voice hired me as music editor. Except as a lecturer or adjunct, I was out of academia and glad enough of it. But though my colleague soon changed careers too, applying her intellect to first cocounseling and then real estate, her interrogation obviously stuck with me. So I admit I find it comforting that the idea of a professor of rock and roll is no longer an affront to the academic weal. Inexorably, academia moves to contain what it cannot ignore, and while its mandarin cultural studies sects and middlebrow popular culture programs still anger conservatives, both exist because the early rock critics were onto something.
For starters, we were one vanguard in what now seems to be called the culture wars--prepostmodern multieverythingists. Inspired by Andy Warhol, Ellen Willis, baseball, a literalistic notion of democracy, and above all rock itself, I worked from a "theory" of pop that was more an elaborate hunch. In essence it asserted the aesthetic and political equality of not just "folk," not just "popular," but crass and abject "mass" culture. Naive, defensive, and/ or self-evident though the point may now seem, it felt essential in a reflexively hierarchical cultural environment to argue that rock and roll was "art" every bit as worthy as the English lit of my baccalaureate and the jazz, classical, and folk to which it was invidiously compared. In a left environment where Frankfurt School elitism informed the Freudian Marxism of the guru Marcuse himself, it seemed equally important to insist (as he vaguely and belatedly allowed) that this particular form of "mass culture" liberated far more than it oppressed--and that its most uneducated consumers understood things that Marcuse didn't.
But beyond these ideals, I had another reason for wasting my time: I was a writer, and rock was my subject. My theory of pop extended to myself, wordslinger for hire in a world hall bohemia and half media--Grub Street, twentieth-century style. Like the musicians whose juice and oomph and smarts and value I proclaimed, I put a lot into what I did. While celebrating a moment highbrows assumed was disposable, I was also craftsman enough to intend that what I wrote would repay rereading down the line. Like literature, right--but also like the collected journalism of Pauline Kael, Tom Wolfe, Dwight Macdonald, Murray Kempton, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, and A. J. Liebling, who included in his boxing book The Sweet Science an account of the 1955 Moore-Marciano fight so rich it convinced me that the fictional imagination I didn't have enjoyed no decisive aesthetic advantage over the reportorial eye I might yet develop. About criticism itself I was more ambivalent. Criticism was what you learned to do in graduate school, whose blandishments I had forsworn primarily because the evidence suggested they were hell on good writing. But my sense of pop-political mission eased my misgivings, and so did my love of language. Like most of my contemporaries, I'd learned to write by reading everything from the canon to the cereal box. But I was well aware that rock and roll had beefed up my propensity for the irreverent, the demotic, the neologistic, the slangy, the dirty, and the downright screwball, and I thought my literary quality the better for it.
In journalism as in rock and roll, the idea was to add aesthetic tension and social dimension to one's piddling self-expression by turning a received, commercially delimited form to one's own creative ends. But though I began Grub Streeting at Talese and Macdonald's Esquire and got my mainstream break from the eventual home of Kempton and Breslin, I didn't have what it took for the slicks or the dailies--in part because my gifts lay elsewhere, but in part because traditional havens of writerly journalism had been supplemented if not superceded. With all respect to such predecessors as Pauline Kael and her nemesis Andrew Sarris (as well as Gilbert Seldes, who championed "the seven lively arts" in the twenties), rock critics weren't just movie reviewers who processed records instead. In addition to making the world safe for the devotional fellatio and semiconsensual s&m popular music "coverage" turned into, we were also exceptionally well-situated to penetrate, exploit, and (if we kept our wits about us) rise above the hypocrisies and illusions of the so-called alternative press. That for all my pop bias the alternative press was where I felt at home is the paradox at the heart of all my criticism only if it's a paradox at all.
I mean, to me my situation seemed sensible enough. From early on I saw pop as class warfare in which paying customers thumbed their noses at cultural panjandrums and impelled entrepreneurs to give them what they wanted. I believed the mass bohemia of the sixties brought to fruition a selective consumption in which the young, freed of their parents' depression-instilled caution by an expanding economy, bought only what they needed and/or enjoyed, untempted by the twin evils of conspicuous consumption and delayed gratification. Admittedly, it was a little harder to figure out how to proceed from there to good politics, by which I meant and mean left politics--politics that attacked privilege. I told myself that because it was antihierarchical, pop was not merely antiauthoritarian--a reasonable notion that turns out to be true only insofar as fans maintain some critical distance from stars--but also democratic, communitarian, and even (pro-pelled by that big beat) militant. These are progressively more dubious propositions. I didn't figure that the economy would stop expanding quite so soon, or that people's needs and, if they're lucky, pleasures burgeon as they get older; nor did I yet know enough about bohemia to understand how damnably idiosyncratic its politics can be. But I saw nothing inappropriate in examining the pop music of a left-identified mass/youth counterculture for a newspaper that predicated its exorbitant profitability on the imbrications of bohemians, students, artists, information professionals, and discretionary income.
Not that there was any lack of what my Marxist friends called contradictions. I just wasn't panicked by them. I've spent my life making fun of how nervously and self-righteously my chosen community resists the axiom that both pop music and newspapers are entangled with capitalism, and anybody who claims that that means I like capitalism is cruising for a bruising. A fireman's son who got off the status ladder willingly if abruptly after earning a scholarship-supported Ivy League diploma, I was convinced of the reality of class, and far readier to fight the rich than my genteelly aspiring, politically centrist parents. Taught to respect my own intelligence at home and love my neighbor in church, I hit the sixties full of beans and drew my own conclusions. Among these was a gut opposition to the Vietnam War as well as the systemic racism that was its domestic doppelganger. But in my disdain for a cultural privilege I have always seen as European, I was also a fervent American. And any examination of this thing I loved called rock and roll made clear that both capitalism and America had played positive roles in its making. For me, that was the baseline. Capitalism and America did these things that were bad and these other things that were good, and rather than assuming that any residue of business practice or know-nothing chauvinism invalidated a cultural product by definition, you tried to knock down the bad and shore up the good. It was to annoy left-wing cheeseheads who felt otherwise that I entitled my signature venue the Consumer Guide.
Nevertheless, my political bent combined with my artistic opinions to draw me into a lifelong relationship with the granddaddy of the alternative weeklies, which I'd started reading in 1957 as a fourteen-year-old Flushing High School "nonconformist." In an old avant-garde tradition, the Voice had augmented its elitist bohemianism with the pop consciousness of Gilbert Seldes and Andrew Sarris well before the rock press sprang up alongside it. But culturally and economically, the paper lived off bohemian notions of consumption, which synthesized voluntary poverty with an aestheticized taste for the good life. Unlike the underground newspapers, the Voice was prehippie, deeply skeptical of pie-eyed sixties fantasy--its editorial bias has always been reform Democrat, and if anything it moved left after apolitical profiteer Clay Felker took it over from Ed Koch confidant Dan Wolf in 1974. It could hardly sidestep sixties ferment, however, and in 1966 published the first true rock critic, my longtime colleague Richard Goldstein. The likes of San Francisco's Express-Times and The Boston Phoenix emphasized music as a matter of course. And along with the early rock mags--especially Paul Williams's Crawdaddy! and Dave Marsh's Creem, but also Rolling Stone, whose review section was pretty far out under Greil Marcus's tutelage--the alternaweeklies redefined writerly journalism.
Part of this redefinition took place in the slicks, where the aforementioned Felker established the quasifictional immediacy of Tom Wolfe as a new industry standard. That the innovations of the rock and alternative press were so much looser was partly pie-eyed and partly bottom-line. Intensive Wolfe/Talese-style reporting requires rare talent and long labor, commodities that generally cost money, whereas confessional narrative, wild verbiage, polemical disputation, lofty thoughts, and the editorial "I" come cheap. Yet while the strictures against these journalistic no-no's are well-taken, not one is altogether barren as a literary method, and the sixties were ripe for all of them. Unable or unwilling to fairly reimburse their contributors, the alternaweeklies and rock mags gave them too much freedom instead, and in a precise analogy to the alternarock of the eighties, sometimes the indulgence paid off: writers (or bands) who had internalized a commercial form took risks with that form that few established publishers (or record bizzers) would have underwritten.
I returned to the Voice in 1974 determined to exploit these developments. As editor and writer, my aim was reviewing more sharp-witted and intellectually unpredictable than the reverential auteurism-once-removed by then ensconced at Stone, preferably touched with the gonzoism of Lester Bangs's Creem. I also expected to test my reportorial powers with celebrity profiles that didn't preclude critical analysis--and to expand upon the kind of career analysis Newsday had let me try with the Chuck Berry opus only slightly revised here.
I've ended up doing three kinds of music writing at the Voice. The Consumer Guide grades capsule album reviews that I later worked into alphabetized decade overviews. Theme pieces address genres, issues, scenes, trends, and the annual Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll. Most of my longer journalism, however, including everything I've collected for this book, is keyed to individual artists--almost always pegged, as newsies say, to an event, commonly an album release plus a show. In the seventies I would sometimes go on the road and report these--see my Clash and Lynyrd Skynyrd dispatches. But today I am known as one of the rare rock journalists who doesn't "do interviews." This isn't literally true--if I want facts only an artist can provide, I go for them. Yet although I have conversed with half the subjects here, I rarely quote them, and in only a dozen or so of the collected pieces does the contact play a role (providing data about Iris DeMent's religious history, say, or Sleater-Kinney's set lengths). Partly this is self-respect; people I do not regard as my superiors (which for me means almost everyone, as it should for you) have gotten very controlling indeed about "access," and as long I can do my job without begging, I will. But mostly I just prefer to keep my fannish distance. I know--real fans crave access. But they don't get it, and that leaves us equal. We all respond aesthetically to an information nexus comprising sound recordings, live performances, videos, printed mediations (reviews, press releases, interviews, features, sometimes entire books), and rumor.
Inevitably, sound recordings become the "oeuvre." But it's the nexus I write about. Of course popular music is a collectively produced "cultural practice." Of course its aesthetic impact is inflected by producers and backup musicians, managers and record execs, programmers and disc jockeys, interviewers and reviewers--and fans, above all fans. Rock critics knew all this well before Jean Baudrillard, and knew it was epochal, too. But for excellent empirical reasons that dovetail with journalism's crass and often reactionary commitment to celebrity, the music continues to be heard as the manifestation of an individual or group. And most of the time I write about the human beings rock and roll creates for me.
Highbrow philistines will assume that the reason you won't find much close reading in these pages is that rock is too underdeveloped--harmonically, structurally, and intellectuallly--to support it. But the main reason is that I'm more interested in the human beings it projects. "Persona" is an overused term, and there's now a wide gap between consciously pop pop stars who specialize in it, Madonna being the paradigm, and alternative musos who cultivate anonymity instead, like Pavement or DJ Shadow. But usually it's personas we remember and return to. They're the prism through which we perceive work that supports note-for-note concentration but is designed for the casual attention it enriches. In general, sounds matter more and the rest less as an artist's heyday recedes. But the likes of Bette Midler and Janet Jackson as well as Madonna and Elvis cry out for other kinds of scrutiny. And from Loudon Wainwright to KRS-One, there are always artists who make music a means to an end that wouldn't be nearly as meaningful without it.
The tone and form I arrived at wasn't exactly what I'd envisioned. Good gonzo requires a loose-lipped head few writers can manage even if they get so blotto they can't type, and although I've filled notebooks on location from Akron to Abidjan, I've avoided the profile for almost two decades. What's left is sharpwitted and intellectually unpredictable when I'm on my game, which I find is greatly improved by a newshound's hunger for facts and a gonzo-inflected willingness to go out of my way for a laugh. Like Kael and Wolfe and Liebling--and unlike such academic titans as Raymond Williams and Lionel Trilling, both heroes of mine--I believe that humor is a prime virtue: good prose should make the reader snort or chortle if not guffaw. Nevertheless, Voice music writing has a reputation within the music world for being impossibly (and inappropriately) intellectual, and by the standards of the music world it is--even though that world is nowhere near as unlettered or unintelligent as too many academics ignorantly assume.
By the standards of the university, on the other hand, these pieces may seem rather middlebrow. Just because rock critics were onto the postmodern perplex so early, they rarely kowtow to it, and there's clearly a sense in which some of my rhetorical assumptions are academically disreputable if not just retro. I do not keep up with theory and the jargon that goes with it. Blatantly antigenteel though it may be, my criticism was belletristic before the term became a cause célèbre, and I wouldn't want it any other way. I'm a humanist who believes artists create art. I am for interpretation even if I explicate personas as texts. I make value judgments as a matter of course. Mixing guesswork sociology with approximate aesthetics, imbued with the utopian suspicion that justice has something to do with fun, I'm driven by a continuing quest for music that will serve some function or other in my life and yours--inspire, amuse, enlighten, calm, excite; help a person do the dishes or stay awake on the interstate, get through a bad night or a good marriage, know beauty and feel truth.
Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. |
