From the issue dated May 11, 2001
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Is Rock 'n' Roll Dead? Only if You Aren't ListeningBy KEVIN J. H. DETTMARA few years ago my friend Ben Saunders, then a graduate student in the English department at Duke University, helped organize "Representing Rock," a wonderful interdisciplinary conference on rock 'n' roll. In fact, it was through the conference that we became friends: We discovered a common astonishment at the work of the British band Radiohead. At that Duke conference, a prominent scholar -- well known in the field of popular-music studies and in the larger realm of cultural studies -- gave a talk in which he announced, to a rather stunned, largely graduate-student audience, that rock was dead. To say that this verdict surprised us would be a gross understatement; various members of the audience had come by plane, train, and automobile to discuss their research on Stereolab, U2, Fugazi, PJ Harvey, the aforementioned Radiohead -- a number of artists and bands generally thought to be not quite dead yet. Indeed, the first night of the conference featured a gig by the Chapel Hill band and indie sweethearts Superchunk, and the closing night a performance by a clearly undead Jon Langford, founding member of the British punk band the Mekons. The senior scholar's evidence of rock's morbidity was entirely anecdotal, which he passed off as "ethnographic"; it consisted primarily of the fact that he had spent a good deal of time "hanging out" with college students during the previous summer, and could find no commonality in their listening habits or their tastes. And worse, he couldn't find anything to listen to in their music. What the critic did, in effect, was suggest (without stating it quite explicitly) that rock was dead because he had stopped listening to it. Although it may seem like a stretch, it reminded me of the famous deathbed scene of Colonel Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Charlie Marlow's narration of Colonel Kurtz's "last words" is, I believe, a much misunderstood scene. Kurtz's words that close this tableau, "The horror! The horror!" are among the most famous in modern literature, and have been seen by subsequent commentators as a capsule summary of 20th-century history. But looking at Conrad's text closely, we discover that "The horror! The horror!" aren't necessarily Kurtz's last words; rather, they're the last words that Marlow, our protagonist and narrator, sticks around to hear. "The horror! The horror!" are Kurtz's last words only because after they were uttered, Marlow blew out his candle and left Kurtz's cabin. It is some time later, while eating his supper, that Marlow hears a native cabin boy announce, "Mistah Kurtz -- he dead." When Kurtz actually died -- and what, in fact, his last words were -- neither Marlow nor we readers will ever know. What is clear, however, is that Marlow's claim to have been the sole audience for Kurtz's death and last words gives him an extraordinary amount of authority and power. Thus, we might say, Kurtz was dead because Marlow had stopped listening. A disturbing number of critics -- including James Miller, Martha Bayles, Fred Goodman, Lawrence Grossberg, and just about anyone writing about Bruce Springsteen -- have stopped listening to rock music. Of course, rock's more apocalyptic critics have been decrying the death of rock for decades. In last year's Cameron Crowe film Almost Famous, the Lester Bangs character tries to warn a young Cameron Crowe stand-in away from a career in rock journalism: "I'm tellin' you, you're coming along at a very dangerous time for rock 'n' roll. The war is over; they won. And they [professional rock critics] will ruin rock 'n' roll, and strangle everything we love about it." This was 1973. The decision to stop listening, for a music critic -- or stop watching, for a film critic, or stop reading, for a literary critic -- is a perfectly legitimate one; to delimit, however arbitrarily, the boundaries of one's expertise and interests creates a field of manageable size within which one might hope to make a significant contribution. But surely there's a world of difference between admitting "I don't find time to read a lot of contemporary poetry," on the one hand, and pronouncing that "no significant poetry has been written since Robert Lowell," on the other. A new class of music writers is on the rise -- call them the rock curmudgeons. Call them dangerous. When rock 'n' roll first erupted in America's heartland with performers like Ike Turner, Bill Haley, and Elvis Presley, plenty of critics were plenty hostile to it. Rock was seen as an overturning of all the traditional values that had made our country great. Such reactions are predictable, and can be seen throughout the history of art criticism. They are largely generational, with the elders calling for discipline among anarchic sons and daughters. Reviewing T. S. Eliot's early poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," for instance, literary curmudgeon par excellence Arthur Waugh charged that a poet of the younger generation, "beginning with the declaration 'I knew my father well and he was a fool,' naturally proceeds to the convenient assumption that everything which seemed wise and true to the father must inevitably be false and foolish to the son." Some of the British poet Philip Larkin's most energetic prose was devoted to jazz criticism -- but exclusively of post-World War II jazz which, to Larkin's taste, was formless, chaotic, undisciplined -- precisely the epithets applied by earlier critics to the first generation of jazz artists who inhabit Larkin's pantheon. (Ken Burns: Are you listening?) But for today's rock curmudgeons, early rock 'n' roll wasn't some monstrous perversion, an unprovoked disruption of the musical landscape they'd known. It was the music of their youth, the musical paradigm through which all subsequent records would, perforce, be heard. Most of the curmudgeons were born within five years of the December 28, 1947, release of the song that popularized the word "rock" as a label for this music -- Wynonie Harris's "Good Rockin' Tonight." The music at their bar mitzvahs would probably have included not only Elvis but also Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm, Bill Haley and the Comets, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly. By the time the curmudgeons were old enough to buy their own records, the rock 'n' roll revolution had already been fought and won. (In this case, Gil Scott-Heron notwithstanding, the revolution was televised, with Elvis making his first appearance on the Dorsey Brothers' Stage Show on January 28, 1956.) How sad and ironic, then, that the majority of those who think rock is dead -- and who are busy publishing and popularizing that opinion -- are the first-wave baby boomers who helped to create the rock 'n' roll ethos that we see played out in films like The Big Chill and Almost Famous. While there are many ways to tell the story of rock 'n' roll, it is the boomers' narrative of rock as the authentic sound of freedom that remains the most influential and compelling. I was reminded of Wynonie Harris when reading James Miller's Flowers in the Dustbin, which ironically takes its title from the Sex Pistols' song "God Save the Queen" (and more immediately from Neil Nehring's smart 1993 book of the same title on music and British youth culture, which treats youth culture with respect and critical sophistication). Miller's subtitle is, tellingly, The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977. A little bit of digging reveals to the industrious reader that Miller himself was born in 1947 -- the very year rock was born! -- and, thus, turned 30 (and officially too old to be trusted) in 1977 -- the very year that rock died! Ostensibly, Miller's bookend dates refer to the release of Harris's single, at the one end, and the death of Elvis at the other. The convenience of Miller's arbitrarily declared death of rock is suggested by one customer on the amazon.com Web site, who writes: "Rock died when Elvis did. ... I didn't know!" (If Miller's got the time of death right, one shudders to think what rock's last words were.) Miller himself, seemingly anticipating such criticism, acknowledges on the book's penultimate page that "Of course, the history of rock and roll did not stop when I stopped writing about it, any more than it stopped after Elvis Presley died." That he senses the need for that last-minute apology suggests that the book tells a very different story. Having written about popular music for a period spanning four decades, and most recently serving a 10-year stint as Newsweek's rock critic, Miller now finds the time ripe for his own postmortem of rock. Looking back to the 70's and 80's, he writes: "In many ways, it was an exhilarating time to be listening to popular music, and to be writing about rock and roll. Yet despite a steady stream of new artists and a relentless flood of publicity for every passing fad -- and despite the fact that for many years I made my living by contributing to the flood of publicity -- the rock world as I came to know it professionally seemed to me ever more stale, ever more predictable, ever more boring." Hence his decision to leave Newsweek in 1990, "in part because I no longer felt able to feign enthusiasm. ... Most of my friends," he goes on to write, "(discounting those who have continued to make their living by writing about, or recording, popular music) long ago stopped listening to rock." Again, the confusion of cause and effect: We've stopped listening, therefore it's dead. There's quite a list of recent books and articles that trade on the putative death of rock (and relish in a kind of survivor's glee). Martha Bayles's 1994 Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music was an early harbinger of things to come, and Fred Goodman's 1997 The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-On Collision of Rock and Commerce -- well, the subtitle suggests the tenor of the book. As Goodman puts it in his preface, "Perhaps it is my own professional cynicism, but after years of covering the music business as a reporter, it is hard for me to believe that many of the performers who stake a claim to that old folk ethos -- making music with conscience and meaning -- are as interested in that message as they are in what it does for their careers as messengers." But the most disappointing recent defection -- one hopes that it will be a momentary aberration -- is none other than Nick Hornby, who wrote the most significant book on the life of the rock fan, the 1995 novel High Fidelity. Hornby's novel celebrates the music made directly in the wake (one is tempted to say, during the wake) of rock's purported death, in the late 70's and early 80's; and last year's movie adaptation intelligently updates the musical references from punk-era London to late-90's Chicago. The novel suggests that Neil Young was right: Rock 'n' roll will never die. Hornby's act of betrayal was the review he wrote last fall in The New Yorker of Radiohead's Kid A, the eagerly awaited follow-up to the band's 1997 critical success OK Computer (recently voted, rather preposterously, the greatest rock 'n' roll album of all time by the readers of the British rock magazine Q). In terms that eerily echo the antimodernist stance of Larkin, Hornby attacks Kid A for being -- gulp! -- too challenging: "You have to work at albums like Kid A. You have to sit at home night after night and give yourself over to its paranoid millennial atmosphere as you try to decipher elliptical snatches of lyrics and puzzle out how the titles ('Treefingers,' 'The National Anthem,' and so on) might refer to the songs. In other words, you have to be 16. Anyone old enough to vote may find that he has competing demands for his time -- a relationship, say, or a job, or buying food, or listening to another CD he picked up on the same day. He may also find himself shouting at the CD player, 'Shut up! You're supposed to be a pop group!' (The music critics who love Kid A, one suspects, love it because their job forces them to consume music as a 16-year-old would. Don't trust any of them.) I suspect that people who have been listening to rock music for decades will have exhausted the fund of trust they once might have had for challenging albums. Kid A demands the patience of the devoted; both patience and devotion become scarcer commodities once you start picking up a paycheck." Perhaps it's only because we're the same age, but I (born in 1958) would like to believe that Hornby (born in 1957) is too young to be a curmudgeon; for the time being, we'll chalk up his snide attack on the most intelligent music being made today to the fact that Hornby was writing for The New Yorker, and succumbed to the temptation to suck up to his older and more conservative readers. Say it ain't so, Nick. There's a lesson in all of this for those of us who do intellectual work. Archimedes famously declared, "Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I will move the world." That's an attractive proposition, but for the critic, it's death. As cultural critics, we can't afford the luxury of standing still. The river of culture, as W. B. Yeats (echoing another Greek philosopher, Heraclitus) reminds us, "changes minute by minute," and if we establish a comfortable position on the bank, while pretending to be "down with" the river, we'll never really understand what's happening. The cultural historian might require that place to stand in order to do her work, but the cultural critic must be willing, as the recent Limp Bizkit song has it -- and as Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Proud Mary" had it before Fred Durst was born -- to keep rollin', rollin', rollin'. It's a difficult task, but not impossible. The elder statesman of the boomer rock critics, Robert Christgau (b. 1942), has managed to keep listening, keep thinking, and keep talking and writing intelligently about the vital music that continues to be made; he was eloquent, for instance, in a recent All Things Considered story about the controversy over Eminem's Grammy nomination for The Marshall Mathers LP. (The members of the Recording Academy weren't as open-minded; the award for album of the year went not to Eminem but to the revivified 70's icons Steely Dan.) Once a public intellectual has staked out his turf, and shaped and refined his lever -- his style of reading, his theoretical apparatus, his thesis, his habitual way of seeing -- he can, if not move the world, at least accrue some measure of intellectual capital. One can ride a good, generalizable thesis about the functioning of culture for a full (if not entirely rewarding) career. But the real challenge, posed by bands and performers like Radiohead, Cat Power, Ani DiFranco, the Deftones, Eminem, and Dr. Dre is always to remain willing to re-examine the ground beneath our feet, and the appropriateness of our critical tools. If rock really is about freedom, the paralysis of habitual styles of listening and thinking is the way we guarantee the death of rock. Kevin J. H. Dettmar is chairman of the English department at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B10
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education