On Music BRUCE COOK
On Music TWO KINDS OF CRITICISM BY BRUCE COOK In the beginning, few people took rock music criticism seriously. Certainly most of over-30 America felt nothing important enough to discuss...
...That is why so many rock critics resort to the apocalyptic mode, shouting at the top of their lungs about revolution and holocaust when all they are really describing is modest change and exuberant energy...
...You run out of things to say...
...Richard Goldstein, for one, claimed and was allowed great indulgence in expression and taste even in his frequent contributions to no less sober a journal than the New York Times...
...their rhetoric won them some of the space necessary for action, but the police also forced them to live up to it...
...The book is drawn from his production over the last four years, and in the case of events included that I attended, I found I disagreed with what he had to say about half the time...
...But for me—however much he might disagree—they underline the fact that rock music itself is not substantial enough, as music, for a critic to focus on very long...
...Nobody ever dreamed up an American Studies approach to jazz...
...Interestingly, if not surprisingly, most of Marcus' similes are taken from the movies...
...And at no added cost, which kind of makes this record better than just any nice-to-listen-to album...
...Thus a long essay on Elvis Presley becomes at its best a treatment of the Southern ethos...
...In an eloquent howl against "the Richard Goldsteins of this world, illegitimate offshoots of the already dubious Music Appreciation Racket," Ned Rorem complained angrily: "Pop critics are spokesmen of, rather than reporters for, the people...
...as though feeling were not a question in Debussy and Bach as well...
...Concentrating on five performers (Memphis street singer Harmonica Frank, bluesman Robert Johnson, Sly Stone, Randy Newman, and Elvis Presley) and a single rock group (The Band), Marcus plays them against certain archetypal figures of American myth (the pilgrim, the devil-obsessed puritan, the Staggerle-style bad nigger), effectively capturing echoes of their work in every corner of American life...
...It has a complexity and substance that is not likely to be exhausted by the descriptive powers or intellectual ambitions of any critics—not even one as admirable as Whitney Balliett...
...Crawdaddy (under new management) became politically attuned to radical possibilities in postWatergate America...
...Balliett once called jazz "the sound of surprise," a phrase that comes as close as any I have heard to capturing its essence...
...But it helps when the subject at hand is jazz, rather than rock...
...The Panthers walked that fine edge, threatened by their own rhetoric, which called for actions they could not afford to take...
...The degree he took at the University of California was in American Political Thought, and he taught American Studies there for several years before devoting himself full time to writing...
...Or brilliantly exact—as when, in depicting Count Basie's understated piano style, he remarks: "What Hemingway had done for American prose Basie was doing for American music...
...That is also why the better ones among them find they must introduce their own subject matter, as Greil Marcus has done in Mystery Train...
...Marcus is well equipped to handle such digressions...
...On the whole, Marcus succeeds...
...Not so with jazz criticism, and to further illustrate what I have been driving at I will take advantage of the appearance of a new collection by Whitney Balliett, whose reports on jazz events and profiles of jazz personalities have been running in the New Yorker for nearly 20 years...
...And the truth is that at the outset the writing on rock and roll, like the music itself, was not only terribly subjectvie but often quite inarticulate...
...It is too simple...
...The rock press, too, started to demand more of its writers in the way of style and sense, and to expand its horizons...
...he requires no grand plan or vision of America to fill out his work...
...Similarly, a discussion of Sly Stone's music in the light of the Staggerlee myth leads Marcus to the Black Panthers, and he offers this provocative analysis of the paradoxical nature of their power: "[Huey] Newton's idea came down to a new kind of power, growing out of the barrel of a gun that was good only as long as it didn't have to be fired, because once it was fired, the other side was going to win...
...It is an unpredictable music, a form with more moods and phases, more variety, more twists and turns than any other I know of...
...His seventh book, New York Notes (Houghton Mifflin, 256 pp., $8.95), is about the music and the people who make it, with the pieces reprinted ranging from single-paragraph comments to lengthy articles on Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan, Jimmy Rowles, Ellis Larkins, and others...
...In 1966, at the age of 17, he founded Crawdaddy, filling its short issues with his own long-winded essays exalting all the new noise gods...
...No one describes music as well as Balliett does...
...More often he hits the mark, and then he is quite instructive: "If Tatum and Monk and Hines sometimes suggest painters, [Teddy] Wilson suggests a superb water-colorist, whose textures and colors and draftsmanship are an unfailing delight...
...They tell me my preconceptions prevent my grooving with the Stones ?You've got to feel that sound...
...Nobody needed to...
...A paragraph of vintage Williams will communicate the quality of his prose far more effectively than I could by trying to describe it: "And context notwithstanding, the thing that makes Beach Boys Party a good album (to me) is the fact that it's nice to listen to...
...Stuff that stays with me...
...Out of all this emerged two first-rate rock critics, Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus...
...Rolling Stone began de-emphasizing those interminable ego-trip interviews and stressing investigative journalism...
...As the youthquake and its aftershock quieted to a mere tremor, editorial standards at most publications returned to pre-1968 levels...
...The song lyrics lack sufficient depth to support the close scrutiny that more complex art forms demand...
...Unlike Marcus, Balliett has no difficulty sticking to his subject...
...But what makes it an excellent album is that while I'm listening to this record-that-is-nice-to-Iisten-to, I get a lot of extra stuff: I get moved on an emotional level, I get insight into the nature of rock music and the creative impulse itself, I get impressions of the world and the way people feel about it, I get a lot of just plain good reactions...
...This is hardly reliable commentary, much less criticism, nor is it relevant...
...Although both have been around for quite a while, in recent years they have widened their scope and improved the quality of their writing to the point where they are worth reading for what they have to say about not just rock but a variety of other subjects as well...
...And to precisely define a style, to accurately evoke a specific musical moment, is not an easy task...
...The first acknowledged rock critic to set up shop was Paul Williams (not the singer-songwriter...
...Indeed, an example of the coming-of-age of rock criticism—and of its possibilities and limitations—is Marcus' Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock V Roll Music, published last year in hardcover and available now in paperback (Dutton, 271 pp., $3.50) It is a laudably ambitious effort by him to bring to the music of his generation the same critical apparatus others have brought to bear on American literature and art—in other words, an American Studies approach to rock and roll...
...With allowances made for age, education and at least minimal editing, the majority of rock critics managed to sound like Paul Williams for more years than they should have...
...Gradually, things got better...
...It is not necessary to accept Balliett's judgments to admire him...
...He tells us, for instance, that listening to John McLaughlin and his Mahavishnu Orchestra play at their usual eardrum-shattering volume was "like walking through a garden of Malliol nudes...
...Who cares how pop critics groove...
...Certainly most of over-30 America felt nothing important enough to discuss could be found in the crashbam-jangle of those early sounds...
...But he is an irresistibly elegant writer, one of the few left in magazine journalism, albeit not beyond occasional extravagant similes...
...Yet some of the most interesting observations in Mystery Train have less to do with its rock heroes than with the rock pattern in our society...
Vol. 59 • September 1976 • No. 19
