Requiem for Rock
COOK, BRUCE
On Music REQUIEM FOR ROCK BY BRUCE COOK Critics are so fond ot quoting Schopenhauer's dictum that all arts aspire to the condition of music?meaning, to pure form—that they sometimes forget the...
...Later word indicates that they may have reconsidered, and that a reunion is just around the corner...
...Even the finest music criticism written during the '60s seemed more concerned with rock's social impact than its intrinsic-value...
...That the Sex Pistols and punk rock could be given the close inspection they have received from even the best of the critics does more than simply point to the decay of standards that too often accompanies the decay of a form...
...Record companies, though, are not the sole generators of hype...
...In fact, even the naughtiness doesn't quite make it over here...
...The lofty tone, the majesty of the 18th century, for example, was most pefectly expressed in a Bach fugue...
...His fascination with the quality of the group's protest, his overemphasis on the "show" aspect I mentioned before, prevents him from realizing one crucial detail: Such protest cannot be valid unless the music is valid as well...
...In Berlioz' Harold in Italy...
...And it became clear just how invalid this music is when the Sex Pistols' first album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (Warner BSK 3147), and the group itself hit these shores almost simultaneously earlier this year...
...In certain films, such as American Graffiti, the hit-record soundtrack becomes supremely important: I he hapless adventures of the kids who frequent the drive-in arc no more than a backdrop to the real action, which keeps banging out at you from the speakers on either side ol the screen...
...looking awlullv ie-inoie and daicd...
...His view prevailed...
...it's a protest against life, and Johnny Rotten [of the Sex Pistols] is its Celine...
...The Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Stranglers, et al...
...shhv enunieicd thai the music was so closely linked in the public's mind with Vietnam marches and draft-card burning, that to use anything else would be unthinkable...
...pioiiioiion, I he big sell I his woiks icasonahlv well in a iwilidi...
...Besides, they have already been taken far too seriously by Marcus, Robert Christagau and company, who have all but explicated them...
...As for the album, it consists of 12 tracks of some of the most repetitious and boringly undifferentiated rock you will ever hear outside of a junior high sock hop...
...They see the whole vast panoply of institutionalized social upheaval that came to be called the counterculture as a direct response to the crashing riffs of the electric guitar...
...No, they insist, the music itself was the activating force...
...Marcus, whom I respect a great deal, has been rendered purblind by longing...
...Both did dismally...
...what excited them particularly was the intensity of punk's negation...
...The punk-ers, it was said, were going all the way, epatez-m% the burgeoisie when there was practically no bourgeoisie left to epatez...
...Their "God Save the Queen" was banned from the British airwaves, but when we hear a reference to the Queen's "white bum" it sounds merely quaint...
...If music reflects the times, there may be some cause for optimism in the public's rejection of the Sex Pistols...
...The critics are capable, when the stakes are right, of drum-beating with the best of them, as the affair of the Sex Pistols proved...
...This led some critics to dogmatically repudiate lighter and prettier sounds as palliative and uncompromising...
...To hear them tell it, when Elvis Presley picked up his instrument and sang "That's Alright, Mama" in the Sun Recording Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, the Establishment began to fear for its life...
...The British band's appearance in America, a pseudo-event, was engineered and ballyhooed by the serious rock writers, who saw in the group and the entire punk phenomenon the last best hope for the state of permanent revolution...
...Then there are those who believe thai the relationship between rock and the '60s was more than a matter of close association, of recording and reflecting the tumultuous Zeitgeist...
...The Romantic Era...
...It doesn't matter, because we are not likely to see them again...
...Thus Greill Marcus, writing in the Boston Phoenix: "Punk isn't just a protest against a 'system,' against 'conditions...
...At its limit—and often its least effective moments, musically—it speaks for an utter loathing of one's body, of sex, of women, of human frailty, of just about anything you can reach out and touch...
...All in the name of the revolution...
...The nutty, the vulgar, the diabolical, the grisly, and the freaky were not merely taken seriously and paid the compliment of solemn analysis, they were defended, endorsed and ultimately encouraged...
...lor anyone like myself, who liked the music and loved its energy, who gloried that the cutesy, syrupy, silly pop music ol the '5()s was being leplaeed by something with guts, [he prospect ol watching rock limp oil the scene is eeilainlv unpleasant...
...Similailv and nunc recently, director Hal Ashby insisted on employing the hard rock of the late '60s for the soundtrack ol Coming Home I o his collaboraloi s' obtcclions thai the de vice had become a cliche and had lost its el leet iv eness...
...were conscientiously exploring the outer limits of impropriety—spitting on their audiences, poking safety pins through their cheeks, and recording songs that praised the Nazis, vilified the Queen and extolled necrophilia...
...By the time they reached the West Coast, however, the demoralized punkers had fallen out...
...If it weren't for the naughty words and naughty sentiments in the lyrics, there would be absolutely nothing to catch the attention...
...Not for nothing arc the years before World War 1 known as the Ragtime Era, or the '20s the Jazz Age...
...in (<>nu/i^ lU'iuc...
...On Music REQUIEM FOR ROCK BY BRUCE COOK Critics are so fond ot quoting Schopenhauer's dictum that all arts aspire to the condition of music?meaning, to pure form—that they sometimes forget the paradox involved: Of all the arts, music is the most responsive to the emotional currents of an age...
...But music's ability to capture, communicate and be almost synonymous with an epoch is most immediately apparent in America...
...Bad word-of-mouth publicity preceded the tour, and the Pistols staggering across the land breaking dates everywhere didn't help...
...Consumed by a fit of nostalgia, they touted the Pistols as the genuine article...
...They attracted laughably small crowds in Atlanta and Nashville, with their first full house in San Francisco...
...Warner Communications, for instance, did about half-a-billion dollars worth of business last year, trafficking in rock singles cut by completely negligible groups...
...A decade or so has passed and tlie-Rock Era is winding down to a final, faltering and rather inglorious end...
...it was announced that lead singer Johnny Rotten was leaving and the rest were disbanding...
...period, lending the enterprise a convincing semblance of life...
...I refuse to dignify the lyrics on these droning tracks (I can't bring myself to call them songs) by discussing them...
...Bui iheie u is...
...That was hype from start to finish...
...It is hardly surprising, then, that a movie wishing to instantly evoke nostalgia does so through the use of golden oldies...
...Indeed, the idea of rock-as-revolu-tion was once pervasive...
...If violent uprising was rock's aim, only more violent music would make it happen...
...Hence, performance —the "show" aspect—was overemphasized...
...I he one ilinig keep mg io^k alive lodav is hvpe pubh citv...
Vol. 61 • March 1978 • No. 7
