Parlor Game

According to Roland Barthes, virtually all music criticism “is only ever translated into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective” (Image-Music-Text, p. 179). Seeking to find a new way to listen to music and a new way to write about what he hears, Barthes says about typical music criticism:

Music, by natural bent, is that which at once receives an adjective. The adjective is inevitable: this music is this, this execution is that. No doubt the moment we turn an art into a subject (for an article, for a conversation) there is nothing left but to give it predicates; in the case of music, however, such predication unfailingly takes the most facile and trivial form, that of the epithet. (179)

For Barthes, adjectival music criticism—or what he later calls “predicative interpretation”—is the most common (“institutional”) form of critical writing about music. Predicative criticism typically perceives a piece of music as being simply a codified form of expression, to which the critic is obliged to ascribe an ethos (qualities and traits, i.e., adjectives).

Having picked up at the bookstore yesterday a remaindered copy ($3.98) of the hardcover edition of The New Rolling Stone Album Guide: Completely Revised And Updated Fourth Edition (2004), I thought I would test Barthes’ theory whether predicative interpretation inevitably resorts to the epithet. Since the potent tome purports to represent “three years of work by more than 70 writers and editors”—a declaration which I assume means a selected group of writers and editors—I think the book would qualify as a good indicator of common, or institutional, popular music criticism at the present time. Below I have reproduced a few passages from the book, on a particular musician, band, or album, which I think is illustrative of Barthes’ observations about music criticism’s penchant for the epithet. I have also selected few statements that I think are illustrative of how the critic seeks to identify an underlying ethos (traits, rendered as adjectives) in an individual piece of music.

On The Beatles:
It [Revolver] contains their prettiest music (“Here, There, and Everywhere”), their bitchiest (“And Your Bird Can Sing”), their friendliest (“I Want to Tell You”), and their scariest (the screaming-seagull acid-nightmare “Tomorrow Never Knows”). (53)

On Fleetwood Mac:
After striking such a perfect balance between self-expression and commercial appeal, Fleetwood Mac succumbed to studio artiness. The double-disc Tusk reveals Buckingham’s secret fixation: to become Brian Wilson with a touch of Brian Eno thrown in. (304)

On Daryl Hall & John Oates:
But it [Voices] did have “Kiss on My List,” a slick, bouncy #1 synth-pop smooch that taught Hall & Oates the way to make rock girls, disco girls, and new-wave girls scream together. (359)

On Kiss:
Kiss’ early albums are thin, cruddy-sounding hard rock recorded on the cheap, with only occasional lapses into catchiness. . . . (461)

On Led Zeppelin:
The [cover] image [of the band’s first album] did a pretty good job of encapsulating the music inside: sex, catastrophe, and things blowing up. (479)

On Midnight Oil:
…The Oils’ U. S. debut, 10, 9, 8 is a stunning, sunbaked answer to London Calling. Midnight Oil’s ferocious jeremiad against corporate greed and American military imperialism is powered by the apocalyptic delivery of bald singing colossus Peter Garrett and the twin-guitar assault of Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey. (541)

On Ted Nugent:
“Journey to the Center of the Mind” (1968) would be just another pleasant psychedelic excursion without that lead guitar: Nugent makes the instrument snarl and stutter like a Harley-Davidson in low gear, shifting into a high-pressure whoosh on the solo breaks. (594)

On Neutral Milk Hotel:
Although psychedelic retro-pop and neohippie experimentalism defined the cadre of affiliated bands known as Elephant 6 . . . Jeff Magnum’s Neutral Milk Hotel stands out as the unique, even visionary, one of the collective—and the most enigmatic. (579)

On Ratt:
Ratt may be the platonic ideal of ‘80s pop metal/hard rock. (679)

On Patti Smith:
Teeming with ambition, primitivism, anybody-can-do-this chutzpah, and casual androgyny, Horses demands a reaction. (751)

On Warren Zevon:
With a head filled with ideas lifted from “cyber-punk” paperbacks and an imposing synthesizer arsenal, Zevon [with the album Transverse City] set out to do for art rock what he had done for the singer/songwriter movement—kick it in the ass. (905)

Let’s play a game: Try to revise each of the above epithets without employing any adjective at all or without the various traits attributed to the individual piece of music, and also without the various conceptually elusive taxonomies (e.g., “'80s pop metal/hard rock,” “psychedelic retro-pop,” “neohippie experimentalism”), and see what you’re left with.

Pop Quiz

I’ve noticed pop-ups consisting of “IQ Tests” seem to have become ubiquitous on the web lately, an interesting phenomenon that I cannot let go unremarked. For behind every pop-up window (every advertisement) there’s a product pleading for an avid consumer, inviting him or her to participate in a process that Louis Althusser called interpellation, the process by and through which individuals are constructed as “subjects” when they are forced to respond to the solicitations of ideology: “the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection.” Pop-up windows frequently contain requests for individuals to respond to a question or questions, that is, they contain a quiz (a form of entertainment based on questions and answers). Quizzes function “phatically,” to use linguist Roman Jakobson’s term, by which he meant a type of (verbal) communication that implies nothing more than a simple willingness to converse (for instance, talking about the weather with your neighbor). Hence quizzes select, establish, and ultimately decide the kinds of knowledge (“bodies of knowledge”) that any particular culture, or subculture, considers “important,” marginalizing as irrelevant other kinds of knowledge. Determinations of importance, in turn, enable people to perform comfortably culturally symbolic gestures such as the expression of (preferred) taste; in turn, preferred tastes serve to enable (support and encourage) consumption and consumptive patterns—watch HGTV sometime. Or better yet, open the pages of any popular music publication. You are likely to find within its pages a quiz—which serves the same interpellative function as a pop-up window. Hence the quiz and the pop-up window are parts of the same communicative network that channels communication into consumption. Quizzes are simply pop-ups in disguise.

Bathroom Humor

Jacques Lacan observed that public life in the Western world, rather like the majority of primitive communities, is subjected to the laws of urinary segregation. The bathroom serves the function of sorting society into men and women. Ludwig Wittgenstein once told a few of his students that one of his strongest childhood memories was the bathroom of his parents’ house, in which on the wall there was a discolored patch of broken plaster that suggested a sort of terrifying duck. No wonder, then, that he was attracted to the theory of the “duck-rabbit”: he wished to transform that demonic duck into a friendly rabbit. And perhaps the most influential work of the twentieth century is Duchamp’s “Fountain,” a urinal.

Today’s date should remind us that in the history of rock the principle of urinary segregation led to one of its more celebrated episodes, one that took place in England at a roadside petrol station on Stratford’s Romford Road. In the late evening hours of 18 March 1965, a Daimler carrying Rolling Stones’ members Mick Jagger, Bill Wyman, and Brian Jones, their chauffeur and various others, pulled up to the station. Bill Wyman got out and asked the manager, Charles Keeley, for permission to use the toilet. Wyman was told by Mr. Keeley that the public toilet was out of order, and he wasn’t about to let the long-haired Wyman and the rest of the motley crew use the staff bathroom. The need to urinate being rather severe, Wyman, Jagger and Jones out of necessity relieved themselves against a nearby wall, violating Mr. Keeley’s sense of public decorum. At a hearing the following July, the three Rolling Stones were each fined 5 pounds, roughly equivalent at the time to about 8 dollars. Subsequently, the toilet contributed to the rock community sorting itself out into rival camps: there was the Beatles camp (clean and wholesome), and the Rolling Stones camp (dirty and dangerous).

Of course, the toilet has always figured highly in both the formation of rock culture (urinary segregation as a consequence of racial segregation in the South in which Elvis grew up; Elvis would later die in his bathroom) and in its depiction (George Michael being charged with “lewd conduct” in a public toilet in Los Angeles in 1998). In order to commemorate March 18 as the day which acknowledges our social practice of urinary segregation, I have assembled the following playlist, to be listened to, of course, in addition to the Rolling Stones’ album Beggars Banquet (1968; pictured).

Ten Songs Of The Commode:
She Came In Through the Bathroom Window – The Beatles
Norwegian Wood (“I . . . crawled off to sleep in the bath”) – The Beatles
Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room – Brownsville Station
God’s Own Drunk (“I wasn’t . . . commode huggin’ drunk”) – Jimmy Buffett
Mirror in the Bathroom – The English Beat
Bathroom Wall – Faster Pussycat
Rockstar (“And a bathroom I can play baseball in”) – Nickelback
Rock ‘n’ Roll Toilet – The Soft Boys
867-5309/Jenny – Tommy Tutone
Why Does It Hurt when I Pee? (“I got it from the toilet seat”) – Frank Zappa

Update (3/18/09, 4:25 p.m. DST) – Subterranean outhouse blues: Apparently some of Bob Dylan’s Malibu neighbors are complaining about a portable toilet that has sat for seven months on the singer-songwriter’s estate. They say at night the sea breeze delivers odors strong enough to drive people from their bedrooms; see the complete story in the L. A. Times about the ghastly smell blowin’ in the wind here.

The Dream and the Nightmare

In theory, rock ‘n’ roll is an egalitarian artform, having derived from an ideology of amateurism (as opposed to professionalism). Because of this ideological underpinning, it has consistently struggled with the problem of how to redress the gap separating the fan from the star. In its positive form, the problem of the gap is overcome by a version of the Horatio Alger myth, in which a working-class stiff is kissed by Lady Luck, and the dream comes true: he becomes, as John Lennon memorably sang, a “Working Class Hero.” Think, for instance, of Tommy DeCarlo, once a credit manager at a Home Depot store in North Carolina, now the lead singer for Boston.

The recent, much publicized events surrounding Rihanna and Chris Brown represents the dark parody of the Alger myth: the star-struck, working-class stiff on whom fortune has smiled, but because of some failure of character, some moral weakness, he throws it all away (Bad Company’s “Shooting Star”). Tommy DeCarlo is the emblem of the (generative) dream, Chris Brown the emblem of the (destructive) nightmare. One can understand these two stories as the myth of “the rising star” and the myth of “the falling star.”

Historically, “the star” became distinct from what was known at the time as “the picture personality” around 1914. There were (at least) two consequences of this transformation: 1) the cinema became disassociated from the theater, from the theatrical mode of representation (hence rock stars are more like movie stars than stage actors, and are more likely to become movie stars than stage actors); and, 2) the studio relinquished control over the “picture personality’s” public image. The emergent discourse on the private life of the picture personality created what is known as “the star,” the star by definition having a private life that is open to the press and to fan magazines; fan magazines, the subject of which is the life of stars, are premised on open access to the private life. In other words, the life of the star forms a narrative that is separable from the roles that he or she plays and have made him or her a star in the first place. One’s private life comprises a narrative that is utterly distinct from the narrative forming one’s professional life, although as is clear from Chris Brown’s recent case, when problems presumably concealed in the private life emerge, there are real and drastic consequences on the professional life. Why? Because the generative or positive version of the myth must be preserved at all costs. Because it is inviolate, those who have transgressed against the benign myth must be made examples.

Et Tu, Bono: You, Too?

As if in response to the massive media campaign that has geared up to promote U2’s latest album, NO LINE ON THE HORIZON, Andrew Gumbel has penned the following article for The Wrap, “Bono, U2 Blasted as Hypocrites and Sell-outs.” Gumbel chides U2 for turning its back on its fans as revealed by the band moving its business operations offshore in order to escape Irish taxes. While Gumbel may have a point, one might do well to remember that the history of rock is marked by continuous controversy: the strongly negative reaction to Bob Dylan’s going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, for instance, or the commercialization of the Woodstock 1999 festival, and the violence that erupted there. While I sympathize with Gumbel’s position, I think his article is, in part, a response to the problem of feeling disenfranchised. Alienated from the products and services of mass culture, one feels drowned by consumer goods.

The Nabokov Letter

In my and Rebecca’s book, Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side (FAB Press, 2006), we discussed Donald Cammell’s proposed film of Vladimir Nabokov’s “unfilmable” novel, Pale Fire (1962). As his biographers, we were told of a letter Donald had received from the famed author regarding Donald’s proposed adaptation of the novel, but the letter written by Nabokov—of which Donald was justly proud—was never recovered during the many years my wife Rebecca and I worked on our book, which went to press three years ago this month.

We are happy to report, however, that the letter from Vladimir Nabokov to Donald Cammell was discovered by David Cammell, Donald’s brother, just a couple of months ago, in December 2008, among his personal papers. During the writing of our biography, David assured us of the letter’s existence because he’d read it—but was unable to locate it despite his best efforts. Although the letter now has been found, its discovery, obviously, has occurred too late for inclusion in our book. And yet, now that the letter has been recovered, happily it is available for all the world to see. Although all of the late author’s work is closely guarded, Dmitri Nabokov has kindly given his permission for the letter to be distributed in cyberspace. We are deeply grateful to him for granting permission. If anyone wants confirmation of this permission, you may contact Dr. Stephen Blackwell, Professor of Russian at the University of Tennessee—Knoxville and moderator of the NABOKV-L discussion boards, with whom Dmitri Nabokov is in close communication. I have discussed Donald’s proposed adaptation at length on the NABOKV-L, and a copy of the letter was sent to all list members who wanted one.

Becky and I were mildly surprised by the date of the letter—July 30, 1971—as the treatment Donald had written of Pale Fire—the treatment we have a copy of and have read, anyway—is dated May 1974. Although we knew he was always at work on various film projects, we were confident that during the 1970-71 period Donald was entirely focused on a film project titled Ishtar (not to be confused with the Dustin Hoffman-Warren Beatty film released in 1987). But it is now clear that he had begun thinking of adapting Pale Fire during this period, perhaps even earlier. Donald admired Lolita and also Kubrick's film adaptation of it, and also admired Nabokov's novel Despair, filmed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1978. In July 1971, when the letter was received, Donald and Myriam Gibril were living in David Cammell’s flat on Old Church Street in Chelsea, literally just around the corner from Mick Jagger. Somehow, the letter must have subsequently remained in David’s flat, over the years eventually getting mixed in with David’s other papers, only to resurface thirty-seven years later, and almost thirteen years after Donald’s death in April 1996. As Nabokov was not profligate of praise, we can certainly understand why Donald was so proud of the letter. Below is a copy of the heretofore unpublished, and largely unknown, letter. Although Nabokov suggests a possible meeting, I am quite sure that no meeting ever took place between the two men.

Diarmid and Broccoli

Happily, Diarmid Cammell’s good friend, Carol Staswick, wrote to me last night in regard to my recent post on my memories of Diarmid, supplying me with some additional information and also correcting some information I’d included in it. I’m pleased to able to share that information here, in order to set the record straight. I am thankful Carol wrote to me. First of all, I’m happy to report that she and Diarmid did, in fact, see Donald’s film White of the Eye, some time before 2000. She remembers Diarmid’s reaction to the film being “mixed, along the lines of: it’s disturbing that Donald chose that subject, but the camera work was very artistic.”

Regarding his childhood acting career, she remembers his view toward it differently than I do. It seemed to her that he was not so dismissive of his early acting. She says he seemed proud of having been part some successful TV dramas. In addition to The Prince and the Pauper, which I’d mentioned, she mentioned a TV play by John Mortimer titled David and Broccoli (1960), which I’d forgotten about, but remember being told about. I don’t recall Diarmid specifically mentioning this TV play to me, although David Cammell had mentioned it to me, as he personally knew the barrister and dramatist John Mortimer (who died just this past January at age 85) because of his career in film production. I’d claimed that Diarmid dismissed his early acting career, saying he referred to it as an “embarrassment,” and I mentioned this because I specifically asked him about his acting career on two separate occasions. The second time I asked him about it, I clearly remember him saying to me, “Oh, it’s an embarrassment really. I don’t want to talk about it. Someday when I know you better, maybe.” My reply was simply, “Fair enough.” Actually, the only reason I knew about his career as a child actor in the first place was because David Cammell had told me all about it prior to my first introduction to Diarmid, in 1999. And even before he angrily called us demanding that his name be removed from our book (for reasons detailed in my previous post), he’d previously written me an email requesting that I remove all references to his acting career (we had been sending him document files of the chapters in draft form as email attachments). So all of these instances contributed to my perception that he was highly dismissive of that portion of his life; perhaps I am wrong in that assessment. Personally I thought it was fascinating and I wanted to know about it, not because I intended to go into it in any depth in our biography of Donald, but because I was actually interested in knowing about it. Perhaps rather than using the word “embarrassment,” I should have said that he was “ambivalent” about it, which seems to be more accurate given Carol’s recollection. And most certainly she knew him much better than I did.

As for his knowledge of Arabic, she believes I misunderstood something Diarmid said, and I believe she’s right. She says that in the 1970s, Diarmid translated from the French a book titled The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual by Abdallah Laroui, for which his knowledge of Arabic was useful. But she writes, “He never mentioned to me any professional translations from Arabic (at least I don’t recall any such mention), nor did he put any on his resume. He did say that his Arabic script was quite good.” On this latter point I’m sure she’s right: what he must have told me was that his Arabic script was very good, a remark which I mis-remembered as him saying that his Arabic was very good--a big difference. So I apologize for including incorrect information in my earlier post.

Carol appended to her email the last picture she took of Diarmid, taken just this last December, while he was preparing to barbecue salmon. I thought I would share it. He has much more gray hair than the last time I saw him a few years ago, but then again, I suppose I do, too. And of course he was ill. The picture is very much like him--his smile, that impish twinkle in his eye; but what particularly strikes me about the picture is the strong family resemblance to Donald, which I’d never noticed before as being so pronounced, but it sure is in this picture. Carol asked me to take special note of his green Tibetan wool socks and his custom-made sandals—so inimitably Diarmid! I am privileged to have known him; would that we could have patched up our disagreement before he passed away.

Diarmid Cammell, 1945-2009

Today I received the incomparably sad news that Donald Cammell’s youngest brother, Diarmid Cammell, died this past Friday, February 27, at the age of 63. Becky and I both were fortunate to meet Diarmid some years ago, spending a couple of memorable occasions with him over bottles of fine wine, during the research phase of our book on Donald. We spoke to him on the phone many times during our research, during which he would frequently regale us with stories of his father, Charles Richard Cammell (1890-1968), whom he adored. I suspect that Diarmid’s appearance in this world was something of an unexpected surprise for his father, Charles Richard Cammell, who at the time of his youngest son’s birth was a few months shy of 55 years old; Diarmid’s mother, Iona, was in her mid-40s. Perhaps he was conceived during a celebration toward the end of the second world war.

Reading our book, however, one would think that Diarmid had very little to say about his famous brother, but that was due to Diarmid’s demand that we remove all references to him, and quotes by him, just prior to the book’s publication in April 2006, due to his extreme dislike of the controversial theory we put forth in our book, that his brother Donald suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), the result of being sexually molested as a small boy. Diarmid demanded that we remove all references to the years of his youth, when he was a successful child actor on stage and in film, his later career as a photographer in both the UK and Europe, and his personal views of Donald’s films—he loved Demon Seed, thinking it Donald’s best film, had never seen White of the Eye, and detested Performance—he had a strong dislike of Mick Jagger based on a brief run-in with the rock star in the mid-60s, during an occasion when Donald had invited Mick to visit his parent’s home. We were allowed to include in our book a brief mention of his troubling and debilitating mental illness, but beyond this and very few other instances, very little mention of Diarmid remains in the published version of our book. But his views and insights are, nonetheless, reflected throughout, and he was an essential source of information and of contacts.

Diarmid Victor Charles Cammell was born in London on 21 July 1945, the third and youngest child of Charles and Iona Cammell. A precociously gifted child, he achieved early renown as a child actor, appearing on the London stage in one of Robert Bolt’s first plays, The Flowering Cherry (1958), which starred Ralph Richardson and Celia Johnson (and, later, Wendy Hiller), at age 12. Subsequently, he appeared in the Boulting Brothers’ sex comedy A French Mistress (1960), starring the French sex kitten Agnes Laurent, although was mistakenly billed in the film’s credits as David Cammell. He later appeared in an episode of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Disney, The Prince and the Pauper: The Pauper King (1962). He also appeared on some LP recordings of medieval British plays issued in the early 1960s. When I asked him about his career as a child actor, he dismissed the whole thing, saying it was an “embarrassment,” and refused to talk about it.

In late adolescence, he developed a mental illness that plagued him the rest of his life. He told me it was manic-depression, and after one particularly violent episode, he was jailed for his behavior. One person told us she remembered him ranting he had “the power of God,” while another told us he at times could hardly care for himself. Certainly he had some form of mania, based on the anecdotes Donald’s friends and acquaintances related. In an email one time he referred to his illness as “the curse” of his existence. But in the 1960s, he became a reasonably good photographer, living for a time in France with Patrick and Mijanou Bauchau, whom he spoke very highly of, and for a short time with Donald and Deborah in Paris, this prior to Donald and Deborah’s break-up late in 1967. As I understand it, his first marriage failed; his second marriage also failed, but a lovely child was born, Karima. Because of his second marriage, he spent the majority of his life in the United States, in and around the Bay Area of San Francisco. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, studying both Arabian culture and the Arabic language; he would later serve as translator of Arabic texts for various scholarly studies.

I first met him in a pub in Berkeley in 1999, accompanied by his brother David, whom I had arranged to meet in San Francisco earlier that day. The night I met him, Diarmid was in fine form. He spoke of his brother Donald’s film career, insisting that Donald should never have given up painting, for which his talents were ideally suited. He talked about staying up all night helping Donald prepare for his first painting exhibition, in London in 1959. He strongly disliked Performance, claiming that the reason the film couldn’t get released was because Mick Jagger couldn’t act, which is why Jagger is in the film for so little of its running time (a controversial thesis, to be sure). He claimed on the first night I met him, and many times after, that he thought Donald’s finest film was Demon Seed, which he greatly admired; he hadn’t seen White of the Eye, and I don’t believe he ever saw it, or Wild Side, either. He spoke fondly of his visits to Los Angeles when he would stay with Donald and China in that little house on the hill on Crescent Drive, saying that he always appreciated the fact that on the occasion of his visits, Donald would always have fine bottles of red French wine available for consumption. But there was an age difference between the two, of eleven years, and Donald’s life took a much different direction than his. I believe the age difference separated him emotionally from his older brothers; brotherly love was there, but they were not extremely close.

Our BPD thesis, as put forth in our biography of Donald, both offended and angered him. As one who—despite his mental illness—believed in good old Cartesian common sense, he found our BPD thesis an instance of what he said was the “liberal disease” and thought that we had utterly no idea what his brother Donald was all about. He demanded that all references to him, and all quotations by him, be removed. But it is important to know that Diarmid was extremely conservative: he was, for instance, the English translator of Jean-Francois Revel’s post-9/11 attack on European complacency in the face of terrorism, Anti-Americanism (2003), a book whose purpose was to defend America against its European detractors. (Revel is famous for authoring many years ago the book Without Marx or Jesus, a positive social critique of the America of the 1960s.) Diarmid became a conservative reactionary in his final years, but then again, according to many individuals we interviewed during the writing of our book, so did his brother Donald.

According to Diarmid’s very good friend, Carol Staswick—a lovely person who wrote us this afternoon with the news of his death—Diarmid realized he had liver problems by the spring of last year and had made a valiant effort to get well. But it may have been too late, and in any case, after some months without alcohol, he went somewhat manic, and that drove him back to the wine, and to developing an alternative theory about his physical condition. He was never quite normal, she said, since some time in September of last year. I found some comfort in Carol’s observation that Diarmid seemed to be at peace with his life, and despite his illness he said he had enjoyed the past year. When she finally called the ambulance, several days ago, things went very fast, which, she said, “was merciful.” Diarmid died this past Friday, February 27, 2009.

She told us, though, that despite his frustration with our BPD thesis, Diarmid read our book and found it quite well done, and had meant to write us praising it, but alas, he never did; nor shall he ever. The last I spoke to him was probably three years ago this month. I feel deeply saddened by the news of his death; as I write these words, I feel like lead. I am thinking of his father’s second book of memoirs, Heart of Scotland (1956), in which he proudly speaks of his son Diarmid’s birth, and his son’s love of all things Scottish. And now I write of his death. I can think only of a paraphrase of the statement made by the Beat comedian Lord Buckley many years ago, that people are the flowers of life. Diarmid Cammell was one of the more unusual, but lovely, flowers I have happened to come across in this, the short stroll in the garden that we call our life. A wonderful photo of Diarmid as a young man can be found here, on his lovely daughter’s, Karima’s, blogspot, a site which I only found today. I’m so glad I did.

Yakety Yak

As a form of popular music, 1950s doo-wop was characterized by its playful use of nonsense syllables (take, for instance, the hyphenate “doo-wop” itself) repeated in order to create elaborate harmonic and rhythmic effects. Hence the paradigmatic example of doo-wop is probably the Coasters’ hit “Yakety Yak” (1958), a song written and produced by Leiber and Stoller. For the word yak—like the words ibis, vole, x-ray fish, and umbrella bird—is an invention, existing for the sake of completing the English alphabet in children’s books. Nonetheless, while an invented word, yak refers both to a mythical creature in the books of Dr. Seuss and to meaningless chatter, authoritarian speech that is to be ignored as an act of defiance. Hence the lyrics to “Yakety Yak” describe the recalcitrant response to the household chores a kid (presumably a teenager) has to perform on order of his parents. Stoller has referred to these songs as “playlets,” mini-dramas or character contests created by the songwriters to capture stereotypical teenage life. Another term for these “playlets” might be “whimseys,” a form of nineteenth-century parlor game that transformed any given piece of pre-existing prose into a poem. Thus, from the BBC News this morning:

US Republicans
Have broadly welcomed
President Barack Obama’s
Plan to withdraw
Most troops
From Iraq
By 2010.

In the same way, “Yakety Yak” pulls snippets or quotes from common colloquialisms:

You just put on your coat and hat
And walk yourself to the laundromat
And when you finish doing that
Bring in the dog and put out the cat
Yakety yak
Don’t talk back

Rock music has always seemed particularly amenable to the invented word and the nonsense syllable, from Little Richard’s refrain in “Tutti Frutti,” “Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom,” to Roy Orbison’s “Ooby Dooby,” to Manfred Mann’s “Doo Wah Diddy,” to Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” to the refrain of David Seville’s “Witch Doctor,” also from 1958:

Ooo eee, ooo ah ah, ting tang
Walla walla, bing bang
Ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang
Walla walla bing bang
Ooo eee, ooo ah ah, ting tang
Walla walla, bing bang
Ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang
Walla walla bing bang

Although by no means a rock song, the Sherman Brothers’ “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” from Disney’s MARY POPPINS (1964), suggests the close association of nonsense or invented words, children’s books, kid songs, and the appeal the lyrics to rock songs have for adolescents, and, no doubt, why certain rock songs are so popular at frat parties.

Goodbye, New Yorker Films

I am saddened by today's news, as reported by IndieWIRE, that the decades-old distributor of European and arthouse cinema in North America, New Yorker Films, has announced it is shutting down. As a film student in the 1970s, thanks to New Yorker Films, I was able to see the work of a great many filmmakers that I would not have been able to see otherwise. I can’t begin to count the number of times I sat in a darkening theater when the “New Yorker Films” logo would appear on the screen; I saw it so often, it was like a fact of nature. For me the logo was synonymous with European arthouse films, films that for me formed my cinematic consciousness. I am very saddened by this news. According to the report, among the filmmakers whose films were distributed in this country were: Ackerman, Bertolucci, Bresson, Chabrol, Fassbinder, Fellini, Godard, Herzog, Kieslowski, Malle, Rohmer, Rossellini, Sembene, Wenders, Schlondorff, and many others. The full story can be found here. It is a sad day indeed.

Pop Aphorisms: XII

1. Record Collecting—A pseudo-scientific activity motivated by the same obsessive narrowness of focus that characterizes the autistic mind.

2. If Coldplay would realize how terrible it was, and were able to ironize that terribleness, it could be U2.

3. As a guitarist, Eric Clapton is to B. B. King what Gene Kelly is to Fred Astaire—what virtuosity is to grace.

4. Mallarmé’s advice to poets, “Yield the initiative to words,” finds its analogy in the lesson of Elvis, who understood rock music differed from classic pop by yielding the initiative to sound.

5. So many “important” albums have been named in the history of rock that the word “important” is no longer meaningful: the word is simply a ruse used to cloak individualized taste.

6. The problem of referring to a certain album as an example of a certain school of music (e.g., “punk,” “alternative”) is critically irresponsible, because it suggests that a particular school of music is more coherent than it actually is.

7. There is a crucial difference between a movie star and a rock star: the latter is seldom, if ever, able to stage a “comeback.” The “oldies” circuit is rock’s equivalent of country music’s Branson, Missouri—just a waiting room to hillbilly heaven.

8. To become art, rock music had to elevate the guitar to its primary expressive instrument, just as jazz since bebop elevated the saxophone. Unfortunately, it fell prey to the same pitfall: virtuosity too easily became pretension.

9. Country Pop—the last refuge of a failed rock ‘n’ roller.

10. In the era of Madonna, the need for publicity is obvious; in more honest days, though, they called it “payola.”

Importance

According to John Tobler’s This Day In Rock (Carroll & Graf, 1993), on this day in 1977, Fleetwood Mac released one of the biggest-selling rock albums of all time, RUMOURS. The album is still in the Top Ten of the Top Selling Records of All Time despite being surpassed in recent years by Garth Brooks and Shania Twain, having sold to date 19 million copies, more or less the same number as The Beatles’ “white album.” It is astonishing that the album nonetheless has sold ten million fewer copies than The Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975, the all-time sales leader. While lists—lists being a form of indexing—of best sellers are no doubt interesting as well as provocative, such lists also make it difficult to determine the historical importance of an album, if by importance we mean significance. Although RUMOURS sold more in terms of copies than Fleetwood Mac’s previous, eponymously titled album, and more copies than the band’s subsequent album, TUSK, is it historically more important than either of these two other albums?

Perhaps it is time to explore the importance of “importance.” For “importance” is the word normally invoked whenever popular music becomes an object of academic study. Many articles and books have been written on so-called “important” albums and musicians, in which the critic, by necessity, makes the assertion that such-and-such is “important.” And yet inevitably, as Simon Frith has observed, whenever a particular album (or musician) is deemed “important,” a study of ideological effects ensues, following conventionalized, highly predictable routes (see the first twenty pages of Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, Harvard University Press, 1996). If the determination of “importance” allows us to designate the significance of a particular album or musician, what sorts of information does the designation also happen to repress? The problem with “importance,” as a designation of significance, is that it leads to an uncritical identification with a particular album or musician, which is why analyses seeking to establish importance inevitably follow the predictable path of ideology. The trick is to establish significance while still remaining critically aloof, if not disinterested, in the object of study, not because the object is analogous to a specimen under a microscope, but to avoid predictability and redundancy, or pleonasm.