White Out

I apologize for not being the best of bloggers this past week. I’ll plead the usual: too many things going on, too many irons in the fire. I’m writing at the moment from New Orleans, where I’m attending the PCA/ACA Annual Conference. Most of this past week was devoted to putting the finishing touches on my paper, which I delivered yesterday morning and went very well. I suppose, since I’m in New Orleans, I ought to talk about the food—strongly associated with this Southern city in the popular imagination—which is, of course, excellent. Cutting my lunch hour short yesterday in order to attend a session on popular music (one particular paper on the role of stuttering in The Who’s “My Generation” was fascinating, which I’ll discuss in a forthcoming blog), I ordered fish and chips in the bistro of the hotel where the conference was being held, and even this so-called “fast food” sort of meal was very good—the fish was fresh and delicious. More importantly, the conference sessions I’ve attended have been extraordinarily stimulating intellectually, and on the personal side I’m delighted to have hooked up with some old friends I haven’t seen in years, as well as met some new ones. In short, attending this conference has been a great experience for me.

For whatever inexplicable reason, I woke up this morning thinking of Tomorrow’s “My White Bicycle.” None of the sessions I attended these past couple of days discussed this example of psychedelic music; in fact, none of the popular music sessions I attended discussed psychedelia at all. My thoughts moved from “My White Bicycle,” to the wider use of “white” as an adjective within rock music. I say this because in the late 1960s—a result of the lore that emerged surrounding Albert Hoffmann’s first experimental use of LSD-25 while riding home on his bicycle, the anecdote that prompted Tomorrow’s “My White Bicycle” and other songs as well—“white” seems linked, not always but early on, with the drug experience. Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” also seems to confirm this initial impression of the adjective’s use. The adjective “white” thus has a rather interesting place in the history of rock, and while in Melville’s Moby-Dick Captain Ahab sees evil symbolized in the “whiteness of the whale,” “white” seems to be associated in rock culture with the drug experience, a sort of shorthand for a startling revelation, a new way of seeing, a keen insight. Of course, there are racial uses of “white,” as in Three Dog Night’s “Black and White”—musical tropes for social “harmony” are centuries old—the number of rock songs using “white” in the title without obvious racial connotations is worth remarking upon, as I realized today while jotting down some titles during my lunch hour. I haven’t included songs such as Merle Haggard’s “White Line Fever” or George Jones “White Lightning,” but I easily could have done so. One famous band—The Average White Band—employed the word in their group’s name. And while the song isn’t listed below, I’d always assumed the title of Wild Cherry’s biggest hit was “Play That Funky Music, White Boy,” but I learned I was incorrect: it is simply “Play That Funky Music,” as I discovered after a quick web search displayed the label of the 45 rpm single. Incidentally, the root of the word “album” is from the Latin, “albus,” meaning blank, or white. So the common reference to the Beatles’ The Beatles as “the white album” is actually redundant. The color of the album was a pun on the meaning of the word album.

The White List:
Elvis – “A White Sport Coat (And a Pink Carnation)”
Tomorrow – “My White Bicycle”
Jefferson Airplane – “White Rabbit”
Procol Harum – “A Whiter Shade of Pale”
The Moody Blues – “Nights in White Satin”
Cream – “White Room”
The Beatles – The Beatles (aka “The White Album”)
Merry Clayton – “Poor White Hound Dog” (Performance soundtrack)
Big Star – “Life is White”
Jimmy Buffett – “A White Sport Coat (And a Pink Crustacean)”
Boz Scaggs – “Sail On White Moon”
Billy Idol – “White Wedding”
MX-80 Sound – “White Night”

Magneto and Titanium Man

While there’s a rather obvious connection between comics (“sequential narratives”) and motion pictures, the connection between comics and popular music is less obvious. Although it’s unusual to see a reference to comics invoked in the context of popular music, this article, on Esoteric’s new SERVE OR SUFFER hip hop album, reveals some interesting connections between the two media. One of the earliest explicit connections I remember between comics and music, revealing that the two could come into confluence, was Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Magneto and Titanium Man,” from VENUS AND MARS (1975), a sort of ekphrastic attempt at a comic book. The music on Esoteric’s new album may not appeal to everyone, but it is interesting to see a concept album focused on the idea nonetheless.

In the 1960s, there was perhaps a closer connection to rock culture and the so-called “underground“ comics of the time--the cover of Big Brother & the Holding Company’s CHEAP THRILLS, for instance, was drawn by R. Crumb. Some years later, John Byrne would create the Silver Surfer illustration used on the cover of Joe Satriani’s album SURFING WITH THE ALIEN; a webpage of album covers drawn by comic book artists can be found here. So far as I’ve been able to discover, the first rock band inspired to take its name from a comic book was Suicide. According to Simon Reynolds (Rip It Up and Start Again, p. 143) the band took its name from the title of a Ghost Rider comic titled “Satan Suicide,“ “an issue of [Alan] Vega’s favorite comic book.” In 1979, Marvel Comics released a comic book (pictured) based on the characters in Alice Cooper’s FROM THE INSIDE (1978). The typographic design for The Cramps’ name was inspired by EC Comics’ Tales From the Crypt (EC Comics’ influence can also be seen in the cover of the Alice Cooper comic).

I’ve assembled below a playlist with references to comic characters. I’ve listed The Jam’s version of Neil Hefti’s “Batman Theme,” which has been covered many times over the years; it’s interesting that all the rock songs that I could find with comics references appeared after the Batman TV series premiered in January 1966.

A Rock Comic Con:
Donovan – “Sunshine Superman,” Sunshine Superman (1966)
The Kinks – “Johnny Thunder,” The Village Green Preservation Society (1968)
The Beatles – “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” (“So Captain Marvel zapped him right between the eyes”), The Beatles (1968)
T. Rex – “Mambo Sun,” (“I’m Dr. Strange for you”), Electric Warrior (1971)
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band – “Sergeant Fury,” The Impossible Dream (1974)
Paul McCartney and Wings – “Magneto and Titanium Man,” Venus and Mars (1975)
The Jam – “Batman Theme,” In The City (1977)
Suicide – “Ghost Rider,” Suicide (1977)
XTC – “Sgt. Rock (Is Going to Help Me),” Black Sea (1980)
Joe Satriani – Surfing With the Alien (album of instrumentals), 1987
Prince – “Batdance,” Batman (1989)
Crash Test Dummies – “Superman’s Song,” The Ghosts That Haunt Me (1991)
Spin Doctors – “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues,” Pocket Full of Kryptonite (1991)
Esoteric vs. Gary Numan – “General Zod,” Pterodactyl Tubeway (2007)

Soft Rock

Perusing the used record bins in the local Goodwill Store the other day, I came across the worn, tattered cover (no LP inside) of a K-Tel compilation album consisting of “Soft Rock” hits, issued in 1975 or thereabouts. I don’t remember all the songs listed on the back cover, but I do recall the album including, for instance, Jim Croce’s “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song,” Three Dog Night’s “Old-Fashioned Love Song,” Neil Sedaka’s “Laughter in the Rain,” Dave Loggins’ “Please Come to Boston,” Frankie Valli’s “My Eyes Adored You,” and America’s “Tin Man.” Since coming across that old album cover, I’ve been thinking about what constitutes “Soft Rock,” its features and characteristics.

What the phrase “Soft Rock” refers to, musically speaking, is very elusive. I don’t recall hearing the term prior to the mid-70s, when compilations of the K-Tel kind (pictured) began to be heavily marketed and sold through television advertisements. Obviously “Soft Rock” is feminine-coded as opposed to the masculine-coded “Hard Rock,” thus linking “Soft Rock” to the “Singer/Songwriter” tradition, also feminine-coded (Carole King, James Taylor). “Soft Rock” suggests that there’s something about the contents of the K-Tel album that fundamentally distinguishes it from other forms of rock, rather like “light” sour cream is different in some basic way from “regular” sour cream, or “fat free” Half and Half from regular Half and Half. If, by analogy, “Soft Rock” is different from “normal” rock in the same way fat free Half and Half is different from “normal” Half and Half, then presumably it refers to rock music purged of some feature of “normal” rock that is perceived as pernicious or “unhealthy.” Of course it is much more complicated than this (based on list of songs I remember being on the album, I would say that Soft Rock is characterized by traditional romantic themes, for instance), but as a rhetorical gesture, perhaps it is enough to understand what it, at least in part, refers: as a phrase peculiar to the 1970s, “Soft Rock” means, this music ain’t that 60s “free love” and “got to revolution” crap. As opposed to being “raw,” Soft Rock is “cooked”—that is, it has so-called “high” production values, medium tempos, orchestrations (“strings”), pop-like melodic hooks, and lyrics focusing on traditional romance (and heartbreak): “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song,” “Old-Fashioned Love Song,” “My Eyes Adored You,” “Laughter in the Rain.” And while the designation is rife with problems (as Simon Frith and others have pointed out), the general consensus at the time, as I remember, was that Soft Rock was commercialized rock—an accusation bolstered by the aggressive marketing of K-Tel albums, among other sorts of compilations, on TV. The K-Tel compilation albums of the 1970s are the antecedent of the “Now That’s What I Call Music” series of CDs currently found in stores and on-line.

In fact, the phrase “Soft Rock,” rather like that of “Garage Rock,” represents the reinterpretation of the past by a later generation. “Garage Rock,” as a term, didn’t exist until 1972, thanks to Jac Holzman and Lenny Kaye’s NUGGETS anthology, in which the value and significance of aspiring rock musicians rehearsing in their parents’ garage was reinterpreted as “authentic,” that is, non-commercialized, rock. The same principle applies to the history of “Punk Rock.” “Punk,” as a term used to describe the culture gathered around a particular type of rock music, had no musical application until around 1975. Immediately afterward, the word “punk” gained currency, people identified themselves and their culture with the term and they started stitiching together a history, memorializing certain figures that came before them and ascribing to those figures their own desires--which those illustrious predecessors could not have fully known. Thus, some historiographers memorialize the MC5 and The Stooges as punk precursors, while others memorialize the Velvet Underground. The narratives that grew up around punk are, in effect, reinterpretations of the past, establishing predecessors on the analogy of the pilgrims who settled America, who sacrificed for a future they could not have fully known or understood. To refer to, say, The Byrds or The Beau Brummels as “Soft Rock” would have made no sense in the mid-60s; the term can only make sense in retrospect, as a consequence of the reinterpretation of the past by a later generation.

“This Record Was Made To Be Played Loud”

Trivia question: What was the first album in the history of rock to include the disclaimer, “This Record Was Made To Be Played Loud”? I cannot provide a definitive answer to that question, but in my (limited) experience, it was an album by Mountain, titled Climbing!, released in March 1970 (which includes the band’s biggest and perhaps best known hit, “Mississippi Queen”). Of course, loudness is not noisiness, but at the time that album was released, the terms were often used interchangeably, and the injunction to play the record loud was meant to suggest that if the listener would play the record at a high volume, it would sonically recreate, as closely as possible, the live concert experience.

Loudness has to do with volume level; noise typically refers to disagreeable sounds (which may be loud) rather than to music. Early on, “noise” (and “noisy”) was a pejorative term applied to rock, which meant that [fill in the blank] was not music at all. Hence the word “noise,” as Jacques Attali has pointed out (Noise: The Political Economy of Music, 1985), is really a category of taste. I remember hearing the word “noise” quite a bit in 1964, the year the Beatles were introduced to America. For those Americans born before the war who grew up listening to jazz and swing, what the Beatles played was not music but noise, which, translated, meant that the music challenged what were presumed to be clearly defined notions of good and bad taste.

Hence, while there is such a thing as noise, noise-as-noise, in rock music, because it is a product of culture and technology, noise is never noise, but rather noise-as-code. Even so-called “feedback,” which might be considered as an accident or a form of error, can be considered noise-as-code: because of the theatrics of the Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix and The Who, by the late 1960s rock concerts often concluded with guitarists leaving their instruments on the stage in order to generate self-sustaining feedback while the audience left. At the very least, this practice challenged conventional notions of taste. Yet because “change is inscribed in noise” according to Attali, it also, obviously, represented rebellion, but perhaps more importantly a new, perhaps “revolutionary,” order outside the hegemonic norm (the “mainstream”). Feedback, in other words, was not noise; it was ideology.

Noise-as-code pre-dated Elvis, but he was certainly aware of its existence. By the late 1960s, noise-as-code could be deployed both as an individual statement as well as a critique of cultural violence and chaos, and there is perhaps no better illustration of noise-as-code in the history of rock than Jimi Hendrix’s performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock in August 1969. That the performance was understood to be an ideological statement was revealed by the cultural debate that occurred almost immediately after the release of the film WOODSTOCK in March 1970 (coincidentally, at about the same time as Mountain’s Climbing!). As is typical of much public discourse, the issue quickly became polarized: was his rendition of the national anthem an anti-war statement, or a statement on the divisiveness that characterized America in 1969? Idealism or disillusionment? In retrospect, the moment was so significant that subsequent developments of noise-as-code, as exemplified by movements such as “industrial music,” “electro-industrial,” and “industrial rock,” can be understood as mere gloss on this historic moment.

Update: 31 March 2009 9:02 a.m. CDT: Ian W. Hill wrote in (see comments) and indicated that the first rock album to carry the disclaimer was Let It Bleed, by The Rolling Stones, released November 1969, which contained the injunction to “play it loud” on the inner sleeve (as well as a note to play side one first). Thank you very much, Ian, for writing in and supplying the information. I forgot that the Stones album contained the injunction; for some reason I remembered the Mountain album instead. Given that the albums were released just a few months apart, I suspect we now know not only the first album to contain the disclaimer, but the second as well.

Angels In Red

In her book, Women and Popular Music (Routledge, 2000), Sheila Whiteley is interested in identifying and examining female archetypes in popular music. She has observed that there are benign female fantasy figures (“inscribed within a dreamlike and unreal world”), but fantasy women can sometimes become supernatural (as an example, think of The Eagles’ “Witchy Woman”), and therefore dangerous and unpredictable. But there is also the highly idealized woman, the object of the (male) singer’s devotion and desire. The flipside of these highly idealized women are highly sexualized, fallen women, and in songs about them they are defined exclusively by their sexual availability. This morning I sketched out these categories, along with some songs that typify each. Whiteley’s primary interest is in images of women in Sixties rock songs, but in the following list I haven’t confined myself exclusively to songs from that era. Obviously many other examples could be cited; I restricted my list to ten songs in each category. While this is nothing more than a sort of parlor game, it is revealing nonetheless.

Benign Fantasy Women:
(The ideal woman, the “dream lover,” often appears only in dreams; while these songs are about fantasy women, they are also about male fantasy)
The Beatles – “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds“
Johnny Burnette – “You’re Sixteen”
David Allan Coe – “Angels In Red”
Bobby Darin – “Dream Lover”
Electric Light Orchestra – “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head”
John Mayer – “Love Song For No One”
Roy Orbison – “Dream Baby”
Roy Orbison – “In Dreams”
Sugarloaf – “Green-Eyed Lady”
Neil Young – “Cinnamon Girl”

Dangerous Women/Malignant Fantasy Women:
(In which the female becomes predatory and is often unmanageable; they are often given names, but names such that only a writer like Poe would use)
The Beatles – “Girl”
Derek and the Dominos – “Layla”
Fleetwood Mac – “Rhiannon”
The Four Tops – “Bernadette”
Hall & Oates – “Maneater”
The Hollies – “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress”
John Fred and His Playboy Band – “Lucy in Disguise (With Glasses)”
Chris Rea – “Stainsby Girls”
Rod Stewart – “Maggie May”
Neil Young – “Like A Hurricane”

The Earth Mother (and Itinerant Men):
(In which women are nurturing, patient, long-suffering, metonymically associated with the “comforts of home.” In contrast to the Earth Mother, however, the male singer is itinerant, shiftless, financially irresponsible, and unable to “settle down”)
The Rolling Stones – “Angie”
Glen Campbell – “Gentle on My Mind”
David Allan Coe – “Under Rachel’s Wings”
Hall & Oates – “Sara Smile”
Waylon Jennings – “Amanda”
Kiss – “Beth”
Looking Glass – “Brandy”
Chris Rea – “Standing in Your Doorway”
Marty Robbins – “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife”
Conway Twitty – “I’d Love to Lay You Down”

The Sexually Available Kind:
(These contain rather obvious sexual innuendo in which the women are defined by their sexual availability, preferably to be dominated as well)
Aerosmith – “Walk This Way”
Cher – “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves”
Confederate Railroad – “Trashy Women”
Def Leppard – “Pour Some Sugar on Me”
Kiss – “Lick It Up”
Billy Paul – “Me And Mrs. Jones”
The Rolling Stones – “Honky Tonk Women”
Shocking Blue – “Venus”
Conway Twitty – “Tight Fittin’ Jeans”
Neil Young – “Saddle Up The Palomino”

Women figure in songs featuring the carpe diem (“sieze the day”) theme, such as Billy Joel’s “Only The Good Die Young,” in which the male singer pleads with the female (“Virginia”) to give up her virginity. Such songs would also include Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night,” but I would argue that because the erotic scene of such songs is so highly theatricalized, or “staged,” it strongly suggests their subject is male fantasy and not women at all.

Gun Club

On this day in 1982, David Crosby fell into a drug-induced slumber while taking a spin on the San Diego Freeway. Although he crashed into the center partition dividing the freeway, he emerged from the accident physically unharmed. He was arrested on drug charges, however, after the police discovered cocaine in his vehicle. The police also discovered a gun in his car, a gun that Crosby claimed he had purchased over a year earlier, in the aftermath of John Lennon’s murder in December 1980. He may have been telling the truth about why he had the gun in his car. After all, John Lennon was murdered in America, where the gun is ubiquitous.

The gun is a central feature of American culture, as essential as money (and sex, of course). John Lennon’s murder was a terrible tragedy, but he wasn’t the first figure associated with rock culture in America whose life and destiny became bound up with the gun. It is now widely accepted that Dylan’s putative motorcycle crash in July 1966, while it actually happened, was subsequently exaggerated in terms of its physical injury in order to allow Dylan to remove himself from public life (for safety reasons). In Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary, No Direction Home, Al Kooper says as much, averring that he was afraid to tour with Dylan after 1965 because he didn’t want to play John Connelly to Dylan’s JFK. The fear of being shot and killed was very real, long before John Lennon’s slaying.

The lives of many figures associated with rock culture have ended by the gun. On 11 December 1964, at the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles, Sam Cooke was shot and killed by Bertha Franklin, the motel’s manager. Some years before that, in 1954, Johnny Ace, who had a hit with “Pledging My Love,” accidentally killed himself while playing Russian Roulette. And there are other examples: Arlester “Dyke” Christian, leader of Dyke and the Blazers, was shot to death on 30 March 1971. On 23 January 1978, Terry Kath, guitarist with the band Chicago, apparently accidentally shot and killed himself while cleaning his gun. In April 1983, Felix Pappalardi, Cream producer and Mountain bassist, was shot and killed by his wife Gail Collins. A year later almost to the day, Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his father. The gun has also been used, of course, to achieve self-murder: Danny Rapp, of Danny and The Juniors, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1983. Country singer Faron Young also died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound (1996), and Wendy O. Williams, vocalist for the short-lived Plasmatics, killed herself with a gun in 1998. And famously, on 8 April 1994, Kurt Cobain was discovered having murdered a rock star with a gun, the closest one he could find: himself. As the gun is to the culture, so the gun is to the music.

An A-Z Of Blue Steel Poetics:
Aerosmith – “Janie’s Got A Gun,” Pump
The Beatles – “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” The Beatles
Johnny Cash – “Don’t Take Your Guns To Town,” The Fabulous Johnny Cash
Depeche Mode – “Barrel of a Gun,” Ultra
Elvis Presley – “In the Ghetto,” From Elvis in Memphis
Kenny Rogers & The First Edition – “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town,” Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town
Grand Funk Railroad – “Don’t Let ‘Em Take Your Gun,” Good Singin’ Good Playin’
Jimi Hendrix Experience – “Hey Joe,” Are You Experienced
Ice-T – “Big Gun,” Tank Girl: Original Soundtrack
Jethro Tull – “I Am Your Gun,” The Broadsword And The Beast
Kiss – “Love Gun,” Love Gun
Lynyrd Skynyrd – “Saturday Night Special,” Nuthin’ Fancy
Ethel Merman – “You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun,” Annie Get Your Gun
Nine Inch Nails – “Big Man With a Gun,” The Downward Spiral
Phil Ochs – “The Men Behind the Guns,” I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore
Gene Pitney – “(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance,” 25 All-Time Greatest Hits
Queen – “Another One Bites the Dust,” The Game
Rollins Band – “Gun In Mouth Blues,” Do It
Steely Dan – “Don’t Take Me Alive,” The Royal Scam
George Thorogood and the Destroyers, “Cocaine Blues,” Move It On Over
Ultravox – “Cut And Run,” Quartet
Violent Femmes – “Add It Up,” Violent Femmes
Hank Williams, Jr., “I’ve Got Rights,” Family Tradition
XTC – “Melt the Guns,” English Settlement
Neil Young – “Powderfinger,” Rust Never Sleeps
Warren Zevon – “Lawyers, Guns And Money,” Excitable Boy

Love is the Drug

For Georges Bataille, who thought a great deal about what constitutes human pleasure, for pleasure to be what it is, it has to exceed a limit of what is perceived as “wholesome” or “healthy”—it must be transgressive. The demands of pleasure (as opposed to, say, mere “happiness” or “contentment”) force us to confront the limits of our being. One way to exceed or surpass this limit is through chemical prosthesis—the use of drugs. Indeed, “addiction” is a common idiom for the way our culture perceives any excessive pursuit of pleasure, whether that be “sex addiction,” “shopping addiction,” or “drug addiction.” Our colloquialisms, however, also reflect the double nature of pleasure: we don’t “enjoy” or “really like” something—we “love” it, or perhaps “crave” it. When something strikes deeply in our being, it is “stunning.” “You send me,” Sam Cooke sang decades ago, employing a quaint metaphor of being sent into orbit, by which he meant, “You send me off the planet,” synonymous with the expression, “out of this world.” But since pleasure is also structured as destructive excess, we can also say we are “blown away,” or “knocked out,” or “floored.” “It stoned me,” Van Morrison sang, but he might just as easily have sung, “It almost killed me.”

Our popular music, particularly jazz and rock, traces the double nature of pleasure as excess. “Within jazz mythology,” writes Michael Jarrett, “drugs corroborate an ideology of control: playing one’s body as if it were a horn. Within the realm of rock, the reverse obtains. Drugs underwrite an ideology of freedom; they promise loss of control—the bliss of one’s body played as if it were a horn” (248). In effect, one’s self is either pumped up, or depleted, by chemical prosthesis: the limits to the self are surpassed either by the illusion of omnipotence or by the illusion of possession by an ego alien.

The number of popular songs about chemical prostheses—drugs and alcohol—is vast, so vast and so innumerable that it is impossible to name them all. But here are thirteen more unusual ones outside of the standard playlist that have the virtue of equivocating pleasure and addiction:

“For My Lover” – Tracy Chapman
“Pump It Up” – Elvis Costello & the Attractions
“Emma” – Jonathan Edwards
“Sister Morphine” – Marianne Faithfull
“Gold Dust Woman” – Fleetwood Mac
“White Lightning” – George Jones
“Addicted to Love” – Robert Palmer
“Mary Jane’s Last Dance” – Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
“Comfortably Numb” – Pink Floyd
“She’s My Cherry Pie” – Poison
“Something Happened to Me Yesterday” – The Rolling Stones
“Love is the Drug” – Roxy Music
“Carmelita” – Warren Zevon

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.