Rave On

Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. Richardson (“The Big Bopper”) died fifty years ago today in a plane crash that occurred just a few miles from Clear Lake, Iowa. Of course, this is not “news” as such, but the commemoration of the event serves two important functions. One is that such anniversaries give newspapers and websites (and bloggers) a readymade topic. Always on the search for information to fill a news hole (blank space on the page), the dredging up of old news, using as an excuse its intrinsic historicity, gives editors (and bloggers) a slight reprieve from the daily grind. Even stories tangential to the core event, such as the identity of Peggy Sue, becomes news fodder. The second function of such commemorations is, of course, a commercial one: it helps sell merchandise and helps sell tickets to nostalgic concerts. A recent article in the newspaper discussed the economic boon that Clear Lake, Iowa has received as a result of its historic relation to the rock ‘n’ roller’s death: the small resort town has a multimillion-dollar tourist industry as a consequence of being near the location of the fatal crash.

There are very few individuals living today who can claim they knew Buddy Holly. I don’t mean those individuals who claim to have run into him at the drug store one day, or once filled his gas tank. I mean those individuals who were personally close to him. I say this because, even though I was “alive” at the time he died—I was a small boy at the time—he has never existed to me as anything more than a media construct: his image, the lore, the movies and music about him all are products of the mass media. There’s the biopic, THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY (1978), which garnered Gary Busey an Academy Award nomination, and there’s THE REAL BUDDY HOLLY STORY (1986), which Paul McCartney produced in response to the biopic because he was unhappy with it. And there’s LA BAMBA (1987), the biopic of Ritchie Valens—has anyone made a biopic or documentary on J. P. Richardson? The cultural memory desires Holly to not fade away. There is a waiter dressed up as Buddy Holly (Steve Buscemi) in PULP FICTION (1994), and the John Milner character (Paul Le Mat) in AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973) laments the fact that “Rock ‘n’ roll’s been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died,” a line that makes perfect sense as art, but is implausible in the given historic context of the film (set in the fall of 1962, the characters do not have the requisite historical perspective for the line to resonate properly, although presumably it did to audiences in 1973 when the film was released, and perhaps still does). And there’s the instance of 1980s nostalgia for the Fifties in the Kathleen Turner-starring movie PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986).

There have been several songs written about Buddy Holly: Eddie Cochran’s “Three Stars,” The Smithereens’ “Maria Elena” (for Holly’s widow), and Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” are a few examples, but the most famous, and perhaps most successful is, of course, Don McLean’s willfully obscure “American Pie.” A web search will lead to several sites dedicated to the interpretation of the lyrics to McLean’s song, but the song’s meaning has never seemed that difficult to me. Perhaps I’m jaded. Elvis’s phenomenal popularity in 1956 enabled nascent rock ‘n’ rollers to respond in at least two ways: imitate him (which was artistic death, although many tried), or opportunistically use the space he opened up to create one’s own unique form of expression, which is precisely what Buddy Holly did. His records never achieved the phenomenal sales of Elvis, but he is a nostalgic figure nonetheless. His life resonates as myth because of what might have been. I’ve always wondered what sort of album Buddy Holly might have made once he heard the Beatles. It’s one of those great “lost albums” of rock history.

Don McLean’s “American Pie,” released in 1971, is a response, on the one hand, to the events of the winter of 1958-59 (“A long, long time ago/I can still remember/How that music used to make me smile”) and on the other to the Sixties (“Now for ten years we’ve been on our own”). Elvis had been in the service about five months (departing for Germany late September 1958) when Buddy Holly was killed on 3 February 1959. Hence, within the space of only a few months, both of them were gone: Elvis was overseas in the service, in figurative terms never really to “return” (“While the king was looking down/The jester stole his thorny crown/The courtroom was adjourned/No verdict was returned”), and Buddy Holly was killed (“February made me shiver”). Both events are condensed into the hyperbolic, cryptic phrase, “the day the music the died.” Most of the lyrical content is devoted to the Rolling Stones and Beatles, those two emblems of the so-called “British Invasion” of the mid-1960s; the song is at least in part a reaction to the usurpation of American rock ‘n’ roll by the British “pretenders” (“Now for ten years we’ve been on our own/And moss grows fat on a rollin’ stone/But that’s not how it used to be”). Of course, interpretation is not meaning in the sense that “decoding” this phrase or that symbol reveals to us what the song is “all about.” But most certainly it is not simply or only about Buddy Holly; the allusion to his death is really only the point of departure, the starting point. To me, the song expresses a sort of conservative reaction against the Sixties, a compressed social history that contains both an expression of belatedness (having missed, or arrived too late for, the Golden Age) as well as nostalgia for a “simpler” time. Most of us form emotionally strong attachments to the music of our youth, in this case the rock ‘n’ roll of the 1950s, and the song expresses that, but it is a mistake to think the song is merely “about” Buddy Holly. As far as I know, Don McLean didn’t know him, and that makes all the difference.

Download This

Yesterday, soon after posting my blog, “Post Rock,” I happened to read about Neil Young’s hilarious new single, “Fork in the Road,” in the latest issue of Rolling Stone (Issue 1071, February 5, 2009, p. 68). Having watched the video for the song on youtube.com, I was so struck by the similarity of theme between his single and my blog on “Post Rock” that I’m providing a link to the video here. The video depicts Young rocking along to a blues groove holding what appears to be a pair of iPod earbuds plugged into a big red apple. He sings, “I’m a big rock star/My sales have tanked/But I still got you... thanks.” But he then continues, “Download this,” he sings as he holds up the apple, “it sounds like shit,” only to then take a bite out of the apple and throw it away in disgust, and then pines for the old days of radio. The difference, of course, between his form of communication and mine is that my presentation is more conventional, expository in nature, written for an audience that is expecting me to deliver a particular kind of information. His video, on the other hand, is an example of what Gregory L. Ulmer has called “a dramatic, rather than an epistemological, orientation to knowledge” (Writing and Reading Differently, p. 39). The ideas contained in the two forms, however, are remarkably similar. Rarely has Young been funnier: “There’s a bailout comin’, but it’s not for me/It’s for all those creeps watching tickers on TV.” I urge you to check out the video by clicking on the link above.

Post Rock

This article by Ann Powers in yesterday’s L. A. Times refers to the dwindling significance of rock music as a cultural force. She avers that rock music is in “its Götterdämmerung phase” and writes, “Not only does rock no longer dominate popular culture worldwide, having long been eclipsed by hip-hop and Celine Dion, it’s also past both its youth as an agent of rebellion and its midlife as a ‘temporary autonomous zone’ for nonconformists….” Alas, I’m afraid she is right. In my past two blogs, in the context of discussing progressive rock, I have discussed the way modernism supported the conception of the popular musician as artist. My point was a rather simple one: early 1970s progressive rock demonstrated the lingering power of modernist values to bolster the image of the rock musician as “artist.” To some extent, that image is still viable, a testament to the lingering influence of modernism: check out this article in the Telegraph, on the lingering influence of Buddy Holly, whose untimely death fifty years ago will be commemorated this coming Tuesday, February 3.

Don McLean’s “American Pie” was putatively motivated by the death of Buddy Holly, in which the singer refers to the moment he heard of Holly’s death by the cryptic phrase, “the day the music died.” Too bad Don McLean didn’t write a song commemorating the 1 billionth download from Apple’s iTunes store, which happened just about three years ago, on February 23, 2006. (The download, incidentally, happened to be Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound.”) That date should be commemorated as well, because it marks the day when rock music died, or rather, marked the death of the fundamental method of its consumption. If jazz culture is based upon the live performance, being present at the scene and moment of an actual performance, rock culture is based upon the record: the basic material artifact central to its consumption is the record—or, if you will, the discrete physical object, liminally demarcated, one imagines holistically as an “album.”

“Post Rock” musical consumption, in contrast, is entirely different, and is represented by the download. Today a piece of music exists, but it is not anchored in a discrete physical object such as a record (some “albums” exist only in downloadable form), and thus it does not have any liminal demarcation. The piece of music is also ontologically unstable, since it may exist in various states of incompletion known as a “remix.” The song may be found on an album (in the antiquated sense, most likely in the storage format of CD), but the album is not conceived of holistically, but rather as an arbitrary heaping of heterogeneous pieces. Indeed, it is possible now to make a record simply by recombining fragments of sounds sampled by other records—you don’t even need to know how to play an instrument. Some years ago, Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy put it this way:

We don’t like musicians. We don’t respect musicians…. In dealing with rap, you have to be innocent and ignorant of music. Trained musicians are not ignorant of music, and they cannot be innocent to it. They understand it, and that’s what keeps them from dealing with things out of the ordinary…. [Public Enemy is] a musician’s nightmare. (Keyboard, September 1990, pp. 82-83).

Interestingly, the trend in popular music identified by Shocklee was anticipated over forty years ago by pianist Glenn Gould. In his famous 1966 essay “The Prospects of Recording,” Gould warned that “the technology of electronic forms makes it highly improbable that we will move in any direction but one of even greater intensity and complexity.” (The Glenn Gould Reader, p. 352)

In the era of Post Rock, there is no equivalent for the discrete material object known as the record. To understand Post Rock, the era of iTunes and the download, one must turn to quantum physics for the cognitive metaphor. A download is like a photon, a liminal object neither particle nor wave, a burst of energy that appears but is anchored nowhere. (Marx: “Everything that is solid melts into air.”) The iPod, the retrieval system for downloads, is by definition a portable device, designed for neither café nor concert hall, but primarily for mobility, a technology whose purpose is to provide an ambient background to a life premised on speed, not reflection, a life in which politics is defined as taste. Viewed in this way, Post Rock represents the triumph of Muzak, the era anticipated by art rockers such as Brian Eno, who settled on the collocation “ambient music” as a name for such decorative sounds, what Erik Satie called furniture or furnishing music.

Muso

In my last blog I argued that bands such as Emerson, Lake & Palmer (ELP) represented, within a rock context, the fundamental values of modernism: complexity, individuality (as exemplified by the naming of the band eponymously), virtuosity, and mastery. I think I’m correct in that observation, and I think the point is true of all bands one might consider exemplary of so-called “progressive rock.” Indeed, I think all the supposed masterpieces of progressive rock have been judged under the evaluative terms characteristic of modernism. Having continued to think about the issue over the past few days, I think the special value of ELP is that their career conveniently serves to trace the rise and fall of “progressive rock.” Using the band’s popularity curve as an example, it becomes clear that the so-called “heyday,” or widespread popularity, of progressive rock in fact lasted a brief time, peaking in 1974, thereafter subsumed by other movements, including “glam rock,” disco, and, of course, punk. Progressive rock was, by 1978, an anachronism, meaning that the sort of modernist values represented by the movement were no longer endorsed by the rock ‘n’ roll avant-garde, progressive rock being perceived, by then, as elitist. British bands such as Yes and King Crimson were irrelevant by 1978—in fact, by that date, King Crimson had been long disbanded (the first time). Simon Reynolds writes, “Punks were supposed to purge their collections of King Crimson and Mahavishnu Orchestra albums, or at least hide them in the cupboard” (Rip It Up and Start Again, p. 20). As I mentioned last time, the pejorative British term for bands such as ELP, Yes, and King Crimson was muso. Musos were musicians who were considered overly preoccupied with technical virtuosity at the expense of authentic expression. Stated somewhat differently, by the late 1970s, progressive rock was considered inauthentic, while the sort of music that supplanted it—reggae, ska, and punk, for example—in contrast, was considered “authentic.”

Using, arbitrarily, the release date of King Crimson’s IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING as the starting point for so-called progressive rock (October 1969), then the period of progressive rock’s greatest popularity lasted about five years, peaking about mid-1973, the bookend at the other end being ELP’s WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS TO THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS… LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER (August 1974). Although not released on CD until 1997, ELP’s EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT FESTIVAL 1970, recorded during the band’s first formal appearance at the Isle of Wight Festival on August 29, 1970, should be considered that group’s first album. Including that album, a few selective examples of prog rock’s development can be seen here (all release dates UK):

King Crimson – In the Wake of Poseidon 5/70
Emerson, Lake & Palmer (ELP) - Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970
Yes – The Yes Album [“Classic” Yes line-up; recorded 10-11/70]
ELP – Emerson, Lake & Palmer 11/70
King Crimson – Lizard 12/70
ELP – Tarkus 6/71
Yes – Fragile 11/71
King Crimson – Islands 12/71
ELP – Trilogy 7/72
Yes – Yessongs 5/73
ELP – Brain Salad Surgery 11/73
Yes – Tales From Topographic Oceans 12/73
King Crimson – Starless and Bible Black 3/74
ELP – Welcome Back My Friends... 8/74
King Crimson – Red 11/74

By 1974, however, as is well known, the movement began to fragment. Rick Wakeman left Yes, Robert Fripp disbanded King Crimson on 24 September 1974 (about six weeks or so before the release of RED, by which time King Crimson was a power trio), and in August ELP released the live album WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS…, subsequently taking a lengthy sabbatical. Shortly thereafter, in December 1974, Yes released RELAYER, and then it, too, took virtually a three-year hiatus.

In retrospect, the disbanding of King Crimson and the contemporaneous withdrawal of both Yes and ELP, was historically significant, but not for the standard reasons. The Sex Pistols emerged as a significant musical force in 1976, and in January 1977, The Clash was signed to CBS Records for a significant sum. What this musical shift represents is not so much a reaction against what came before (what rock historiography typically claims), but a paradigm shift. It is true that punk marked a new phase in rock music’s youthful insolence, as opposed to prog rock’s insolent iconoclasm in the form of “rocking the classics“ (but which actually represented the reproduction of ideology). In effect, progressive rock was to rock ‘n’ roll what bebop was to swing: the triumph of the muso. Punk rock was rock’s putative reclaiming of amateurism in the form of rhythm and sound, but it also effected an ideological transformation in music as well: when the famed progressive rock bands made their “comebacks,“ they had been transformed as well.

Thoughts On A Long Ago Exhibition

A few days ago, in a blog entry on the relationship between psychedelic and progressive rock, I discussed The Nice, the British band from which emerged Keith Emerson, later of Emerson, Lake & Palmer (ELP). It has happened since the writing of that blog—primarily because I’ve been preoccupied by certain theoretical issues that emerged as a consequence of writing it—that I have made an effort to re-familiarize myself with the music of ELP, trying to get a better handle on what so-called progressive rock was (is) all about, at least in its ELP incarnation. It has been years since I listened seriously to ELP’s music, having given up on them long ago after the release of the appropriately titled 3-LP set, WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS TO THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS… LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER (1974)—and they weren’t kidding. I can’t recall ever playing sides 5 and 6 of that ponderous set of records—still haven’t—although I’ve had the album now almost 35 years, frayed corners, ring wear, bulk and all. Like an old high school classmate, it’s an artifact of a time long gone, one with whom you have instant familiarity, but little communication. But having done some reading of critical assessments as well as a bit of checking on fan sites during the past several days, I’ve learned that the general consensus is that BRAIN SALAD SURGERY (1973), with its famous H. R. Giger cover, is the band’s finest album. I do not agree: after having given a focused listen to every album up until (but not including) WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS… the past couple of days, I doubt seriously I’ll ever return to blarney such as “Karn Evil 9,” a huge chunk of BRAIN SALAD SURGERY. However, having re-familiarized myself with the band’s first few albums, I think the best album is TRILOGY (1972), which has the best song written by Emerson and Lake, “From the Beginning.” But that’s neither here nor there.

I found myself returning to the band’s third album, PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION (1971 UK; 1972 USA), since it seems to me to epitomize everything the band was about—the objective correlative of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, as it were. I picked up a copy of the remastered CD (Shout! Factory, 2007) of the album in order to put it on my iPod, and while I was at the store I also found and purchased a used (“previously owned”) DVD by ELP that I didn’t know about but also happened to be titled PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION (Classic Pictures Entertainment, 2002). Mistakenly, I assumed the live performance on the DVD was the same performance as on the CD—not so. The performance on the CD (38:07) was recorded at Newcastle City Hall on March 26, 1971, while the one on the DVD (41m 50s—not the complete concert) took place a few months earlier, recorded at the Lyceum Theatre (London), on December 9, 1970. The DVD reveals why Keith Emerson, busily tickling the ivories (and fondling the knobs of his then avant-garde modular synthesizer) in his tight fitting, glittery pants and vest, must be considered the Liberace of rock. I was pleasantly astonished, however, by the sheer youthful exuberance of drummer Carl Palmer: at the time the concert was recorded, he was a mere twenty-one years old, but he looks about fifteen or sixteen years old in the film. Little did he know about what lay ahead, in the form of rock stardom.

Having watched the DVD of PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION twice now, and having walked many, many miles the past few days listening to the album on my iPod, I’ve concluded that Emerson, Lake & Palmer (and progressive bands like them, such as King Crimson, from which Greg Lake emerged) represent, in a rock context, the fundamental values of modernism: complexity, individuality (as exemplified by the naming of the band eponymously), virtuosity, and mastery. It is no accident that ELP, like all popular musicians in the modernist tradition since Louis Armstrong (the jazz trumpeter who enabled the transformation of the popular musician into artist) released albums with titles arguing for their status as artists: WORKS: VOLUME 1 (1977) and WORKS: VOLUME 2 (1977).

The consummate professionalism of progressive bands such as ELP is nowadays disparaged, of course, by the term (primarily British) muso, meaning a musician who is overly preoccupied with sheer technical virtuosity at the expense of authentic expression. It is no wonder that ELP’s last album (prior to re-forming as a tour band in the 1990s), LOVE BEACH (1978), flopped. (I remember the record hitting the cut-out bins faster than any album I’d ever seen.) While LOVE BEACH is not a good record by any standards (which the band, in interviews, has readily admitted), that’s not my point. By 1978, the sort of modernist values they represented were no longer endorsed by rock ‘n’ roll: Emerson, Lake & Palmer were, by the late 70s, pejoratively considered musos. Rock critic Simon Reynolds (author of BLISSED OUT and THE SEX REVOLTS) observed: “[Muso has] always been a derogatory term, criticizing the likes of Santana or big prog-rock bands obsessed with developing skills—chops. In the punk context, it had a lot to do with the idea that there was more to great rock ‘n’ roll than actual music.” For a critic such as Simon Reynolds, the ultimate muso is Robert Fripp. And if that term has any meaning whatsoever, he is right. But Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (considered as individuals, not as a band) were also musos, and perhaps that term designates a narrow but nonetheless deep rift in rock culture, between musos, on one side, and those who believe they represent the values of “authentic” (or “traditional”) rock ‘n’ roll on the other (the spirit of amateurism). The rift I speak of has been identified by Mick Jones, former leader of Big Audio Dynamite and former guitarist with the Clash, who wrote in the song, “I Turned Out a Punk”:

Better learn how to play guitar with a plink and a plunk
I didn’t like jazz I didn’t like funk
I turned out a punk
I turned out a punk

Meaning, if you didn’t become a muso, well, you became something else.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer still perform, of course (although not necessarily together as a band), but I think the band now invokes a set of values—modernist values—that have long since been replaced by the values of post-modernism. But post-modern values shall become the subject of a subsequent blog.

Worst Pop Singer?

My friend JIM FIELDS sent me the link to this article in Slate, posted this past Friday, on Billy Joel. The article, by Ron Rosenbaum, is titled, provocatively—no doubt intentionally so—“The Worst Pop Singer Ever,” and explores the question, “Why Is Billy Joel So Bad?” I urge anyone even mildly interested in popular music to read the article, whether you like Billy Joel or, like Rosenbaum, happen to think he is “the worst pop singer ever.” Actually, you should read it even if you don't care one way or the other. The article is worth reading because Rosenbaum, whether he consciously realizes it or not, is dancing around the foundational principle at the basis of all of rock criticism, the perception that determines all final determinations of value (and negotiations of value) of a particular expression of music—whether something is “good” or “bad”—and that is authenticity, those artistic creations that are perceived by listeners as especially “genuine” and “real.” To be “genuine” and/or “real” is to manipulate successfully the various codified gestures of passion in our culture: beads of sweat on the forehead, singing with your eyes closed, the proper (or tasteful) use of melisma, and so on, all without ever committing the unpardonable sin of hyper-emoting which, as Rosenbaum's analysis shows, has the unhappy effect of evoking both pity and scorn from listeners. Having read his article, I wonder whether he is on to something, namely that Billy Joel, as a white singer, is filled with self-loathing (the guilt caused by an awareness that one is both inauthentic and privileged) but also an insatiable desire for fame (the desire for power that comes with privilege).