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.