Same As the Old Rock?
Dear Chris,
It's a strange rock history indeed whose pivotal chapter concerns David
Bowie, but here you have it. In Bowie's failure to sell big in the States,
James Miller isolates what I suspect is the real tragedy in his own critical
life. Bowie's failure was, he writes, "an early indication that global youth
culture created by the Beatles, and ratified at the Monterey Pop Festival, was
already beginning to fall apart ..." What Miller really seems to lament--more
than the hype, silliness, or commercialization of rock--is the death of
monoculture. Earlier in the book, he describes the global impact of Sgt.
Pepper --when you could hear it wafting out of cars and cafes "from Los
Angeles to London, from Paris to Madrid"--with the wistfulness of an old
Catholic rhapsodizing the Latin mass. Then again, who can blame him? Covering a
record that the London Times cultural critic called "a decisive moment
in the history of Western civilization," must have been a heady enterprise
indeed--especially if you bought the hype. Rock criticism must have seemed
fresher, more important, and probably easier then.
Yes, new sounds can really ruin critical paradigms. Show me someone like
Marilyn Manson and I'll say, OK, Miller's right: Rock is a "finished cultural
form--a more or less fixed repertoire of sounds and styles and patterns of
behavior." But show me someone like the Wu-Tang Clan--whom Miller groups with
Manson as "musically crude, gleefully obscene, and just plain silly" (as well
as "the triumph of the psychopathic adolescent")--and I think Miller's simply
not listening. Classifying Wu-Tang's strange, chilly, beats-and-glass
aesthetic--along with trance, house, and trip-hop--as simply "new forms of
rock," requires either some impressive semantic gymnastics or deafness. I have
to mistrust someone who, while bemoaning the bland repetitiveness of current
rock, concedes that occasionally new groups do "catch [his] ear--like En Vogue,
Queen Latifah, and the Cardigans." The Cardigans?
Still, the stars have aligned to give Miller a nice context for his book
tour. We are, after all, in the age of Puffy Combs, Limp Bizkit, and that
life-affirming spectacle that was Woodstock '99. (Flowers in the Port-a-San?)
Given the last, Miller's snapshots of the riots that accompanied Moondog's 1952
"Coronation Ball" and the early screenings of Blackboard Jungle seem
judiciously chosen. I'm also glad a rock fan feels obliged to recognize the
real-life chaos and violence in rock unapolegetically, even a bit
joyfully--closing with the image of 15-year-old John Lennon at a Liverpool
movie theater, disappointed that there wasn't a riot.
What I like about the early chapters is Miller's idea of rock's
serendipitousness: the idea that jokes, studio tricks, and technical accidents
created a new pop form. That, and the way youthful twitchiness and
uncertainty--from an uncomfortably pandering Ruth Brown to an amateurish
Frankie Lymon to a jittery Elvis Presley--formed a new musical vocabulary.
These kinds of unorthodox responses to rock's creation myth were fresh enough
to make me expect more from the later chapters than a gloss on punk as simply
rock's "quintessence" of "stunning ugliness." Man, Miller's writing sure is
uneven, isn't it? When he's in teen-spirit mode, he'll lapse into
bodice-ripper-isms like "These records touched me in ways that I'd never been
touched before." And when he's trying some Greil Marcus-y fabulism, he'll
resort to a scene-setting device like "As the sun rose in the East ..." Hard to
believe the same guy wrote those gorgeous meditations on Marvin Gaye and
"Strawberry Fields."
But I liked the sweep. I enjoyed the flashback, Nicholas Roeg approach
Miller took to this overtold narrative, and actually, I bought a lot of his
seemingly perverse omissions, including Woodstock. I certainly don't need to
hear this fetishized event described again, and I respect his choice of
Altamont as the more relevant chapter in rock's dark lineage. The chapters that
bored me most were the retreads, like the Springsteen chapter, which basically
condensed Fred Goodman's Mansion on the Hill , and the Grateful Dead
genesis, which seemed ancillary and, well, about Deadheads. While Steely Dan
and Frank Zappa strike me as tributaries pretty distant from the mainstream
Miller was trying to trace, I think you're correctly suspicious of disco's
absence--and not just as a high-point of decadence. Miller spends an entire
chapter lovingly detailing the design and production of the Fender electric
guitar, showing how the technology enabled an amateur musical expression that
would change mass culture. Disco prefigured the most cataclysmic reordering of
rock sound and attitude in 20 years: hip-hop, a form in which the technical
"gimmickry" that Miller seems to both enjoy and distrust became central to
music-making. And that's leaving aside the race issues--until the next
letter.
Yours truly,
Chris Norris
