The Conformists
Dear Chris,
A Beatles biographer, I forget which one, once said that Sgt. Pepper
"brought the world closer together than any event since the Congress of
Vienna." Whatever that means. Maybe "monoculture" is too strong a word
for this way of thinking, maybe not. But you've certainly hit on something by
focusing on Miller's partiality to music that "brings us all together." He's an
e pluribus unum man.
Miller quotes Ed Kelly, one of the interchangeable dancers on Dick Clark's
American Bandstand , as saying: "The craziest part of it was that many of
us became these instant celebrities, yet none of us really had any talent."
There is an implicit criticism here of rock's role in creating today's
problematic (to put it mildly) celebrity culture.
But Miller is not awfully concerned about authenticity. For him, rock is
the product of the coldest sort of commercial calculation, true,
but also embodying a not ignoble vision, of an America transformed, of Mind and
Body, Black and White, dancing the same dance, moving to the same beat, as
kids, en masse, joined in their own brand of Dionysian revelry, watered down
and trite, but genuinely uplifting all the same.
But this is ignoble. This is where rock turns into the
feed-bag-for-morons, the opiate of the masses, that its harshest critics have
always condemned. Once rulers understand the political implications of
Dionysian revelry, it gets turned to rotten ends. Merengue is terrific music,
too, but when, half a century ago, Trujillo ordered that sound systems be set
up to play it all over the Dominican Republic, it wasn't to "uplift" people but
to render them passive.
Rock has its roots in the Cold War; it is, at least in part, the musical
expression of outrage at the uniformity and boredom of American suburbia. But
like so many protest movements, it partakes of the very vices it purports to
critique. Rock--at least the canonical line of it that Miller describes
here--has been a greater force for unthinking conformism than anything
Levittown wrought.
Kids understand this. Miller doesn't always. That's why he gets blindsided
by punk and disco. The Sex Pistols, of course, are incomprehensible without a
glance at the two-track uniformity of mid-to-late 1970s music: lugubrious,
11-minute-long navel-gazing guitar dirges by the Eagles and Jackson Browne on
one hand; ad jingles like "Undercover Angel" and "Heartbeat--It's a Love Beat"
on the other. Not that there weren't a few truly emetic songs that united the
vices of both: Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street," Walter Egan's (was that his
name?) "Magnet and Steel."
But what is disco? Since I know little about it, and since you make big
claims for it, I would love to hear more. At the time, it seemed like a bid by
"out" classes--both urban blacks and the last of urban working class whites--to
partake of the license and self-expression that rock had provided to privileged
classes. Since disco came precisely at a time when the privileged classes, in
their political incarnation, were busily pitting working-class whites against
blacks through such innovations as forced busing, this seems like an odd
alliance, to say the least. Unless the white participation in--and enthusiasm
for--disco was a mirage. But it didn't seem like it at the time.
Maybe you're right that Miller is not listening to much modern rock. I don't
listen to much, either, and most of it's poppy stuff I hear on the drive to
work. I too, find a lot of what's come out of the 1990s derivative. Sheryl
Crow's guitar licks seem so familiar that I have often suspected they're simply
mixed out of "Stuck in the Middle With You." Smashmouth makes me certain that,
while Jim Morrison may be dead, Ray Manzarek is not. The New Radicals sound
like Todd Rundgren has just emerged from the cryogenics lab where he's lain
frozen since 1972. Beck, whom I find a consistent delight, seems to draw from
less mainstream stuff--a hybrid of Prince and that terrific high-tech British
duo Godley Creme (who had a pop incarnation as 10cc).
I'm sure these are fogeyish and undiscriminating sentiments. My point is
that any casual acquaintance is bound to lead to similar ones, because the
surface of rock is exciting only at rare and lucky moments.
Best,
Chris
