From Disco to Hip-Hop
Dear Chris,
Hmm ... Feedbag for Morons. Isn't that a Dead Kennedys album? I don't know,
maybe the great, big, arena-rocking songs are masses-opiating tools of social
control, but I really can't believe that everything in the pop
marketplace is just numbly imbibed by a passive audience. (Also, isn't pinning
today's celebrity culture on rock letting the tabloids, glossies, talk shows,
Hollywood, etc., etc., off a bit easy? Maybe Elvis was the first modern
superstar--riding the emergent nexus of TV, film, and records to a new level of
global acclaim--but I hardly blame American Bandstand for O.J. and
Princess Di.)
As someone who routinely got his head pounded into school lockers by Led
Zeppelin fans, I'm pretty aware of rock's role in fostering unthinking
conformism. Still, I think Miller's somewhat overheated "Dionysian" riff does
make an important point: that even a music with the crassest commercial aims
can have liberating, transformative effects in the world.
At least on other musicians. Had you heard Miller's anecdote about Dylan
mishearing the Beatles before? I really liked that one, where he thought the
line "I can't hide, I can't hide" was "I get high, I get high," and concluded
it was a "song about dope." Not exactly Das Kapital , I realize, but the
tale is suggestive of rock's power as charged, volatile, as they say, "open
text." If Dylan's ears weren't caught up by the Beatles' sound first, he
never would have imbued the song with such possibilities--which I have to
believe were pretty subversive back in 1964.
Whether or not rock still has such possibilities depends, I think, on your
definitions of "rock." One thing that makes a popular music rock , as a
verb, is its ability to take private but common feelings and put them into a
shared public language. This phenomenon gets more interesting as the culture
splinters and technology creates new languages--which is one of my main
problems with Miller's critique. As a critical theorist himself, Miller must
know how subjective his rock narrative is (even the jump-cut structure suggests
it), yet he still seems to present pop music as the product of the same shared,
single history. I'd say that construct breaks down near the end of his
book.
While I don't mean to make too great a claim for disco, I do think it
represents a moment in which cultural forces that Miller doesn't account for
realigned in a way that changed "rock." The polarizing "Disco Sucks" movement
revealed a mass audience not just splintering, but clashing along certain
demographic lines. Meanwhile, the music's sound and technology was providing
the sonic space and public rituals for hip-hop--as electrifying a pop form as
I've ever heard. I'd say NWA's "Fuck Tha Police" was every bit the protest song
that "The Times They Are A-Changing" was and way more fun. I'd also say
similar, if less broadly significant upheavals are happening in the worlds of
house, techno, and other electronic music even now. Musics that emphasize
rhythm and texture over melody and lyrics aren't necessarily apolitical or
content-free, but they do tend to occur on narrower bandwidths.
Some smart guy--Cocteau I think--said that style is a way of saying
complicated things simply. No, I don't think Smashmouth is saying anything too
complicated. But others well within pop's debased, commercialized, 50-year-old
landscape--Nas, say, or Beck, or Pavement, Radiohead, P.J. Harvey--often are.
Nowadays, you just have to work a little harder to hear it.
Which Miller, by his own admission, stopped doing over a decade ago. This
raises a question we've both evaded. Is this book really necessary? Is Miller's
style or his point of view compelling enough to merit another go-round on the
rock-history tour bus?
Yours,
Chris
P.S. I don't think your sentiments are fogeyish or undiscriminating. I must,
however, give you kudos for being the first writer I've ever seen limn Beck's
Godley Creme influence.
