Pop & Pleasure & Freedom
Jarrett Earnest on pop music
Pop & Pleasure & Freedom
Jarrett Earnest
In the prologue to his first collection of essays, The Dyer’s Hand (1962), W.H. Auden explains why criticism is inescapably personal:
Though the pleasure which works of art give us must not be confused with other pleasures that we enjoy, it is related to all of them simply by being our pleasure and not someone else’s. All the judgments, aesthetic or moral, that we pass, however objective we try to make them, are in part a rationalization and in part a corrective discipline of our subjective wishes.
Therefore, Auden insists, as a matter of professional honesty critics should detail their “dream of Eden”—their notion, say, of a perfect day—up front so that readers will be able to judge their judgments. To that end he proposes a short questionnaire that would provide “the kind of information I should like to have myself when reading other critics,” including their preferred “Sources of Public Information” and “Public Entertainments”—in his case, respectively, “Gossip. Technical and learned periodicals but no newspapers” and “Religious Processions, Brass Bands, Opera, Classical Ballet. No movies, radio or television.” The implication is: Don’t trust critics who judge things that they have no feeling for or that are not important to them. (In Auden’s case this seems to include most forms of popular culture.) The best criticism offers a vision of the world, not only as it is but as it could be, and an invitation to share in it.
For instance, in 1968, when Ned Rorem argued in these pages for the excellence of the Beatles, the provocation was to take them seriously within a rarefied intellectual milieu, as part of the “high/low” collapse that characterized the avant-garde historically and the triumph of Pop Art in that decade:
Since pop tunes, as once performed by such singers as Billie Holiday and the Big Bands...are heard not only in nightclubs and theaters but in recitals and concerts, and since those tunes are as good as—if not better than—most ‘serious’ songs being composed today, the best cover-all term is simply song. The only sub-categories are good and bad.
Rorem marshals his formidable knowledge of music theory (“the minute harmonic shift on the words ‘wave of her hand,’ as surprising, yet as satisfyingly right as that in a Monteverdi madrigal like ‘A un giro sol’”), and yet, as he wryly argues for the technical brilliance undergirding the Fab Four’s unbridled verve, they end up mattering to him in the same way they mattered to millions of people then and ever since: “The Beatles are good even though everyone knows they’re good.... Our need for them is neither sociological nor new, but artistic and old, specifically a renewal, a renewal of pleasure.”
It’s no accident that Rorem arrives at this life-affirming principle in writing about pop songs. Pop is our great arena of pleasure; it is all about the swooning intensity of crushes and kisses and lust in every conceivable permutation, along with the tears and broken hearts. Perhaps that is why pop music penetrates our emotional life so thoroughly, giving voice to our collective feelings at birthdays, at weddings, at funerals, and when we dance, communally or at home alone. We play songs of erotic infatuation and fathomless heartache while walking, driving, and riding the subway, but we also hear them in bars, bookstores, and the dentist’s office; they become an ambient score to daily activities, fusing our memories into a seam of public and private experience. As Ellen Willis, the first pop music critic for The New Yorker, wrote in the liner notes to Lou Reed’s compilation Rock n’ Roll Diary, 1967–1980, “For those of us who are always confronting our own history through rock and roll, this album is more than the summation of one artist’s career; it is the spiritual record of a decade in the life.”
In 1976 Jonathan Sage was twenty-three and living in his hometown of London after graduating from Cambridge. He was studying to become a lawyer but was looking for an escape. Sensing the heat lightning of what would become punk music, he quit the law, started a fanzine called London’s Outrage, and by the next spring was chronicling the scene under the name Jon Savage in the national music newspaper Sounds, beginning with a short write-up on the Sex Pistols, a group of boys slightly younger than him but already legends beginning to implode:
The Pistols have become symbols—us against them—the songs anthems, inviolate from criticism. Just to see them is enough—it’s a bonus that they played a good set.
So ultimately, the environment was totally controlled in favour of the Pistols—no risks. I admire the media manipulation, but feel the sour taste of patronage and the exploitation of base brutality instincts. It’s too easy. The eventual problem may be—who cares?
They’re being overtaken. Fast.
Two months later, on June 7, 1977, he was on the Thames aboard a boat festooned with banners announcing the Sex Pistols’ acidic new single “God Save the Queen,” timed to Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee; the band played furiously on deck as police vessels swarmed:
Now all adrenalin is flat out—do it do it do it now now now NOW. Suddenly in “I Wanna Be Me” they get inspired and take off: “No Fun” screamed out as the police boats move in for the kill is one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll moments EVER. I mean EVER. (Think about that.)
Throughout the late 1970s Savage dispatched slangy firsthand accounts of early gigs and releases by some of the legendary bands of the era (the Clash, Cabaret Voltaire, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Joy Division) as well as publishing ideas-driven interviews with everyone from Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle to David Thomas of Pere Ubu—a solid path for a young writer accruing credibility while stockpiling invaluable primary sources. This early writing, which was typical of the golden years of rock and pop criticism from Lester Bangs and others, comes off more as the necessity of working within a highly stylized scene than as a natural inclination, and before long that first-person voice slips away. In conducting interviews Savage is sensitive to the point of self-effacement; it’s easy to understand how he moved so seamlessly inside such a volatile milieu. By the time he began publishing in the new hyper-cool monthly The Face in 1980, he was poised to become one of the preeminent music and culture writers of his generation.
Savage’s only collection of criticism, Time Travel: From the Sex Pistols to Nirvana: Pop, Media and Sexuality, 1977–96 (1997), spans the twenty years he spent tracking early punk to its avatar in grunge, parallel gangs of disaffected teens empowered by music to tear everything down. His sympathetic profile of Nirvana and his interview with Kurt Cobain—a roving, confessional, late-night talk in a NYC hotel room—became cult texts after Cobain’s death by suicide less than a year later in 1994 at age twenty-seven. Having thought deeply about the contradictions of rebellion and success, anarchy and capitalism, Savage was attuned to the impossibility of the band’s situation:
Nirvana should have been on top of the world but instead they freaked out. Part of the problem had to do with the culture from which they came, which had celebrated the outsider—“Loser,” read an early Sub Pop T-shirt slogan—and which was fiercely anti-major label, pro-independent. One of Nirvana’s first acts on joining Geffen Records was to print a T-shirt which read “Flower-sniffin’ kitty-pettin’ baby-kissin’ corporate rock whores.”
He saw that there was no way out but still hoped they’d find one.
The fascination of reading a critic’s work over time and then again in a collection is seeing the ideas gather steam in accumulated observations until they burst forth in new arguments, sometimes much later. Critics learn by working out their thoughts in dialogue with a public, testing the balance between their natural gifts and limitations, which eventually results in a unique voice with its own delights, preoccupations, and worldview. Often that work involves defining what the object of criticism is: a song, an album, an artist’s life, an image, a persona, a book, a jacket, a film, a political protest, a social moment. In Savage’s writing there is surprisingly little actual description of music; instead he is increasingly concerned with the complex relations within a band and between the band and its audience. By the time he set out to write his authoritative England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond (1991), the book must have appeared to him as his own personal Excalibur waiting in the stone of the recent past, all his aesthetic sensibilities and philosophical questions, not to mention his life experiences, lodged there for him alone.
Focusing on the Sex Pistols’ explosive rise and fall, he picks up the story in 1971 but narrates most closely, almost month by month, the period from 1975 to 1979, as they became the figureheads of a youth insurgency against postwar British life:
The inevitable condemnations of Punk reflected its contradictory desires and its stupidities, but they were couched in terms so biased and based on an implicit definition of social acceptability that was so restrictive, that it was easy to reject them. If you did so, the whole thing collapsed like a pack of cards. If you were a Punk, you suddenly found yourself a scapegoat, an outsider. This realization—part delicious, part terrifying—radicalized a small but significant part of a generation.
It is precisely because of this embattled euphoria, at the intersection of alienation and belonging, that punk has proliferated in various forms around the world—improbably? paradoxically?—for the past half-century.
Central to the Sex Pistols’ story was their mesmeric, impressive, yet strangely unappealing manager, Malcolm McLaren, who was routinely described in the press as the Faginesque (with all the antisemitism that implies) mastermind of that gang of street boys ten years his junior. He and his then romantic and creative partner, Vivienne Westwood, were a visionary couple who seemed preternaturally attuned to the workings of the expanding media industry. There was also the charismatic front man, John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, at personal and artistic cross-purposes with the rest of the band. Even as the Sex Pistols turned against one another, they sporadically united against McLaren’s machinations as he leveraged multiple contracts and major labels to a fevered pitch of publicity, committing the group to appearances, tours, and movie projects with little regard for their mental or financial—not to mention artistic—well-being. In Savage’s hands the tale becomes Shakespearean, a cut-up history, comedy, and—with the 1978 murder of Nancy Spungen, the girlfriend of the Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious, and then the overdose of Vicious himself in 1979—utter tragedy.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
