The Idler: Out of Step

At the first newspaper that employed me, the entertainment editor used to send me to review rock concerts in addition to the classical concerts that I preferred. It was a small paper and they didn’t know any better. Since often I either did not know or actively disliked the music, my rock “reviews” tended to be more in the line of reports than criticisms.

There were exceptions. I still remember being excited by a band called The Dixie Dregs. This enthusiasm was greeted with something like condescension by my rock-savvy friends, who said that Dixie Dregs wasn’t “real rock.” Too many jazz and classical influences, they said. Apparently they were right, because a few months after I heard these musicians, they dropped the “Dixie” part of their name and, with it, all the musical elements that had made them interesting to me.

I went on reviewing, or at least reporting, but I was perplexed by what it was rock listeners heard that I wasn’t hearing. Invariably, a rock or pop group I liked would be the subject of cruel jokes, whereas the ones I detested would be praised.

Finally, I lost patience and gave one band a very negative review by holding them to the same “classical and jazz” standards I had applied to the Dixie Dregs but finding them woefully lacking. The band wasn’t particularly worse than the rest; I had merely grown tired of not saying what I really thought was true.

The result was a minor scandal. People wrote letters, and my editor, thank God, took me off the rock beat. That wasn’t enough for one colleague at the paper, who called me aside to lecture me about the necessity of what she called “being objective.” Being objective, she said, meant considering everything “in its own context.” There was a classical context and a jazz context and there was a rock context, too. Actually, she amended, there were several rock “contexts” because there were many kinds of rock.

I waited for her to take the argument to its logical conclusion and to say that every group had its own context and that therefore, every group was “good in its own context,” which is tantamount to saying that everything is good and no negative criticism is permissible (including, if one is consistent, negative criticism of negative criticism: a total implosion of logic). But she didn’t, so I asked my own question instead.

“Well, what about the context of music?” I asked.

More words were said, but in essence the conversation ended there. I had stumbled onto the brink of the unbreachable canyon separating not only the two of us, but rock intelligentsia from “traditional” thinking.

In the world that spawned rock culture, all estimations of value are relative. Every value is its own category, and all categories are, in theory, equal. (The “in theory” part will later become very important.) On the other hand, in the world that spawned “classical” music and much pre-rock popular music, estimations of value reach back to some final category.

Small categories like “rock,” “classical,” “jazz,” etc., lead back to the larger category of music. “Music” signifies an art with tremendously flexible standards that may be stretched and restated and adapted. But those standards may not be altogether abandoned. In other words, if examples from one of the smaller categories fail to meet the specifics of the final category “music,” they are found lacking.

That discussion with my colleague was a revelation to me. A disagreement many would dismiss as a mere difference of taste (“I like this but you like that”) had unearthed something much more significant. Here were two distinct modes of evaluation that could never be reconciled with each other.

When I insisted that the band I had reviewed was no good because of the redundant, loud beat, the uninventive melodies, and the singing style that was actually a variant of shouting, my colleague replied that these judgments were peremptory, even snobbish. I was trying to impose my “values” on somebody else. To me, her argument sounded very much as if someone had said: “I don’t like your astronomy. I like my astronomy. I prefer the names given to the stars by my group of friends, and I prefer our maps of the galaxy. That’s our context, and it’s as good as yours, you snob.”

She saw “values” as arising from personal preference; I saw them as arising from nature. There is no com-promising those two positions. The distinction is either/or. It is, I have discovered over the years, a distinction not limited to music or art. It has eye-opening applications in ethics and politics. There are, for instance, people who believe that concepts like justice change from one application to the next and alter their natures with considerations of race or culture or class. And there are other people—a dwindling minority, it would seem—who believe that normative concepts are color-blind, cross-cultural, and irrespective of class.

Time rolled on. I wrote about and composed “classical” music and occasionally enjoyed a variety of other music from jazz and musical comedy to folk and country. But whenever I liked something I thought was “rock,” I usually ended up being told that it wasn’t rock at all, or that, according to rock standards, it was no good. The last time I went crazy for something I thought was a rock song was in 1982, when I heard a single called “Africa.” This was a skillfully put together, lyrical, harmonically inviting piece of work that disposed of the predictable, heavy, four-beat meter of rock and substituted instead a sort of undulating, syncopated roll, with opening chords that moved mercurially from one key to another. “Ha,” some rock critic friend of mine laughed. “What a stupid song.”

I was in esteemed musical company in liking what rockers sneeringly called “soft rock” or “pop.” I once mentioned Leonard Bernstein’s 1960s enthusiasm for The Association to a “real” rock fan, and he thought that was the craziest thing in the world. He couldn’t understand why a musician wouldn’t go for more “progressive” rock. Classical pianist Glenn Gould wrote adoring essays about Petula Clark, whose singing really was singing (a variant of the Broadway belt, but singing) and not moaning and screaming. Gould was one of the unqualified musical geniuses of his time, yet I’m sure his “taste” in popular music would have been chastised as “unknowledgeable” by every subscriber to Rolling Stone magazine. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ned Rorem wrote glowingly of the Beatles in their early stages, then backed off sharply as the 1960s drew to an end and the sound of rock plunged into the “hard-edged” sonic slamming of dullards like the Rolling Stones. “Our” good music was invariably “their” bad music, and vice-versa.

What was going on here? I thought every kind of music was supposed to be considered “in its context.” Why did rock people make fun of The Association and Petula Clark and songs with melodies to them? Weren’t they just as good as Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton and similar music with virtually no harmonic changes? Wasn’t all music good of its sort? In theory that was the case. The fact of the matter, I came at long last to understand, was something al-together different.

What was going on in rock music circles, transmitted to the culture through the media, was the establishment of a musical standard lacking a rational basis, a set of principles imposed through peer acceptance, commercial sales, and the sophistry of criticism. I’m not talking about rock ‘n roll, music for teenage parties and pubescent petting. I’m referring to the extrapolation from rock ‘n roll’s extremely basic musical language to the formulation of an absolute, rigid—indeed, rock-hard—standard. According to this standard, the sole purpose of music is the attainment of a certain emotional state evoked by a repetitive, four-four beat, squealing guitar riffs, and harmonic stasis. Furthermore, only that emotional state, and not other emotional states, such as those produced by listening to Barry Manilow or “The Star Spangled Banner” or Bach or “Oklahoma!” or anything else, is accept-able. This particular emotional state is the absolute good, and all music is to be judged by how close it comes to achieving it.

How to define the emotional state? If you have to define it, you don’t know what it is. And if you don’t know what it is, then you are not of the faith. And here at last is the fundamental stratum of rock’s gospel: “We know, and you don’t know, and don’t ask us to explain anything in rational terms. Don’t you feel the music?” People who use that argument are apparently incapable of conceiving of inner lives different from their own. That someone may weep at Beethoven’s “Eroica” or feel buoyant after hearing a Sousa march doesn’t occur to them, or if it does, it is with a mixture of contempt and fear. Those people, to the true rock fan, are dangerous. They feel the wrong feelings. They are without the Knowledge. But this Knowledge cannot be learned. That would give their aesthetic a rational basis, and the whole point of it is that it is anti-rational: you either feel it or you don’t.

Such subjectivism is a two-edged sword. If attacked, the rock fan claims prejudice on the part of the attacker: after all, everything’s subjective. But when on the attack against “elitist” European classical music or some other hated enemy, the rocker transforms that very subjectivism into an argument from intimidation: “Don’t you feel like everyone else feels? Don’t you know what we know?” The dynamics of high school personalities and peer pressure groups, it seems, persist long after graduation day. In short, rock culture holds the position that its music is better than other music because more people who know and feel the proper things listen to it. These proprieties are always stated in non-musical terms. That way, an attack in musical terms can be made to seem either ridiculous or beside the point.

Suppose, for example, that I am considering the music of Prince. I choose Prince because everyone in the rock world seems in agreement that he and his music are somehow valid, significant, and appealing. But on listening to Prince I hear redundant rhythms, ordinary harmonic progressions, melodies that involve a limited number of notes. In short, I hear little of musical interest. A typical rock fan, I have found, will rebut this observation with a statement like, “Well, you like classical and I like Prince,” and ignore that my statements were not of opinion, but of fact. When rhythms repeat a lot, that’s called redundancy. When progressions and melodies stick to a handful of common gestures, then that is what they are doing, and not something else, even if a listener imagines them to be doing something else. And the veracity of a listener’s observation can be empirically tested by listening to the music.

Such objectivity is not only totally lost on the typical rock apologist, it is the very substance of the thing that he, through rock culture, is fighting. Reason is rock’s enemy. Rock is primarily ideology, not music, and the metaphysics it espouses is that of Gnosticism. Gnosticism was the heretical Christian sect that sought to strangle reason via the promulgation of a sophisticated mysticism. According to the Gnostic, reason was damned, a thing of the world, tied to matter and therefore evil. All that was necessary to undo it was to embrace a faith in other-worldly, automatically perceived feelings and beliefs. It is not known if the Gnostics used drugs or hypnotic music to convince their flocks that divine insight was theirs, but either would certainly have been consistent with Gnosticism’s central tenets. Both are not only consistent with but symptomatic of today’s Gnosticism.

The new Gnosticism, like the old, depends for superiority in normative matters on the crushing of categories set up by reason. For instance, in answer to an attack made on Prince (or Sting or U-2), a defender might point out the artist’s social relevancy, or the correctness of his political views. In addition, something is frequently said about sex appeal and/or moral pertinence. This avoids the issue of whether the music is any good by redefining musical worth in extra-musical terms. Musically—as opposed to politically, morally, socially or sexually—nothing has been said; music, as a category, is effectively eliminated through absorption into politics, the only meaningful normative category for an anti-rational mind.

Music is an easy target in American society, which has never had a strong tradition of music education. Music’s sway over the passions is every bit as potent as Plato implied, and its value as a rational category is not as easy for the musically ungifted to see as the category of visual art, for example, is easy for the artistically ungifted to comprehend. It is a specialist’s field. And it is rock culture’s prey. Some, who subscribe to what Francis Fukuyama has called “the Wall Street Journal school of deterministic materialism,” treat rock as just another entertainment commodity. In reality, it is a method by which Gnosticism, once defeated, thrives in its business of dismantling reason.

Author

  • Kenneth LaFave

    At the time this article was published, Kenneth LaFave was fine arts critic for the Poenix Gazette

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