Up From Rock
RobbieFulks.Com by Robbie Fulks
March 3rd, 2004
"You must have heard it SOMEWHERE."
Those of us who are out of step with the herd hear that one a lot. I heard it last spring, traveling between cities with my band. We were listening to a CD called "The Very Best of Cher." It had been given me by a friend in Boston who works for a corporate concern, specifically, a record label, one that stakes its survival on the issuance of CDs like "The Very Best of Cher." Why my friend passes this stuff on to me is unclear, but she did, and several months later, after it had bounced around unopened on the floor of my van long enough, I put it on. The first song was called "Believe," and it wasn't long until the groaning began.
"Put on something else, for Christ's sweet sake!"
"Hey, this doesn't sound half bad to me," I said. "It's kind of a catchy song."
"It's not so much the song," the drummer told me. "It's how all of civilization couldn't escape it five years ago."
"I don't know where I was five years ago," I said. "Probably in this van. But I missed it then, and I'm liking it now."
"Oh, come on. You must have heard it SOMEWHERE."
If the expectation is that every American must know "Believe," I can name several just in my immediate family that don't. Maybe it's in a well-rounded musician's own best interests to maintain some passing acquaintance with mass taste. I'll have to call up Zubin Mehta and ask him. But I bet he didn't keep up with Cher much past "Bang Bang."
That keeping a foot in the stinking YMCA pool of pop culture is the informed citizen's duty is certainly the cherished premise of its peddlers. "Entertainment Weekly," America's most profitable magazine, smugly and openly exploits the anti-hierarchical justification: he who would be whole must surrender not only his brow to Montaigne for furrowing but his rib to Ivan Reitman for busting. The smart modern has "experienced" -- connotations of bovine passivity intended -- a smattering of the centuries-dead set as well as the best works of Santana, John Grisham, and Tom Hanks. You don't need to take a very long view on the matter to see that this line has no merit whatsoever, except to keep corporate media revenues robust and to soothe the troubled souls of people who have not read Montaigne once but have seen "Caddyshack" several times.
This is not to indulge in easy snobbery. (As though! The number of hours I have spent in the celluloid company of Bill Murray over the years dwarfs the time I have spent with a volume of Montaigne in my lap.) It is just to admit that culture and entertainment, no matter that they fortuitously conjoin from time to time, are separate and separable species, and that as a man ripens in age, pari passu with his powers of discrimination, he will naturally come to prefer one over the other. He will tend to abjure radio and television except for news and weather. He will stay clear of discotheques, and effortlessly tune out department store music. These are healthy habits that harden as one grows slowly deaf to the frequencies of youth. They are symptoms not of a studied snootiness but of a happy temperament.
Music is my beat, my daily working environment, and you might think it takes some doing for me to avoid pollutants in the air. Not so. My ignorance has been easily attained, by following the prophylactic steps described above -- keeping the radio off, etc. I don't think my isolation from the Zeitgeist has affected my professional prospects, which have proved steadfastly dim no matter what I listen to. In fact, I don't honestly think of myself as cut off, but liberated. The shedding of the old compulsion to familiarize myself with whoever is on the cover of Spin magazine this month is a big relief. Like Malcolm Muggeridge, who at the age of 80 was delighted to find his sex drive finally waning, I feel as though I have been allowed to dismount a wild horse.
I like to think that what I am missing out on is Rock Music. That is a term, like "government," that connotes everything and nothing, a big bland badness. Rock is, of course, not really a kind of music. Jazz and bluegrass and Baroque can claim some identifiable, even if loose, formal boundaries. They come with compositional and instrumental outlines. Anyone who wants to get in the ring needs first to train, since any style that meets a hard definition of "music" demands a specific set of hard skills. And not only the players but the listeners too need specific contextual knowledge of the form. Without this sense, music is little more than a goad to foot-tapping and body-slamming: an appealing noise, maybe, but fundamentally incomprehensible.
Rock requires relatively less of its players than a clearly-bounded style like Baroque. And it demands almost nothing of its audience, since, almost by definition, its function is to cater, not demand. Whatever it might once have been, Rock in the early 21st century is an amorphous sociological category, a catchall for a distilled product marketed to people who don't care too much about music. It's just about anything bought in quantities of hundreds of thousands or higher, from any one of five corporate sources. It is to music as entertainment is to culture: an awesome force and an insatiable beast that tyrannizes the jungle. Surrounded by smaller and prettier fauna, it perpetuates its hegemony by devouring whatever it can grab. What goes into its great maw comes out, predictably, as shit. In goes Miles Davis, out comes Chuck Mangione; in Howlin' Wolf, out Rolling Stones; in Chris LeDoux, out Garth Brooks. All right, maybe "shit" is a tad opprobrious. But even Rock's worthiest figures (Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan) are clearly downmarket models of non- or pre-rock prototypes (Louis Jordan, Woody Guthrie).
When I was a kid I spent hours of intense enjoyment poring over Bob Dylan lyrics for oblique truths. Rock inspires and encourages this kind of hero worship, which is, not coincidentally, an easier sell than tough-minded discrimination, just as excitability is a bigger high than jaundice, and conformity more comforting that wondering what the hell everybody else is talking about. Rock is, then, the perfect love object for hero-starved excitable conformists, or "kids," to use the Saxon term. I like to think that it is more than the sluggish metabolism of middle-age that has changed my relationship to music. It now seems self-evident that appreciation (or the attempt at it) is an improvement over idolatry. The one focuses attention simultaneously and deeply outward and inward, reckoning with objective forces and the response to them, curiously examining and arguing with both. The other gratifies a crude need.
No doubt about it, Rock has its endearing traits: its ever-escalating outrageousness, its comic priapism, its lip service to democratic ideals, its sentimental dedication to the outcast. But these are theatrical and theoretical strengths. If you love music for its own sake, why even waste time with this weak variant? Take a look at what everyone is enjoying, as recorded on this week's1 Billboard Top 50 Albums: Hillary Duff (#1), Evanescence (#5), YoungBloodZ (#11), Linkin Park (#12), 3 Doors Down (#22), something called Mya (#41), Michelle Branch (#43), Jessica Simpson (#45), the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (#47), and Fabulous (#50). What on earth is all this? Does there lurk here a single piece of music that will enlarge my life and gladden my heart? It's possible, but not too likely. And the couple of names I do recognize -- Beyonce (#4), Christina Aguilera (#25), Toby Keith (#32), Kenny Chesney (#46), and matchbox twenty (#48) -- shout emphatically: Not very fucking likely at all! (And look, there's "The Very Best of Cher," still hanging in gamely at #36. Apart from "Believe," this mostly-decades-old recyclage is, like the singer's career, another expensive waste of time, and its 23-week tenure on the chart illustrates that pop's cognate stodginess exceeds even my own.)
As surely as this music is the soundtrack for the fantasy lives of the comatose, it is just as surely unsporting of an old grumpus-wumpus like me to take pot shots. Okay then, take a look at another list, one of nearly all the prestigious rock establishment people I can think of without lifting a very heavy book by a very bad writer: the Rolling Stones, James Taylor, Eric Clapton, the Allman Brothers, Bruce Springsteen, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, the Doobie Brothers, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, John Mellencamp, Smashing Pumpkins, the Clash, Sting, Dave Matthews Band, Neil Young, U2, Prince, Counting Crows, Phish, R.E.M., Billy Joel, Green Day, Lenny Kravitz, Beastie Boys, Oasis, Tom Petty, Nirvana, Eminem -- have I missed any? I have nothing in particular against these people. I'm even partial to a few of their songs, here and there. But I've never bought any of their records, and I don't happen to believe that music as a whole would be any the poorer if all their master tapes were rocketed to the sun tomorrow.
The truth of rock's incurable inferiority is confirmed by the attitudes of its more sensitive practitioners, who reserve most of their admiration and respect for comparatively obscure musicians outside rock. We are told that Bob Dylan, far from sitting secure in the catbird seat of worldwide superstardom and significance, privately worries that his legacy will not match up to Jimmie Rodgers's or Willie McTell's. Garth Brooks admires not Toby Keith (I am speculating on this one) but Buddy Mondlock, and Paul McCartney is a fan of Lloyd Green. Bruce Springsteen looks up to Joe Grushecky, and Tom Petty is nervous around Mavis Staples. This unabashed artistic appreciation -- which doesn't often run the other way, from obscurity to star, though a stealthy envy does -- suggests that, if music insiders know their onions, the rest of the world has it almost exactly backward.
It is a fine thing that there are people who can sell records. Almost everyone needs music, and for almost everyone there are the popularizers. But there's more afoot in the jungle, for anyone who cares to listen in; strange creatures, deeper in, exuding tone like it was carbon dioxide. There is no accounting for voices like Willie McTell's or Mavis Staples's, and maybe no marketing them either. They are what floats my boat as I drift ever farther from civilization. And a nice benefit of that drift is that, every once in a while, something like Cher's "Believe" happens to blow in unexpectedly. Out here in the sticks you can hear it, as it were, acoustically, free of the whirr of star machinery. You can appreciate its assured melodic authority and architectural integrity, which derive from other dim forms upriver, forms with names like Goffin and McCartney, and, a bit farther up, Ellington and Berlin. Maybe I have heard it somewhere, after all.
