|
|
Twenty-five years ago, Greil Marcus, the
self-appointed Dean of the Rock-Critic Academy (West Coast), signed off on
the editor’s note that opened the first edition of Stranded: Rock and
Roll for a Desert Island, originally published by Alfred A. Knopf. That
anthology rounded up twenty members of the pioneering first generation of
rock critics—the folks having all of that fun in Almost Famous—and
each weighed in with an essay praising the one album they’d choose for
company if marooned on a desert island.
Despite that unforgivably goofy premise, many
of these essays—Nick Tosches on the career of the Rolling Stones, Lester
Bangs on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Ellen Willis on The Velvet
Underground, Dave Marsh on Onan’s Greatest Hits (an invented
compilation of great rock songs about masturbation)—remain essential reading
for anyone interested in good writing about great rock ’n’ roll. Some of the
others are equally unforgettable, but for different reasons; these include
such classics as John Rockwell championing Linda Ronstadt’s Living in the
U.S.A. and Grace Lichtenstein cheering for the Eagles’ Desperado.
Stranded was reprinted by the fine
folks at Da Capo Press in 1996, and in the introduction to that edition,
Robert Christgau, the self-appointed Dean of the Rock-Critic Academy (East
Coast), expressed his hope that a new generation of rock
writers—the one that came of age in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and which
has now largely replaced the pioneers of the ’60s and ’70s in the paying
gigs—will produce a Stranded of its own.
This is not that book.
In the words of the Velvet Underground’s
“Sweet Jane,” these are different times, and the central notion of
Stranded seems cornier than ever in an era when a peculiarly narrow
vision of rock history is enshrined and hermetically sealed in a
pyramid-shaped Hall of Fame on the banks of Lake Erie, following an annual
five-hundred-dollars-a-plate, tuxedo-clad induction ceremony at New York’s
Waldorf-Astoria. The time is indeed ripe for an anthology that displays the
aesthetics and voices of some of the best new music writers, but this is a
group that is more diverse, cynical, sarcastic, curious, and irreverent than
the one that preceded it, and any anthology of its work should capture its
contentious alternative spirit, as well as its contrarian vision of rock
history.
Welcome to Kill Your Idols: A New
Generation of Rock Writers Reconsiders the Classics, a collection of
thirty-four essays in which each writer addresses an allegedly “great”
album that he or she despises. If we want to be high-minded about it, we
can call it a spirited assault on a pantheon that has been foisted upon us,
or a defiant rejection of the hegemonic view of rock history espoused by the
critics who preceded us. If we want to use the vernacular, let’s just say
it’s a loud, angry, but hopefully amusing “Fuck you.”
I first conceived of this collection in 1995,
during my mercifully brief tenure at Rolling Stone—which isn’t
surprising, given that magazine’s obsessive devotion to charting a rock ’n’
roll canon. (More about that silly business in a moment.) In the years that
followed, I pitched this book to several publishers, all of whom responded
with a look of shocked indignation and some variation of the authoritative
dismissal that, “No one wants to read a book of all negative reviews.” Jeff
Nordstedt was the first editor who enthusiastically responded in the
affirmative—which, again, isn’t surprising, given that he works for
Barricade Books, a house founded by the octogenarian publishing legend and
First Amendment absolutist, Lyle Stuart, a punk-rock soul if ever I
encountered one.
Jeff agreed
with me that it is often more fun to read a really bad review than it is to
read a really good one. A savage but well-considered critique of a piece of
art that you love gets your blood flowing. The point isn’t necessarily to
change your thinking about a work that you adore, but to prod
you to consider anew why you admire that work. As such, the pan can be much
more stimulating (and useful) than the paean. The most illuminating reviews
I’ve read of
On the Road—a book I
consider a sacred text—are not the many fawning praises, but the brutal
trashings (Kerouac wasn’t writing, he was typing), because they make me
reexamine what I love about the novel. Of course, it can be a jolly good
time indulging in the public flogging of a sacred cow, and why should rock
criticism be any more polite or restrained than the nightly debate at the
corner sports bar or the spirited back-and-forth of politics? Why should
anything be accepted as dogma in an art form (the devil’s music, no less!)
that, at its best, is about questioning everything?
A lot of people don’t think this way; a lot of
people don’t like to think, period. Baby Boomers, the largest generation in
American history, some seventy-six million strong, are particularly prone to
safeguarding works whose value they adopted as articles of faith in their
youth, even though said youth is now several decades behind them.
Nostalgia is still a relatively new concept,
and many scholars view it as a byproduct of fears about industrialization
and modernization. With Greek roots meaning “to return home” (“nostos”)
and “pain” (“algos”), the word was coined in 1688 in a medical
treatise by a nineteen-year-old Swiss physician looking to describe a severe
and sometimes lethal form of homesickness as he studied soldiers suffering
from a mysterious malaise while serving far away from their mountain homes.
In the Victorian era, the word came to signify a spiritual sickness rather
than a genuine illness; in 1874, the poet Arthur O’Shaughnessy called
nostalgia “the disease of the soul.” More recently, scholar Susan Stewart
dubbed it “a social disease” and defined it as “the repetition that mourns
the inauthenticity of all repetition.” Parse the academic-speak, and Stewart
is basically saying that it’s foolish to live in the past—especially a
glorified, rose-tinted past that is largely a fictitious recreation. Or, as
political pundit Art Buchwald quipped, “Nothing is more responsible for the
good old days than a bad memory.”
It is particularly sad to see people who are
nostalgic for a past they never even experienced. As I write this, the
downstairs neighbor in my Chicago three-flat—one of the seventy-two million
members of Generation Y, the second-largest generation in American history,
and the Baby Boomers’ snot-nosed progeny—is once again playing The
Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan at ear-shattering, floor-rattling volume. He does
this two or three times a day, every day, and has ever since I moved in six
months ago. Granted, it could be much, much worse—he could be blasting Dave
Matthews or the Grateful Dead—but while I once loved this album, I am now at
the point where I never want to hear it again. When I asked this fellow
about his fascination with this disc, he responded with the question, “What
else is there to listen to?” He can’t fathom the idea that there’s
ever been another album worthy of his time or that there’s been any
worthwhile music made at all since 1962, which is approximately two decades
before he was born. He’s an extreme case, and I pity him: He’s in his early
twenties, and his life is already over. In fact, it never even began, at
least not in terms of experiencing great art made in the moment—his moment,
instead of his parents’.
Now, about that canon business: In the early ’90s, the hallowed halls of the
academy were rudely awakened from their soporific slumbers by the sound and
fury of the so-called “culture wars.” Here was a rabid backlash against what
conservatives perceived as the insidious plague of “political correctness”
on our college campuses, spread by the voices of diversity who’d been trying
since the mid-’60s to broaden the literary curriculum away from “dead
white European males”—you know, guys like
Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope—in order to include
folks who weren’t . . . well, quite so dead, white, European, or male.
The heavy hitters of literary conservatism and canon defense were,
ironically, two unrelated men named Bloom. Allan Bloom, the late sociology
professor and philosopher, published The Closing of the American Mind
in 1987, and Harold Bloom, a professor of humanities at
Yale, gave us The Western Canon in 1994. Here were the cornerstones
of the defensive wall erected in the war against P.C., and the battle still
rages today. Do a quick Web search on key words such as “Western” and
“canon,” and you’ll find not only reams of blatherous articles, pro and con,
but countless syllabi for courses with titles such as “Canon
Revision: History, Theory, Practice” that attempt to answer pressing queries
like, “Why does society need a canon?” and “Why does the just-in-time
society of ‘postindustrialism’ need revisionary canons?”
Good questions, but I would
like to think that the dynamic, impolite, and ever-evolving art form of rock
’n’ roll has better things to be concerned about. Hell, Allan Bloom
said as much in The Closing of the American Mind. “Rock music has
one appeal, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire not love, but sexual desire
undeveloped and untutored,” he wrote. “It acknowledges the first emanations
of children’s emerging sensuality and addresses them seriously, eliciting
them and legitimizing them.” He meant that as a slam—rock is too juvenile to
ever be considered as “Art” by Bloom’s kind—but I take it as a compliment.
At its best, rock music is focused on living in the present,
celebrating the wonder and intense discovery of the world around you, just
as a child does. It would seem by definition to be opposed to the very
notion of fixing in stone a canon. Yet the rock media is obsessed with doing
exactly that.
In recent years, we’ve seen countless
unimaginative efforts to enumerate and rank rock’s icons in just about every
mainstream rock rag, as well as on radio, MTV, VH1, and in that ludicrous
glass pyramid in Cleveland that I mentioned earlier. But the institution
most dedicated to charting the sounds we need to venerate is the granddaddy
of ’em all, Rolling Stone. I’ll confess that in the midst of editing
this collection, I had a brief crisis of conscience when I wondered if this
book was too much of a childish exercise—the rock-critic equivalent of the
bratty kid wiping his snot on the blackboard in feeble protestation of the
injustices of third-grade life—but that very day, Rolling Stone No.
937 arrived, a “Special Collectors Issue” all-knowingly titled “The 500
Greatest Albums of All Time,” and Kill Your Idols once again seemed
not only valid, but absolutely necessary.
Set aside for a moment consideration of whether the album as we know it—a
collection of songs recorded at a particular point in time and arranged in a
particular order in the attempt to capture an elusive moment, like snapshots
in a photo album—is still a valid concept in the age of downloading, when
the fan has as much power to define the listening experience as the artist,
if not more. Anachronism or no, I still love the album as a measure of
artistic value, and so do all of the contributors to this book. But even if
we play by Rolling Stone’s old-fashioned rules, there are still
serious problems with this business of dictating “the best albums of all
time.”
For one thing, there’s the issue of consistency. Rolling Stone now
tells us that the ten best albums ever are, in order: Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band (which isn’t even the best Beatles album!),
Pet Sounds, Revolver, Highway 61 Revisited, Rubber Soul, What’s Going On,
Exile on Main St., London Calling, Blonde on Blonde, and The Beatles
(a.k.a. “The White Album”). But back in the summer of 1987, the mag’s
twentieth anniversary issue was dedicated to listing “The 100 Best Albums of
the Last Twenty Years.” At that point, rabid Beatlemaniac Jann Wenner and
his sycophantic underlings announced that the top ten albums were, once
again in order: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Never Mind the
Bollocks . . . Here’s the Sex Pistols, Exile on Main St., Plastic Ono Band,
Are You Experienced?, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders
from Mars, Astral Weeks, Born to Run, “The White Album,” and What’s
Going On.
Given that the top picks in both cases span the same time frame, what
happened to Bowie, the Boss, Van Morrison, and the Plastic Ono Band that
made them fall out of grace in the intervening years? Did those albums
somehow grow “less great,” while the additional Beatles efforts and Pet
Sounds got better? And how could Rolling Stone possibly be
more conservative fifteen years later, knocking the Sex Pistols all the
way down to No. 41, and remaining as blissfully dismissive of hip-hop as it
was before the genre started its decade-plus run as the dominant sound in
popular music? (Rap’s first appearance on the new list is at No. 48, with
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.)
What we’re really seeing here is a panicked,
turtle-like, Blooms-style defense by a still absurdly Boomer-centric
publication against the notion not of P.C., but of “critical correctness”—a
more expansive, postmodern view of the history of “rock” (and I’ve used that
term all-inclusively throughout this introduction) which dares to
acknowledge that, say, in the eyes of legions of today’s punks, the Ramones
are infinitely more important than the Rolling Stones; that to countless
hip-hoppers, Run-DMC is more revered than Jimi Hendrix (and rightly so), and
that the entire electronic music and dance underground views Kraftwerk as
boundlessly more influential than the Beatles.
Primarily members of Generations X and Y (with
a few strays who are, technically speaking, demographic Baby Boomers, though
they identify philosophically as X’ers), the men and women who’ve written
for this book resent the notion that they missed out on everything just
because they weren’t at Woodstock. They’ve seen the movie and it sucked, and
many of them have been to raves in warehouses and muddy fields that had much
cooler soundtracks, not to mention better drugs. How much of the “classic
rock” of the last fifty years is defended by the lame notion that, “You
really had to be there”? Shouldn’t a great album speak to you even if you
weren’t?
Postmodernism has taught us that history is
fluid, and it can be considered from many different perspectives. An event
like Custer’s Last Stand can be examined from the points of view of the
conscripts, the officers, the headstrong general, the Native-American
warriors, the chiefs, the wives, the white politicians, the settlers, or the
forces of capitalist expansion, among many others. In the rock world, the
reason that alternative views are so frightening to conservative critics is
that they require these cultural arbiters to keep listening and grant that
maybe, just maybe, the best sounds ever are still to come, instead of being
forever embalmed in the amber of the past. The only valid response that any
true rock fan should have to some pompous, omniscient windbag standing at
the front of the class prattling on about “the true masterpieces” and “the
good old days” is to make the loudest farting noise possible.
When I asked my fellow flatulent troublemakers
to include a list of their top ten albums along with their biographies—a
task that, iconoclasts one and all, many groused about, and a few never did
fulfill—I wasn’t trying to illustrate some revisionist canon that would
“correct” all of these problems. In addition to giving the reader some
insight into what albums each of these critics value (after you’ve just read
about one they believe is offensive, overrated, over-hyped, or just plain
lousy), I fully expected that many of them would laud one or more discs that
their peers have just demolished. They didn’t let me down: It happened no
less than thirty-six times. This is to say that many of these writers will
be as angry with each other as you might be with them, if they just pissed
on your particular tree. For the record, I myself think that no fewer than
sixteen of them are just dead wrong. And all of this is as it should be.
We ought to just abandon the whole stupid idea
of having a single rock canon, and instead stand ready to question and
re-examine our values and assumptions at any time, while communicating with
people who share our passions and thereby coming to a greater understanding
not only of differing viewpoints, but of ourselves. Most of all, we should
revel in whatever joyful noises each and every one of us decides is “the
greatest” for ourselves in the here and now.
In closing, I have to say that I am a fan of
all of the writers I approached to contribute an original essay to this
book, and I’m happy to note that all but a few of them—folks who were
otherwise occupied with lame obligations such as crushing deadlines or the
recent birth of a child—happily obliged. In fact, they were all chomping at
the bit to have at one reputed classic or another, generally harboring a
long list of pent-up grievances that have been mounting since their teens.
Given that they were, essentially, working for free (there is a down side to
Lyle Stuart being a First Amendment absolutist), these were labors of
love—which may seem like a strange thing to say, because they were writing
about albums that they hate. But there was a sadomasochistic element to this
entire endeavor: In agreeing to deconstruct a work they intensely disliked,
by necessity, they had to spend much more time with that album than they
were able to spend with the countless others that they love. I’m veering off
into some very murky waters of the psyche here, but I’ll venture that deep
down, at some level, some part of you must admire an album—or at least the
genre it comes from and what it is supposed to represent—in order to
adequately explain why you find it thoroughly repugnant.
Kill your idols, indeed.
In addition to the writers, I have to thank
Jeff Nordstedt, Lyle Stuart, Carole Stuart, Jennifer Itskevich, and everyone
at Barricade Books; my bandmate, Chris Martiniano, for his outstanding cover
design; my agents, Chris Calhoun and Kassie Evashevski; my beautiful and
brilliant co-editor, co-conspirator, collaborator, and wife, Carmél
Carrillo; and most all of, you, the reader. I hope that you enjoy reading
this book as much as we enjoyed putting it together—or at the very least,
that you love hating it.
BACK |
|