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Epicharmus.com: It was 1970, and Tom McSloy was annoyed in a way only a fan could be annoyed. He wrote to William F. Buckley detailing what he saw as the National Review's crippled ability to matter to young people like himself. The letter concludes:
The moment McSloy cites as his letter's proximate cause comes at the beginning of a 1969 Red Norvo review: seizing upon a Cash Box article on the recent successes of 30's and 40's jazz reissues as a sign of the imminent eclipse of all that nasty kid's music, Neil McCaffrey let out a gratuitous and frankly lame crack at the nastiest of the nasties, "the Rolling Scum."2 He doesn't mention him by name, but McSloy might have also been thinking of Philip P. Ardery Jr., whose personal account of Woodstock was curiously euphoric, if mindful of the festival's limitations, both as event and as an example, calling it "a moment of glorious innocence, and such moments happen only by accident, and then not often."3 The virtue of innocence was turned on its head, some time later, by an alternative take by National Review publisher William A. Rusher whose title, "Mass Infantilism, Anyone?", probably tells you all that's worth knowing about it. Except maybe this one line: "The young have always had, and probably will always have, a natural hankering for a less demanding, more accommodating world -- a world in which the charms of irresponsibility are not so harshly penalized."4 McSloy's letter is a long, unfocused sigh of exasperation at this kind of generation-gap triumphalism, couched in youthquake slang already past its expiration date, and quixotically asking for a little dynamism from a magazine that, as William F. Buckley put it in its inaugural issue, stood athwart history, yelling STOP! 5 Yet not only was it printed, seemingly in its entirety, in the National Review, the intellectual crucible of American postwar conservatism, but Buckley got five of his key editors and contributors to comment at length on it. And partially fulfilling one of his offhand suggestions, McSloy actually gets to try his hand at rock-writing, and the result, called "Music to Jangle Your Insides," gets published too, even though it contains such muzzyheaded lines as: "To get into rock, you have to give in to it, let it inside, flow with it, to the point where it consumes you, and all you can feel or hear or think about is the music. Once you've done that, there is a kind of breakthrough; and you can perceive the music on many different levels." 6 Truth be told, despite McSloy's complaints, the magazine had been running lengthy pieces on the music throughout the sixties, and by no means were these all on the order of "Rolling Scum" remark. When the Beatles -- those charmers -- arrive in America, the oft-occluded cultural eye of the National Review looks at them and winks: "The Beatles are, in fact, affable, intelligent and the only youngsters around who don't take the Beatles seriously; we wish them fat bullrushes."7 So begins the irregular coverage of rock's high modernist phase, which is at times jaded, agonistic, and delighted, although nearly all the writers take some pains to undercut their enthusiasm, reassuring their readers that they don't reaaallly think all rock is good or important. Frank Gannon, in a largely cynical review of UK rock music circa 1965, nonetheless welcomes the Beatles as a return to the original rock & roll verities; this in distinction to the music of the early sixties, where "melody, harmony, and even remotely convincing, not to say understandable, lyrics were sacrificed to insistent, demanding, compelling beat. The epitome of this was a song like 'The Bird' which was performed by artists who had the honesty to call themselves The Trashmen."8 Antoni E. Gollan applauds Dylan's turn away from message songs and delights as the radical left howls in pain 9; this appears a year after after a sclerotic attack on Barry Macguire's "Eve of Desctruction" as an example of the mass media's sympathies for left-wing agitprop10. Future Time Magazine critic Richard Corliss literally puts his affection for the Beatles in quotes when he says in an early '67 overview of pop music: "I am strongly tempted to write 'The Beatles are great. Their most recent album is Revolver. Buy it.' and leave it at that. But as a critic is never simply to effuse, I will attempt to bridle my awe of the group's genius for invention and elaboration." I might also add that Corliss tackles soul music, grievously describing it as almost entirely a matter where white svengalis like Phil Spector and Bacharach/David hover over black singers.11 Christopher Simonds, in a 1968 album round-up, concentrates almost entirely on forms of rock that show off a debt to the classical music traditions, such as the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, but also takes a detour to describe the hard rock of '68 as "screaming voices, shrieking electric guitars, sexual undertones and overtones, the freakout thing. It has a way of picking up people; rather, knocking them down with the big bad beat and then carrying them away on clouds of super-amplified electronic wails."12 In context, Simonds is not actually demonizing the music; he is recognizing these are characteristic of hard rock's gift for overstatement, but reduces them to a mere laundry list of known quantities that are maybe a little amusing, maybe tiresome, the latter attitude crystallized two years later when he applauds the Grateful Dead for the comparatively unflashy and "workmanlike" attitude.13 For Simonds and other writers, rock is treated as passing entertainment rather than something with a past or much of a concievable future. The class of people who take the music a little more seriously than mere amusement -- that's US, kids! -- are labeled "meaning-mongers" more than once.12, 14 So what the hell is the National Review doing publishing things like McSloy's exhilarated bit of groovy-speak or an article praising Woodstock? What madness is this? In his 1988 biography of William F. Buckley, John B. Judis describes the magazine's relatively sympathetic engagement with rock as largely Buckley's doing, a recognition that many of the young conservatives of the day were beguiled by some aspects of the counterculture15. After all, since mid-sixties, the Young Americans for Freedom, the primary campus conservative organization of the time (also the same group that recently held "Catch an Illegal Immigrant" games at several campuses), was split along so-called "traditional" and "libertarian" lines; while the former tended to hold the positions of power within the organization, significant numbers of the latter supported such issues as the decriminalization of marijuana, and an end to the draft (while maintaining an overall pro-war stance). Judis sums up Buckley's attitude in this regard as a belief that if there are young college students who self-identify as conservative but also like the Rolling Stones, well, the magazine may well have to reconsider its attitude towards the Stones. And think back to the quote about Woodstock I cited earlier, and think how a young campus conservative or a solider in Vietnam (McSloy was one) might feel about being told they were naturally inclined to taking the easy way out. Well, I would imagine they would be pissed. Buckley was always looking towards the young to carry the burden of the future of a conservative revolution, and Buckley was not about to let minor considerations like the Beatles or Woodstock serve to fragment the right any more than it already was. Judis also describes the National Review's '60's rock coverage as also something of an expression of Buckley's own mild interest in the music, noting a couple of friendly encounters between the Buckleys and fellow Stamford, Connecticut resident Alan Freed; He calls the Beatles "the crowned heads of anti-music,"16 though later they become the subject of Buckley's irritated -- but quite sincere -- plea that there is no need to travel to India for enlightenment when the words of Jesus are next door.17 For some time Buckley was making handsome profit from rock radio stations whose DJs and newscasters were chanting down American Babylon. And while he has no patience whatsoever with pop music today, as evidenced by a hysterical review of the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards18, he has developed a belated admiration for Elvis Presley, the subject of 2001 novel Elvis in the Morning. Judis ascribes Buckley's sympathy towards the music as stemming from his ability to make hard and fast distinctions between the politics and culture of the sixties, allowing him to abhor the former and cautiously enjoy the fruits of the latter, perhaps most notoriously epitomized by Buckley's call for the legalization of marijuana after trying some supplied by a New York City police officer. The insistence on a split between the cultural and the political manifests editorially in the lingering distaste for message songs of folk-rock and anything else in rock explicitly leftist. And this strategy continues today: a recent online review of Jeff Chang's recent book, the political as a dangerous supplement to the hip-hop experience: "When it is political, where it is destructive (in the case of some graffiti), it is the voice of an embittered people; where it is more purely art created as art (as a novel or a mural), it is a celebration of and by that people."19 Todd Seavey, in the middle of a discussion of Hillary Clinton's appropriation of Jesus Jones' "Right Here Right Now," calls his philosophy "friendly to both the aesthetically radical and fiscally conservative" or "a sort of 'conservatism for punks.'"20 In the 1970's, rock is becomes both hegemonic and fragmented, and National Review writers lick their chops as the music becomes, in their minds, a house divided between its liberal and conservative factions. Edward Meadows' frankly astonishing 1977 essay "Pistol-Whipped" describes punk as a thoroughly right-wing enterprise, stating that "most of the groups lean toward the (Neo-Nazi) National Front"; rather than expressing distaste, he delights at the gastrointestinal discomfort right-wing rock must be giving liberal elites, specifically the then-crumbling Labor Party and the calcified remnants of sixties' culture grown fat from corruption. In one of Meadows' more colorful formulations: "And if any fur-lined radical-chic fat-cat rock critic for Rolling Stone magazine should leave the safety of his chauffeured Rolls to enter a New Wave rock club and survey the scene, he's likely to get laid out quick."21 If that image of a rock critic with a chauffeured Rolls had any reality outside of Edward Meadows' burning mind, it would be in the shape of Jann Wenner -- really more a publisher than critic at that point and who the hell knows if he ever had a Rolls, but still, a pretty easy target for charges of limousine liberalism. This, I think, gets to part of the conceivable appeal of punk to the NR: the implication is that where Jann Wenner cannot go, 34-year-old economist Edward Meadows can -- and by extension, your average National Review reader can too. John Buckley -- a former rock critic and Bill Buckley's nephew -- contributes a not-entirely-ill-informed piece in 1979 reflecting on the cold war anxieties in the music of Bowie, the Clash, and John Cale22; ten years later, he would defend punk in the National Review by saying "Just as supply-side economics and the rise of Reagan were a back-to-the-roots rebellion against the hippie era and the stultification of the Seventies, so the rise of punk was a return to real rock 'n' roll. Both used classical prescriptions: for the supply-siders, it was the return to low tax rates; for the punk rocker, it was the return to songs based on three simple chords."23 An editorial squib on the state of rock music published in 1984 notes a Gallup poll showing heavy support of Reagan amongst people under thirty, and states that "their music--rock, rap, and pop--has finally caught up with their conservative politics," citing the "cowboy libertarianism" of Bruce Springsteen's heroes in Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. and the "explicitly conservative lyrics" of, of course, Little Steven. 24 Perhaps themselves doing some catching up to a zeitgeist defined by the likes of the Meese Commission and the Parents' Music Resource Center, the National Review would be more hostile towards contemporary rock throughout the rest of the eighties and nineties, adopting an strident moralizing tone largely absent in even the most critical writings about the music. Former rock critic and batshit crazy born-again Christian Stuart Goldman uses the video for Sam Kinison's "Wild Thing" as his jumping off point to take on the whole of rock in the broadest of strokes, concluding "it continues to breed new addicts. And why not? Look at what it promises: eternal youth, bliss, happiness, fulfillment for a terminally empty soul. And of course these are, lies -- but they're lies that man has been buying ever since Eve took the serpent at his word."25 A cover story by Tom Bethell on New Orleans jazz trumpeter Bunk Johnson called "They Had a Right to Sing the Blues" is premised on the curiously adolescent notion that as great art requires suffering, and as the lot of African-Americans has improved, their popular art has necessarily declined to the point where what we have left is, as he calls it, "all this hip-hopping."26 Andrew Ferguson describes the coverage surrounding Jerry Garcia's death as merely proof of the Baby Boomers' tendency towards towards hyperbole27; his tone is so irreverent that perhaps it is no coincidence that Buckley himself contributes more measured take on Garcia's death an issue later.28 Other writers suffer from a surfeit of optimism, mistaking any old thing in their visual field -- country music29, a Luciano Pavorotti concert at Hyde Park30, nu-swing31 -- as proof that yes, over there, just above the horizon, OMG, finally! a real rain that will wipe this rock scum off the streets. And yet even most of these writers I've cited don't necessarily find rock completely useless. They have a rock ideal: unsurprisingly, it's in the past; somewhat ironically, given the National Review's sixties' rock writing, their idea of rock's glory days are pitched somewhat closer to early sixties, or really, a vision of rock that is strictly pre- or non-countercultural. Bethell's Bunk Johnson article cites Marvin Gaye and Motown as a last gasp of black popular music, according retroactive reverence to musics almost completely ignored by the magazine in its time, incidentally implying to me that quite unlike the treatments accorded to the Beatles, Dylan, and the Stones back in the sixties, contemporary black popular music is not worthy of comment in the National Review, con or pro, until it can spied from a rearview mirror, or it becomes a threat. The anonymous Bruce-appropriator of 1984 approves of white rock's turn to "for the shorter, boppier, brighter" -- and more apolitical -- "styles of the early Sixties"; Stuart Goldman blames the Stones and the Beatles for splitting a perfectly fine music into the gutless and the daemonic. Today, though, perhaps as a testament to the thoroughness with rock has "won", many writers within the NR stable today consider themselves rock fans, and feel much less of a compulsion to write about rock -- at least as a whole -- with the hostility or prophylactic defensiveness of the past. And yet this new freedom has not been married to any increase in sophistication or insight. The nadir of this was last year's John J. Miller article "Rockin' the Right: The Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs"32 and its sequel.33 The idea itself wasn't ridiculous, but Miller, succumbing to the de-evolved charms of the Blender-style list article, offered pat and just jaw-droppingly stupid lyric interpretations, sailing past the double entendres of "Little Red Corvette" and misreading it as a "cautionary tale" and claiming the Sex Pistols' "Bodies" as an anti-abortion song rather than an anti-EVERYTHING song, if anything. When National Reivew Online Editor-in-Chief Jonah Goldberg -- a man notorious for dropping references to his favorite TV shows throughout his writing -- criticizes what he sees in Kanye West as "the canned rebelliousness not just of rap music but of most pop music," he knows enough to reference Columbia Records' infamous "But the Man Can't Bust Our Music" ad campaign, but is seemingly oblivious to the fact that musicians, fans, and critics have been subjecting these ideas to countless cycles of dialectical development since 1968.34 I find this state of affairs really rather...disappointing. Carson Holloway, in his response to Miller's listicle, writes that "All music is a combination of reason and passion, but in rock above all the latter prevails over the former. As a result, we may well suspect that rock fosters a kind of emotivism and even irrationalism that is at its base hostile to conservatism."35 I roll my eyes at his boilerplate Platonism but if anything I respect it more than any of the recent pro-rock writings in the National Review because it doesn't describe it as mere entertainment, demand a strict separation between ideology and taste, or champion rock at its most apolitical or consonant with conservative values, the strategies most NR writers use to come to terms with rock in a positive sense. A less hedged conservative appreciation of the music might admit to the the ways rock culture has informed recent developments in the attitude of contemporary conservativism, or providing a sustained argument that rock music has proved to be a valuable addition to the West's concepts of freedom. Or how about subverting the image as a rebellious enterprise -- an idea common to hostile outsider and enthused fan alike -- by redescribing rock as being not "about" chaos but its management? As I am but a mere liberal, surely they would consider my sentiments mere rockcrit geekout wankery. Yet until National Review writers master the terms on which rock discourse is based, or come up with a novel way to subvert them, I'm afraid they're going to continue to be regarded as freakshow outliers. Presented at the 2007 Experience Music Project Pop Conference 1
Tom McSloy, "Notes and Asides" National Review 7
Apr. 1970 |