The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism

THE TRIUMPH OF VULGARITY This page intentionally left blank THE TRIUMPH OF VULGARITY Rock Music in the Mirror of ...

Author: Robert Pattison

28 downloads 1010 Views 16MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

THE TRIUMPH OF

VULGARITY

This page intentionally left blank

THE TRIUMPH OF

VULGARITY Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism

ROBERT PATTISON

New York

Oxford

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1987

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Beirut Berlin Ibadan Nicosia Copyright © 1987 by Robert Pattison Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pattison, Robert. The triumph of vulgarity. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Rock music—History and criticism. 2. Music, Influence of. 3. Music and society. 4. Popular culture. 5. Romanticism in music. I. Title. ML3534.P37 1987 784.5'4'009 86-12670 ISBN 0-19-503876-2 (alk. paper) Printing (last digit): 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

PREFACE

"Is not every civilization bound to decay as it begins to penetrate the masses?" Sixty years have passed since Michael Rostovtzeff, the historian of the ancient world, asked the question, all the more ominous for his assertion that "our civilization will not last unless it be a civilization not of one class, but of the masses." Caught between the certainty that the vulgar will join civilization and the probability that civilization cannot survive vulgarity, can we escape the fate of Rome? The young soul rebels are already at the gates shouting, "For God's sake, burn it down!" This book examines rock, the pervasive music of contemporary vulgarity, as a way of describing the convergence of elite and mass cultures in our age. Chapter one defines vulgarity and points out that rock is the perfect expression of everything the classical world meant by the word. Its admirers want to make rock appealing by making it respectable. The thing can't be done. Rock is appealing because it's vulgar, and an appreciation of it requires a defense of vulgarity. This defense is implicit in the Romanticism and pantheism that have been staples of refined culture for the last two hundred years, and chapter one examines how, against its better

vi

Preface

judgment, the case for vulgarity has already been made by the elite culture of contemporary civilization. Romanticism and pantheism have generated their own myths about the world. These myths may be historical or imaginative, so long as they encapsulate Romantic or pantheistic ideas in narrative form. Whether a myth is objectively true is of no importance to its believers. A myth is tested against the emotional needs of the living, not the objective events of the past. I have described several myths in this book, from that of the sexual potency of rock stars to the Satanic predilections of their fans. In chapters two and three I look at the myth of rock's black and primitive roots. In these chapters, I am less interested in the historical facts about rock's foundations in black or primitive cultures than in what people believe about those foundations. Rock could never have come to rest on the foundation of black music unless it had first been launched on a tide of white ideas about the primitive. My suggestion is that there is good reason to locate the origins of rock in modern, Western ideas that found their classic expression in the nineteenth century. This suggestion will, I think, prove unpopular because it challenges an assumption shared alike by rock's friends and enemies. But the myth deserves a dispassionate examination, if not in the name of free inquiry, then in the cause of more honest racial perceptions. In the case of rock, the white man foists his own conception of the primitive on the unexplored facts of black life. In these two chapters I have thought it best to err on the side of candor and skepticism rather than allow the myth to pass unchallenged. The elite schools of modern art share a Romantic heritage with the mass culture of popular music. Vulgarity divides them, but a common set of conventions unites them. From top to bottom, our civilization has a mythic unity that was absent in the classical world. The triumph of vulgarity does not mean the extermination of elite culture but the reinterpretation of that culture in a popular mode. Chapters four, five, and six explain how rock expropriates Romanticism's refined traditions of self, sex, science, and social organization and suggest a method for

Preface

vii

translating the elite conventions of Romanticism into the vernacular of popular music. What threatens our refined culture is no alien barbarism but its own vulgar reflection. If vulgarity is without redeeming features, then civilization is lost, because the triumph of vulgarity is assured, and vulgarity is nothing but a mirror image of what now passes for elite culture. But vulgarity has all the strengths of the Romantic pantheism that justifies it, and in chapters seven and eight I have put the case for vulgarity as a social and aesthetic power. This is no easy job, not because there's nothing to say on behalf of vulgarity but because there's no language to say it in. There is an unacceptable language to justify vulgarity, though, and rock is it. These chapters explain the language of rock as the manifestation of an inarticulate social and artistic creed. Aaron Copland said, "If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong." He was being charitable. This is not a book about rock as music but about rock as idea. It's worth noting, though, that rock as music is no simpler than rock as idea. The philistine in the Modern Museum looks at a Jackson Pollock painting and says, "Anyone could do that—it's just a bunch of oil hurled on the canvas." The philistine listener approaches rock in the same spirit: "Anyone could play that. It's just a lot of noise. It's only five blues chords repeated again and again. All it takes is a guitar and a drum kit." These observations are largely correct, both as applied to Jackson Pollock and rock, with the exception of the philistine's premise that "anyone could do that." Consider the case of the Hollywood soundtrack artist Lalo Schifrin, who in the 1960s and 1970s tried again and again to produce suitable rock accompaniment for the bikers, hippies, and drug fiends inhabiting the crash pads and nightclubs of the B-movie scripts for which he composed the scores. Practice did not make the otherwise highly professional Mr. Schifrin competent in rock. His attempts to duplicate the sound of Led Zeppelin or the Grateful Dead always sounded like the marriage of Dizzy Gillespie with a mariachi band. If so respected a professional con-

viii

Preface

sistently failed to achieve even the semblance of rock, what credence can there be for the philistine who thinks he could produce a successful rock album given an afternoon off from work? Rock is the available music of our culture, but available is not easy. What musical quality makes rock inimitable by those who do not share the rock spirit lies beyond my very limited musical competence to describe. I have tried instead to explain the world of thought in which the rocker lives—a world literally unthinkable to Lalo Schifrin. I have relied to a great extent on the lyrics of rock to make my case. I think there are few points I make that could not be illustrated by a score of additional lyrics. I have tried to use those lyrics which illustrate the points with the greatest wit and diversity, but I'd be surprised if knowledgeable readers couldn't find a dozen of their own examples for each argument. There are those who believe that rock lyrics are incidental to the music, that few people really listen to them, that at best they are chosen for sound or effect, and that no genuine conclusion can be derived from them. If rock lyrics were merely an embellishment to the music, there would presumably be more rock songs that dispensed with words altogether. But a straight instrumental rock song is an oddity. Rockers want to write lyrics and their audiences want to hear them. The perennial outbursts of middle-class indignation at the content of rock lyrics demonstrate that at the very least sanctimonious adults listen to them. College freshmen who can't recall a line of Shakespeare can cite line after line of rock lyrics and will usually display critical contempt worthy of a Housman for anyone so ill-informed as to misquote Bruce Springsteen or John Cougar Mellencamp. Rock lyrics and variations on them are a favorite source of graffiti. I have seen ordinary citizens buying breakfast in the deli at seven in the morning who found some kind of solace in singing the lyrics of Foreigner, I would no more want to be the one to tell the English scholar Christopher Ricks that the lyrics of Bob Dylan, which join the poetry of Milton and Keats as objects of his critical esti-

Preface

ix

mation, were a verbal antimacassar on Dylan's threadbare guitarplaying than I would want to inform the devotees of Ratt that their heroes' "Lay It Down" would please them equally were it called "Play It Down" or "Weigh It Down." I hesitate to think whose reaction would be more violent or just. The words count in rock just as much as in refined poetry. Rock lyrics may be trite, obscene, and idiotic—which is to say, they may be vulgar—but they are certainly not incidental, and the proof of their importance is their consistency. Many would deny that rock has consistency. They claim that it's useless to discuss rock as if it were a single movement when in fact rock is a warren of subcultures and historical cults which can only be understood separately, socially, and in historical context. Like sportswriters and sociologists, rock critics suffer from a baseball-card mentality. The game disappears in a welter of distinctions. At one extreme, Casey Kasem tantalizes the audience for his weekly Top Forty Countdown with questions like, "What is the record for the number of weeks in which there was a different number-one song on the pop charts every week?" At the other extreme the righteous critics of the more obscure fanzines can detect countermovements within rock movements on an hourly basis, Many books mentioned in the bibliography to chapters two and three give summaries of the facts and subspecies of rock. I have tried to provide something different: an understanding of what holds the various kinds and periods of rock together as an intelligible whole. I have taken my examples as broadly as possible, so that Brian Eno and Ted Nugent find themselves used to support a single argument about rock, a procedure that will seem to rock purists what using Ignatius Loyola and Jerry Falwell as the exemplars of the composite Christian would seem to an Episcopalian bishop. If readers find this portrait of rock useful, the procedure will be justified in the result. But I would give it as a rule that the two most dissimilar rock songs have more in common than do any rock lyric and the song most like it in another musical genre. Rock distinguishes itself from all other music by a shared ideology that crosses all its internal divisions. Believing in this consistency, I have escaped the

x

Preface

rock critic's usual compulsion to make his book absolutely upto-date. Whatever is now or to come in rock is inherent in what has passed. If the key words of this argument were capable of quick and ready definition it would have been unnecessary to write the book. I have generally allowed the book to define terms like Romanticism and pantheism as it proceeds. But rock itself is a vague term and one of the aims of the book is to give it better definition. I start with the Vincentian postulate that rock is that which has been called rock everywhere, always, and by all rockers. Elvis is rock, the Beatles are rock, the Rolling Stones are rock, Iggy is rock, the Clash are rock, Bruce Springsteen is rock, the Fall are rock. Rock, like the ideology out of which it grows, is a subjective phenomenon. To be rock, music does not have to be played on guitar or drums. It does not have to use blues chords. It does not have to be electronic. It does not have to have hillbilly roots. It does not have to have a black pedigree. It does not have to be sung by teenagers. None of these conditions is either necessary or sufficient because each is a mere objective correlative of what is first and always an idea. Frank Sinatra singing "My Way" is old-fashioned pop in a regressive jazz tradition, but Sid Vicious singing the same song is rock, pure and simple. The Sinatra version is an old man's song whose mature theme is the acceptance of life as it is. The Vicious version is a young rebel's denunciation of everything old, smug, and wistful. The words, accompaniment, and all other objective criteria might be the same in each version, and yet one would be rock and the other not. I have tried to describe the idea of rock. This is an American book, and those who believe that the British invented or reinvented rock will find little comfort either here or in the facts. Without much hesitation the Englishman Wordsworth declined the opportunity to become the father of modern vulgarity and so of rock. The American Whitman accepted the same invitation with alacrity. Wordsworth's opinion of the vulgar is examined in chapters one and four, the relation of British and American rock is discussed in chapter three, but the poetry of Whitman necessarily finds a place in every chapter.

Preface

xi

I think the ideal reader for this book would be an intelligent twenty-year-old American who likes rock and reads books. Older readers may find something here too. Many people who have not been teenagers for some time wonder how to account for the durability and omnipresence of rock. I have tried to provide them with an introduction to the subject. Scholars and social commentators have examined the relation of mass or popular culture—what I call vulgarity—and traditional letters and learning—what I call refinement. The book has something to say about this. There is a growing body of academics who specialize in deciphering the social and cultural message of popular music. They may find some of the conjectures here of interest. And historians of Romanticism may be interested in a theory that purports to show the continuation—I would say the victory—of nineteenthcentury pantheism in the shopping-mall culture of the late twentieth century. If my argument is correct, I think it would tend to support the following statements: • Ours is a more homogeneous culture than we generally allow, in which elite and popular cultures subscribe to a single set of ideas. • Prominent among these ideas is Romantic pantheism. • In its pure form, Romantic pantheism encourages vulgarity. • American democracy provides an ideal setting for the growth of romantic pantheism. • American democracy necessarily grows more not less vulgar. • Poe's Eureka and the Velvet Underground are products of a single cultural force. • What separates elite from popular culture is its unwillingness to embrace the vulgarity inherent in its own premises. • There is more ideological vigor and consistency in the music of the Talking Heads than in the paradoxes of the academy. • Nineteenth-century Romanticism lives on in the mass culture of the twentieth century, and the Sex Pistols come to fulfill the prophecies of Shelley.

xii

Preface

• Vulgarity is no better and no worse than the pantheism and the democracy out of which it grows. • Believing in Whitman, the democrat should also glory in the Ramones. What follows explains these contentions in more detail. Greatest thanks to Roger Rawlings of the Alter Boys for information, criticism, and advice the whole way through. Many thanks to Steve Allen for sharing with me his parodies of rock lyrics, to Maury Webster and the Radio Information Center for kind help with the figures on audience distribution in American radio markets, and to Jorge Garcia-Gomez for advice on pantheism. Southampton, NY May 1986

R. P.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE The Triumph of Vulgarity Rock and Romantic Pantheism

3

CHAPTER TWO 7 Am White, but O, My Soul Is Black The Origins of Rock in the Romantic Primitive CHAPTER THREE

30

Dreams of Elysian

Blues, Folk, and Rock Pantheism

56

CHAPTER FOUR I Formulate Infinity Feeling, Self, and Growth in Rock's Forever Now CHAPTER FIVE The Road of Vulgar Excess Conventions of Rock Selfhood 111 CHAPTER six The Zombie Birdhouse and the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle Rock and the World

138

87

xiv

Contents

CHAPTER SEVEN Man and God at Rock 'n Roll High School Popular Culture and Its Critics 164 CHAPTER EIGHT De la Musique Avant Toute Chose A Rock Aesthetic 188 NOTES

213

BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

259

239

THE TRIUMPH OF

VULGARITY

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER ONE

THE TRIUMPH OF VULGARITY Rock and Romantic Pantheism

This is the age of vulgarity. School's out forever. They're dancing in the streets. Love has gone to a building on fire. What's happening? Vulgarity has triumphed. Champions of refinement remain. In 1980 Barbara Tuchman issued a blast against the decline of quality in the pages of the New York Times Magazine. But what effect can this anguished cry have when published in gray type next to the tan young flesh in the underwear ads? The genteel build themselves neo-Georgian mansions, but the fortunes that support their Augustan airs are made in sit-coms, drugs, and cheeseburgers. On both sides of the Atlantic, knights of the New Left and the Old Right prepare for the last great battle in the West, in which refinement will go forth to slay vulgarity. But the struggle is over. The dragon has long since won the victory. Vulgarity finds itself condemned on all sides by enemies as disparate as President Reagan's Secretary of Education, who wants to restore the legacy of cultural refinement, and the Marxist critic Theodor Adorno, who looks to socialism to purge the world of its capitalist crudities. But vulgarity by its nature is impervious to condemnation. The point is not to condemn it, which 3

4

The Triumph of Vulgarity

has been done without success, but to describe it, which has yet to be undertaken. Since we live in a vulgar world, and since the world seems likely to become more not less vulgar, the time has come not only to say what vulgarity is but to enumerate its benefits alongside its sins. Rock is the quintessence of vulgarity. It's crude, loud, and tasteless. Rock is vulgarity militant, and modern vulgarity is one incarnation of Romantic pantheism. This is a book about the nature of rock and about the contours of Romantic vulgarity. VULGARITY Horace, the least vulgar of poets, opened the third book of his odes with an incantation against the uninitiate mob: "Odi profanum volgos et arceo," I hate the vulgar mob and keep my distance. Let the tongue be silent. I am the Muses' priest And sing a song not heard before To youth. Horace borrowed the language of Roman religious ritual to sanctify his hatred of the ordinary. His is the classical definition of vulgarity. Everything common is profane. No beauty is possible without shunning the unrefined multitude. A new generation of cultivated taste must bring to life the same rule it has learned in the temple: "Let the tongue be silent!" Horace's word for the mob comes into English and French with little change of form and none of meaning. David Hume, writing in 1757, might have been composing a gloss on Horace's definition of volgos: "the vulgar, that is, indeed, all mankind, a few excepted." In vulgarity, there is no east or west. The vulgar includes almost everybody. It embraces the "them" of "us and them." Only a handful of mankind has the refinement that rises above vulgarity. This handful may be lopsidedly aristocratic, but membership is not confined to any one order. Horace himself rose from the ranks of the lower orders. A hundred years ago, Matthew Arnold devoted the better part of Culture and Anarchy to developing Horace's attitude into a principle of social organi-


5

zation. All social classes are equally defective. The populace is raw, the middle classes philistine, the aristocracy barbaric. Only those who practice "sweetness and light" and find "their best selves" can overcome the inherent vulgarity of the human condition. Let the genteel few who have risen above the common herd rule the world. Vulgarity is common. The great mass of men who lack refinement are vulgar. But inside a man vulgarity is not a presence but an absence. Vulgarity is the absence of cultivation. All men are born with the emptiness of vulgarity inside them; few ever fill the void. "The vulgar" is the language of the people, the language ordinary men learn without education. The Vulgate was once the Bible of Greekless Latin speakers. If lack of cultivation is the inward mark of vulgarity, delicate authors agree that the outward and visible sign of this deficiency is noise, the mingling of sound without rational order. "Let the tongue be silent!" Horace admonishes youths who would transcend vulgarity. The cultivated man thinks, speaks, and acts with reasoned restraint. The furthest remove from vulgarity is perfect silence, Horace's sacro silentio. Man in his natural state is a selfish ranter. Thersites, the only commoner among the aristocratic Greeks who fought at Troy, is an ugly, self-seeking lowlife. But before Homer presents his physical deformities, he has identified him as a vulgarian by his speech. Thersites talks too much. His words are akosma—ranting, undisciplined, chaotic. "Rank Thersites," Shakespeare called him. Noise, unchecked by the contemplative powers of inner cultivation, is a reminder of the chaos before creation. The vulgarian lives in the primal disorder that classical culture strives to subdue. W. H. Auden was writing in the tradition of Horatian refinement when he denounced modern civilization: Needing above all silence and warmth, we produce brutal cold and noise. Two centuries earlier, Auden could have said that we are vulgar and meant the same thing. The natural milieu of the vulgarian is the mob. Like the vul-

6


garians who comprise it, the mob defines itself not merely by its noisy presence, but by its uncontemplativeness. "What is the applause of the Multitude," Sir Walter Ralegh asked, "but as the outcry of an Herd of Animals, who without the knowledge of any true cause, please themselves with the noise they make?" A mob is a noisy, undifferentiated mass of men who have sacrificed their humanity to coalesce in an ignorant herd. Even the constellations were "vulgar" to Milton because they swarmed in a pack. The vulgar can hardly aspire to be individual, because individuality requires the tranquil development of the will. The vulgarian sinks to the common denominator of his herd instincts. He lows and bleats with the multitude. He does not use the divine gift of reason to find "the knowledge of any true cause" because such an effort requires a solitary excursion into the realms of spiritual silence, where transcendent truth dwells. "Give me my scallop shell of quiet," Ralegh says, "then the holy paths well travel." The courtier's plea would have been understood by two thousand years of cultivated taste. Vulgarity is common, noisy, and gross, but above all, vulgarity is untranscendent. Unless he believes in a realm of spirit, of soul, or of mind above the flux of ordinary activity, the refined man has no basis by which to distinguish vulgarity from cultivation. His distinction may take many forms. The anchorite mortifies his flesh in the desert to transcend the noisome burden of the flesh, while the Epicurean liberates his mind from worldly ills in the cultivation of his garden. However different in style, both believe in a contemplative escape from the world as it appears to unaided sense. Not so the vulgarian. Common language, common activity, common sensation are the be-all and end-all of his existence. He substitutes for the metaphysical raptures available to the reflective mind the mechanical curiosities of physical magic, and so cultivated authors like Hume have always collated vulgarity and superstition. Today the vulgarian adores technology just as his forebears worshipped idols or relics. The same refusal to rise above the mechanical details of ordinary experience marks the vulgarian's language. Polite society takes the crude physical events of carnal existence and out of them makes love or has sex. The vulgarian screws or fucks.


7

Vulgar is not a word in the vulgarian's lexicon because he has no transcendent vantage from which to make the implied distinction between the ordinary and the cultured. Vulgarity is always indiscriminate, while refinement is the art of making reasoned exclusions. This art is sometimes called taste. Good taste demands the ability to transcend ordinary experience and from a higher perspective judge it. In clothing or art, for instance, good taste stands apart from the colors of nature, then selects a few or none. The better the taste, the more completely the gross and random are excised. A black dress with a string of pearls is timeless good taste because of the calculated exclusion of all color. Acting on this exclusionary rule, Beau Brummell made himself the arbiter of Regency fashion by the "exquisite propriety" of an apparel based on "clean linen, plenty of it, and country washing." The vulgarian, on the other hand, cannot transcend ordinary experience. Untranscendent, he cannot discriminate between sensations. Indiscriminate, he has no taste. He goes wherever his passions take him. "Passion paralyzes good taste," Thomas Mann writes in Death in Venice, "and makes its victim accept with rapture what a man in his senses would either laugh at or turn from with disgust." Mann meant this sentiment to be one which Horace might approve. The classical vulgarian does not have bad taste; he lacks all taste. He is not "a man in his senses" but a creature of his passions. In his clothing or his paintings, one color is as good as another, and let them come in what order they will. The Hawaiian shirt is the epitome of vulgar taste. Its gross, lurid colors mix without restraint. It's worse than tasteless; in the noisy tradition of vulgarity, it's loud. From the eminence of taste to which the editorship of Vogue elevated her, Diana Vreeland proclaimed that peacocks "are unbelievably beautiful, but they're vulgar." There is nothing enigmatic about such a pronouncement. Although they are exotic and in the West usually found in the parks of aristocratic estates, peacocks sin against good taste in two unpardonable ways. They combine in their plumage all the colors of the rainbow, and they have a cry like an icepick. Peacocks are de trap. Even if they should be white, like the peacocks that harassed Diana Vreeland, they are ostentatious, and ostentation is nothing but a boast of

8


vulgar materialism. Of the earth, earthy, they are vivid exemplars of untranscendent physical sensuality. Loud and indiscriminate, the peacock is the national bird of Vulgaria. Peacocks are vulgar in spite of their aristocratic pretensions, and vulgarity, its enemies insist, is not a class trait. But the cultivation of taste and the nurture of contemplation require leisure or money or both, and ordinary mortals have until recently enjoyed little of either. Traditionally the ranks of the vulgar and the working classes have nearly coincided, and vulgarity has always had a political as well as an aesthetic connotation. "The vulgar," said Dr. Johnson, "are the children of the state, and must be taught like children." Men of sensibility might rise from the vulgar lump to join the charmed circle of refinement—Horace thought he exemplified the possibility—and yet the lump is hardly diminished. Without the vulgar to be ruled, there is no sense in a ruling aristocracy of talents. Vulgarity always has a democratic tint. The concept is inseparable from an elitist bias. This much is classical vulgarity—an idea intelligible to Dr. Johnson in the same sense Horace entertained it 1700 years before and greeted with the same disapprobation by generation after generation of Western sensibility. Not that vulgarity has lacked an audience. Horace in his satires and Shakespeare everywhere draw on the vulgar. Refined art has never eschewed vulgarity. Instead it circumscribes it within the cultured net of comedy, pastoral, and satire. That most vulgar novel, the Satyricon, achieves its effect only by being written from the satirical heights of an Epicurean Olympus. Chaucer's miller tells a vulgar tale and unwittingly illuminates the divine master plot. Vulgarity finds its place in cultivated literature to either ridicule itself or reveal a transcendent value which its untutored sensibilities cannot comprehend. That vulgarity should free itself from the limits prescribed for it by culture and set up on its own is an idea almost unimaginable before the modern period. The kingdom of Refinement views the prospect of an independent republic of Vulgaria with unalloyed contempt. In Vulgaria's democracy, cultivation would compete with unskilled labor. Public men with a taste for contemplation would be driven from office and replaced by noisy


9

partisans of transient factions. Noise would be the legislated medium of all business, public and private. Special machinery would be installed in homes and public places to insure that no vestige of tranquility could flourish. The transcendent forces of religion would be given the choice of conforming to the noisy sensationalism of vulgar ideology or disbanding their congregations. The media would be controlled to assure the steady flow of rabblerousing facts and the suppression of reasoned reflection. Science would be harnessed to quell any lingering desire for solitude by providing technologies to involve the population in ceaseless movement and acquisition. License, which is unbridled activity, would flourish. Morality would be swallowed up in the orchestration of sensations. Culture, where it had not disappeared, would become the object of indifference or derision, and education would teach meaningful skills for the practical life. Civilization would pulsate briefly in the throes of anarchy, lapse into the paralysis of overindulgence, and pass finally into the void beyond mind, taste, and decency. In short, a vulgar nation would be America—land of democracy, television, fast foods, cars, computers, high school, sexual liberation, Jerry Falwell, and The National Enquirer. But above all, land of rock 'n' roll. ROCK Rock is the music of triumphant vulgarity. Rock begins in America, and its roots are deep in the same soil that gives birth to the great experiment of vulgar democracy. In the egalitarian spirit of vulgarity, rock recognizes no class boundaries. Rich and poor, well-bred and lumpenproletariat alike listen to rock, and in the age of vulgarity, Harvard Square shares its musical taste with Peoria. In 1976, two social scientists at Temple University wanted to investigate students' physical and emotional reactions to rock. They had no difficulty locating an experimental group of fiftysix rock enthusiasts for their study, but when they tried to form a control group, "a significant sample could not be found who disliked hard rock music." In the thirty years since its emergence, rock has come to dominate America's musical taste. Ac-

10


cording to figures compiled by the Radio Information Center for the fall of 1983, rock and its accretions, soul and mellow rock, account for something like half of the AM and FM radio audiences in America's top 100 markets. By comparison, jazz had less than a one-percent share of the top 10 AM and FM markets and talk shows less than ten percent. In the same year, rock purchases accounted for thirty percent of all American record and tape sales and over fifty percent when rhythm and blues and soft rock are included in the figures. At the same time, jazz and classical music together made up only ten percent of the market. Rock is the music of the profanum volgos. As befits a vulgar music, rock is loud—"sheer noise," rock critic Nik Cohn called it. "It's noise we make, that's all. You could be kind and call it music," says Mick Jagger. Rock is the noisy fix that keeps the modern vulgarian going. "Things go better with rock," says Autograph: Turn up the radio— I want the feeling, Gotta give me some more. O,

And rock is utterly tasteless. Good taste is an avoidance of bodily crudity, a difficult passage through the material world carefully guided by transcendent reason. Rock's passionate vulgarity dispenses with good taste. In a song dedicated to "all you Gucci bag carriers out there," the Cramps tell the girlfriend, You got good taste, you got good taste, You come here and sit on my—lap. You and I know where it's at— Yum Yum. As the aborted slant-rhyme in the first couplet insists, in rock, taste is a vulgar physical fact, not a rational act of discrimination, and refinement disappears in sensuality. And rock is blunt, rude, and popular. Rock disdains polite or correct diction and rejects refined theorizing about society and politics. "We are the white crap that talks back," say the Fall. In describing themselves, they describe all rockers. Everything Hor-


11

ace abominated in the profane mob finds its glorification in rocknoise, passion, profanity, populism. Like the American culture of which it is the musical manifestation, rock has swept the globe. It holds the same firm grip on the musical preference of all the English-speaking countries that it does on America's. In his appraisal of contemporary West Germany, the historian Walter Laqueur describes young Germans adorned with stickers and buttons proclaiming their devotion to Black Sabbath, Elvis, Bob Dylan, and Led Zeppelin. Europe has now produced a phenomenon known as Euro-rock, which is sometimes successful enough to penetrate the rock markets of the United States and Britain as well as those of its native lands. Latin countries, once thought to be immune to Anglo-Saxon music because of their strong native traditions, are now capitulating, and a ten-day rock festival outside Rio de Janeiro in 1985 drew a million Brazilian rockers and a still larger TV audience to hear AC/DC and the Go-Gos. Japan has taken to American rock as easily as it did to baseball, and any number of rock groups have enriched themselves playing Tokyo's Budokan. Rock is not only a free-world phenomenon. Young East German rockers are as devout as their Western compatriots, and scholars estimate that in the German Democratic Republic the average young person between the ages of fourteen and twentyfive listens to two or three hours of rock a day. Poland teems with rockers, of which the members of the group Lady Pank are the most famous. In the U.S.S.R., young people from Riga to Baku join "rock bends," and though the government once banned rock, when it relaxed its restrictions and allowed blues guitarist and Ur-rocker B. B. King to make an unpublicized tour in 1979, there was "a near riot in the Georgian capital of Tblisi, where two people sat in each seat in the theater." The Soviet state tries to control rock by censorship, disallowing whatever it deems to be "too loud"—so Communist refinement tries to suppress capitalist vulgarity, but without success. Even the Chinese have relented and now permit Western rock bands to tour, and when Wham! played Peking in 1985, "at least three Chinese youths who started to boogie in the aisles were hauled away." "They should make 'Rock and Roll' the theme song of the

12


Voice of America," the critic Lester Bangs wrote about Lou Reed's classic lyric, and he could just as well have been discussing rock music as a whole: "The Cold War would be won, finished in a single blast of fine, fine music that could have all of Eastern Europe dancing in the streets for sheer joy." "Why does music from the West sound so damned good?" muses a Hungarian guitarist as he sits in a late-night cafe listening to American rock. Vulgarity in its rock incarnation is America's most powerful weapon and most successful export, an export with all the political and cultural significance of American vulgarity itself. Rock and vulgarity are well on the way to conquering the sensibilities of the entire planet. "Things go better with rock." Rock adapts itself to all electronic media from radio, where it started and now prevails, to television, where it supports perennials like American Bandstand and Solid Gold and integrates itself into all other programming, providing the canned credit-music even for sports and the news. Rock is equally comfortable on tape, record, and in live performance. Most self-respecting commercial movies now go into release with at least one rock song in their soundtracks. Rock in the house, rock in the car, rock in the streets with a Walkman or a blaster. Cleaned up, rock is suitable for elevators, dentists' offices, and supermarkets. One of Ann Landers's correspondents, in the hospital for minor surgery under a local anaesthetic, was surprised to discover that rock filled the air in the operating theater—to relax the surgeons and nurses, Ann explained. Rock is the ubiquitous ingredient of American popular culture. ROMANTICISM The triumph of vulgarity, of which rock is the manic evidence, did not occur against the united opposition of all cultivated opinion. Vulgarity has won its victory with the aid of refined Romanticism, and specifically with the support of Romantic pantheism. A great convulsion in world affairs has dislodged refinement and vulgarity from their classical moorings. This convulsion makes itself apparent as early as the seventeenth century, though its


13

roots may lie deeper in history. Economists call it the Industrial Revolution. Historians refer to it as the Age of Revolution. These are only different names for a single upheaval whose epicenter is Northern Europe and whose tremors are only now reaching the furthest corners of the globe. This upheaval continues today with unabated vigor. For the sake of convenience, I will call it by the name of its literary incarnation, Romanticism. Fifty years after the proclamation of the First Republic, the Romantic historian Jules Michelet still wrote of the French Revolution in the present tense, translating it from the deathbed of history to the vitality of myth. "The revolution is nothing but a tardy reaction of justice against the government of favor and the religion of grace." The Empire had memorialized itself in the friezes of the Arc de Triomphe, royalty in the palaces of the Louvre, religion in the masonry of Notre Dame. And the revolution? "The revolution has for her monument—empty space." Michelet was thinking of the Champs de Mars, where the French nation celebrated the first Quatorze Juillet in 1790 and four years later gathered under the leadership of Robespierre to solemnize the Republic in rites now directed to a new deity, the Supreme Being, who had ousted the Christian divinity of the ancien regime. But Michelet's "empty space," where the people once assembled to celebrate the overthrow of favor and grace, is also a memorial to vulgarity and Romanticism. Refinement, the mode in which favor and grace have apprehended the world, has always made a point of filling the imagined vacuum of vulgarity with reasoned civilization. The Romantic revolution proclaims that the apparent emptiness is in fact infinite energy that needs no refined tinkering. Two hundred years after the Revolution, rock, celebrating this energy, is the liturgy of a new religion of vacant monuments, the fulfillment of a devotion begun on the Champs de Mars. The Romantic revolution has made vulgarity an ineluctible issue for this century as well as the last. In politics, the vulgar mob has wrested power from its genteel rulers. Youth, which is noisy and uncontemplative, has usurped the cultural privileges of maturity. The heroes of Romantic civilization are no longer the disciplined patriots of Horace's odes but unrefined primitives

14


who pledge allegiance to self or the universe. In the West, the masses now have the leisure to indulge their vulgarity, and they have done so. The Romantic revolution has posed vulgarity as a central question for the modern period. But before there was rock, before vulgarity won its victory, men of culture had first to test the assumptions of Romanticism. For every Michelet with a commitment as deep as life to the Revolution, there were dozens of moderate Romantics devoted to the new sentiments of Rousseau or Shelley or Goethe but troubled that these sentiments seemed to conclude in a vulgarity that would destroy the very civilization out of which Romanticism had sprung. "Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away," says Oscar Wilde's aesthetic Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray. If as Lord Henry says the nineteenth century could not explain away vulgarity, it was not for want of trying. Its great writers found themselves caught between the inherent vulgarity of the Romanticism that shaped their lives and the implicit refinement of the culture they sought to defend. In Modern Painters, the fifth and last volume of which he finished in 1859—the year of Darwin's Origin of Species and Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat—John Ruskin meant to refocus the modern eye so it would see both art and life from a Romantic perspective. Wordsworth, whose poetry shaped his youthful sensibilities, and Turner, whose greatness Modern Painters was written to establish, were his inspirations, and out of his art criticism arose a fully devolped Romantic view of life whose revolutionary impact is attested by the fact that the first Members of Parliament elected by the British Labor Party named Ruskin's Unto This Last the work most influential in forming their political beliefs. But Ruskin called himself "a violent Tory of the old school; Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and Homer's," and the conflicting impulses of revision and conservation that dictated his work make Ruskin the perfect exemplar of the modern era's unresolved conflict with vulgarity. Ruskin saw that vulgarity must be a key term in the description of Western culture since the Renaissance, and in the last section of his last volume he gave himself over to a definition of


15

the word that he hoped would balance the claims of the Romantic revolution against the standards of classical decorum. Ostensibly, Ruskin invoked the term vulgarity in order to crush the seventeenth-century Dutch painters whom he abominated. In fact, he developed the term to describe what had happened to Western culture since its fall "into the rationalistic chasm" during the Renaissance. Painters like Steen, Wouvermans, and Teniers typify the disaster that has overtaken our culture. They are very vulgar in their paintings of lowlife characters, complete with pockmarked faces and red noses, who inhabit seedy taverns, or in their landscapes that revel in nature without spirit, and worse still, glory in the cow: Farthest savages had—and still have—their Great Spirit, or, in extremity, their feather idols, large-eyed; but here in Holland we have at last got utterly done with it all. Our only idol glitters dimly, in tangible shape of a pint pot, and all the incense offered thereto, comes out of a small censer or bowl at the end of a pipe. Of deities or virtues, angels, principalities, or powers, in the name of our ditches, no more. Let us have cattle, and market vegetables. And the worst of the Dutch vulgarians had been Rembrandt, whose browns and grays betray a sensibility "absolutely careless of all lovely living form." That Rembrandt is arguably the artist the twentieth-century most reveres would be for Ruskin conclusive evidence of the triumph of vulgarity. For Ruskin the Dutch painters are vulgar because they are common, earth-bound, devoid of any transcendent value to lift them above the level of cattle. So far there is nothing new in Ruskin's idea of vulgarity—Horace meant the same when he called the crowd in the forum the profane mob. But left here, in its traditional sense, this idea of vulgarity is too much of an aristocratic sneer for Ruskin. His own definition identifies two leading characteristics of vulgarity, both chosen to preserve classical values while revising the word's connotations to accord more nearly with Romantic passion. First, Ruskin deals with the class issue that lurks behind the

16


term vulgarity. As a champion of Wordsworth and the credo of Romantic sensibility, Ruskin was half in love with vulgarity, at least vulgarity as the old world had defined it. He could not dismiss the lower classes as "the vulgar" and still be true to the conviction which he was forming at the time he was writing Modern Painters that ordinary men in their communal labors can express the divine. By the time Ruskin wrote the last volume of Modern Painters he had cast himself in the role of a cultural missionary, preaching to audiences who had no instinctive sense of the key terms of refined discourse—he had begun lecturing at the Working Men's College in London as early as 1854. And so Ruskin had to revise the inherited idea of vulgarity to exclude its grosser class biases. According to Ruskin, vulgarity is the opposite of that quality which defines a gentleman. A gentleman is a creature of good breeding—literally of good breeding, as in animal husbandry. As a result of domestic selection practiced for centuries, the English of the nineteenth century had raised up a variety of human called gentlemen with both a "fineness of structure in the body . . . and ... of the mind," but so-called common people may be gentlemen if they have had the same breeding as the real itemjust as a dalmatian without a pedigree may be as genetically genuine as one with the right papers. For Ruskin, anyone may be vulgar, anyone refined. Vulgarity and refinement come to be embodied in different classes, but the classes are secondary. They are merely the symbols of what we would call a genetic disposition in people, and in Lamarkian fashion Ruskin believed that this disposition could be improved by external culture and then transmitted to one's progeny—what we might call using education as a means of genetic engineering. Ruskin wants it both ways. He cannot lapse into the supercilious class bias that goes with the traditional definition of vulgarity because he is a friend to labor and its aspirations, but he cannot surrender what he considers to be noble and pure in the classical tradition because he is a lover of the beautiful. The result is his hybrid redefinition of vulgarity—an excellent example of the tergiversations about common life and cultural transcen-


17

dence that typify nineteenth-century thought, as Wilde recognized. But Ruskin's most important distinction between vulgarity and refinement is made by way of "sensitiveness." Since vulgarity is an internal matter, we must distinguish between the gentleman and the vulgarian not by "rightness of moral conduct, but in sensitiveness." "A perfect gentleman," he says, "is never reserved, but sweetly and entirely open." He is all kindness and mercy. He is complete in sympathy. "The tears have never been out of his eyes," is Ruskin's memorable phrase. "He feels habitually, . . . and he simply feels rightly on all occasions." Ruskin makes a radical departure from the traditional notion of vulgarity when he insists on feeling. The gentleman "feels habitually"—the vulgarian feels not at all. Nothing in this definition of the gentleman hints at reason or restraint. Quite the contrary, the gentleman has no reserve at all. He is instinctively open. Parts of this rhapsody on the gentleman might be describing the perfect race horse. No wonder Ruskin felt he had to redefine vulgarity. His gentleman often sounds remarkably like the classical vulgarian, who was a creature given over to his animal impulses. Again, Ruskin wants it both ways. He praised Giorgione for painting with a perfect intellect that conquered evil and rose "beyond it into the magnificence of rest"—a classical and transcendent ideal of painting. But he appreciated Titian because he "saw that sensual passion in man was, not only a fact, but a Divine fact; the human creature, though the highest of animals, was, nevertheless, a perfect animal, and his happiness, health, and nobleness, depended on the due power of every animal passion." It is possible to reconcile Ruskin's various denunciations and exaltations of the passions. God made man first and foremost a passionate animal. When man acts openly, and naturally, he is most passionate, that is, most natural, that is, most divine. The vulgarian denies his passions, retreats into himself, and therefore insults his Creator, who gave him passion as a way of finding the transcendent beauty behind the veil of this world. The natural man seeks peace and rest through his passion for beauty. But in

18


making this definition of vulgarity, Ruskin stood the word on its head and made it signify an absence instead of an indulgence of passion, as the classical world had it. Ruskin had an almost religious and certainly a Romantic commitment to many of the things the classical definition of vulgarity would have relegated to scorn. His championship of the Pre-Raphaelites, who today are once again studied seriously but only a few years ago were regarded as camp, is evidence to many, both in his time and our own, of how far his taste inclined to things classically vulgar. Ruskin admired the Pre-Raphaelites because of their "brilliant hues," the very thing that discriminating taste finds vulgar in their work. Behind Ruskin's definition of vulgarity lies a grand and greedy ambition—it is the ambition of all concerned taste in a century torn by the competing demands of revolution and decorum—nothing less than a union of the opposed worlds of Romantic and classical aesthetics, of body and soul, of spleen and ideal. The equilibrium between working-class virtue and aristocratic refinement, between animal and angel, that was implied by Ruskin's idea of vulgarity was too delicate to survive. But Ruskin changed the critical vocabulary in a permanent way. Oscar Wilde, who had been Ruskin's student at Oxford, acquired his teacher's obsession with vulgarity. He certainly borrowed from Ruskin the word itself, which comes up again and again in Wilde's work, as if he were perpetually writing a commentary on Modern Painters. In Dorian Gray, Lord Henry tells Dorian, Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations.

Wilde followed Ruskin in making the noble qualities that are the opposites of vulgarity passionate and emotional, not rational and restrained. Like Ruskin's, his idea of vulgarity is an aesthetic marker first, and only incidentally an element of class. But in embracing Ruskin's Romantic passion, Wilde ignored his classi-


19

cal idealism. The synthesis had been too fragile, and though Wilde is the self-proclaimed archenemy of vulgarity, in his work the vulgar wins a signal victory as Romantic sensibility is purged of the last remnant of reasoned classical restraint. When the attainment of "new sensations" becomes the highest value, the vulgar self becomes the final arbiter of all standards. In the same year in which Ruskin published the last volume of Modern Painters, an American prepared his own sentiments on vulgarity for the third edition of Leaves of Grass: The vulgar and the refined, what you call sin and what you call goodness, to think how wide a difference, To think the difference will still continue to others, yet we lie beyond the difference. Walt Whitman's America, lying "beyond the difference," accepts vulgarity as the equal of refinement. Ruskin had wanted to rise above vulgarity into "the magnificence of rest." Whitman celebrates the noise of the universe and is content "to sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." Ruskin had wanted to train the sensibilities for gentility. Whitman accepts the universe as he finds it: "I and this mystery here we stand." Whitman is the prophet of vulgarity, and Leaves of Grass is its bible. His poetry expounds a philosophy that for the first time in modern history unequivocally vindicates "what is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest"—all of which, Whitman says, "is me." PANTHEISM Whitman arrived at his vindication of vulgarity by taking the pantheist bias of Romanticism, which Ruskin had tried to supress or temper with decorum, to its unadulterated conclusion. Pantheism is as old as philosophy, and every age has had its believers. They have often been martyred for their creed. In the ninth century, the medieval church condemned the philosopher Erigena, who delighted in pantheistic paradoxes such as the proposition that God is not only what creates and is not created but also what does not create and is not created. According to legend Erigena died when his students stabbed him with their

20


pens, another tribute to the popularity of pantheism before the modern era. The Counter-Reformation burned Bruno at the stake in 1600 for advocating the pantheist doctrine that God is the unity of an infinite universe. Orthodox Islam routinely denounced the pantheism of the Sufis, whose prophet Hallaj was executed in Baghdad for declaring "I am God." Christian orthodoxy reviled, and the Jewish synagogue excommunicated Spinoza, who survived his assertion of an infinite God as the sole constituent of the universe only because of the toleration of the seventeenthcentury Dutch government. As late as 1864, Pope Pius IX, in his Syllabus of Errors, listed the pantheist creed that "there exists no Divine Power, Supreme Being, Wisdom and Providence distinct from the universe" as the first heresy to be anathematized by true Christians. As these examples demonstrate, pantheism has been a dangerous and esoteric profession, and the Romantic period is distinguished from what precedes it, first because it has produced not one or two but a host of pantheists, and second because their ideas have gradually usurped the place of established opinion. Heretical pantheism is the orthodoxy of modern culture, a revolution in thought for which there is no precedent. That Whitman could retail a fully developed pantheist system and die in bed honored by millions as the good, gray poet betokens a startling alteration in the way the world thinks. It is amusing to observe the West adopting a vulgar edition of Eastern pantheism at the very moment the East is busily scuttling its native Hindu and Buddhist pantheisms in favor of Western rationalism. "Who, if not Heraclitus, was the great thinker who first realized that men are flames and that things are processes?" asks Karl Popper. Modern science, whose spirit the philosophy of Popper describes, looks back to the pre-Socratic Heraclitus as a spiritual founder. In the surviving fragments of Heraclitus' philosophy, the modern era finds a blueprint for the pantheism that satisfies its conflicting Romantic yearnings for primitive freedom and scientific discipline, for individual liberty and universal order, for perfect selfhood and absolute godhead. Because Heracli-


21

tus prefigures Romantic pantheism, his philosophy is the best prologue to modern vulgarity. The world is constantly changing, says Heraclitus, and I would be foolish to deny my only source of evidence for this change, my senses. A close examination of my senses tells me that neither I nor anything in the world is the same from minute to minute, and no two of my perceptions are ever identical: "The sun is new each day." I never step twice in the same river. It changes, and if it did not, my perception of it changes. The universe is new every second, and the things in it are infinite. Names are always misleading because by describing disparate aspects of single process, they encouarge us to regard life as fragmentary and obscure the whole. The road up and the road down are the same road. The universe is "an everlasting fire," Heraclitus' way of describing the infinite process of which the variety of events is the by-product. The process itself, unseen, ceaseless, and hidden from our private understanding, is the unifying element of all events. In this process, all the apparent contradictions and disharmonies of the changing world are useful and necessary. Tradition records Heraclitus as a misanthrope who retreated to the hills above his native Ephesus and disdained the vulgar mob in the city that, typically, misconstrued and distrusted his protopantheist riddles. His own remarks stress that ordinary folk can never understand the totality of process, "which loves to hide itself." But the triumph of vulgarity begins with his brand of pantheism anyway. Heraclitus' incipient pantheism takes away the possibility of transcendence. There is nowhere I can go to escape from process, and no part of process is more special than any other. "God is day/night, winter/summer, war/peace, satiety/ hunger." Everything is equally common and equally special, and the distinction between vulgarity and refinement crashes into ruin. Heraclitus' philosophy stresses sensation. "The things that can be seen, heard, and perceived—I prefer these," he says. And Heraclitus goes on to castigate those who believe they have a privileged access to transcendent wisdom: "although the system is common, the many live as if they had private understanding." Heraclitus clears the ground for a defense of vulgarity, and not

22


surprisingly, in our vulgar era he is the pre-Socratic on whom a host of modern disciplines converge. Heraclitus formulated his philosophy five centuries before the Christian era, but the English word used to describe it is a coinage from the dawn of the Romantic era, a modern word for a modern need. The term pantheism came into its own with the publication in 1720 of John Toland's Pantheisticon. Toland deserves a footnote in the history of pantheism and an entry in the encyclopedia of vulgarity. Born poor and Irish, he subsisted by finding patrons among respectable British protestants, many of them nobles. What he had to offer them was a slender talent in disputation in a period when religious or political controversy was a sport played by aristocratic patrons speaking through the pamphlets of their clients. In these contests, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe were the champions, but there was ample employment for second-stringers like Toland. But Toland was too daft to be patronized with any success. Instead of producing solid works of rational piety or pamphlets of factional irony, the items most prized in eighteenth-century disputation, he attacked the legitimacy of the New Testament canon and explored the religion of the ancient Celts. Had he been a better scholar or a man of independent means, he might have maintained the high ground of intellectual freedom against opponents who denounced his religious opinions as heterodox. But he was a mischievous dilettante with a penchant, like all pantheists, for espousing views which were necessarily offensive to the sober dogma and opinion of his employers. For his pains, he earned a humbling couplet in Pope's Essay on Man, all the more humiliating for being deleted in the finished version. Two centuries earlier the establishment would have burned him as a heretic; two centuries later it would have made him a professor of comparative religion in a California university. In the rational Protestant climate of early eighteenth-century Britain, he was merely ignored to death. He produced his increasingly bizarre religious pamphlets for a dwindling audience and died in genteel poverty in 1722. Pantheisticon, or the Liturgy of the Socratic Fraternity, is the


23

oddest of Toland's productions. In it, he imagines that eighteenthcentury British society really advocates two religions. Christianity is the worship of the masses and supports the social order of the ignorant. But the educated maintain a more enlightened worship which they are compelled to conduct secretly for fear of bewildering the credulous multitude. At their symposia, the initiate profess pantheism and worship according to a Heraclitean liturgy. The world is "an everlasting Circulation" which is infinite and eternal, so that there are "innumerable earths" in which all is connected. "Every Thing in the Earth is organic." In Pantheisticon Toland satirized a devout Protestant England ruled by a pagan Whig aristocracy, and the book was accordingly greeted as a public scandal. But more than this, Pantheisticon anticipates the vulgar pantheism of the modern era, right down to its longing for the organic and its wonderment at the "billions and billions" of stars that comprise Carl Sagan's scientific universe. "Infinite" and "organic" were uncouth concepts to the finite and orderly sensibilities of early eighteenth-century Britons eager by means of transcendent values to distinguish between truth and falsehood. But for Toland and his modern successors, there are no transcendent values, and all ideas are equally valid. The truth is infinite and comprehensive, not narrow and exclusive. The best religion is eclecticism taken to its limit. The triumph of vulgarity has merely reversed the situation imagined by Toland. Now pantheism is the worship of the masses, and Christianity is the clandestine practice of an elite fraternity. Any established ideology has much to fear from pantheism, and the indignation which greeted Toland's book ought not to have surprised him. Pantheism is a garbage-pail philosophy, indiscriminately mixing scraps of everything. Fine distinctions between right and wrong, high and low, true and false, the worthy and unworthy, disappear in pantheism's tolerant and eclectic one that refuses to scorn any particular of the many. The pantheist may be fascinated or bemused by the castes, religions, and ethics of a various world, but he denies to each in turn transcendent validity. There is no transcendent validity. There is only the swarming many making up the one. Pantheism is necessarily vul-

24


gar because it rejects the transcendence from which refinement springs, because it delights in the noisy confusion of life, and because it sacrifices discrimination to eclecticism. The pantheist himself often recoils from the vulgar consequences of his creed and seeks to escape them by a retreat into what philosophers call monism, which holds that though the universe is made up of infinite and equal events, our attention should be directed to the single mystery that unifies them. This mystery is usually called God. By emphasizing the single principle that unites infinity, the monist achieves a kind of transcendence, a single standard beyond common experience that can be used as the basis of judgment and discrimination. Monism is the refined version of pantheism, and before the era of vulgar Romanticism, pantheists from Parmenides to Spinoza took refuge in it. The monist wants to have and eat his cake. He begins with an infinite and indiscriminate universe but ends in a God who preserves all the transcendent values of morality, art, and politics. So the Sufi can be a pantheist and still believe in Allah and his unique law. So in his private notebooks Bishop Berkeley acknowledged that according to his pantheist idealism, "All things in the Scriptures which side with the Vulgar against the learned side with me also. I side in all things with the Mob," but in his public philosophy he maintained an elitist orthodoxy that preserved the genteel values of eighteenth-century society. The monist retains in his refined philosophy all the categories, like tragedy, morality, art, religion, and politics, that depend on transcendent values and therefore would have been obliterated in pure pantheism, and his desire to preserve these untouched by vulgarity is his motive for becoming a monist in the first place. Coleridge, the Romantic who took the most pains to understand the workings of pantheism, could stomach the refined monist's notion that "God is All," but was disgusted by the vulgar pantheist proposition "that this all constituted God." The vulgarian is precisely the person who does not share Coleridge's qualms. In his pure pantheism, the vulgarian rejects any transcendent principle beyond the multiplicity of life, and since the universe is now exclusively comprised of its events, it follows


25

that the universe converges on what apprehends these events, namely "me." Like so many Romantics, Coleridge was both entranced by pantheism and revolted by its vulgar potential to be a self-centered creed devoid of fixed moral standards. He satirized its tendencies in his mock ode on the philosophy of the German pantheist Fichte: I of the world's whole Lexicon the root! Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight The genitive and ablative to boot! The accusative of wrong, the nominative of right, And in all cases the case absolute!

After much study, Coleridge rejected all pantheism, but the Romantic era had made it available, and popular culture has adopted pantheism's purest, most vulgar version, the version advocated by Whitman, whose poetry espouses exactly the vulgar self-centeredness Coleridge ridiculed. Only for lack of a better term can pantheism be called a philosophy. It is not truly a philosophy or a religion or an ideology because it professes to include all philosophies, religions, and ideologies. In the language of logic, pantheism asserts that class which is a member of all classes, includes all classes, is identical with every class and also with each of its members, and both is and is not a member of itself. Whitman identifies this class with the "me" of his poetry, and before him Fichte had equated it with the "self" of his philosophy. In the Romantic era the pantheist ranks have flourished, and Whitman is only their purest spokesman. Pantheism naturally encompasses all the disparate energies loosed by the Romantic revolution. It embraces the mass, propounds the wholeness of the universe, makes room for all paradoxical contraries, and reveres the energy of process. The homemade pantheistic theosophies that characterize the modern era began to appear just after Toland's time. Swedenborg began publishing his Arcana coelestia in 1749, and Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell appeared some fifty years later. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Hegel reduced the nebulous pantheism of Romantic poetry to a monistic system that now provides the philosophical framework

26


for Marxism. Coleridge in England and Goethe in Germany worried through the relation of culture to the new pantheism. In the nineteenth century, pantheism was in the air, and easily caught. Bismarck, who didn't like to read philosophy, nevertheless left school "as a Pantheist" at about the same time the young Whitman was assembling his own pantheism out of the fragments of Quaker piety, democratic radicalism, and five years of formal education. But Bismarck gave up his pantheism for diplomacy—never a pantheist's calling. Hegel's philosophy is more abstruse than even the medieval pantheism of Erigena, and Blake's pantheist visions were accounted the work of an isolated madman. And almost to a one, the European pantheists took refuge in the refinements of monism, which diluted the purity of their creed. Only in America could pantheism find not just its voice but its first mass audience, and Whitman's pantheism is still alive and well in the substance of American popular culture. In Whitman's America the virtues of pantheism redeem the vices of vulgarity. Vulgarity is common—so are leaves of grass. The pantheist has a natural affection for grass. Toland had already said the spire of grass might be called a mystery, and Whitman merely took the point to its conclusion in the title of his never-ending poem. The refined seek to rise above the ubiquitous democracy of the grass, but Whitman answers, "I exist as I am, that is enough." The transcendentalist looks for a God or a truth above common experience to guide him. Whitman's reply is the more devastating for being funny: "It is middling well as far as it goes, but is that all?" The man of refinement suffers the constant misery of unrealized idealism. The American vulgarian looks at the same universe and sees only happiness: "It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness." Happiness is Fate. For Whitman, the political form of the commonwealth of Happiness is democracy and its boundaries are the universe. Work and sex are the healthy diet of this democratic universe, and sensation is its common language. There is no evil in the pantheist democracy because the transcendent vantage to distinguish good and evil has been gobbled up in the whole. Every act,


27

no matter how loathsome by traditional standards, is valid, since the one knows itself by assuming the infinite forms of the many. To understand this process is "to live beyond the difference" between good and evil, refinement and vulgarity. Whitman's democracy is Vulgaria by another name. Men of cultivation scorn vulgar pantheism. They are trained to scorn it. Before the West had learned to write, Homer had taught it to despise the vulgar. And pantheism in its purest form has suffered a similar fate, as might be expected of a creed whose foundation is an appreciation of vulgarity. It is time pantheism and vulgarity received their apology. Vulgar pantheism is abysmally indiscriminate—or said another way, it is infinitely tolerant. The vulgar pantheist finds room in his universe for the atheist and the witchdoctor as well as the Pope and the rabbi. Professing no one religion, he accepts and rejects them all. Sectarians—that is, almost everybody—disdain this easy receptivity, and one of the sins of pantheism is its refusal to be drawn into the debilitating conflicts between antagonists each possessed of a partial truth. Vulgar pantheism is viciously cheap—or put another way, it appreciates life. The pantheist finds as much to admire in the design of a Chevy as in the proportions of the Parthenon. He would as soon eat at McDonald's as at Lutece. He lacks discrimination, which is another way of saying he's grateful to be alive in this particular universe and not some other. Life is common, and a view of it that delights in the humble routines of ordinary existence has something to recommend it. Vulgar pantheism is selfish and sensuous—or said another way, it is pragmatic and pleasant. Britain's musical Gang of Four remind us that Conrad said, "We live as we dream—alone." If Conrad is right, who would not wish to make his isolation infinite and infinitely pleasurable? Vulgar pantheism acknowledges as neutral fact what so many have been at pains to condemn as sybaritic narcissicism: that we live in a universe of sensual experience of which I am the center and infinite circumference. By this admission, pantheism gains in honesty what it sheds in guilt. Traditionalists will dispute whether the guilt can or should be disposed of. The pantheist embraces their objection with the

28


benign tolerance of his creed. The world must judge who does better. Vulgar pantheism is frivolous—or put another way, it has a sense of humor. The Argentinian pantheist Jorge Luis Borges sees the universe as a game of infinitely variable combinations played by infinitely shifting rules. Such a universe may contain tragedies but can never be tragic. The pantheist is a sports enthusiast. His virtues are compassion for each state of existence, exhilarated sympathy for the energy of process, and genial acceptance of infinity's paradoxes. Allen Ginsberg, Whitman's most devoted disciple, pictures the master in "A Supermarket in California": I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. "A Supermarket in California" is a fitting memorial to Whitman, and the tribute offered to him by his home town of Huntington, Long Island, is more apt than ridiculous. In Huntington the good gray poet is remembered in the Walt Whitman Shopping Mall. The vast spaces of retail outlets are the temples of American pantheism, presided over not by some mere trinity or Egyptian ennead, but by an infinite variety of consumer goods that reflect but do not exhaust the multiplicity of the changing universe. The deities of the supermarket hide in no penetralium, as do the refined gods of Delphi or Jerusalem. They parade their labels for all to see, and each worshipper approaches them as an equal without the intercession of shaman or priest. The liturgy mirrors universal process and continues without end. The temple itself is low, box-like, built in a day to disappear in a day. Its transience is only another reminder of a universe whose one unchanging principle is change, whose constituent parts are common. The worshippers do not believe they are worshipping, and if they did, pantheism would have failed, since in its most essential points it rejects the transcendent separation of religion and ordinary activity. The distinctions between consumer and consumed, between the goods on the shelves and the gods in the aisles, dis-


29

solves to nothingness, and the shopper emerges from K-Mart or Piggly-Wiggly as deeply imbued with the ideology of his culture as the medieval peasant reeling into the sunlight from the aromatic glooms of Chartes or Salisbury. America has perfected the rites of vulgar Romantic pantheism. It gives them to an astonished world. And the music of its ritual is rock.

CHAPTER TWO

I AM WHITE, BUT O, MY SOUL IS BLACK The Origins of Rock in the Romantic Primitive

Rock begins in the imposition of white Romantic myth on black Southern music. An investigation of rock's origins shows that Romanticism is a living popular creed, not a superannuated artistic movement; that this creed, originally the province of an educated minority, is now by mutation the ideological currency of the Western masses; and that beneath the primitive rhythms of rock is a vulgar pantheism, the unacknowledged mass creed of which Romanticism and its popular music are harbingers. What follows is the myth of rock's black origins as distilled from sources as varied as scholarly monographs on the art of Rob Dylan and mass-market biographies of Elvis. THE MYTH Everyone knows how rock began in Africa. The white man plundered the villages of the Wolof, the Ibo, and the Yoruba and carried their peaceful inhabitants to captivity in the New World. On the banks of the Mississippi, bereft of their native culture, the slaves recreated in the sweat of bondage the music they had enjoyed by the Congo or the Senegal. It was a music of strings and percussion, of exotic instruments like the balafo, ancestor to the 30

I Am White, but O, My Soul Is Black

31

xylophone and the steel drum. More than this, it was a music that combined the sensuous ecstasies of their uncontaminated spirits with the stifled pains of their brutal oppression. Heartfelt and righteous, the music of slavery could no more be denied than the injustice of the institution from which it sprang, and while the white man had dominion over their bodies, the slaves' rhythms infiltrated and finally overwhelmed the souls of their masters. The infiltration began years before Stephen Foster's adaptation of a black folk melody, "Old Folks at Home," became the favorite tune of antebellum America in the 1850s. It continued in the ascendancy of ragtime and jazz, of blues and soul. The Delta is the root and the Mississippi the stem for the flowering of African music in America. In 1897, a white bandleader, William Krell, published "Mississippi Rag" in Chicago. It was the first use in print of the term "rag," and its title and history give an abbreviated history of black musical influence in America: nurtured in the Delta, bucking the flow of the river to move north, adopted by the white working classes in the industrial heartland of the midwest, and then conquering the popular taste of the nation. Rock followed this same route. It came out of the heart of the old Confederacy and moved up the river, then on to the world. But the beginning was gritty. Before rock, there was white music and there was black music. White music was sung by Frank Sinatra, Patti Page, and the Andrews Sisters. It emanated from a major industry efficiently promoted by an international media network centered in capitalist New York. Black music was sung by Howlin' Wolf, Furry Lewis, and Ma Rainey. It was an organic product compounded of slavery, cotton, and sour mash, and its center was Beale Street. Barely a step away from the cotton fields, it was funky, and commercially available only through the efforts of a handful of nickel-and-dime white entrepreneurs who made their livelihood peddling black music to an impoverished race market. The greatest of these was Sam Phillips. Sam Phillips had the ideal credentials to be the instigator of the rock revolution. He was born in Alabama and reared among the cotton fields. He grew up with a passion for the black music

32


that was an integral part of agricultural life in the Delta and for the people that made it. He got a job as a deejay in Memphis and went on in 1952 to found his own company to record and promote the black music of the Delta—which according to Tennessee Williams began in the lobby of Memphis's Peabody Hotel, where Phillips had worked announcing local dance bands. He called his recording company Sun Records and put out for the black market rhythm-and-blues songs by obscure black talents like B.B. King, Ike Turner, and Junior Parker. It was the dawn of a new era. Had Sam Phillips done no more than cultivate a taste for the louche black music of the Delta, he would have passed into the oblivion then reserved for the artists he recorded. The secret of Phillips's success was not his devotion to black genius but his appreciation of white taste, for which Sun Records produced a number of country and rockabilly classics. Phillips's use of black rhythm merely extended his mastery of white musical predilections, and he is the source of the most famous remark ever made about rock, made before there was rock: "If I could find a white boy who could sing like a nigger, I could make a million dollars." Phillips had not only grown up with Delta blacks, he had grown up with Delta whites—poor white trash, rednecks, good ole boys. In him the folk and country conventions of the Anglo-Saxon pioneers converged on the African rhythms of the Delta slaves, a conjunction facilitated by generous amounts of greed. Phillips found his white boy in Elvis Presley. Nineteen-year-old Elvis cut his first professional record for Phillips on July 6, 1954, a date that will live forever as the day on which rock began. The Supreme Court had handed down its Brown v. Board of Education decision six weeks earlier. Elvis's Sun Sessions are a more accurate reflection of the current sweeping across America. The road by which black music would be engrafted on white taste had already been prepared. It was the usual route—up the Mississippi to the cities of the Midwest. In the same year that Phillips founded Sun Records, Alan Freed, a deejay on WJW in Cleveland, discovered that his white teenage audience went wild for black records never before programmed for white lis-


33

teners—songs like the 1951 release "Sixty Minute Man" by Clyde McPhatter and the Dominoes. Freed's new programming began the biggest crossover since Moses parted the Red Sea. After him, millions of teenagers switched their musical allegiance from white to black rhythms. He and Phillips independently realized that white America was eager to be swept away on a tide of African rhythm, and they stood ready to supply what the market demanded: imitation black rhythm on genuine white hips in Phillips's case, genuine black rhythm over imitation white programming in Freed's. The new African sound gradually found its way onto the white music charts, displacing the stars of the industry. In the mid-1950s, Mitch Miller told Rosemary Clooney not to worry—rock would be gone in six months. Rosemary who? THANK YOU FOR TALKIN' TO ME AFRICA This is the canonical version of the birth of rock. It should be penned on vellum and introduced by an uncial embroidered in ebony and ivory, platinum and gold. What belief in the incarnation of Jesus is to a Christian, devotion to this myth of black origins is to the rocker. Acceptance of the myth is the irreducible dogmatic minimum that defines rock orthodoxy. A myth may be historically true or false. Whether Jesus was really born in a stable in Bethlehem is of no interest to the worshipper who has accepted the story on a level of faith indifferent to fact. It is the same with the myths of rock. The true believer finds a satisfaction in them that would withstand the animadversions of a thousand pedants. These myths are more real than whatever reality might be, and for the critic, easier to describe. Truth, reality, and historical accuracy are terms with little meaning to a rocker absorbed in a pantheism that reduces these concepts to comedy. The history of rock is its myths. The great rock groups have duplicated the myth of black origins in their own fabulous histories. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones began their careers doing cover versions of American rhythm and blues. Like the great bluesmen before them, rock heroes are supposed to have begun in obscurity and deprivation, playing for pennies in dank clubs reeking of piss and stale beer.

34


The stories of the earliest American rockers are in legend all intertwined with black music. Bill Haley, once credited with the first rock hit, the 1954 "Rock Around the Clock," got turned around musically after he heard Jackie Brenston's 1951 rhythmand-blues hit "Rocket 88"—pure black product on the all-black Chess recording label. According to the 1978 film of his life, Buddy Holly of Lubbock, Texas, got his big break when he played New York's all-black Apollo Theater on 125th Street—he had so successfully assimilated the black sound that his audience was amazed to discover the performer they had only heard on record or radio was a white boy. When they pioneered the heavymetal sound early in the 1960s, the Yardbirds did so by appropriating Chicago blues pieces like Gene McDaniels's "I'm a Man." More recent rock groups continue to pay honor to the myth of rock origins. The New York Dolls, protopunks, recorded McDaniels's "Pills." Dexy's Midnight Runners, who have adapted the folk music of their native Ireland to the pulse of rock, introduce themselves as "the Celtic Soulbrothers." David Byrne and Brian Eno went their predecessors one better when on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts they claimed not just the Delta but Africa itself for their inspiration by way of Amos Tutuola's folk novel of life among the Yoruba of Nigeria, from which their album takes its name. Reverence for rock's black roots is the litmus test of rock orthodoxy and applies to talent and no-talent alike. In their formative stage, the Velvet Underground, who like all great rock bands began by doing covers of black classics like Chuck Berry's "Carol" and "Little Queenie," acquired their drummer Maureen Tucker because of her devotion to the rhythm-and-blues sound of the 1950s. Lou Reed explains, "She worked as a computer keypuncher and when she'd come home at five she'd put on Bo Diddley records and play every night from five to twelve, so we figured she'd be the perfect drummer and she was." The shibboleth of black sound is not reserved only for the great. Patti Smythe, the white singer for the innocuous group Scandal that reached the charts in 1984 with "Warrior," a song whose audience is white suburban teenagers, says, "The real roots of my music is r and b-Gladys Knight, Aretha Franklin, Al Green." No rock


35

history, however humble, would be complete without a confession of black obligation. The historians of rock have been quick to follow the lead of the stars upon which they gaze. Greil Marcus is the St. Luke of the myth of rock's African origins, offering it up with undisguised piety as the central revelation of Mystery Train. The distinguished musicologist Wilfred Mellers locates the origins of the Beatles' music "in the most primitive forms of Negro blues" and "a rediscovery of orgiastic magic," and he calls Bob Dylan a "white Negro." Charles Hamm, author of the standard history of American music, begins his chapter on rock with a laconic summary of orthodoxy: "Rock 'n' roll was, first of all, an interracial music." Rock and Roll is Rhythm and Blues, White Boy Singin the Blues—the titles of rock criticism confirm the universality of the dogma. Rock is popular music that consciously borrows from the American rhythm-and-blues tradition. This is a necessary if not a sufficient condition for the existence of rock. In some cases, the borrowing has been purely exploitative, as when Bill Haley recorded versions of black rhythm and blues carefully edited of any sexual innuendo likely to offend white ears. In most cases the borrowing has been an act of homage, as when Jim Morrison sings Willie Dixon's "Backdoor Man." But the rocker does not have to record old blues. He can honor the black tradition by a gesture or a reference, or he can borrow from music that borrows from blues. In the golden days of Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco's two famous and lily-white bands acknowledged their debt to black America not only by recording straight blues, as did the Doors or the Stones, but in the case of the Jefferson Airplane by hiring Papa John Creach, an old black fiddle player, or in the case of the Grateful Dead by recording songs like "U.S. Blues" that retain the name if not the nature of their putative black sources. The alleged reason for borrowing a black song will determine how rock purists rank the music borrowed: exploitation and tokenism are bad, homage and empathy are good. But the aesthetics or morality of the choice is of no importance to the definition of the genre, which merely demands a devotion to rock's black roots.

36


That the most prosperous civilization in the history of mankind should in the fullness of its power ascribe its popular music to the influence of an oppressed African minority atrophying among the farmland of its poorest economic sector is at first blush improbable. And yet within ten years of Elvis's legendary recording session at Sun Records rock had become the popular music of America, and Britain as well, and the elderly bluesmen who had thought to live out their days in ragged obscurity suddenly found themselves objects of white veneration. The bluesman Furry Lewis, the wry first citizen of Beale Street whom fellow Tennessean and bluesman Brownie McGhee said wouldn't talk to white people, found himself sitting next to Ed McMahon on the Johnny Carson show, a translation indicative of the larger shift in which black music moved from the race records of the ghettoes and the Southern fringes to the center of American popular taste, Successes of this type are often best described by their detractors, just as Dr. Johnson's strictures on Paradise Lost offer the surest introduction to the glories of Milton's poetry. The early opponents of rock accurately described its essence. In 1956, Asa E. ("Ace") Carter, self-appointed leader of the North Alabama Citizens Council, called on concerned whites to stamp out rock because it is "the basic heavy beat of Negroes. It appeals to the base of man, brings out animalism and vulgarity." Mr. Carter was right in every respect and is in complete accord with the champions of rock, only parting company with them in his moral assessment of the form. Rock is first, last, and always a musical return to the primitive. When white America turned to black rhythm and blues for its popular music, it embraced "animalism and vulgarity" as virtues. It did so wilfully and selectively. FIND ME A PRIMITIVE MAN Rousseau is usually cited as the greatest of those who celebrated the innocent strength of the Noble Savage, but in fact the glorification of the primitive was well under way a hundred years before the publication of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality in 1755. But Rousseau dressed the primitive up in the

7 Am White, but O, My Soul Is Black

37

sentimental attire it has worn since, and from his time dates the veneration of children, Indians, animals, and other life forms thought to be close to the source of being, like the humanist proletarians of Marx's Utopian communism. The correspondence between the Romantic myth of the primitive and the events of Western history is by no means simple. While the American public adopted the Indian head as a proud emblem for its coinage and elevated Longfellow's Hiawatha to the status of a national classic, General Sheridan, confronting the Noble Savage on the prairies, reflected that the only good Indians he had ever seen were dead. The idea of the primitive has nonetheless proved resistant to repeated doses of fact and continues to thrive in our own century. The novels of D. H. Lawrence are built on it. The Plumed Serpent, in its fervid apotheosis of "the dark-faced natives, with their strange, soft flame of life wheeling upon a dark void" and its equally passionate evisceration of Christian morality, embodies the Romantic idea of the primitive, and the Noble Savage lives on in crude popularizations like Carlos Casteneda's Don Juan novels and in reputable anthropological fictions like Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa or Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques. Primitives themselves care nothing for the myth of the primitive. Children wish to grow up, native peoples crave washing machines, the proletariat happily barters its revolutionary purity for membership in the comfortable middle classes. The myth of the primitive is the creation of a Western minority and coeval with the industrial era, of which it is the pastoral reflection. Early in its career, the myth was the exclusive property of poets and intellectuals, but for at least two hundred years the West has also spawned popular incarnations of the Noble Savage, from James Fenimore Cooper's Uncas through Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan and on to the comic-book hero Conan the Barbarian. Mass audiences have perhaps been more adept than their erudite contemporaries in separating mythic convention from social actuality, and popular depictions of wise children, dignified Indians, and peaceful natives have not arrested the erosion of childhood, the degradation of the North American tribes, or the exploitation of the jungles where the anthropologists have found their noble

38


specimens. In practice the ennobled primitive has been for us an idea rather than a fact—and that idea the product of two thousand years of literate culture. Rock adopts the Romantic notion of the primitive as the cornerstone of its mythology and takes over the Romantic conventions associated with it. In this, rock is another stage in the progress of Romanticism. But rock goes two extra steps. Rock has made Romanticism available in a populist formula more successful than anything achieved by Tarzan or Conan, and rock offers this populist Romanticism not just as a network of artistic conventions but as a living creed. Rock has endowed the conventions of Romanticism with popular life. Tonto and the Lone Ranger are popular depictions of the Noble Savage and the Caucasian Companion from another era. No one will mistake them for characters from life, and after half an hour with them on radio or television, the audience willingly suspends its interest and returns to General Sheridan's workaday logic. The Lone Ranger and Tonto are phoney baloney in costume. Compare with them the rock partnership of Bruce Springsteen and his black saxophonist Clarence Clemons as portrayed on the album cover of Born to Run. Bruce leans on Clarence as the disciple whom Jesus loved must have reclined on his master's breast. Bruce and Clarence are no fictional stereotypes but ordinary people engaged in living out a Romantic fantasy about the primitive. There is a lived intensity about the best rock that rises above conventions and asks for religious comparisons. In the past, the average Joe was a day-tripper to the Romantic. The rocker is a native. So others have been before him. Walter Pater advised his followers that "to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." But his followers were a handful of Oxford undergraduates, and Pater himself was so wary of his own words that he deleted the conclusion in which they appeared from the second edition of The Renaissance for fear "it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall." There is nothing new in rock's Romantic injunction, enunciated by Neil Young and promulgated by Def Leppard, that "it's better to burn out than fade away"—


39

this is the ecstatic risk of all Romantics from Shelley to James Dean, of all who have burnt with the hard, gem-like flame. What is new is that the idea should with success be retailed to a global following by way of a populist musical idiom proclaiming a primitivist creed. A person of discrimination might despise rock for any one of its tenets—its primitivism, its populism, or its pretended refusal to distinguish between art and life. Taken together, they make rock inexpressibly vulgar to classical taste. And rock is nothing if not wilfully vulgar. THE ROCKIN' PNEUMONIA

Rock builds its version of the primitive not on ideal Indians or ennobled aborigines, but on blacks. In rock, blacks assume the stature of Dickens's children, Marx's proletariat, or Gauguin's Polynesians. Blacks become the great primal source of all goodness. Lou Reed's "I Wanna Be Black" is more honesty than satire: I wanna be black, Have natural rhythm. . . . I don't wanna be a fucked-up middle-class college student. The black man is thought to have "natural rhythm" generated by the world's primal energy, and white, middle-class rock wants it. Rock has room for other ideals of the primitive, but none of these is dogmatically necessary for the music. The black primitive is. The black influence can be explained in part by the same logic that attracted Mallory to Everest: because it was there. White rockers adopted black bluesmen as their primitive ideals because there were no Navahos or Samoans available for the role. Most Americans have never met an Indian, but the black man is a ubiquitous American presence—thought to be primitive in his dark skin, his poverty, his strange dialect, his mysterious African origins. In the white man's imagination, he is only a few generations from the jungle and therefore the perfect candidate to be the realization of the Romantic idea of the primitive, But in the myth of the origins of rock, whites do not con-

40


sciously choose to adopt black music. In myth, whites catch black music like an infection. Every true rocker has an incurable case of "the rockin' pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu." The rock myth demands that the primitive should have overwhelmed its effete white audience like a contagion, gripping them in a literal panic. In "The Ubangi Stomp," Warren Smith sang about a journey out of boring European civilization into black African rhythm: Well, I rocked over Italy And I rocked over Spain, I rocked in Memphis—it was all the sameTill I rocked to Africa and rolled off the ship, And seen them natives doin' an odd-lookin' step.

After a night and a day of stomping, "the captain said, 'Son, we gotta go,'" to which the rocker replies, That's alright, you go right ahead, I'm gonna Ubangi Stomp till I roll over dead. Rock's primitivism is a compulsion whose happy victims are beyond rational control. In myth at least no one chooses to be a rocker, any more than Pentheus chooses to follow Dionysos. The myth by which black music rocked its white audience with a steady roll depicts a musical rape. The black man takes the pallid soul of white America by force. In the rock myth white America responds to this rape much as white Southern ladies of crass humor are said to do in similar circumstances. Initial protests of violation quickly give way to moans of ecstasy. So American society initially resisted rock as barbaric penetration, then did an about-face and acclaimed it as its musical demotic. The myth of the origin of rock serves tor its audience the same purpose that the ideal of chaste womanhood did for the Old South. It is a complete defense against any hint of complicity that might undermine the charge of rape, vitiate the thrill of the crime, or relieve the black man from responsibility. But in the rock myth guilt and innocence have exchanged the roles they


41

play in Southern legend. In rock, uptight whites are guilty of sterility and impotence in their cultural life until mastered by the innocent jungle rhythms of black America. The rape is the ultimate good rather than the central horror it was in the imagination of the South. Rock depends in large measure on a simple reversal of values in old myths. Except for the inversion of values the myth of the origin of rock operates by the same machinery that generates the myth of white chastity violated by black lust. It takes two to do the Ubangi Stomp—the black man to provide the primitive and the white man to adapt it to his Romantic myths. White America has a very successful record in segregating itself from black influences it wishes to avoid. If whites could contain black influences in their schools, factories, and restaurants, they could certainly have contained black music if they had wanted to. But whites have invited the influence of black music, always premised on the condition that the initial contacts be staged as a rape, thereby preserving the sanctity of the myth of the primitive. LET'S BUNGLE IN THE JUNGLE The myth of the primitive requires not only a Noble Savage but as importantly a Caucasian Companion, No Jim without Huck, no Tonto without the Lone Ranger, no Clarence without Bruce. The Noble Savage knows neither that he is noble or a savage. The white man must project these attributes upon him and guide him through his assigned role in Romantic mythology. The myth of the origin of rock tells us that rock grows out of a black influence on whites. So much is undeniable. But rock is also a white influence on blacks—the imposition of white Romantic ideas on black music. White fantasies about black culture are the dominant element in the mixture that is rock. The Romantic idea of the primitive and the convention of the Noble Savage have allowed educated white Europeans to project their ideals and desires upon exotic races throughout the modern era. The uses to which blacks have been put in European culture of the modern period illustrate the process. The black man of white myth embodies what the West believes to be the

42


best or worst about man in his native, uncivilized state. As Western opinion about the nature and desirability of the primitive has changed, so has the Western portrait of the black man. Whites have used blacks as a screen upon which to project a montage of the primitive for at least three hundred years. Aphra Behn, sometimes claimed as the first woman in English letters to make her living from writing, also has the distinction of being the first English author, in her novel of 1688, Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave, to incorporate the black man in a Romantic idealization. White slavers carry off Oroonoko, the young prince of an African tribe, along with his intended, Imoinda, to Surinam. Here on the plantations built among the jungles of South America, the noble instincts of Oroonoko revolt against the indignities inflicted by his white masters. He leads a slave rebellion, suffers defeat, and gets a thrashing. Oroonoko is now set on a revenge which he expects neither he nor his beloved Imoinda will survive. He preemptively murders Imoinda, but his masters capture him before he can accomplish vengeance and kill himself. While his white tormentors look on, Oroonoko is tortured to death. His arms, then his legs, his nose, and his genitals are cut off. Oroonoko meanwhile calmly smokes a pipe, his royal dignity intact to the last. Though raised in the jungle, Oroonoko has the virtues of a martyred Stuart prince. He is Charles I in blackface. Than him "there could be nothing in Nature more beautiful, agreeable, and handsome." His skin is jet black, his nose "rising and Roman, instead of African and flat." He has all the accomplishments of wit and courtesy and "was as sensible of Power, as any Prince civiliz'd in the most refined schools of Humanity and Learning, or the most illustrious Courts." To understand Oroonoko, it is necessary to understand Mrs. Behn. Her sympathies were very much against slavery but very much for the Stuart court, which may have employed her in the second profession of spy. For her, the Stuarts' imperious claim to rule by divine right was no tyrannical usurpation of the people's power, as their detractors alleged, but the natural order followed by primitive society, where an aristocracy of strength, beauty, and wit prevailed, as demonstrated by Oroonoko's tribe.

7 Am White, but O, My Soul Is Black

43

The Royal Slave is a projection of Mrs. Behn's Romantic conception of Restoration monarchy upon the then uncluttered screen of black Africa. Even Oroonoko's nose is European—it's Roman, not African. He is a neoclassical statute of ancient virtue carved in ebony. Translated to the stage by Thomas Southerne, Oroonoko enjoyed revivals throughout the eighteenth century. The formula underlying Mrs. Behn's novel has enjoyed a longer run. Whites create black characters out of their very Western impulse to describe the fundamental nature of things. The late eighteenthcentury abolitionist Thomas Day endowed the blacks of his poem "The Dying Negro" of 1773 with all the virtues Rousseau ascribed to the natural man: What tho' no rosy tints adorn their face, No silken tresses shine with flowing grace; Yet of ethereal temper are their souls, And in their veins the tide of honour roles.

Slavery was for Day only a literal manifestation of the principle his master enunciated in The Social Contract that "man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." Day's version of black life is different from rock's not because African history or black culture have changed but because white conceptions of the primitive have evolved. Blake, writing sixteen years after the publication of the "Dying Negro," distilled into a single line the mythic process by which Romanticism projects its very European ideas of the primitive upon other races. His Little Black Boy cries out from the African wild, "I am black, but O! my soul is white." The projection of white Romanticism onto black culture has flourished in the New World, most famously in the pages of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Uncle Tom is so risibly an exemplar of the Christian virtues espoused by New England abolitionists of 1852 that he has become a byword for a black man who cannot separate imposed white ideals from black facts of life. Harriet Beecher Stowe makes clear from the start of her novel that its picture of black life means to capture the ideal goodness of the human race. Civilized Anglo-Saxons have become "hard and dominant." "Africa, who began the race of civilization and human

44


progress," reminds us in the person of the slave that Christianity rests upon compassion. Blacks hold up to white civilization the image of a purity it lost "in the dim, gray dawn of early times." In blacks we see Adam and Eve polluted by our civilized inhumanity. Behind Mrs. Stowe's black men—behind all white Romanticized black men—is an image of life at its source, primal for good or ill. Because white men use black life as a canvas on which to paint their Romantic portraits of life in a state of nature, it is not surprising to find black characters frequently in the company of white children. Blacks and children are two complementary and reciprocal forms of primal nature. The bonds between Uncle Tom and Little Eva, between Huck and Jim, between Uncle Remus and the Child, are two-fers. Here we have nascent white culture arm-in-arm with the strong black wisdom that brooded over the prime. Rock makes abundant use of this two-fer by coupling the unsullied white male adolescent with the primitive black man, both just this side of Paradise. The album cover showing Bruce recumbent upon Clarence is an example of the phenomenon. In a society where black mammies are no longer generally available, the myth of the primitive has come to take their place, substituting for black nurture vicarious association with the aboriginal in the delayed childhood of rock mythology. WHO PUT THE BOMP IN THE BOMP-BA-BOMP-BA-BOMP? The Romantic conventions of the primitive and white perceptions of black life are now so enmeshed in one another that black writers themselves confuse the two. Alex Haley's Roots owes its popularity more to its successful manipulation of Romantic mythology than to its accuracy as black history. Small wonder that when transformed to TV it racked up the largest viewing audience of all time in predominantly white America. Like Aphra Behn or Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alex Haley projects upon the slaves a vision of the primal African condition that reflects a deeply felt white as well as black longing. Kunta, born on a trib-


45

utary of the Gambia in 1750, grows up in the primal dignity typical of the Noble Savage. He is, in fact, little different from Oroonoko, except that his is a primal dignity with soul. "The first sound the child heard was the muted, rhythmic bomp-a-bompbomp-a-bomp of wooden pestles" as the village women pounded couscous in their mortars. His African baptism is performed to the sound of drums, and he awakes from his childhood slumbers to the call of the tobalo. By 1976 when Roots appeared, the black paradise of Romantic convention was firmly established as Eden with a backbeat, and to capture the sound of primitive Africa, Haley unconsciously reproduced the lyrics of Barry Mann's rock nonsense song of the early 1960s, "Who Put the Bomp in the Bomp Ba Bomp Ba Bomp?" The introduction of a rhythm section into Romanticism's black Eden is a prerequisite for the emergence of rock. Whether tribal Africa is in fact a pastoral continent alive with the pounding of drums is of no importance to the development of the myth. The Africa of Mrs. Behn and Thomas Day is a quiet, courtly place. The Africa of Alex Haley and David Byrne seethes with rhythm. The facts of African history have not meanwhile changed, only white perceptions of what black life should be like to satisfy Romantic mythology. To explain the drums of Eden it is necessary to look at the pounding in the heads of white Westerners in the last century. From at least the early seventeenth century the white man in contact with blacks in Africa or America has noted their love of music and dance. Often these observations are condescending— "A dance, a song, and a laugh are his sole desiderata," remarked the English actor and impresario John Bernard of the American slaves in the years immediately following the Revolutionary Warbut in an earlier time the white man was detached, dispassionate, even clinical in recording the black man's musical rituals— until the era following Emancipation. After the Civil War some whites began to see black culture in a lurid light. Blacks were satanic, animalistic, pagan, lustful, anarchic, violent. For these whites, the evils of black life were apparent in its music. This strain of racism reached its crescendo in Thomas Dixon's story

46


of the South during Reconstruction, The Clansman, published in 1905 and lovingly filmed by D. W. Griffith in 1915 as The Birth of a Nation. Dixon's blacks are "jungle-eyed" creatures with "cunning intelligence." The best of them are descended from "savage spellbinders" and given their freedom they become a drunken mob reeking of "onion-laden breath, mixed with perspiring African odour." Whites who promote racial equality have, like Stoneman, the Republican villain of The Clansman, "sunk into the black abyss of animalism" where miscegenation and anarchy proceed hand-in-hand. Equality for blacks means "barbarism strangling civilization by brute force." And for Dixon the whole primitive evil of black life is condensed in its music, which in the novel literally propels whites to their death. The time is 1867, the place South Carolina during Reconstruction. Two white women, mother and daughter, both of spotless reputation, have been raped by a savage black animal. Regaining consciousness, they determine that rather than expose their shame they will kill themselves by hurtling off Lover's Leap. On the precipice, the mother hesitates. "Life is still dear," she tells her daughter, "while I hold your hand." As they sat in brooding anguish, floating up from the river came the music of a banjo in a negro cabin, mingled with vulgar shout and song and dance. A verse of the ribald senseless lay of the player echoed above the banjo's pert refrain: "Chicken in de bread tray, pickin' up dough; Granny, will your dog bite? No, chile, no!" The music bereaves mother and daughter of all hope. Their humiliation completed by the blues, they step over the edge "and through the opal gates of Death." Dixon's view of black primitives is the negative from which the glossy action shot of rock is made. In rock too the black animal ravishes white America, but now the rape is good. In rock too it is the black man's music that propels the white victim into the abyss. Like the reversible dreams of Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the visions of rock and racism "impose on one another." In rock's Swedenborgian fantasy, Dixon's "opal gates of


47

Death" are more truly the ebony door to a life of primitive joy. The myths of rock primitivism and of ravished southern chastity are Romantic twins, and Memphis where Sam Phillips invented rock in 1954 had been 87 years before the base of the Ku Klux Klan. Historians explain the vicious stereotypes of blacks that emerged after the Civil War by referring to the social and economic hostilities created by the bungled Republican Reconstruction of the defeated Confederacy. No doubt the course of American history helped to induce the white man's racial hallucinations, but their appearance also coincides with a dark rereading of the primitive across Western culture, of which The Clansman is a late, crude example. The nineteenth century began with Chateaubriand's Atala, but it ended with Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Chateaubriand's Romantic Indians roam the forests of North America, finding sermons in stones and good in everything. Conrad's natives are "howling savages" belonging to "the beginning of time," who gather at midnight to perform unspeakable rites that mirror the dark anarchy at the heart of Mr. Kurtz. I tried to break the spell—the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness—that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions. This alone, I was convinced, had driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of the fires, the throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations. In Chateaubriand the wilderness is nature's own Gothic architecture, a still and melancholy evocation of the Great Spirit. His primitives have all the virtues of their environment. In Conrad, the wilderness is a pointless concatenation of jungle rhythm and unbridled instinct. The last century began with a Romantic primitive of pastoral beauty; it ended with one of ithyphallic horror. The white man's concept of the black changed in lock step with the alteration in his notion of the primitive. In Day's "Dying Negro" blacks are rational and civilized; in Harriet Beecher Stowe, they are more Christian than Christians. But by

48


1900 they are, in some Romantic fantasies, howling savages pulsating to a drum beat that overwhelms any vestigial trace of rationality. In this hundred years Romanticism moved from a meditation on the original health of the soul to a lucubration upon its fundamental malignancy. Historical events in the defeated Confederacy merely exacerbated a universal trend to convert Old Black Joe to sooty Lucifer. Behind the grotesque stereotypes of The Clansman lies a white Romantic fear that man reduced to a pure state of nature is not a Noble Savage but a neolithic satyr. The chains of civilization so despised by Rousseau and his followers were in Conrad's time no longer manacles of oppression but gossamer webs feebly restraining the lycanthrope. Bram Stoker's Dracula precedes Heart of Darkness by two years. Both are followed in due course by Freud's observation that "man is a wolf to other men." Beneath the Transylvanian graces of European civilization, Romanticism now declared, lurks the aboriginal bloodsucker. "Ace" Carter spoke in a reputable Romantic tradition when he denounced rock as the Negroes' music, appealing to the "base in man," and that base "animalism and vulgarity." Romanticism added the drums to black Eden because savage rhythms suggested the primordial libido against which man had struggled to fashion a frail and threatened culture, and rock was born out of this Romantic mythology. THE ROCK 'N' ROLL NIGGER One further alteration was required to make the myth of the primitive suitable for rock. It only remained to combine Rousseau's admiration for the primitive with Conrad's definition of it. A school of Romanticism now proclaimed that man in his native state is indeed a wilfull animal and that in his naked desire lies his highest nobility. The forces of rapine detested by old-style Southern Romantics like Thomas Dixon had already found Romantic champions in the era of the Klan. Nietzsche's is the loudest voice in praise of man's primitive animal will, and in mangled form his argument lives on in all apologies for rock. "Let's bungle in the jungle," says Jethro Tull, "Well, that's all right with me."


49

The first white-trash rockers and their respectable critics shared a single myth about black music. Music Journal condemned rock in 1958 as "this throwback to jungle rhythms" that incites youth to "orgies of sex and violence (as its model did for the savages themselves)." Teenagers "use it as an excuse for the removal of all inhibitions and the complete disregard of the conventions of decency." No true rocker would disagree. The often ridiculous antipathy between rockers and respectables in the era of Elvis and Alan Freed pits two Romantic versions of the primitive against each other. In both the black man is a libidinous jungle animal. The versions differ only in their judgment of what whites should do when confronted by what Mr. Kurtz calls "the horror, the horror." Respectability resists; rock succumbs: Baby was a black sheep Baby was a whore Baby got big and baby gets bigger Baby gets something, baby gets more Baby baby baby was a rock 'n' roll nigger. Patti Smith's 1976 "Rock V Roll Nigger" is a complete identification of what racism detests about blacks with the forces rock most prizes in life. "The storm that brings harm also makes fertile," the song says: Jimi Hendrix was a nigger Jesus Christ and grandma too Jackson Pollock was a nigger Nigger, nigger, nigger. For the rocker, the black man is the ideal of Whitman's "nature without check with original energy." Before the Church warped it, Jesus' teaching arose from this primal energy. The wholesome and unpremeditated life grandma led was fueled by the same fecund powers that generated Jimi Hendrix's highvoltage guitar virtuosity. This much of the lyric belongs first to rock mythology and ultimately to the Blakean tradition of Romanticism, and the song is right to include Jackson Pollock's work in the same line of

5o


descent. Patti Smith was not for nothing the first lady of the New York rock establishment. She learned the lessons of the Modern Museum well. Jackson Pollock's work played a prominent part in the Museum's 1984 show, "Primitivism in TwentiethCentury Art." Pollock was a devotee of Jungian primitive archetypes, of tribal masks, of cave painting. He had read John Graham's influential 1937 works on the primitive, which linked the exploration of the unconscious mind with the excavation of "the primordial racial past." The route to "new authentic values" lay through "delving into the memories of the immemorial past and expressing them in pure form." And both Pollock and Graham had learned their primitivism from Picasso, whose life-long interest in the aboriginal apparently crystallized around the art negre he had seen at Paris's Musee d"Ethnographie du Trocadero in 1907. Picasso said the tribal masks were "weapons to keep people from being ruled by spirits, to help free themselves." In this confrontation with Africa, Picasso recalled, "I realized what painting was all about." Jonathan Richman pays Picasso the highest rock compliment: Some people try to pick up girls and get called

assholes— This never happened to Pablo Picasso.

Picasso has the primitive cool that exudes sexuality. Picasso has the primal dignity of the jungle, so "Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole." If Patti Smith's conflation of original energy with the virtues of the "rock 'n' roll nigger" sounds vulgar, it is vulgarity with the most respectable parallels in modern Romantic art. The rock 'n' roll nigger is a popular musical version of the Romantic primitive, arising not from contact with African artifacts but from white myths engendered on the Southern blacks of the Mississippi Delta. The modern Romantic views the coalescence of black popular music and white Romanticism as an act of serendipity. "Is it not remarkable," asked Robert Goffin fifty years ago, "that new modes both of sentiment and its exteriorisation should have been discovered independently? What Breton and Aragon did for poetry in 1920, Chirico and Ernst for painting, had been instinctively


51

accomplished as early as 1910 by humble Negro musicians." But neither jazz nor rock has any "instinctive" attunement with the Zeitgeist that has produced modern art. White Romantics have attuned these in their own imaginations. In The Pirates of Pen*zance the Major-General comes to the chapel on his estate to implore pardon at the tombs of his ancestors. "But you forget, sir, you only bought the property a year ago," objects Frederic, the apprentice pirate. "Frederic, in this chapel are ancestors: you cannot deny that. With the estate, I bought the chapel and its contents. I don't know whose ancestors they were, but I know whose ancestors they are." The Major-General has become "their descendant by purchase"—exactly the relation that obtains between Romanticism and black music. There is no guarantee that a white population living next to blacks will adopt their musical culture as the base of its own. The rise of rock also requires a disposition of white thought favorable to its growth. White Africa has developed no indigenous interracial music—white Africa imports its black music from America, like the rest of the world. Rock had to begin in America, and specifically in the South, not only because the blacks were there with their music, but because the strain of white Romanticism that must react with black music to make rock was there. The ideal breeding ground for rock should be somewhere steeped in the ideas of nineteenth-century Romanticism, especially Romantic notions of the primitive. It should be an area that has a history of translating Romantic ideas into action. It should be an area with a strong preference for the democratic ideas that abet the rise of vulgarity. It should be a locale remote from the intellectual mainstream of Western culture and therefore safe from the censorious scrutiny of an educated elite fussing about the popularization of Romantic ideas. All these conditions were met by the American South of 1954. The South was Romantic early on. W. J. Cash said the poor Southern white, gorged on the leisure provided him by slavery, became "one of the most complete romantics." After it lost the war, the South's Romanticism continued to flourish in the quarantine of Reconstruction. But now Romanticism became avail-

52


able to the whole white Southern population through universal education. Cut off from the rest of America, the South devised a curriculum long on the antebellum Romantic staples that elsewhere in the West were displaced by more pragmatic education. In 1931 a report on the curriculum of New York State's junior high schools noted that in the ninth grade "the amount of literature read is surprisingly small," and that under the North's pragmatic methods, "the topics emphasize mechanics." At about the same time ninth-graders in the Nashville public school system were required to read Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum. Romanticism lived on in the schoolroom as in the life of the South, and English was Elvis's favorite class in his Tennessee high school. The environment necessary to start rock rolling among the masses prospered in the South as it did nowhere else. But the South's Romanticism alone is not a sufficient cause for the rise of rock in the American South. This Romanticism had to be coupled with a strong urge to convert Romantic ideas into action, a fascination with the Romantic primitive, and a commitment to the most vulgar principles of democracy. The Civil War itself is proof of the South's impulse to fight for the realization of its Romantic principles. Mark Twain blamed the Civil War on Southern infatuation with the Romantic ideals of the Waverly Novels, and in Huckleberry Finn he memorializes the Gotterdammerung of the South's Romantic illusions in the hulk of the steamboat Walter Scott, shipwrecked on the Mississippi, a prey of murderers and marauders. And as for the primitive, while the Southerner might have drawn his Romantic picture of it from Scott's tales of kilted highland clansmen, the lessons of the Romantic texts had always to be adapted to the facts of the black life around him. The name of the Ku Klux Klan itself underlines how Scott's European myths of the primitive among the highland glens became bound up in the Southern mind with an attempt to control the black primitive at hand. The Klan took its name and its mission from Scott's Romantic clans of the Scottish glens. The Klan is one ideal of the primitive striving to subdue its black counterimage. Of course the Romantic primitive had been alive and well all


53

this time in the evolving patterns of modern art, where it was appreciated by an educated minority, and in cliches of popular culture like Tarzan, where it was carefully confined to the role of amusement. But Romanticism and primitivism are not textbook ideas in the South. They are the stuff of action that was allowed to go forward to its full development because of the area's postwar isolation from high culture's development of Romanticism. Sam Phillips knew what he was talking about when he said he could make a million dollars "if I could find a white boy who could sing like a nigger." By reconciling the South's two opposed ideas of the primitive he hit mythic paydirt. Rock has become the epitome of Southern Romantic culture, not its nemesis as the North Alabama Citizens Council feared. Charlie Daniels, a good ole boy from Wilmington, North Carolina, who became one of the leading practitioners of down-home rebel rock by grafting traditional Southern music styles onto rock's electric beat, equates vulgar rock and Southern Romanticism when he tells his audience, Get loud—you can get loud and be proud, Yeah, be proud you're a rebel, 'Cause the South's gonna do it again. Rock comes as the fulfillment of Southern myth. It's a patriotic movement. Southern rock bands like Charlie Daniels's, .38 Special, and Molly Hatchet have noisy and devoted white followers who fly the stars and bars as the symbol of their vulgar music. The South has scored as great a victory in rock as it did at Manassas and now is the purveyor to the globe of a vulgar, democratic music that could only have emerged where slavery and myths of the black primitive collided. VULGAR PANTHEISM But still the Southern impetus to work out the myth of the Romantic primitive in the life of its culture does not fully explain how it can be the home of vulgar rock. One additional ingredient was present in the South necessary to produce rock; the vulgarity

54


that grows out of the pantheist sentiments of a democratic people. In the second volume of Democracy in America, de Tocqueville describes how the democratic spirit fosters a pantheist ideology: If one finds a philosophical system which teaches that all things material and immaterial, visible and invisible, which the world contains are only to be considered as the several parts of an immense Being who alone remains eternal in the midst of the continual flux and transformation of all that composes Him, one may be sure that such a system, although it destroys human individuality, or rather just because it destroys it, will have secret charms for men living under democracies. ... It naturally attracts their imagination and holds it fixed. It fosters the pride and soothes the laziness of their minds. Or as Charlie Daniels sums up the life of the Southern democratic pantheist, I ain't got no money, But I damn sure got it made. The democrat flatters himself that he is equal with the divine One, that the part is the whole and the whole the part. Every man his own intergalactic Louis XIV: L'univers, c'est moi. The artistocrat de Tocqueville saw as much absolutism in democracy as had existed in the ancien regime. At heart he was no more sympathetic to the ideas underlying Jacksonian democracy than he had been to the ideological props of Bourbon monarchy: "Of all the different philosophical systems used to explain the universe, I believe pantheism is the one most fitted to seduce the mind in democratic ages. All those who still appreciate the true nature of man's greatness should combine in the struggle against it." Particularly offensive to de Tocqueville's aristocratic tastes was the fate of culture under pantheism. He saw that with pantheism came vulgarity. "The literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aris-


55

tocratic literature. . . . The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold." Contemplation would give way to noise. Aristocratic taste had been trained to transcend the narrow limits of time, place, and self and to view the world from the stillness of a larger perspective. Democracy is sunk in the here and now of pantheism, and the one subject available for its art is the individual, because "each citizen of a democracy generally spends his time considering the interests of a very insignificant person, namely himself." The democratic artist cannot with a straight face write about gods, myths, or traditions. These are the stuff of refined, transcendent culture, and the democrat who makes these his themes must end in pretension. The poet who is true to his democratic roots must be a vulgarian: "All these resources fail him, but the man remains, and the poet needs no more." The great democratic poet will be utterly unlike his European predecessors, says de Tocqueville. He will be loud and common. He will "depict passions and ideas rather than men and deeds." In other words, in a vulgar, pantheist democracy the great poet will write a hymn to God called Song of Myself. The democratic pantheism that in the North produced Whitman's Leaves of Grass in 1855 generated rock in the South a hundred years later—a pantheist music that is as "strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold" as Whitman's poetry, but now mixed with Romantic notions of the primitive and served up for the democratic masses. Noisy, primitive, and self-centered, the democratic ideal generates a vulgar pantheism. In the American South, this pantheism moves in an orbit with Romanticism and black primitivism. All these elements fuse in rock, the music of vulgar American democracy.

CHAPTER THREE

DREAMS OF ELYSIAN Blues, Folk, amd Rock Pantheism

In rock the white man surrenders to his own Romantic myths. The black man has had the leading role in this white drama, supported by choruses of Indian mystics and white kulturvolk. But all the characters and subplots of rock's Romantic drama converge on a single denouement, the resolution of the universe into a vulgar pantheism. The blues offers the rocker the musical route to the primitive most consistent with his Romanticism, and so in its mythology the blues is the source of rock. But the blues is not perfectly consistent with the Romantic notion of the primitive, and rock has remade the blues in its own vulgar image. WHAT YOU MEAN WE, WHITE MAN? What the rocker looks for in blues is primitive Afro-American music, "proof that beauty can be wrung from terror," "pure pleasure out of making music," "a feeling, a way of making sense of a universe that at times seems as crazy as a drunken duck." These quotations from rock critics Greil Marcus and Michael Bane reflect two hundred years of Romantic critical theory. They envision the blues as sublime and oceanic. Edmund Burke or

56

Dreams of Elysian

57

Arthur Schopenhauer would immediately recognize the terms by which a rocker deals with black music, but would Mississippi Fred McDowell? Rock uses blues in the same way Picasso and Jackson Pollock used tribal masks, as a catalyst to complete the transformation of disparate Romantic ideas into a new Western art. The catalyst is necessary to induce the reaction but not a true element of the result. The blues of rock mythology is something more and something less than the blues of fact. The Romantic myth tells us that blues is African music speaking to effete white souls with jungle honesty, but even Charles Hamm, who in Music in the New World is at pains to stress the African origins of American music, acknowledges that "the blues scale as such does not exist in music from this part of the world," and the guitar, the instrument of choice for blues and rock alike, is a Western, not an African instrument. The blues solo, as LeRoi Jones pointed out, is atypical of African tribal life. Most music historians agree that blues is hardly a hundred years old. Blues has more to do with black life in Reconstruction America than with tribal ritual on the Bight of Benin. Nor are blues as sublime as rock mythology would have them. The sublime is a product of a culture that has carefully nurtured the distinction between art and life. The blues grows out of culture more practical and less fragmented. Anyone who has heard Leadbelly or one of the other blues artists on the musical archivists' recordings knows the frequency with which the bluesmen, cued to sing, disappoint white artistic expectations by chatting away about nothing in particular instead of filling tapes with meaningful primitive sound. One of the conventions by which a black musician may deal with white audiences is this amused frustration of their Romantic expectations. This tradition continues in the age of rock. Mick Jagger is alleged to have asked black jazz great Miles Davis to collaborate on a record. "How much are you paying me?" asked Davis. "Let's do it together because we're artists," said Jagger. "To hell with art!" replied Davis. Blues and rock work with some of the same materials, but they differ in approach. Lust, alcohol, passion, and grief are com-

58


mon elements of both. Blues treats these with irony and detachment, rock with urgency and overstatement. The rocker makes the blues conform to his white notion of the primitive. Rock's primitive cannot be ironic, because irony demands the mental detachment to contrast opposed versions of events. The primitive cannot be detached, because detachment implies control, and in rock's notion of the primitive, control is incompatible with pure energy. Blues is supposed to be momentous, not delicate. The usual rock cover version of blues aims for passionate intensity and is sung with a very different conviction from the amused irony that suffuses the originals. Like the blues, rock is comic, but it makes its comedy out of the overindulgence of vulgarity. Irony is a trademark of the blues that rarely survives the transition to rock. "What makes me love my woman," sings Blind Willie McTell, "she can really do the Georgia crawl." Feel like a broke-down engine, Ain't got no drivin' wheel, the song continues. The lyric has all the lust and despair that rockers demand of the blues, but its tone is ironic. The singer stands at a distance from himself and his woman, and from this distance he reduces both to images that are simultaneously acute and amusing. A woman who can do the Georgia crawl may be passionate and agile, but the lyric shows her from a remove that makes her humorous as well. A man who is a "broke-down engine" may have hit bottom, but we are seeing him in an image as sardonic as it is grim. This ironic perspective is the consolation blues offers—a mordant humor that transcends the passion and misery of life like an act of grace. "Jack o' diamonds," Blind Lemon Jefferson had sung, "jack o' diamonds is a hard card to play." Only a studied ironist could have said it, and only a white man on a kamikaze mission would try to interpret it by the standards of Romantic art. In rock, the blues' refined mixture of lust, pathos, and humor turns into pure Romantic vulgarity. Led Zeppelin's famous "Whole Lotta Love" is lifted from the blues tradition but lifted so that intensity replaces detachment:

Dreams of Elysian

59

Way down inside, I'm gonna give you my love, I'm gonna give you every inch of my love.

The sex of the rock lyric is tumid and immediate, while in the blues, sex is usually fretsome and amusing. In "Black Snake Moan" Blind Lemon Jefferson sings about the "black snake crawlin' in my room": Some pretty mama better get this black snake soon. . . . Well, wonder where that black snake's gone, Well, wonder where that black snake's goneLord, that black snake, mama, done run my darlin' home.

Both rock and blues lyrics have a sense of humor, but the white version depends on the overstatement of slapstick, the black on detached amusement of irony. Even in the low-down black lyrics that rock claims as its immediate inspiration, sex is more a source of laughter than of passion. In the original version of "Tutti Frutti" performed in allblack clubs on the deep South's chitlin circuit, Little Richard had sung, Tutti Frutti, good booty. If you don't fit, don't force it. "It would crack the crowd up," Little Richard explains. "Tutti Frutti" had to be cleaned up for the white rock market not just because it was obscene but because it was funny. When white rockers sing about sex, the lyrics are more salacious than amusing. The heavy-metal band Whitesnake illustrates the tendency of rock to reduce blues to its own Romantic concepts of libidinal vulgarity. As their name suggests, Whitesnake's lyrics are a white man's translation of Blind Lemon Jefferson's earlier blues, but a translation that has substituted white for black, urgent for ironic, vulgar for delicate. Blind Lemon Jefferson sang, "That black snake, mama, done run my darlin' home." "Slide it in, baby," Whitesnake sings.

60


The textbook example of rock's vulgar transformation of the blues is George Thorogood's version of John Lee Hooker's "One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer." Thorogood has made a career of adapting blues classics to the Romantic demands of his white audiences. He is rock's one-man answer to Amos and Andy. Thorogood affects a thick accent, a leering manner, and a driving style, the imagined attributes of the black bluesman. The lyrics of his and John Lee Hooker's versions of "One Bourbon" are similar, except that Thorogood's evicted singer is a loud, drunken loser, while in the original, soft-spoken rendition he is a dispossessed comedian negotiating with life over a bartop. To fit the Romantic myth, the blues artist should be an outlaw, living on the fringes of society, hovering on the borders of madness, preferably a gambler, probably a drunk, certainly a sexfiend. He sings from a dark, primitive compulsion, and he sings in a trance, uttering Delphic truths from the navel of existence. He is happy to make a dollar for his music, but the white audience will only appreciate him after he's dead, which he soon is from drink, violence, and neglect. Only one blues singer perfectly fills this bill, and not by accident Robert Johnson is the bluesman most venerated by rockers and prominently revived by top bands like the Rolling Stones, who did "Love in Vain" and "Stop Breakin' Down," and Cream, who recorded "Crossroads." Greil Marcus says of Johnson's music, "It was a drama of sex, shot through with acts of violence and tenderness; with desires that no one could satisfy; with crimes that could not be explained; with punishments that could not be escaped." What Marcus is describing is Romantic angst, not the music of Robert Johnson. Johnson's life corresponds to the Romantic ideal of the primitive artist building his glorious poetry against the opposition of the world, but what distinguishes his music is dark irony under studied compression: You may bury my body down by the highway side, Babe, I don't care where you bury my body when I'm dead and gone— You may bury my body, oh, down by the highway side, So my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride.

Dreams of Elysian

61

Robert Johnson deserves all the adulation he has received from rockers, but his rock imitators, hearing him through their Romantic preconceptions, have consistently translated his diamondhard irony into overstated torment, more suitable to Young Werther than to the hero of "Hellhound Blues." By the time they recorded "Wild Horses" in 1971, the Rolling Stones had learned the lessons of Robert Johnson well: Faith has been broken, tears must be cried, Let's do some living after we die. Betrayal and death are the stuff of the blues, coupled in this lyric with the image of wild horses. The cumulative effect is sad, serious, abstract, even profound, and the lyric is one of the glories of rock. But "wild horses" is too Romantic an image for genuine blues, which prefers more mundane and amusing metaphors. A Greyhound bus would shatter the Romantic intensity of this Stones' lyric, but the Greyhound bus is what makes the blues—practical, mordant humor even in the face of death. The reversal of life and death in the Stones' lyric is too clever and artistic for real blues, which always maintains a rigorous simplicity of language. Though it appropriates the raw materials of blues, rock puts them to its own uses. Rock stands or falls not on its putative fidelity to the blues tradition but on the strength of its own vulgarity. EBONY AND IVORY Like all great myths, the received opinion about the origins of rock contains revealing contradictions. In myth, rock is very new but very old. Its origins lie at the dawn of time, but it is a music never heard before. Its history is unique, but its history mimics that of ragtime and jazz. If rock shares its roots and its method of transmission with jazz, where is its originality? If jazz provides all the primitivism required by rock, why has rock come to exist at all? Jazz has its own genealogical myth, but its essential features are interchangeable with those of the myth of rock origins. The

62


birthplace of jazz is New Orleans, not Memphis, but African rhythm is its midwife and the Mississippi its umbilical cord. In its first years jazz was supposed to be indecent and uncivilized, and before installing it as the national music, respectable white America fulminated against jazz with the same hysterical denunciations that greeted rock. But the visceral convulsion that sixty years ago made the name jazz synonymous with an age of Western culture has resolved itself to a mere palpitation. Today less than one percent of the sets in the hundred major radio markets are tuned to jazz stations, fewer than those tuned to classical stations. Most Americans would consider a craving for Charlie Parker's jazz as esoteric a taste as an infatuation with Monteverdi's opera. Punk rockers in particular are given to giggling at jazz as a senile affectation of rhythm. 'Hey, you hipsters, dig that cat's craaazy beat!" says the punk passing the jazz club, and all his mates fall to the pavement crippled by mirth. Worse news for jazz is its respectability. The New Yorker regularly runs jazz criticism. Classical stations integrate Ellington into their programming. Popular American music can survive commercial success but never respectability. In the daily life of our culture, jazz is as dead as a dodo. The age of vulgarity wants its music simple, inexpensive, and open to ordinary people as performers, and it wants it new every day. Jazz is a complex musical form demanding a high degree of musical proficiency and costly instruments, and by now jazz offers little novelty. But jazz has another failing. It is too black and not as readily assimilated as rock is to the Romantic myth of the primitive revered by the twentieth-century Anglo-American. The virtue of rock is that its supposed primitive origins in blues are easily adaptable to the primitive fantasies of whites from Memphis to Merseyside. Some rock groups like Chicago have used jazz, not blues, for their primitive foundations, but Chicago, in spite of its XVII albums and perhaps because of its jazz roots, is little respected among the rock faithful. There is even a subspecies of rock identifiable by its links to jazz—fusion rock. But a glance at the personnel that makes up fusion rock groups reveals the difficulty for jazz in a society governed by white Romantic conventions: Herbie Hancock, Deodato, Stanley Clarke—fusion

Dreams of Elysian

63

rock is dominated by black men. Their names are hardly mentioned in the Encyclopedia of Rock; to find their histories you must turn to The Encyclopedia of Black Music. A handful of whites have dabbled at the jazz-rock fusion, but like Joe Jackson, these have predominantly been musicians with academic training. Rock mythology does not really want a music dominated by a foreign culture, and a vulgar music that depends on the academy is nonsense. Rock wants a primitive music with putative black roots, but this must be music in which the preconceptions of white Romanticism can shine forth. Blues is simple, plangent, and made in America. It requires only one voice and one instrument and maintains a simple but suitably jungle rhythm. It is better suited to the needs of Romanticism than jazz, and so it is blues not jazz that occupies the heartland of rock mythology. Jazz, which has some legitimate musical claims on Africa, is in fact too black to fit comfortably inside the Romantic conventions of the primitive, and so it gives way to its more streamlined cousin rock. Rock grows up parallel to, not congruent with jazz, and there is truth to rock's claim of being completely unique in form and origin. Rock is a unique integration of Romantic mythology and American blues. The conjunction of black music and white myth should not be mistaken for social integration, despite Paul McCartney's sentimental vision of "ebony, ivory, living in perfect harmony." "Soul blew a huge hole in Leave It To Beaver-land," says Gerri Hirshey in her book on soul music, Nowhere to Run. The implication is that black music erupted into uptight out-of-sight white Babbittdom like a Krakatoa of rhythm. In truth, with rock the vacuum white society created by its own self-induced Romantic emptiness imploded. Rock's social consequences are incidental to and often contradictory of its avowed racial integration. There are more blacks at a Republican convention than at a Van Halen concert, and the music industry keeps the statistics on its record sales separate but equal. Billboard tracks the "Hot 100 Singles" on one chart and the "Hot Black Singles" on another. The charts are the lineal descendants of the music statistics used in the bad old days when there were records, and then there were race records. Whites pa-

64


tronize black music in a big way—Stevie Wonder's appeal is global, not racial—but the commercial traffic rarely moves in the other direction. In the week of March 23, 1984, six of the top twenty albums on Billboard's "Top Pop" chart featured black artists, but there was no white performer featured on any of the twenty "Top Black Albums." Black music has supplied the raw material for rock, but there is no reason to suppose that blacks share the same Romantic preoccupations necessary for rock, and some reason to suppose that they do not. When whites respond to black music, they move to the jungle drums of their Romantic imagination, not to any objective force. In South Africa, a black group called Amampondo has tried to preserve the tribal music of the continent. The New York Times reports that their leader, Dizu Plaatjies, the son of a witchdoctor, was puzzled by the different responses of whites and blacks to the group's music. "Black people, Mr. Plaatjies said, are the most difficult to please or to get to participate. Whites, however, frequently leap into the aisles to dance in a manner they perhaps consider African." There is nothing in the modern world more primitive than a white man in the grip of his own Romantic sensibilities. In rock, whites have integrated a living version of the primitive into the working mythologies of daily life. How far this psychic integration extends to social matters is an open question. I once had a roommate from Virginia who was the most devout of rockers and not only owned a Stratocaster but back in the early 1960s had complete collections of the black masters Chuck Berry, Willie Dixon, and Bo Diddley—musical sustenance during his exile in a Northern boarding school. But his opinion on race relations was unaffected by daily doses of soul. "Ship 'em all back to Africa—except the musicians." There would be no rock without black music, but the debt is paid in mythic rather than social currency. The Rolling Stones are arguably the greatest rock band of all time. They have always celebrated their black sources, from the steel-drummers who circulated in the audience at the beginning of some of their concerts to their continuing resurrection of blues classics for a mass audience. In their greatest concert tour, the

Dreams of Elysian

65

notorious American trip of 1969 that ended with the murder of a black fan at the hands of the Hell's Angels at Altamont, they hired Ike and Tina Turner to open for them at Madison Square Garden—Ike Turner, whom Sam Phillips had recorded on race records before the advent of Elvis, and his wife Tina, up to New York by way of the Nutbush, Tennessee, Baptist church choir. In Ike and Tina, the rock traditions of blues and soul were literally wed. An insipid English rocker opened the Stones' concert around ten. He was forgotten by eleven. Half an hour later Ike and Tina appeared. When they were finished, they had sated the most primitive cravings of that overwhelmingly white audience: Come here fella—just because I don't say nothing about the things you do, don't you think I'm no fool, 'cause just one of my ideas would crack your head wide open.

Tina Turner, later chosen by Ken Russell to be the Acid Queen in the rock opera Tommy, is an apparition from a white man's Romantic image of Africa. "She was savage and superb, wildeyed and magnificent. . . . The immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul," Conrad wrote in Heart of Darkness. And so it was with that audience and Tina Turner as it had been with Mr. Kurtz's African woman on the bank of the Congo. The audience experienced its own primitive mystery in the body and soul of Tina Turner and went limp with hysterical veneration of its white secret embodied in so magnificent a black incarnation. The Stones did not emerge for an hour after Ike and Tina left the stage. Then they gave as good a performance as they have ever given. Again the audience was moved to frenzy. Throughout the show Mick Jagger wore a long orange scarf, wafting it behind him through feline renditions of "Jumping Jack Flash," "Midnight Rambler," and "Sympathy for the Devil." The trailing scarf had also been the trademark of Isadora Duncan, the American free spirit from Oakland, California, who in her dances had found another route to emotional liberation through the putative influence of Greek paganism. At the Garden concert, Mick Jagger

66


looked for all the world like a sleeker, sexier Isadora, and his primitive has more to do with her Western fantasies than with the soul of the Ike and Tina Turner Review that had preceded him. The greatest compliment that can be paid the Stones is that after this tour, they again hired soul acts to precede them. The Stones are committed to the myth of black origins even beyond upstagement. A PASSAGE TO INDIA Rock shares a vision of the primitive with the Romanticism out of which it developed. But rock hankers after a very specific kind of primitivism compatible with its underlying pantheism. The idyllic primitive of Polynesia that appealed to Gauguin and Margaret Mead finds no place in rock legend, perhaps because it is remote from the daily lives of rockers. The American Indian, who is nearer to hand and available not only on the reservation but on the movie screen, also contributes little to rock's Romanticism. "Witchi Tai To," a Kaw rain dance, was ignored when recorded by its creator, Jim "Young Eagle" Pepper. Typically, it got airplay not in its Indian version but when covered by Richie Havens, a black man, and again by white sentimentalists Seals and Crofts. The mysterious Orient has exercised a more compelling influence on rock. Eastern man is supposed to be at one with the primal forces, while Western man, says Iggy Pop in "China Girl," has "visions of swastikas" in his head, the result of a rationalism that in the Jefferson Starship's "Ride the Tiger" reduces tears to "salt, carbon, and water": But a tear to a Chinese man—

He'll tell you about sadness or sorrow or the love of a man and a woman.

In rock, the Orient is a land of expansive feeling, the yin to the yang of occidental scientism. American rockers occasionally look to China, but the major Eastern influence on rock has come from India by way of Britain.

Dreams of Elysian

67

Most famously, the Beatles became temporary disciples of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and incorporated some raga music and Vedic truth into their later work. Yorkshire-born John McLaughlin, who began playing guitar with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, progressed into jazz-rock and Eastern mysticism, forming the Mahavishnu Orchestra, named for the happiest incarnation of the Hindi pantheist trinity and organized under the influence of swami Sri Chinmoy. The titles of his Mahavishnu albums tell the mystic tale: Visions of the Emerald Beyond, Inner Worlds, Between Nothingness and Eternity. Under the influence of guru Meher Baba, Peter Townshend of the Who had a similar conversion, resulting in his solo album, Who Came First, the cover of which is decorated with snapshots of Baba astride his pet donkey as if entering the New Jerusalem. The Indian influence turns up even in rock that has no apparent connection with gurus or Eastern mysticism. The English group Echo and the Bunnymen, converts to nothing more exotic than Romantic gloom, use the raga sound in their best song, "The Cutter," and even the Stones attempted the Eastern strain in Their Satanic Majesties Request. After black soul and white folk, Indian mysticism is the next major ingredient in rock's particular blend of Romantic primitivism. Why the gurus succeeded where other shamans have failed illuminates rock's driving predilections. In part, British rockers are attached to things Indian for the same reason American rockers are attached to black music. Indians are for Brits an available form of primitivism. East Indians make up more than six percent of the population of both London and Birmingham. In the same way, as the number of West Indian blacks in the British Isles increased from 17,000 in 1951 to 304,000 in 1971, British rockers took their black primitive directly from Brixton rather than vicariously from Memphis. The reggae sound of the Police or the Clash grows from the West Indian presence just as Elvis's developed from the blues of the Delta. America has no monopoly on the romance of the black primitive. At the very least, it is an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. And British rockers have also had an Indian population to whet their appetite for primitivism.

68


But proximity to East Indians is no more an explanation for the integration of their thought and music into British rock than the proximity of blacks explains the rise of Elvis. Rock needs not just opportunity but motive to explain its choice of influences. Why weren't the British rockers influenced by the 140,000 Pakistani Muslims living in Great Britain by 1971? Why weren't they more strongly influenced by Scottish or Irish folk music? Rock's flirtation with Indian mysticism continues in vulgar guise a tradition as old as Romanticism. Emerson, Whitman, and Forster are only the best-known names associated with a Romantic adulation of Eastern wisdom, and their artistic interest has had its debased middle-class counterpart in the superstitions of the theosophists. "India was the Alma-Mater, not only of the civilization, arts, and sciences, but also of all the great religions of antiquity," Mme. Blavatsky announced in her Isis Unveiled. Rock shares in both the literary and the theosophical veneration of the East. The ideal primitive culture must accord with the Romantic pantheism that drives rock. The rocker looks for a primitive ideal that reaches back past history, beyond written record, beyond even oral report, to the foundation of the earth. The India of Romantic imagination meets these conditions. Whitman's visionary pilgrimage to India is a "Passage indeed O soul to primal thought," Back, back to wisdom's birth, to innocent intuitions, Again with fair creation.

The Hebrew and Greek cultures to which Westerners used to turn for imaginative nourishment began more than two hundred years ago to be belittled by historical fact as archeology and history systematically uncovered the pedestrian details of ancient myth. Or so the Romantics thought. In the nineteenth century men regretted the "fairy spots successively retreating before the progress of discovery." Yet the Romantic impulse found "in the farthest advance which ancient knowledge ever made, some remoter extremity to which they could fly." Where myth becomes fact, the job of the Romantic is to make new myth untainted by history, and what the Romantic looks for is

Dreams of Elysian

69

something which possessed The darkness of the world, delight, Life, anguish, death, immortal love, Ceasing not, mingled, unrepressed, Apart from place, withholding time. While the world became more commonplace, Romantics like the young Tennyson, here describing the mythic splendor of the Arabian Nights, were already busy conquering for Romanticism primordial new universes to compensate for those lost to progress, new universes "apart from place, withholding time." Tennyson found them in the Asia of the Arabian Nights and in the Africa of Timbuctoo, the mythical city at the heart of the dark continent where men's hopes and fears take refuge in The fragrance of its complicated glooms. Rock has also looked for new worlds far from the loathsome commerce of modern culture, and it has found at least three—one in a musical Timbuctoo of Romantic imagination, one in its own folk roots, and one in the Vedic claim of Indian philosophy to embrace the primitive unity of Being. The recrudescence of Romanticism's infatuation with Eastern pantheism in twentieth-century British rock finds its clearest expression in the career of George Harrison. At the breakup of the Beatles, he had already begun to sound like a reincarnation of Tennyson. On Dark Horse Harrison recorded the "Ring out, wild bells" section of In Memoriam, Like the young Tennyson, he was fascinated by the insubstantial and transitory nature of things, or what he called "living in the material world." His All Things Must Pass album is a rock popularization of Tennyson's All Things Will Die. In mid-career Harrison began to look like Tennyson, right down to the beard and the floppy black sombrero he sported on the cover of All Things Must Pass, where he looks like a young, vulgar version of the bard as photographed by Barraud. The resemblance is more than coincidental. Tennyson, the poet of "eternal process moving on," had made a modified brand of pantheism digestible for the Romantic public of the nineteenth

70


century. Harrison performed the same service for a vulgar generation. Tennyson came to pantheism by way of Heraclitus, Harrison by way of the Maharishi. The philosophies are nonetheless similar. Tennyson's "all things are as they seem to all" is Harrison's Maya love that "comes and rolls away." In Harrison the Romantic heritage of rock is only more obvious than elsewhere. Rock has turned to Africa and India for the same reason that Romanticism turned away from Athens and Jerusalem. These new worlds of myth exist beyond the dead hand of history. Rock has no time for Muhammadanism or Confucianism. Islam is too historical and legalistic, Confucianism too social and bureaucratic. But the East Indian, like the black man of Western Romanticism, lives out a creed that swallows up history. His home is the eternal, primitive now from which rock traces its descent: Hail, hail, rock 'n' roll, Deliver me from days of old, Long live rock 'n' roll, The beat of the drums loud and bold, sang black guru Chuck Berry in the rock classic "School Days." Rock is the practical expression of Whitman's homemade pantheism: There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. When rock announces that it "don't know nothin' 'bout history" it's not just being ignorant. Rock is drawn to primitive cultures that promise release from a history that seems to promise the death of the imagination. It is the same impulse that leads Eliot at the end of The Waste Land to turn from the "empty cisterns and exhausted wells" of Western thought to the pantheistic utterances of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. When the Who borrowed Eliot's wasteland, they did so in a song that also preserves the Romantic flight to the East, The saved man in the Who's

Dreams of Elysian

71

"teenage wasteland" is named Baba O'Reilly, the Western commoner redeemed by Eastern enlightenment: "the exodus is here, the happy ones are near." Over the last thirty years teachers have more and more noted their students' lack of historical perspective. Washington, Lincoln, Shakespeare, and Caesar become contemporaries in the modern mind, cocitizens of one vast nation, the Past. History turns into muddle not because students cannot memorize the dates that distinguish past events but because their sense of time itself has changed under the influence of Romantic pantheism. For the vulgar pantheist, the past exists in space, not time. It is a forgotten way station on what the Talking Heads call "the road to nowhere": Well we know where we're going, But we don't know where we've been. The pantheist has no particular destination. He is headed anywhere and nowhere, and as in the Talking Heads' song the road to nowhere is also "the road to paradise." The happy future is only the perfection of an interminable present. "The exodus is here" if it is anywhere. When Pan supersedes Mnemosyne as the guardian spirit of Western culture, the past does not disappear, it merely ceases to be historical. Nietzsche attributes this process to modern man's "sense and instinct for everything, the taste and tongue for everything—which immediately proves it is an ignoble sense." This ignoble sense grows out of "semi-barbarism" and "democratic mingling" until "we ourselves are a kind of chaos." "Measure is alien to us." With Coleridge, de Tocqueville, and Ruskin, Nietzsche is one of the great critics of pantheist vulgarity, which he calls the "instinct for everything." He notes that history itself is an aristocratic and transcendent idea, depending on discrimination between events in time. Democratic vulgarity disposes of both discrimination, which threatens the equality of its individual parts, and time, which disturbs the happiness of its eternal present. As a result, history disappears. In its place, vulgar de-

72.


mocracy creates a past where all things exist simultaneously in the now. When Bob Dylan meets Columbus in his "115th Dream," he asks the explorer how come he doesn't drive a truck. British rockers seize on the music and philosophy of India as a convenient route to the primitive oneness of the universe prescribed by their brand of Romanticism. In Indian culture British rockers discovered the same resonance that horrified Forster's Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India. The echo in a Marabar cave ... is entirely devoid of distinction. Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies, and quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed into the roof. "Bourn" is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it, or "bou-oum," or "ou-boum,"—utterly dull. . . . "Pathos, piety, courage—they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value." What horrified Mrs. Moore, what Nietzsche hated in democratic cultures, was the absolute vulgarity of a pantheistic world expressed in a dull bourn—"everything exists, nothing has value." The same vulgarity has delighted rock. An absence of meaning in the primal boum is also an absence of oppressive categories of morality, history, class, individuality, religion, and order. GREAT PAN LIVES But Timbuctoo, not Benares, is the chief city of rock's primitive. The pantheism of the East, consonant as it may be with the Romantic ideology out of which rock grows, is still the product of thousands of years of introspection and religious devotion. It is too transcendent for vulgar rock. Out of the myth of black origins rock has fashioned its own pantheism under the tutelary deity of black Pan, more primitive, more vulgar, and therefore more attractive than any pantheism the cultivated swamis can offer. The late Brian Jones, first leader of the Rolling Stones, actually discovered black Pan, not dead despite Plutarch's obituary and two thousand years of monotheism. Pan lives, or lived in the 1960s, among the Moroccan tribesmen of Joujouka in Ksar-el-

Dreams of Elysian

73

Kebir province where the Atlas mountains descend to meet Western culture at the join of the Atlantic and Mediterranean littorals. High in their mountain retreats, the nominally Muslim tribesmen had for centuries continued the worship of Bou Jeloud, Father of Skins, uninterrupted by any civilized intrusions. Once a year, "through eight moonlit nights," the natives worshipped Pan with reeds, drums, and incessant chanting: Who is Bou Jeloud? Who is he? The shivering boy who was chosen to be stripped naked in a cave and sewn into the bloody warm skins and masked with an old straw hat tied over his face, HE is Bou Jeloud when he dances and runs. . . . He is the Father of Fear. He is, too, the Father of Flocks. . . . The music grooves into hysteria, fear, and fornication. A ball of laughter and tears in the throat gristle. Tickle of panic between the legs. The description is taken from the notes accompanying The Pipes of Pan, the recording Brian Jones made of the Joujouka festival, notes written by William Burroughs's collaborator Brion Gysin. To Gysin's description Brian Jones added a brief introduction: "I don't know if I possess the stamina to endure the incredible, constant strain of the festival. Such psychic weaklings has Western civilization made of so many of us." But black Pan will save us from ourselves. His is the message at the heart of rock. What attracted Brian Jones to the Joujouka festival is what in myth brought the Rolling Stones and all other rock bands together. Long before they discovered Bou Jeloud, the Stones had found pantheistic primitivism in the black music of the Delta. One of rock's most prized legends tells how two young Englishmen who had not seen each other since they played together as eight-year-olds met twelve years later on the London subway. One is carrying three records under his arm—albums by Chuck Berry, Little Walter, and Muddy Waters. The other is so impressed he initiates a friendship that turns into a life-long collaboration. They are Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. In a year they will meet Brian Jones, a pouting musician with similar taste in records. The legend has mythic perfection. Two lower-class rebels

74


(in life they were middle-class) discover each other among a faceless throng as modern technology whisks them underground through the labyrinth of the West's most civilized capital. The primitive brings them together. They form a pantheist conspiracy to overthrow established order and realize Mrs. Moore's worst nightmares: "Hey, said my name is called disturbance," the Stones sing in "Street-Fighting Man": "I'll shout and scream, I'll kill the king, I'll rail at all his servants." What appeals in the myth is what appealed to the myth's heroes when they formed the Stones. Underground, at the foundation of things, even in our over-civilized world, there remains a primitive energy that unites all men and all things in a universal league surpassing time and place. Even the most frivolous American rock drew on this primal energy: He's the king of the jungle jive, Look at that caveman gol The Hollywood Argyles sang the praises of the cartoon caveman Alley-Oop, but rock was not content to allow its Romantic pantheism to remain at the level of popular entertainment. In due course it made its alliance not with the kitsch conventions of the funny pages but with the latter-day pantheists of mainline Romanticism. Brian Jones studies with Brion Gysin, and Mick Jagger has dinner with William Burroughs, who had made his weird pantheistic deity say, "Born again and again cross the wounded galaxies ... I am not two—I am one." Bou Jeloub, Satan, Elvis, Mick, Brian, Keith, street-fighting men everywhere—in the myth great Pan is born again and again across the wounded galaxies. BUFFALO GALS GO 'ROUND THE OUTSIDE The flip side of rock's myth of the black primitive is its myth of the white modern: "Such psychic weaklings has Western civilization made of so many of us," Brian Jones had said. Contemporary white civilization is effete, sterile, and impotent. The white man is overeducated and undersexed, unnatural and inauthentic. In a word, the civilized white man is boring, and the

Dreams of Elysian

75

Circle Jerks description of the residents of Beverly Hills is a characterization of all Western culture: All the people look the same, Don't they know they're so damn lame? Although Black Pan is the chief salvation from the lameness of white culture, there are subsidiary routes to authenticity. One of these is the way of Hindu pantheism. But the Anglo-Saxon peoples among whom rock had its genesis have another route to aboriginal pantheism in their own folk culture. Malcolm McLaren appears at first glance as far removed from folk culture as the twentieth century can get. Middle-class, British, a student for eight years at various art colleges, McLaren became an entrepreneur of Chelsea fashions in the 1970s, operating a boutique variously called Let It Rock, Seditionaries, Worlds End, and Sex. He went from rags to riches with the discovery that rock groups could be designed and marketed like shmattas. "Malcolm McLaren is the greatest con-man I ever met," said Johnny Thunders, legendary guitarist of the New York Dolls, a group McLaren briefly managed. McLaren more than earned his reputation through promotion of a series of flamboyant and lucrative rock enterprises. First came the Sex Pistols, next Bow Wow Wow, then the World Famous Supreme Team, a group of street-smart black performers who had previously subsisted on the proceeds of three-card Monte games played along 42nd Street. But Malcolm McLaren is also the quintessential folk artist of rock. On his Duck Rock album, he mixed "songs from Zululand and the mountains of Lima and the Dominican Republic and Cuban priests and Appalachian hillbillies all together under one roof." The hit song from the album was "Buffalo Gals," an old Appalachian square-dance lyric backed by African chants and sung by the World Famous Supreme Team: Bup Bup Bup Bup Bup Bup Bup. . . . Four Buffalo Gals go round the outside, round the outside, And do-si-do your partners.

76


Why did the instigator of Never Mind the Bollocks come to America and record a folk song with a black backbeat? I decided that whitey ought to put something back into the culture he'd been plundering for many years. I just thought it was a nice gesture finding something as dramatic as a square dance in this country, in a part where probably there's no electricity, and the people there don't realize the country's called "the United States of America"—and to take that of the ghettos of this godforsaken place and realize there isn't really a hell of a lot of difference between the caller and the rapper. That parallel really brings together the pagan ideals of both countries. "Buffalo Gals" is a song that's been in your heritage for over 100 years. I guess it was your rock 'n' roll 150 years ago.

In myth, Anglo-Saxon folk music is the point where white culture traced to its roots and black primitivism in its musical rapture intersect. The folk are pure, and being pure, they are possessed. Possessed, they are the guardians of our musical soul. Out there, beyond the reeking ghettoes and the technological wasteland, "past the near meadows, over the still stream," somewhere the plaintive anthem of our folk past fades but has not yet dissolved in the polluted air of our rationalist culture. "I go to the Appalachian mountains," says McLaren. "It's not fantasy, those people exist. . . . Tradition doesn't die, only business dies"—and who would know better? QUI CURIOS SIMULANT ET BACCHANALIA VIVUNT The dream that the folk preserve a pure pantheism is as fresh as McLaren's "Buffalo Gals" but as old as Tacitus's Germania. Looking about Rome, Juvenal lacerated his second-century contemporaries for affecting the folk virtues of their distant forebears while living a perpetual orgy. Modern culture has done nothing to disprove the surmise that advanced civilizations are fated to combine nostalgia and indulgence. The glorification of folk has proceeded in tandem with the rise of Romanticism. In rock the two are wed in a vulgar way.

Dreams of Elysian

77

The paradigm of Romantic infatuation with folk is found in the story of Ossian. In 1760 James Macpherson of Inverness published Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, which he followed two years later with Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem, in Six Books. Both were alleged to be translations from ancient Gaelic originals composed as early as the third century by the Scottish bard Ossian. But Macpherson had fabricated Ossian from fragments of Irish legend and from his own Romantic imagination. The poems were written by him in English, and skeptical readers like Dr. Johnson were quick to note that third-century Celts were illiterate, that the translator could produce no originals of his poems, and that the ancient stories had a surprising modern literary finish. But Macpherson's forgeries satisfied a genuine Romantic craving, and the fictive Ossian became one of the chief literary influences of the first Romantic generation. Even while they suspected that these sentimental recreations of the past were bogus, intelligent men at the beginning of the modern era could not resist their counterfeit folk allures. In the cultivated leisure of Cambridge, Thomas Gray read Macpherson's first products within weeks of their appearance. His historian's discipline and Augustan reason told him they were fakes, but his heart was "extasie with their infinite beauty," and from that moment his own poetry was infused with a fresh sense of the folk past. Hugh Trevor-Roper calls the metamorphosis of the highland Scots from "the rubbish of Ireland" to an immemorial kulturvolk an example of "the invention of tradition," but no mere forger can invent a tradition without a willing suspension of disbelief in his victims. Macpherson's marks were the educated European elite, and he succeeded with them beyond his wildest Scottish fantasy because they wanted to be had. Ossian was translated into German, Italian, and French. Mme. de Stael's Romantic sensibilities led her to prefer Ossian to Homer, and Napoleon sailed off to subdue Egypt with only two books to fortify him, Goethe's Werther and Macpherson's Ossian (the conqueror liked the bogus bard "for the same reason I like to hear the whisper of the wind and the waves of the sea"). European taste redeemed the folk of the Celtic fringe from the scorn which had been their tra-

78


ditional lot and elevated them to the status of noble folk actuated by a love of independence, by prophetic visions, and by clean nobility of spirit: Be thine despair and sceptered care; Lo! to be free, to die, are mine, exclaims Gray's Welsh bard in his "bright rapture" before plunging to his death. SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES Rock recreates in a vulgar way the folk culture which the first age of Romanticism invented, and rockers embrace the folk for the same reason their eighteenth-century counterparts did. Out on the fringes of our civilization there linger the folk—for us, they are noble Saxon pioneers, living in the hollows of Appalachia where the arts of the banjo and the dulcimer are kept alive (never mind that the banjo is an African instrument). These folk still speak the language of Shakespeare and preserve unsullied the traditions of our ancestors when first they came to America. They too are proudly independent, unreservedly decent, thoroughly noble, and simply wise. They are our pure selves. Folk is our natural home to which we return from the moribund realms of the modern. We are entombed in our culture, and our longing for our folk roots is what one of Dylan's lyrics calls "Subterranean Homesick Blues"—subterranean because it rises from our buried selves, homesick because it longs for a return to our pure origins, blues because it is identical with the primitive emotion that constitutes black music. Bob Dylan—the early, remembered Dylan of Bringing It All Back Home and Blonde on Blonde—is the high priest of rock's invented folk tradition not because he sings Anglo-Saxon ballads—he doesn't much—but because his satires are counterpointed against a myth of folk purity. Very little of what Dylan writes is about the folk themselves, but very little of it is intelligible except as a description of what we have lost in our flight from folk goodness. His "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" is the heroine

Dreams of Elysian

79

of every medieval English folk ballad now warped by modern society: With your pockets well-protected at last And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass.

Dylan's music is ruined idyll, the folk tradition shot through with "sheet metal memory of Cannary Row" but alive and indestructible for all that. "Oh, who do they think could bury you?" he asks his Sad-Eyed Lady. If his songs are set in the countryside of Anglo-Saxon ballads, it is a countryside no longer habitable: "I ain't gonna live on Maggie's farm no more." Civilization has polluted the folk tradition, and tainted the most innocent rituals of daily life with sophistication: The milkman comes in, He's wearing a derby hat, And you ask me how come I don't live here— Hey, how come you have to ask me that? Much of Dylan's supposed surreal wit is satiric pastoral—vicious images of how the world of folk ballad looks after our civilization has finished with it: "The pump don't work 'cause the vandals stole the handle." The best folk-rock follows in the tradition of Dylan: One of America's great national pastimes is playing ball, Takin' it all, Thinkin' so small, sing the Byrds in their best folk vein. Rock makes its folk music against a backdrop of what R.E.M. calls "dreams of Elysian," dreams next to which the modern world is a failure: The con stole the horse, Jefferson, I think we're lost. The world has aborted the Elysian experiment of Jeffersonian democracy, but the vision of it lives on in rock pantheism. In the

8o


same lyric, R.E.M. equates "Elysian" with "dream of living jungle." None of rock's folk satires makes any sense except against the background of primitive purity from which we have fallen: "There are no truths outside the gates of Eden." I'D RATHER BE A PAGAN Rock's folk Eden does not exist, any more than the Scottish Highlands or the Timbuctoo of Romantic imagination ever existed. Like Thomas Gray, rockers have invented their folk origins out of an ecstatic longing, the same longing that gave birth to rock's myth of black origins. Malcolm McLaren said that he recorded his rock versions of Appalachian square dances because "the source of that song was probably the only thing white people in this country have in proximity to what I suspect the origins of rock 'n' roll are all about: something very pagan, something that harks back to the love rituals of forgotten days, when dance was very serious and sacred, when people really understood the magic of their bodies." The mythology that can confuse a group of mountain-dwelling Republicans doing a do-si-do with a tribe of Zulus dancing with their assegai must be exceedingly powerful, but it is by no means the exclusive province of rockers. Looking over modern England, Wordsworth had already said, Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn. On the basis of a six-month acquaintance with America, Dvorak proclaimed that black and Indian music "bore a remarkable similiarity to the national music of Scotland." Proceeding from these observations, Dvorak produced that inspired Czech extravaganza, The New World Symphony. But Dvorak had made a sensible point about folk music: "The important thing is that . . . the music itself should be a true expression of the people's real feelings." If folk music is the authentic lyrical outpouring of a racially harmonious people acting with spontaneous and pas-

Dreams of Elysian

81

sionate wisdom, then neither rock nor The New World Symphony is folk music. But if folk music is what ordinary people choose as the musical expression of their feelings, then rock is a genuine folk music, even though it belongs to the tradition of Romantic counterfeits. In rock, the English-speaking peoples have chosen a vulgar version of Romantic folk imitation as their mass music. Some critics, especially British sociologists, are disgusted that the revolutionary purity of the folk tradition should be contaminated by the vulgar imitations of rock, which is like complaining that children learn about Snow White from Walt Disney instead of at the knee of an aged German crone reciting the story from a Jungian store of marchen. The world moves on. What is new in rock's Romantic counterfeits of folk is its vulgarity. The original Romantic forgeries of folk culture were produced for an elite audience. Macpherson's Ossian was read by the likes of Thomas Gray, not by the rustic moralist in his sequestered vale. Wordsworth and Coleridge called their joint volume of 1798 Lyrical Ballads to affirm their continuity with folk poetry; still, the Lyrical Ballads sold no more than 2000 copies in its first years of publication. But in the course of the nineteenth century, the passion for Romanticism's bogus folk culture infected the middle classes as well as the educated elite of AngloSaxon society. By the 1920s, Romanticism's version of folk had become thoroughly bourgeois, with predictably hilarious results. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge describe the British folk craze that followed the Great War: "Young men in cricket flannels and young women in short white skirts jigged about to the fiddle, or piano, in the long-forgotten steps of 'Gathering Pease-cods,' 'Rufty Tufty,' 'Black Nag,' 'Sellenger's Round,' and the rest." Folk Romanticism could go this far and still remain respectable, even if ridiculous, because it was clearly an affectation of well-heeled middle-class types with sensible investments in government bonds. But with rock the whole English-speaking population has taken up folk Romanticism and vulgarized it. Rockers enjoy disputing the claims of Britain and America to rock leadership and purity. Trashing America and its degenerate version of rock is a favorite British pastime. The British rock

82


critic Julie Burchill literally raves at the mention of the United States, which is "a running sore on the face of the earth" and "a category of disease." Britons, rockers included, inherit more than two hundred years of snobbery and paranoia about America. In the last century the views of as disparate a collection as Gladstone, Dickens, Mrs. Trollope, and Lord Salisbury may have coincided on one issue alone, contempt for the American experiment. This one-sided quarrel continues in rock, with the British sneering at what the Gang of Four call America's "cheeseburger" mentality, while most Americans admire Brits for their accents and supposed cultivation. The quarreling obscures the homogeneity of rock as a single kind of music with a single following, first in the English-speaking countries and now in the world at large. In spite of the critics' wranglings, the rockers in Memphis and Manchester share a common language and a common Romantic myth growing out of the language. In America, rock began in the South far from the centers of elevated taste. In Britain, the great rock upheaval that produced the Beatles and continues with the best British rock like the Fall began in the North, equally remote from refined taste. Mark E. Smith of the Fall takes the rock patriotism of Charlie Daniels's Southern rock and translates it into British terms: The North will rise again, The North will rise again.

England's North, like America's South, is a cultural backwater where nineteenth-century Romanticism has mutated into postindustrial forms unmolested by civilized intervention. The rockers of Liverpool and Memphis may not have had the "genuine working-class culture" that British academics demand before certifying any popular activity as an authentic mass movement, but whatever they had, they shared—a mixture of democratic impulse, Romantic sensibility, and militant vulgarity. Brits and Yanks have gone different ways with rock, but the elements that unite the movement are far more powerful than those that divide it. The music that makes up their community property may be counterfeit folk, but it's the shared music of the English-speaking world.

Dreams of Elysian

83

Dylan; the Byrds; the Band; Arlo Guthrie; Creedence Clearwater Revival; Television; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; the Flying Burrito Brothers; the New Riders of the Purple Sage; the Eagles; the Rockats; R.E.M.; Aztec Camera; the Violent Femmes; Dexy's Midnight Runners; and Malcolm McLaren—in rock, the Romantic conventions of folk art live on, invigorated by the mythology of a mass audience. But this new incarnation of Romanticism's folk fantasies is no longer genteel, no longer bourgeois, and no longer respectable. The Irish band Pogue Mahone preserves the melodies and instruments of Gaelic folk music in their rock, but with a vulgar difference underlined in their name, which in the Erse means "Kiss My Ass." Dylan wrote the obituary for the refined tradition of Romantic folk music when he said, "Folk singing is just a bunch of fat people." When Robert Burns counterfeited folk poetry for the first Romantic era, he cleaned it up to meet the transcendent standards of poetry: But gie me a canny hour at e'en, My arms about my Dearie, O, An' warly cares, an' warly men, May a' gae tapsalteerie, O!

Rock, being vulgar, has no need of transcendent standards, and a folk-rock ballad on the same theme as Burns's "Green Grow the Rashes" plunges headlong into vulgarity, like the Violent Femmes's lyric "Add It Up," which is in a conventional ballad format but asks, "Why can't I get just one fuck?" Curiously, by sinking into vulgarity, rock's imitation folk music comes closer to the genuine article than Burns dared. Burns had to "purify" the original folk lyrics of "Green Grow the Rashes," which had said, An' ceremony laid aside I fairly fun' her cuntie, O.

Rock takes the ersatz folk tradition of the late eighteenth century and by accretions of vulgarity gradually restores it to the profane language of its genuine sources. But while the Violent Femmes are as crude as the Scots peasantry, they are not so carefree. Their lyric is full of self-concern, an almost nonexistent quality in folk

84


lyrics. So rock recaptures the crude purity of folk poetry while maintaining the anxious Romantic obsessions of an elite literary tradition. The Romantic conventions of art, vulgarized by rock, are now the property of the industrialized Western masses. In rock, Romanticism has created a new kulturvolk. What unites this new kulturfolk is a militant vulgarity that makes fun of the old Romantic conventions even as it steals them for its own use. Rock has folk aspirations in common with the country music propagated by the Grand OI' Opry, but with one essential difference. Country music takes itself seriously and works within the circumscribed folk traditions of Robert Burns. Vulgar rock has nothing to be serious about and laughs at the Romantic conventions it lives by: Oh the gal I'm to marry Is a bow-legged sow— I've been soaking up drink like a sponge. This is sung by Mick Jagger with the corniest of Ozark accents in "Dear Doctor." Even rock's satires of folk confirm the thoroughness with which it has absorbed the Romantic conventions and converted them to a mass lyrical pantheism. THE GREAT CURVE The art-school music of the Talking Heads seems a far cry from the wide-eyed pop songs of America's 6os or the heavy-metal glissandos associated with mainstream rock, but they all share a common ideology. "She is moving to describe the world," the Talking Heads sing in "The Great Curve." The band members have studied African tribal music, and the lyric is accompanied by their version of overlapping tribal choruses and jungle percussion: Divine, to define, she is moving to define So say so, so say so, She is only partly human being She defines the possibilities Holding on for an eternity

Gone . . . ending without finishing.

Dreams of Elysian

85

She is the female Pan, the anima out of Spiritus Mundi. She is Conrad's jungle woman and Tina Turner. But the student of Romanticism has met her long ago among the Spirits who "weave the web of mystic measure" in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound: Our singing shall build In the void's loose field A world for the Spirit of Wisdom to wield; We will take our plan From the new world of man, And our work shall be called the Promethean. Shelley's spirits are the messengers of a new pantheist order in which "familiar acts are beautiful through love" and time fulfills all possibilities. Like the dancer of "The Great Curve," whose models they are, their dance describes the limit of human capacity as widening the pantheist's circle, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Both Shelley's spirits and the dancer of "The Great Curve" have "messages for everyone": A world of light She's gonna open our eyes up. It is the message of pantheism. Pantheism lives on in rock, not as convention or tradition but as living popular belief. Rock is not an alien barbarism eating at the vitals of our culture. It is an organic development of Western Romanticism expressed in the vulgar mode. The art of Shelley and Tennyson, of Picasso and Pollock, proceeded from the same impulse that has produced Lou Reed and John Lydon. The Romanticism that longs for the primitive is not a passing artistic fashion but a movement instinct in the culture from top to bottom. Cultured people despise rock not because it is so irreconcilable with their ideals but because it is too similar to them. Theodor Adorno dissected jazz and popular music with lethal accuracy: "There is no longer any 'folk' left whose songs and games could be taken up and sublimated as art. . . . The material used by vulgar music is the obsolete and degenerated material of art music." "Anyone who allows the growing respectability

86


of mass culture to seduce him . . . has already capitulated to barbarism." In other words, rock is vulgar. The vulgar for Adorno is whatever imitates art but lacks its inner tensions, the tensions which if successfully negotiated make the artist a hero, triumphant and alone because he has fought his way to knowledge beyond the slothful mediocrity of ordinary life. Adorno is right in everything but his conclusion. Rock is made from the same stuff as nineteenth-century and contemporary Romantic art. It is a return to barbarism—that is, to the primitive. It is vulgar or it is nothing. But for rockers the tensions of their vulgar art are real, not sham. The intensity and pleasure in "The Great Curve" are no less genuine because Shelley achieved them 170 years ago. For the great mass of Westerners, Romanticism is not an historical past, but a vivid present with all its power experienced fresh, Rock is the living expression of this vulgar Romanticism. In rock the days forecast by Shelley and Whitman have been accomplished. Who would have thought it? The poets really are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

CHAPTER FOUR

I FORMULATE INFINITY Feeling, Self and Growth in Rock's Forever Now

From its Romantic and pantheist presuppositions follow the grand conventions of rock: its glorification of youth, its loathing of ennui, its celebration of energy, its hatred of formal education. Each of these is connected with the others, and all flow from a central pantheist identification of self and universe realized in the vulgar mode of feeling. On the recording of his lengendary Sun sessions, Elvis stops eight bars into a hillbilly rendition of "Milk Cow Blues." "Hold it, fellas," says Elvis to his sidemen, "that don't move me. Let's get real, real gone for a change." What follows is pure rock—no longer Elvis the country singer subduing every note to a white delicacy of taste, but Elvis the Pelvis, tapped into a reservoir of black primitivism. The source of rock is the primitive as interpreted by vulgar, democratic Romanticism, and the white man's motive for adopting the primitive is his desire to be moved, to get real, real gone for a change. In 1958, Gertrude Samuels of the New York Times tried to find out what impelled teenagers to line up around the Paramount for rock concerts. " It's just instinct, that's all,' murmured Roseann Chasen of Norfolk, Virginia, visiting in New York." Aretha Franklin defined soul succinctly: "It's all about feelings." Mark 87

88


E. Smith of the Fall says, "Rock 'n' roll isn't even music, really. It's a mistreating of instruments to get feeling over." The Troggs gave definitive voice to this central tenet of rock mythology in their 1967 classic, "Love is All Around Us": "My mind's made up by the way that I feel." Instinct, not reason, is the measure of rock's universe. Rock's credo of feeling leaves it open to attack as a mindless species of musical barbarism. The attack has been the more persuasive because a movement holding instinct and feeling as its central values appears confused and inarticulate and therefore unable, unwilling, or uninterested in defending itself on the battleground of rational debate selected by its opponents. But in rock, as in the pantheism from which it springs, confusion and inarticulation are virtues substained by a network of Romantic arguments about self, world, and change. FOREVER NOW "It don't move me," said Elvis. The standard of feeling is necessarily personal and subjective. The center and limit of a universe based on feeling must be self and self alone. John Henry Newman describes an early stage of Romantic philosophy in his account of the thought that troubled his adolescence, "the thought of two and two only absolute and luminous self-evident beings, myself and my Creator." Such a universe is stark, frightening, and antagonistic. It is still a universe in the tradition of Descartes and Berkeley because it is still a universe of thought. My reality is certain because I think; God's reality is more certain still because he thinks me. The real world is comprised of transcendent shadow-boxing between God's absolute thought and my finite reflection of it. The results of this unequal competition can only be depressing for the mortal, because the gap between God's infinite mind and man's transitory image of it looks unbridgeable, and yet man's happiness depends upon bridging it. Not surprisingly, much Romanticism of this penultimate stage is awash in anxiety and despair: "Wither is fled, the visionary gleam?" asked Wordsworth. Coleridge was assailed by "viper thoughts." The young Carlyle

7 Formulate Infinity

89

sank into the Everlasting No. Hopkins said the damned were punished by "their sweating selves." Romanticism proposes as many escapes from the abyss as there are depressed Romantics flailing in its chaos: return to Catholicism, embrace the progressive dialectic of history, surrender to art and beauty. They are all solutions reached through an initial affliction of tragic despair cured by a transcendent leap out of self into higher truth. But in a later stage Romanticism avoids tragedy and despair altogether by reformulating the basic problem: like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answered, "I have felt." The universe is no longer defined by the contest between the mismatched minds of God and self. It is defined by my heart and my feeling. These are not "two and two only absolute and luminous self-evident beings," but one being only, call it me or God as you please. Me is now the great idea: "Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself," says Whitman, relegating God to the status of a derivative notion. Since I am now no longer a minor shareholder in the universe but have become the universe itself, I no longer need to think my way to any transcendent relationship, any more than I have to think my hand as it writes. I know the world as I know myself, as feeling and instinct, and perhaps later as thought and ratiocination. Or more precisely, I know the world because I know myself. There is literally no room for transcendence in this emotional pantheism because there is nowhere for me to go that is not another aspect of self. Under the tutelage of feeling I may have cosmic visions, but in these visions I am expanding, not transcending, myself. When the pantheist equates self and God, he demotes thought to a secondary role in the universe and elevates feeling as the fundamental way of knowing. He does away with history and inaugurates a perpetual now. D. H. Lawrence celebrates the pantheist universe of self in the liturgy he devised for the fictional Mexican paganism of The Plumed Serpent. "There is no Before and After," chant the worshippers of Quetzalcoatl, the serpent god come to overthrow morbid Christianity, "there is only Now":

90


The great Snake coils and uncoils the plasm of his folds, and stars appear, and the worlds fade out. It is no more than the changing and easing of the plasm. I always am, says his sleep. Now and only Now, and forever Now. Rock everywhere echoes the Lawrentian liturgy, and the title of the Psychedelic Furs' album, Forever Now, is only an overt reminder of a deeper affinity. "Let it stay forever now," the Furs sing. The Plumed Serpent can have few contemporary admirers, while the Furs' album has millions of devotees. Rock is the vulgar emissary of Romantic pantheism. Emerson announced the pantheist program when he said, "There is properly no history, only biography." Where the self is all in all, the disparate parts of time contained in history books are mere appearance. Biography, the study of the self, is the reality of the universe, which is only the endless variation of self in its infinite incarnations. In the age of rock, the same people who studiously neglect the traditional history of the classroom avidly consume biographies of anyone from Mary, Queen of Scots, to John Belushi. The most successful books about rock itself are hagiographies of its stars, like Jerry Hopkins's and Danny Sugerman's life of Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive, with sales of over a million copies. And successful rock criticism also becomes biography, as in Peter Guralnick's Feel Like Going Home, Ian Whitcomb's Rock Odyssey, or Stanley Booth's Dance with the Devil, each of which subsumes the music it discusses under a first-person narrative of the critic's emotional reactions. Andy Warhol's dictum that "in the future everyone will be worldfamous for fifteen minutes" is another way of explaining what has happened to history under the reign of pantheism. It has been replaced by an infinite network of selfhood illuminating itself in diverse moments of individual splendor. Or as the Ramones put it, I don't care about history, That's not where I want to be— I just wanna have some kicks. When the pantheist equates self and universe, he also forecloses on tragedy. The morasses of gloom and doubt into which

I Formulate Infinity

91

Coleridge and Carlyle blundered—what were they but self hurtling against its self-created limitations? The utter impossibility of any one's soul feeling itself inferior to another; the intense, overwhelming dissatisfaction and rebellion at the thought;—these, with the omniprevalent aspirations at perfection, are but the spiritual, coincident with the material, struggles towards the original Unity—are, to my mind at least, a species of proof far surpassing what Man terms demonstration, that no soul is inferior to another—that nothing is, or can be, superior to any one soul—that each soul is, in part, its own God—its own Creator:—in a word, that God—the material and the spiritual God—now exists solely in the diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe. , . . In this view, and in this view alone, we comprehend the riddles of Divine Injustice—of Inexorable Fate. In this view alone the existence of Evil becomes intelligible; but in this view it becomes more—it becomes endurable. Our souls no longer rebel at a Sorrow which we ourselves have imposed upon ourselves, in furtherance of our own purposes—with a view—if even with a futile view—to the extension of our own Joy. Poe's Eureka states the pantheist position with gusto. The pantheist does not deny that there is grief in the world—blues, after all, is his chosen influence; he only insists on understanding grief sub specie aeternitatis, which is to say sub specie sua. Like the birds in Attar's Persian tale, we cannot complain of the worldly miseries inflicted by the Creator when we see that we are the world, the misery, and the Creator: I was the Sin that from Myself rebell'd; I the Remorse that toward Myself compell'd. Not surprisingly, Attar's Parliament of the Birds, originally composed in the twelfth century as a poetic explanation of the heretical doctrine of the Islamic Sufis, did not find its first English translator till the same decade that Tennyson published In Memoriam and Whitman Leaves of Grass. The Persian heretics made their appearance in English as a complement to Roman-

92


ticism's own variety of pantheism, which now thrives in the life of popular culture. Pantheism need not share Whitman's unyielding cheerfulness, but it is never tragic. Even the jaded Omar could only believe that the world was ironic. Tragedy demands a seemingly immeasurable chasm between us and some immense power. When we cannot span it, we tumble into the intervening abyss of suffering. There is no such gap in pantheism. Our suffering is whole, organic, and our own. Suffering and death are merely projections of our self-ignorance. They are finally eradicated by blasts of self-sustaining energy. Death, tears, and defeat are the stuff of many rock lyrics, but always enveloped in an extravagance of words and music that is in the end comic. The exaggerated gloom of the Stones' "Paint It Black," for instance, coupled with the ferocity of its beat, turns the song's ostensible grief at the death of a lover into a musical glorification of the singer's intense energies, and the proper response to the song's repetition of "black, black, black" is to get up and dance. Rock has no room for the spiritual catharsis of tragedy, substituting for it the physical catharsis of the dance floor, and some of the grimmest rock lyrics have accompanied the best disco music, like New Order's "Blue Monday." For the same reason pantheism cannot support tragedy, it can't generate heroic or epic productions. Pantheist art strives for what Poe called "unity of impression"—not a coherence of structure in the work, but a coherence of feeling in the self that experiences the work. Since the self is always changing, any work that takes more than one sitting to devour is consumed by two different incarnations of self, and then, Poe says, "totality is at once destroyed." Lyric is the natural mode of expression for pantheism, not only because it is the medium of self-expression, but because it is short enough to have "unity of impression." The four-minute bursts of words and music that make up rock songs are the popular incarnation of Poe's pantheist aesthetic.


93

I SECOND THAT EMOTION Rock is a popular adaptation of Romanticism's pantheist universe of feeling. Its cry is Smokey Robinson's: "I second that emotion." In rock's primitive, rationality is secondary to emotion: Wild thing, I think I love you, But I wanna know for sure. Come on and hold me tight. (Significant pause) I love you. In rock as in the Troggs's "Wild Thing," thought is valid only when ratified by sensation. The self knows the world as a feeling, and for rock this feeling is by and large the optimistic instinct of Whitman's homemade American pantheism. The Beach Boys have written rock's vulgar hymn to feeling in "Good Vibrations," a song complete with the polyphony of the Renaissance mass, now pressed into the service of a new devotion: "Good good good good vibrations." Elsewhere the Beach Boys elaborate on the principle of good vibrations: "Feel flows. Feel goes," Carl Wilson wrote for the Surf's Up album. The Grateful Dead's lyricist Robert Hunter captures the pantheist sentiment that underlies rock as a whole in his "Eyes of the World": Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world. The heart has its beaches, its homeland and thoughts of its own. This is Berkeley's esse est percepi refined through the optimistic strain of American Romanticism and presented in the vulgar mode of rock. To sense the world is to be the world. The heart contains the universe. The Meat Puppets from Phoenix, Arizona, sing, I don't have to think, I only have to do it. The results are always perfect . . . I formulate infinity. The lyric is appropriately called "Oh, Me." When the American rock industry wanted to raise money for African famine victims—

94


typically, rock's charitable impulses are best awakened by an appeal to save the citizens of its mythical African homeland—it devised a campaign built around the lyric, "We are the world." By simultaneously playing on rock's expansive pantheism and its sentimentality about the primitive, the makers of "We Are the World" created a song that zoomed to the top of the singles charts in four weeks and shipped "muli-platinum" with certified sales of four million records in one month. A similar Romantic impulse inspired the only comparable demonstration of rock's generosity— the 1971 concert organized by George Harrison for the relief of Bangladesh. Primitive Africa and mystical Asia awaken the latent charity of rock's vulgar pantheism as no merely Western indigence could, and the attempt to raise money for America's farmers by mounting the same kind of televised musical appeal used by Live-Aid or Band-Aid ended with contributions negligible in comparison with the wealth accumulated in a day on behalf of the far-off Ethiopians. America has no monopoly on rock's vulgar pantheism. The Beatles' famous "I Am the Walrus" develops the same sentiments in the more ornate style of British rock: I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. See how they run like pigs from a gun see how they fly. John Lennon claimed he randomly strung these words together in order to confound rational scavengers delving for profundities— a pantheist's gesture, like the Burroughs/Gysin cut-up method of composition. All variations of self—I, he, you, we, they—are interchangeable. All feelings and events are equally valid, equally present, equally meaningful. Every event is the center of the universe. There is no transcendent location for meaning. Even in language, one syllable or word is as good as another. Hence the random sequences and the nonsense syllables of Lenon's song, of the Burroughs/Gysin technique, or of aleatory music: I am the eggman they are the eggman—I am the walrus. GOO GOO GOO JOOB. . . .

/ Formulate Infinity

95

Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna man you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan POE. As befits a pantheist lyric, the random reference to Poe makes perfect sense. In Eureka Poe had written, "That God may be all in all, each must become God." "Everybody's got one," the Beatles chant at the end of "I Am the Walrus." Poe could not have added anything to this, or Whitman either. HOLD ON TO SIXTEEN The universe is held together by a magical harmony perceptible to those attuned to its good vibrations, and good vibrations must be felt instinctively. Rock lyrics are suffused with the language of emotion; need, want, and feel are the building blocks of its abstract vocabulary. Logic and reason are everywhere associated with the loss of youth and the death of vitality: When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical. . . . But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible, Logical, responsible, practical, And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable, Clinical, intellectual, cynical. This from Supertramp's "The Logical Song," a latter-day rendition of Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode" in vulgar translation—vulgar because the song rejects Wordsworth's transcendent power of "the philosophic mind" as a cure for adult depression. Vulgarity doesn't trust intellect, equating it as here with cynicism. Vulgarity denies transcendence. It sees problems starkly and feelingly. The alternative to magical youth is cynical age, and never the twain shall meet. Yeats described the landscape of rock in "Sailing to Byzantium": Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unaging intellect.

96


The Byzantium of rock is no country for old men. Rock embraces a perpetual youth of dynamic selfhood. "Hope I die before I get old," the Who say on their classic, "My Generation." Yeats's poetry and rock lyrics spring from a single Romantic impulse, now divided between the refined champions of unaging intellect and the vulgar practitioners of sensual music. In the1960s Marc Bolan of T. Rex devised an idiosyncratic lyric style out of his reading of Blake. Blake had been a similarly potent influence on the young Yeats, but starting from the same Romantic materials, Yeats created an art to transcend the "gong-tormented sea" of mire and blood, while Marc Bolan celebrated exactly the noise and confusion Yeats had wanted to rise above: Bang a Gong Get it On. Finding no place for a transcendent departure from the universe of the senses, the Romantic vulgarian makes the most of its sensual music. Everyone knows rock is the music of the young. Sociologists study it as "the music of youth." Businessmen exploit it as "the youth market." Scientists have demonstrated that only the ears of adolescents can withstand rock's mega-decibel blasts. Rock itself has carefully nurtured the myth of its eternal youth. "As we get older and stop making sense," the Talking Heads say on their Speaking in Tongues album. The madness of youth is divinest sense in rock. Adults in their sanity merely command and babble: "Bring in the dog and put out the cat," adults say: "Yakety yak." Adults identify themselves by their insensitivity to the instinctive poise of youth. "Forget it, you wouldn't understand anyway," says the misunderstood youth of Flipper's short satire against everything old, appropriately called "Brainwash." Despite the efforts of social and physical scientists to lend simple objectivity to the myth of youth, the facts are subjectively complicated. In 1983, sixty-seven percent of the American buyers of rock records and tapes were over twenty years old, and thirtyfive percent over twenty-five. The teenagers who gave Elvis his first hysterical reception in the 1950s are now over fifty years old. They have not all forsaken rock for Beethoven or Barry Manilow.


97

Their ranks swell the stream of worshippers who pass daily through Graceland, the Presley mausoleum in Memphis. In the pages of scandal sheets they consume endless tidbits about the state of the king's liver at autopsy. They buy the mail-order nostalgia-rock advertised on TV, and in twenty years, aging punks will send away for the K-Tel recording of Remember the Sex Pistols, The rock audience does not vanish when its members pass puberty. Nor are rock stars immune to aging. The Rolling Stones and the Kinks have now been performing for over twenty-five years. Despite the surgeons's heroic efforts, rock stars wrinkle like everybody else. They grow old, like rock itself, which is now in its fourth decade. Rock audiences do not object to aging, so long as the myth of youth is preserved. Cadmus and Teiresias attended the Dionysian revels though crippled with years. The contemporary rock star need only propitiate the deities of youth. A fiftyyear-old Mick Jagger in the tight pants of a horny adolescent is no more absurd than Cadmus in fawnskin and achieves the same ritual satisfaction. Rock stars and rock audiences do not dematerialize with age, but their tastes become fixed, and perhaps they decay into sentimentalism. Few of Elvis's original admirers have the emotional elasticity to appreciate Black Flag or the Fall, but they are still listening to "Heartbreak Hotel." Rock has a built-in nostalgia that arrests its fans in the music of their youth, a phenomenon welldemonstrated by the spate of movies like The Big Chill and American Graffiti designed to appeal to those who grew up in the 1950s and 6os. These movies lull their viewers into a euphoric delusion of perpetual adolescence by saturating them with the rock music of their teenage years. Rock has little to do with the objective facts of time and age. It has everything to do with mythic realms of imaginary youth, and these are open to adolescents of all ages. The veneration of youth has its roots in Romanticism, and Romantic pantheism especially is a cult of youth. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven,

98


Wordsworth wrote in the adolescence of Romanticism, when the heroes of art were often embodiments of youth itself, as the names Childe Harold and Young Werther suggest. For the Romantic hero age is a fall from grace, a loathsome disease. "To live longer than forty years is bad manners," Dostoevsky's Underground Man remarks. The Romantic cherishes childhood and youth, and his adoration immediately involves him in vulgarity, as Wordsworth was quick to recognize. For Wordsworth childhood is the seedtime of all bliss—and childhood is vulgar. It is a "tempestuous time" of "unconscious intercourse with beauty." It is noisy. In the "Immortality Ode" the Child of Joy dances and shouts with the vulgar throng of lambs, birds, and shepherds, while the aging philosopher sulks under a tree. Children have "fits of vulgar joy"—vulgar because they are not tempered by any mature reflection or muted by any transcendent contemplation. The child, like the student who succeds him, lives in the vulgar light Of present, actual superficial life.

Because vulgarity is the medium of childhood, and childhood is the repository of all that is wholesome in human life, Wordsworth is necessarily sympathetic to vulgarity, and his poetry is lopsidedly about the vulgar subjects childhood and country life. There is enough celebration of vulgarity in Wordsworth to have sometimes earned him the label pantheist, and had Wordsworth rested in a childlike acceptance of the universe of now, he would have been the British Walt Whitman and the Romantic ancestor of rock. But vulgarity is Wordsworth's point of departure, not his goal. We all begin in vulgarity, we are all surrounded by it. If life is good, then so is vulgarity. But we cannot stop at vulgarity unless we are prepared to die in our souls, any more than the child can prevent his growth to manhood unless he is prepared to die in his body. The spirit grows in the soil of vulgarity, but like a healthy plant, it rises above its roots. Only diseased specimens that lack vitality remain embedded in the vulgar soil, and then they


99

bow down the soul Under a growing weight of vulgar sense, And substitute a universe of death For that which moves with light and life informed, Actual, divine, and true. Wordsworth's poetry presents the outline of a spiritual technology by which the vulgar ore of childhood and common experience is smelted into "the faith that looks through death" and "the philosophic mind" of reasoning adulthood. Vulgarity is the raw material for this new industry. The whole man begins in "fits of vulgar joy" and by the application of the correct spiritual processes, transmutes these fits into "organic pleasure." The process requires solitude, tranquility, and contemplation— the familiar virtues of refinement. The joy of seeing a host of golden daffodils is immediate and vulgar, but worked over in recollection and tranquility, the daffodils become an eternal image to be stored in the memory against the vicissitudes of life. As the bee transforms pollen into honey, the whole man spins refinement out of vulgarity. Wordsworth's is the most perfectly balanced compromise of the first Romantic generation between the liberated forces of vulgarity and the traditional claims of refinement. His solution begins in the vulgar pantheism of childhood, which accepts all things as equally divine, and moves by discriminating stages to a contemplative vision of the one behind the varieties of experience. And Wordsworth's spiritual machinery has the added Romantic attraction of being active. His is no poetry of mere ornament or amusement but a working technology of the soul meant to be practiced. So Wordsworth captivated both the pragmatists and the idealists of the new age, and found followers as dissimilar as John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin. There is enough love of vulgar action in Wordsworth to make him a true Romantic revolutionary and enough refined contemplation to make him a champion of traditional values. His poetry found the middle way for a whole generation striving to balance the claims of old and new, and he naturally dominated the poetry of the nineteenth century. Some

100


critics have wondered whether the Wordsworth who began life writing manifestos that extol the common passions of ordinary men and the Wordsworth who ended life writing sonnets about "sinful Nature's bed of weeds" was not two or more Wordsworths. But the secret of Wordsworth is that he always mixed vulgarity and refinement, if not always in equal measure. Wordsworth made pantheism respectable not as a creed we should end in but as the one we all start with. Pantheism is the healthy, passionate religion of childhood. With proper nurture we should grow out of it—into Anglo-Catholicism, if Wordsworth can be trusted. With proper cultivation the vulgar many will bloom into the contemplative one. Wordsworth is selling refinement, but vulgarity is the soil in which it grows. Rock takes over from Wordsworth's brand of Romanticism the celebration of childhood, youth, and their attendant vulgarity, but it rejects the spiritual technology by which these are refined into transcendent beauty. If childhood and vulgarity are the materials of all vigor and goodness, says rock, then the trick is never to relinquish them. John Cougar states the rock case succinctly in "Jack and Diane": "Hold onto sixteen as long as you can." For him as for Wordsworth, adulthood is deprivation: "Life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone," he says. But Wordsworth thought the inevitable yoke of age could only be lightened by a transcendent act of mind. Rock devises strategies to avoid the inevitability of age and the necessity of transcendence. Rock defines youth not in years but in thrills, so even an aged Ray Davies remains young as long as he perseveres in the emotional vitality of the Kinks' music. Rock begins in youthful splendor and means to stay there, and for the same reasons every pantheist reveres youth. The self is the limit and measure of the infinite universe. We know the universe first and always by feeling. Feeling is strongest in youth. In youth we are most fully ourselves, nearest to being God. Rock's obsession with the fact that growing up is hard to do is only accidentally a sociological fact about adolescence in postindustrial societies. First and always it is a convention of Romantic art that has been vulgarized:


101

I strolled all alone through a fallout zone and came out with my soul untouched . . . Oooh—growing up.

Rock's teen-agony lyrics are about conserving the vulgar energy of youth that keeps the soul from worldly pollution. "I was the cosmic kid in full costume dress," Bruce Springsteen says in this same lyric, "Growing Up." The performers who write these songs and the audiences that consume them move past the technical limits of adolescence, and yet the records continue to sell, the songs are played by those as old as thirty, forty, and fifty, and aging rock critics make a living seriously discussing them in the columns of the New York Times, because in the age of rock people want to persevere in their cosmic childhood, no matter what their chronological age. These songs are not about calendar time but emotional vitality, which pantheism equates with life itself. And when this Romantic idea of youth as energy coincides with the facts of modern puberty, the result is like nothing so much as religious possession, as glands and ideology converge on the same emotional territory. But in the end the excitement of the teenage rocker is produced by a Romantic idea rather than a sociological or biological fact. Oscar Wilde perfectly understood that Romanticism had redefined youth to be synonymous with what an earlier age would have called spirit: "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young," says Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray. If Romanticism had not redefined youth and age in emotional rather than chronological terms, then only the middle-aged could appreciate Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode," and only the decrepit could enjoy Tennyson's "Ulysses." These too give age as a state of spirit, not a stage in time. When the Who sing about "my generation" or Richard Hell about the "blank generation," they use the word as the psalmist does in the line, "This is the generation of them that seek him." Rock's generation is comprised of spiritual, not chronological cohorts, and the Who's generation now includes rockers nearly forty years younger than the members of the band.

102


Rock has merely vulgarized the Romantic obsession with youth. The vulgarization lies not only in the mass audience rock reaches with its Romantic conventions nor in the loud presentation it gives to the sublime concerns of Romantic art. In rock, the grand questions which refined taste has made the object of conscious and painful deliberation are handled with instinctive and cheerful abandon. What Wordsworth treated with studied craftsmanship, rock manhandles with reckless spontaneity. By its nature, rock cannot achieve the poetic finish, the historical awareness, or the rational depths of the great Romantic poetry, because these all require the imposition of transcendent order on the materials of feeling. Rock's vulgarity subordinates reason to emotion, denies transcendence, and exalts perpetual youth. The youth of rock mythology is a permanent condition of blissful vulgarity. All rockers, no matter what their ages, are "bastards of young," in the Replacements' sense—vulgar, illegitimate, but alive. Western society now supports two brands of Romanticism. The refined, transcendent variety believes with Wordsworth and Ruskin in an emotional universe redeemed by the spiritual powers of "the philosophic mind." The bastard, pantheist variety accepts the emotional universe as pure feeling. It denies transcendence, equates "the philosophic mind" with the death of the spirit, and looks for apotheosis of the self in the purity of youthful instinct. We stand between two worlds, one dead, the other unwilling to grow up. EDJUMACATION AIN'T FOR ME Given its Romantic commitment to instinct, rock's exaggerated hostility to education follows naturally. In the 1979 movie, Rock and Roll High School, starring the Ramones, feeling wins its archetypal victory over the educational tyranny of intellect. Like vulgar Romantics everywhere, the students at Vince Lombardi High School prefer partying in the fresh air to the cloistered doses of discipline and Beethoven prescribed by the smallminded pedants who have gained a temporary ascendancy over their lives. Rock and Roll High School ends as all rock movies must—with the high school in flames and the Ramones singing a


103

hymn to the primal impulses which it is the business of rock to defend against the dead hand of all things "clinical, intellectual, cynical." In the words of Screamin' Steve, the movie's deejay, it's "a classic confrontation between mindless authority and the rebellious nature of youth." Revelling in its mindlessness, the movie is a masterpiece of vulgarity, and one of its heroines, who during the course of the film gives up her schoolbooks for the rapture of a Ramones concert, is named Kate Rimbaud in honor of the film's sources in Romantic overstatement. Hollywood understood early the antipathy between the West's educational system and rock's Romantic pantheism. In High School Confidential of 1958, the opening shot of Santa Bella High establishes a mood of orderly teenage activity against the backdrop of a classic American high school, the Georgian symmetries of its red-brick architecture an embodiment of solid reason. Suddenly a flat-bed truck drives past—it's Jerry Lee Lewis singing, "Let's shake things up tonight!" Jerry Lee is never seen again in the movie. In terms of plot logic his appearance is gratuitous. But in the emotional calculus of film, his drive-by sets in motion better than pages of dialogue the conflict between society's orderly discipline of the instincts and the youthful impulse that would like to see restraint consumed in great balls of fire. But rock's antagonism to education is not a barbaric substitution of anarchy for reason. The rocker appreciates reason, as Blake had done, as "the bound or outward circumference of energy." In "Nazi Punks Fuck Off," rock presents the seemingly improbable spectacle of the West Coast punks the Dead Kennedys admonishing their slam-dancing audience that they will succumb to neo-Fascism "unless you think." "Your emotions make you a monster," they tell another California child of nature in "Your Emotions." This from the authors of "Let's Lynch the Landlord." Their respect for thought is not at odds with their vulgar energy, any more than Blake's occasional deference to reason subverts his first premise that "energy is the only life." In rock as in the Romanticism of Rousseau or Blake, feeling is primary, and reason is the check on feeling that feeling itself creates. The servant is not greater than the master. Blake and Rousseau lament that Western society reverses the natural roles of feeling and

104


reason, subordinating imagination to the restraint of its own creation. Rock too respects reason—in its place. William F. Buckley or Joan Didion could not have invented more hysterical examples to illustrate the sloth of pure appetite than the vegetable participants in Black Flag's "TV Party" who "don't want to know" and have nothin' better to do Than watch TV, have a couple of brews, or than the Dictators' "Two-Tub Man," who drinks Coca-Cola for breakfast, thinks Joe Franklin is a gas, and says, "Edjumacation ain't for me." Rock takes part in the Romantic anarchism which envisions a universe where wisdom is synonymous with energy, and so rock hates the inertia of stupidity as much as any rationalist. But in rock as in Rousseau, energy and wisdom are not fostered by formal education but by its abolition. "School's out forever," exults Alice Cooper. In rock mythology, schools mutilate instinct, killing energy and reason together. Rock itself teaches the facts of life better than the academy: We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, Than we ever learned in school, Springsteen says in "No Surrender." Rock cries, "Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone!"—Pink Floyd's eloquent translation of Rousseau in Emile: Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man. ... To live is not to breathe; it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life. As would Rousseau, rock hates the sleep of reason that is the TV party, and it accuses its own rationalist critics of inducing it. Reason sleeps when the feeling that gives it life is hobbled by the narrow categories of intellect and order. The dynamic self of


105

rock's vulgar pantheism is not a Cartesian ego or a Freudian libido, though it may momentarily asume these or any other disguises. Potentially, the self of rock is God in the plenitude of being; actually, the self of rock may be nothing at all. Between these possibilities rock's pantheist self continually defines itself, now using reason, now discarding it, as feeling dictates. I WANT MORE Allied to rock's insistence on youth is its hankering after novelty. "Turn and face the strange changes," says David Bowie, and whether rock has in fact changed over the years, its devotees believe wholly in its endless originality. In its thirty-year existence, rock has already spawned as many fads, schools, and movements as Romanticism has in its two-hundred-year history. An alien encountering popular criticism of rock would be bewildered by the vast nomenclature devised to describe its various incarnations: rock V roll; hard, mellow, and soft rock; folk rock; rhythm and blues; soul; funk; fusion; heavy metal; power pop; rockabilly; bubblegum rock; psychedelic rock; disco; schlock rock; art rock; punk rock; minimalist rock. Each of these genera can be subdivided almost without limit. Heavy metal, for instance, comes in British and American species, and American heavy metal has Eastern, Southern, and Western varieties. And not surprisingly, rock's various movements usually have their twins in mainstream Romanticism. The broad middle ground occupied by Bruce Springsteen or Huey Lewis and called simply rock corresponds to the popular and nebulous Romanticism of Thomas Moore or Walter Scott in the last century, while branching off from this center are technorock groups like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark whose experiments with electronic equipment make them vulgar futurists; pop visionaries like R.E.M. whose effects are surrealistic; and musical ascetics like Clive Pig who occupy a universe parallel to mainstream minimalism. Rock shares with Romanticism a habit and a pattern of fragmentation. The terms rock and Romanticism are both bedeviled by problems of definition arising from the impulse to novelty inherent in

106


each. Cultural purists insist that Romanticism is a strictly limited term covering certain artists of Wordsworth's generation in England, of Hugo's in France, and of the Schlegels' in Germany. Out of Romanticism grew related but distinct historical movements. Rock purists make similarly sharp distinctions between the era of Elvis and the age of the Beatles, between black performers like Chuck Berry and their white imitators like the Stones. The rock connoisseur would no more conflate these than the prim historian would confuse Regency and Victorian taste. The purist disdains as slovenly the careless eclecticism of Billy Joel: Punk, funkIt's all rock 'n' roll to me.

But Billy Joel is closer to historical accuracy. Both Romanticism and its vulgar offshoot rock are movements proclaiming development, evolution, and dialectic as central revelations. Nothing is more traditional about Romanticism than its insistence on modernity. The Romantic preserves his eternal youth by being reborn every day. Time only has power over what opposes it. Whatever moves remains fixed in the enduring youth of the everlasting now. The struggle that generates change is the elixir of youth because it keeps us young by making us move. The Rolling Stones, always careful when they borrow black blues to pick songs that conform to rock ideology, made a success out of Fred McDowell's "You Gotta Move." The agon is a central convention of rock as well as of Romanticism: We are the young, Breaking all the walls, Breaking all the rules.

Fomentation and destruction are the carminatives of spirit. The avant-garde scramble after originality described by Renato Poggioli is perfectly reproduced in the rock world's mania to inhabit new musical territory, even if it is the old territory under a new name. "II faut etre absolument moderne," Rimbaud announced in Une Saison en enfer. "In ten years I hope there will be plenty of young bands around who'll tell me I'm boring


107

and continue the tradition of rock 'n' roll," Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats told Trouser Press ten years ago. Reaction and reformation are the essence of rock as they are of Romantic art. The dictum of novelty echoes through myriad artistic manifestos of the modern era. In Hegelian fashion, each manifesto hardens into dogma, inciting new manifestos, and so disjunction becomes the rule, so much so that the stable norm against which rebellion is directed disappears, and revolution feeds on itself in a fusion reaction. Rock faithfully mimics the Romantic drift. "Urgent, urgent—emergency!" Foreigner sings of a girl in a rush to get laid. There is a similar sexual urgency in Romantic culture's search for youthful novelty. Rock reflects it in its critical theories as much as its musical fads. Here is Jon Savage, writing in the introduction to The Industrial Culture Handbook, "a reference guide to the philosophy and interests of ... deviant international artists" like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire: "Punk, by this time, had not gone far enough: its style had become a pose, window-dressing for packaging and consumption through the usual commercial channels. Something new was needed: what was there?" Substitute for "punk" any term from the vocabulary of modern art—realism, impressionism, surrealism, futurism—and Savage's sentence would find a place in any of the manifestos of the movements that proclaimed the death of their predecessor rebellions. Any stability, even the stability of dissent and opposition, is poisonous in a pantheistic universe. Only eternal change can guarantee eternal youth. Because change is the essence of both Romanticism and rock, neither can be confined to any one of its epiphanies, any more than Brahma is merely Vishnu or Siva or Krishna. If Romanticism is only an isolated historical movement sandwiched between neoclassicism and modernism, then it is not Romanticism. If rock is a series of disjointed pop-music fads, it is not rock. One element that holds both together as aspects of a single historical impulse is their insistence on novelty. The logic of both movements demands that they be new, that they be total, that they should be eternally youthful and eternally accommodating to all change. "The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind," Blake had said. The highest praise

108


for a modern artist is that he is a revolutionary who has initiated a new movement, like Rimbaud or Elvis, like the Cubists or the Beatles. Physicists have resolved the confusingly diverse manifestations of matter and energy by tracing them all back to the Big Bang, the original event that generates the forces and rules of our universe. The diverse and antithetical phenomena of rock, or modern art, or modern criticism, also have a common origin in the Big Bang of modern culture which is Romanticism. BOREDOM As long as feeling impels the circumference of the universe ever outward the self thrives. But when instinct fails and contracts on its center, the self is stifled by its own unexpended energy. Rock like Romanticism is less interested in traditional notions of good and evil than in growth and decay. The pantheist self of rock is addicted to growth. Its goal is to subsume the universe and become God. "I need a miracle every day," say the Grateful Dead. Thwarted in this ambition, the self lapses into boredom, the ultimate evil of rock as of Romanticism. Boredom is the terminal affliction from which Romantic heroes from Don Giovanni to Dorian Gray are in perpetual flight. In Either /Or Kierkegaard describes this sort of Romantic hero: "He simply does not fall under ethical categories," "an individual who is constantly being formed, but is never finished," a person for whom "everything is a matter of moment only." Kierkegaard's Don Giovanni is the incarnation of desire. "He enjoys the satisfaction of desire; as soon as he has enjoyed it, he seeks a new object, and so on endlessly." The rocker is a vulgar Don Juan, ceaselessly constituting himself out of the energy of his desire, and Kierkegaard was right that "this energy, this power, cannot be expressed in words, only music can give us a conception of it." The backbeat of rock is not so far after all from the Champagne Aria of Don Giovanni. Both are expressions of an energy too abstract for the pedestrian discriminations of language to capture. This kind of Romantic hero, says Kierkegaard, "dances over the abyss," the abyss of self-destruction created when the self,


109

instead of expanding the limits of the universe toward the infinite, falls back on itself, tortured by its own thwarted desire. Baudelaire, the Romantic most interested in evil, was instinctively the poet of ennui, since after Romanticism evil and boredom are interchangeable. Baudelaire substitutes the term Ideal for good and Spleen for evil and paints a world ruined not by the active power of sin but by the self-inflicted languor of splenetic Ennui: Nothing equals the tedium of the halting hours When under the heavy flakes of snowy years Ennui, fruit of dismal apathy, Takes the measure of immortality.

In boredom the self loses the driving force of feeling and looks out at the immensity of the world not as its own but as something alien. As Baudelaire describes it in one of his Spleen poems, the self becomes the imprisoned monarch of a rainy land, "riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant tres-vieux," "rich but powerless, young and then again very old." The splenetic is automatically old, regardless of chronological age. He is the Romantic thwarted on his road to divinity who can no longer make self expand. He has become a cipher. Dostoevsky's Underground Man notes that there is no middle ground for the Romantic pantheist: "either to be a hero or to grovel in the mud—there is nothing between." The Underground Man is no hero, and consequently he "could not even become an insect." In rock too boredom is the chief sin. "I'm bored," says Iggy Pop, "I'm the chairman of the bored." The lyric is a description of the living death, of the self that cannot get under way, that has become "a lengthened monologue," that's "sick of all my kicks." "Be boring—be nothing," admonishes the pompous voice of authority on Public Image's "Fodderstompf." Iggy Pop and John Lydon are Baudelaire's pop descendants (Lydon named one of his albums Flowers of Romance in honor of Baudelaire and the tradition in which he works), and the hortatory injunction adopted for their name by the North Carolina band Let's Active is the vulgar battle cry of contemporary Ideal. For rock as for Romanticism, the poles of experience are selfdenial and self-fulfillment. Rock's Romantic baggage explains

no


why, in spite of its infatuation with blues, it so rarely achieves either the ironic or the tragic intensity of blues. Rock works on an altogether different system of values. Rock songs are either about the ideal triumph of the self as it moves to encompass more territory or about the splenetic self-questioning that accompanies the failure of this goal. There will never be a rock equivalent to King Lear—there has never been a pantheist tragedy of any kind—not because rock is too low to produce anything of value, but because like Romanticism it rejects the transcendent foundations on which tragedy is built. What rock can produce are sublimely vulgar rhapsodies upon the self in its quest to become the universe: Well I am just a modern guy— Of course I've had it in the ear before

'cause of a lust for life, 'cause of a lust for life.

Those who have the lust for life Iggy sings about exult when satisfied—"We are the champions of the world," Queen chants— and succumb to ennui when the self "has it in the ear." Rock abounds in genre songs—songs about driving fast or partying hard or moving to the city. These are only subspecies of rock's leading convention, the celebration of the energy that drives the self. As Robert Gordon says, the rocker is "too fast to live, too young to die." Why? Because "every morsel in my body's aching with desire." Desire demands energy for the construction of the infinite self. The ideal rock car should move at a speed approaching the speed of light, the better to become pure energy. Jonathan Richman goes "faster miles an hour with the radio on"—that way, "we get the feel of the modern world." The ideal rock party expends so much energy it destroys the house. The ideal rock habitat is a city that never sleeps, because, as the Cars say, "I like the night life baby—let's go." Rock has no patience with the rural. Its hymns to nature, the countryside, and the folk who inhabit them are as conventional as eighteenth-century pastoral, and like pastoral, they speak to city life. Cities are dynamos of self-expansive energies, and it is cities that rock celebrates. "I'm a fool for the city," sings Foghat. Cars, parties, and cities are all expressions of that fundamental energy by which the self creates the universe.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE ROAD OF VULGAR EXCESS Conventions of Rock Selfhood

Blake said that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Two hundred years of Romanticism have established the conventions for driving on the road of excess, and the rocker, in the fast lane, observes them scrupulously. He knows the conventions don't permit him to drive sober, and his chief intoxicants are sex, drugs, and technology. Doped with any or all of these, he is ready for some heroic travelling. TAKING THE WORLD IN A LOVE EMBRACE In one of his illustrations for Milton's Paradise Lost, Blake pictures Lucifer, "the Great Selfhood" of his Romantic mythology, upright amid the visible darkness of Hell, railing against repressive Jehovah. He is a blond, well-built Saxon, naked, defiant, and tumescent—Satan with a hard-on. Rock has transformed this illustration of a literary idea into the vulgar stuff of popular life. The pantheist's desire to usurp God's throne and substitute self in His place is naturally erotic. The sex drive is the most obvious case of the self expanding its boundaries in what Blake calls "continual gyrations" to include more territory, and the widening circle of inclusion that begins with sex ends with God obliterated in a pantheist's cosmic orgasm: 111

112

The Triumph of Vulgarity Something I cannot see puts up libidinous prongs, Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven,

Whitman says. Rock belongs in the Romantic tradition that rejoices in the sex drive as a leading ingredient in the energy that casts off selflimitation in its quest for the infinite. This energy may be revolutionary or perverse. John Lennon writes, "Why don't we do it in the road," John Cougar embroiders the tradition of de Sade and Swinburne when he sings that love "hurts so good," and the British punks Anti-Nowhere League carry to extremes which it will be difficult to surpass the assault on the stifling sexual restraints of a society crippled in its imagination: Well, I fucked a sheep, and I fucked a goat, I wagged my cock right down its throat. So what, so what, you boring little cunt. Like de Sade, Anti-Nowhere League takes sexual excess beyond shock to comedy. "He fucks a turkey whose head is gripped between the legs of a girl lying on her belly," noted de Sade in his outline for a scene in The 120 Days of Sodom. Many of rock's sexual outrages reach a similar level of satire, and the overstatement of Anti-Nowhere League, four English rockers swathed in chains, stubble, and leather, comes closer to the British music-hall tradition of farce than to the orgiastic extravagances of Jim Morrison. A good deal of rock—more than the public hears since it is by nature unplayable on licensed airwaves—employs the Romantic tactic of outrageous comedy, as the group names Circle Jerks, Violent Femmes, Man-Sized Action, and Throbbing Gristle indicate. The comedy of sexual outrage is a well-founded Romantic tradition stretching back through Burroughs, Wilde, Huysmans, Baudelaire, and Flaubert to de Sade and is often coupled with a pantheism that longs for an absolute self. The comedy of outrage incites feeling to smash the self-imposed barriers of decency, first by violating them utterly and then by carrying the violation to such extremes that both limitations and perversions seem ridiculous to a self that has achieved a larger perspective.

The Road of Vulgar Excess

113

But most Romantics are more interested in sexual consummation than in satiric outrage as a means of approaching the infinite: Nothing in the world is single; All things by a law divine In one another's being mingle: Why not I with thine?

Rockers share Shelley's propensity to celebrate sex as an instance of the union of self and the universe. "Take the world in a love embrace," advises Steppenwolf in its vulgar rendition of Romantic consummation, "and explode into space." Shelley's rhapsodic vision of a universe constructed from erotic filaments survives in the Beatles' trite "All you need is love." Elvis explained rock's energetic sexuality in defending himself against his refined detractors: "They all think I'm a sex maniac. They're just frustrated old types, anyway. I'm just natural." The sex drive is a youthful strategy of self-aggrandizement. It is the most natural thing in the universe, and all rock celebrates it, from the mellow-rock stations like WPIX in New York that in 1984 advertised "all love songs" to the hard-rock bands like AC/DC that make the musical request, "Let me put my love into you." As it translates spiritual intricacies of erotic art into crude demands of throbbing flesh, rock looks like a reduction of sublime Romantic energy to the status of popular pornography, but Romanticism itself has been of at least two minds about the relation of spirit and sex drive. For Blake, the sex drive was only a partial manifestation of a more perfect instinct for unity, and he believed that in due course absolute imagination would homogenize the notions of sex and self in the realization of perfect humanity. Rock rarely reaches these heights of pantheistic mysticism, preferring instead Whitman's more down-to-earth celebration of all creation centered on the sexual self: "I dote on myself, there is that much of me and all so luscious." Blake's and Whitman's are both pantheist positions, eradicating any distinction between God and self. In Blake's pantheism, though, only God exists, and I am He. In Whitman's, only I exist, and God is me. Whitman's pantheism is the more democratic and more commonsensical of O

114


the two, and not surprisingly, rock, which like Whitman is vulgar and American, has followed his lead. BIG ARMADILLOS The vulgar pantheist worships the penis. The Indian countryside abounds in symbolic phalluses, just as did the Greek landscape in the pagan era. I am the creative hub of the universe, and the creative hub of me is my genitalia. Little Feat says, "I've got a rocket in my pocket." The crotch is the launchpad for the conquest of the universe. Rock has restored the pantheistic adoration of the phallus to the West. The ideal rock star is young, male, horny, and well-hung. Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop are the most prominent of a series of rock stars who have exposed themselves for a grateful public. Other rock stars, intimidated by modesty or the law, have propitiated the ritual demands of their audience by padding their crotches or highlighting their endowments. David Lee Roth, formerly of Van Halen and one of rock's transient sex symbols, usually performs in tight black outfits accented by a bulging red G-string. With minor variations, his is the costume of most hard-rock idols. A good percentage of rock lore revolves around penis stories. The Plaster Casters of the first age of rock were teenyboppers who took molds of their idols' lingams. Ian Whitcomb, a wellmannered Irish boy who found himself an overnight rock sensation with the release in 1965 of "You Turn Me On," got a rude introduction to the religious practices of American rock. Riding on a chartered bus during a concert tour of the Midwest, he was studying Marx for his Trinity College finals in modern history when "suddenly, with a dull thopp!!, a human book marker hid the print. One of the rock stars had placed his dong, his tool, his wedding tackle, right on the Marx." Rock stars are very defensive about their bulges, rightly treating them as essential tools of the trade. "I do not wear a hose. My hose is my own!" protests Freddie Mercury of Queen. The lead guitarist in the "rockumentary" satire This Is Spinal Tap remarks that the young males who constitute the group's audience are intimidated by "the armadillos in our trousers—it's quite


115

frightful." Andy Warhol designed what are perhaps the two most famous rock album covers, both phallic. The Velvet Underground's Velvet Underground and Nico features a yellow banana that peels back to reveal pink banana-flesh beneath. The Rolling Stones's Sticky Fingers features a crotch shot of a bulging pair of jeans complete with zipper (inside merely underwear). Nothing could more firmly distinguish rock from other forms of popular music than its insistent penis worship. Only someone who has tried to imagine Frank Sinatra performing in a padded G-string has fully appreciated the chasm that separates Romantic rock from its pop-music predecessors. All the priapic details of rock mythology share one feature. They are funny. In legend the rock performer is what James Taylor calls "a steaming hunk of burning junk," a throbbing stud, a musical satyr, and nothing has done more to persuade polite opinion of the subversive vulgarity of rock than its penis worship. But on examination his veneration generates more laughter than passion. The hilarity arises from the disjunction between Romantic myth and living fact. In fact, rock stars are a representative cross section of the young male population of the West, and their sexual endowments and preferences probably mirror those of the general public. But even if all rock stars were impotent the rock myth would demand that their bodies and especially their genitalia be objects of adoration. The rocker adores the idea of feeling in the accidental fact of his idol's crotch. The rocker's fetish is not utilitarian. The object of the Plaster Casters was not to get laid, though they may have obtained this collateral benefit, but to make an image for ritual usage. Genuine passion is rarely humorous. Rock passion is rarely anything else, because it has little to do with sex and everything to do with the Romantic ritual of venerating the instinctual. The comic dislocation between myth and sexual practice is captured in the legend of the groupie who wanted to screw Mick Jagger, reputed to be the best-hung star of all rockdom. She followed dozens of bands and scored with hundreds of rockers, but after each encounter, she would tell her friends, "He was all right, but he was no Mick Jagger." One night she was invited to a glitzy rock party in Los Angeles, and there he was—Mick Jagger! She

116


moved in on her prey and bagged him. The next day her envious girlfriends asked her how it had been. "He was all right," she said, "but he was no Mick Jagger." UNDER MY THUMB Its ritual penis worship leaves rock exposed to the most shrill charges of atavistic male chauvinism, and these have been forthcoming. The members of the movie-parody group Spinal Tap are bewildered when Sears and K-Mart won't stock their latest album, Smell the Glove, featuring on its cover a bound and naked woman on all fours to whom a male hand offers a leather gauntlet. Many lyrics confirm the supposition of the parody that rock is a recrudescence of the most base male fantasies of sexual dominance. The locus classicus of male-dominant rock is the Stones' "Under My Thumb," where the man literally treats his girl like a defiant pet: "Under my thumb's a squirming dog who's just had her day." But the obvious chauvinism of rock obscures the larger mythic context in which it appears. "Under My Thumb" first appeared in 1966 on the album Aftermath next to "Lady Jane," a song with exactly the opposite sexual posture. Lady Jane's man is a courtly lover who renounces all other attachments to submit himself to his woman: Your servant I am And will humbly remain.

The only thing unusual about "Under My Thumb" and "Lady Jane" is that they are the products of the same group. Rock has spawned as many "I'11-be-your-slave" lyrics as it has those of the "Take-my-love-pump" variety, but usually each type is the exclusive province of a species of rocker. The fans of heavy-metal rockers Motley Crue expect and get male dominance, the fans of mellow rockers Genesis expect and get male submission. But taken as a whole, rock makes itself the vehicle for endless varieties of sexual fantasy, and champion chauvinist Iggy Pop is also the author of "I Wanna Be Your Dog." The ambition of rock is to play every variation in the repertoire of sexual energy. While the


117

Turtles's sappy love song "Happy Together" topped the charts in 1967, the Velvet Underground were recording their homage to Sacher-Masoch, "Venus in Furs." Rock is pansexual and thrives on ambiguity. At the distance of twenty-five years it is hard to remember that the Beatles were accused of effeminacy when the public first noticed them in the 1960s and that Murray Kempton compared them to the women novelists of the nineteenth century. David Bowie, himself one of the classic sexual ambiguities of rock, describes the perfect rock star under the name of Ziggy Stardust: "Well-hung, snow-white tan"—he is a hunk of burning love, but pale and delicate. Boy George, a nice British boy from London's Eltham Green who in the drag in which he rose to stardom looked like an attractive Margaret Thatcher, only carried the inherent sexual ambiguity of rock to one of its logical conclusions. But transvestitism and homoeroticism do not exhaust rock's sexual roles. The ideal rock star is sexuality incarnate. He is the focus of every possible taste. He is indiscriminate in his appeal and therefore vulgar, Horace denounced the ephebic Gyges because, with his long hair and horny manner, he might have been anything, and to look at him, one never knew where one stood, ambiguoque vultu. Teasing uncertainty and universal appetite are two constituents of vulgarity, and the sexuality of rock indulges them both. In life, Mick Jagger has come closest to fulfilling rock's pansexual fantasy, and he has received equal sexual obeisance from gushing girls, butch boys, mid-life sadists, and aging discomanes. A cunning rock star nourishes the fantasy that he is sexually omnivorous. David Lee Roth, who may have more brains than talent, tantalized the dim interviewer of the British fashion magazine The Face with visions of pansexuality: Face: You said that every woman that wanted you, got you. Is that really true? David Lee Roth: Absolutely. Why? Do you want me? You only have to ask. . . . Face: Urn, er, what about the men that want you? . . . Roth: Well, come como, that's Spanish which means everyone's welcome backstage. . . .

11 8


Face: You knocked around with Terri Toye, the sex change, for a while, didn't you? Roth: There are rumors, yes! . . . Face: References to S&M seem to crop up often in Van Halen's music. . . . Roth: In Van Halen, we view S&M as either a very sharing experience or else we deal with it from the reverse angle. Here as everywhere, rock's pansexuality is hilarious. Sexual excess is by now a Romantic convention. Rousseau disgusted Bertrand Russell by callously retailing his amours in his Confessions. Shelley's sexual appetites, combined with his adolescent atheism, alienated decent opinion in his lifetime and still form the centerpiece of his popular biographies. Rimbaud and Verlaine's homosexual liaison and Oscar Wilde's self-inflicted martyrdom are two more landmarks of a period in which the sexual excesses of artists have become an extension of their art. The rock star merely enacts the union of personal excess and artistic endeavor before the larger rock audience, which has proved more tolerant of deviations from the social norm than the refined bourgeoisie, probably because the rocker is more willing to see the Romantic sexual excesses of rock for what they are—conventions of his ritual pantheism, not models for practical living. "Do you think it is so easy to have me become your lover?" Whitman asks. "Have you no thought O dreamer that it may be all maya, illusion?" Pantheism is in all else inclusive and can hardly draw the line at matters of sex. Medieval Islamic orthodoxy condemned the Sufi pantheists as heretics for their sexual tolerance, and their great poets, like Attar, depict with indulgent wit the spectrum of erotic possibilities, almost all of which the Prophet has foreclosed. The Hindu spiritualist attended to the variety of sexual proclivities when he decorated the temples of Shiva. In our society, Whitman carries on the pantheist tradition in his poems celebrating everything from the spinster's sexual fantasies to the adhesiveness of comrades. Whitman resisted the persistent attempts of literary busybodies like John Addington Symonds to extract from him a confession of homosexuality, not out of fear but from


119

conviction. Neither the Sufi, the Hindu, nor Whitman wants to be labelled a practitioner of one sexual style to the exclusion of all others. The pantheist sees a world all equivocation and settles for no diminishing resolution of his paradoxes, sexual or otherwise. Rock has made the sexual ambiguity of Romantic pantheism available for a mass audience: "Something meets boy, something meets girl," the Replacements sing in "Androgynous." Women might well object that the tolerant ambiguity of rock is lopsidedly male, that submission and dominance are two symptoms of a single illness, that for all its pansexuality, rock is largely about men. They would be right. Rock has its female stars, from Janis Joplin to Cyndi Lauper. It has its female groups like the Bangles and the Go-Gos. Its Romantic women can be as vulgar as its Romantic men, as the group called The Slits attest by their name. But finally woman's role in rock is that of devotee. The Romanticism that proclaims sexual liberation for every human has followers of both sexes and every preference, but its priesthood and ideology are resolutely masculine. The heroes of Romantic pantheism are frequently chauvinists like D. H. Lawrence or homosexuals like Whitman. Rock continues this tradition in its penis worship. Perhaps pansexuality is only another strategy of male chauvinism by which Romantic men reduce women to the same status as sadists and sodomites, thereby denying them a rightful equality. One of the curiosities of rock is that a movement so absorbed in erotic vulgarity should have produced so little interest in the female nude. The iconography of rock albums, posters, and movies abounds in chests and crotches, but they are more often than not men's. Bruce Springsteen's buttocks on Born in the U.S.A. are calculated to sell millions more albums than any display of femininity could. The gods of pantheism and the heroes of Romanticism are men—Dionysos, Satan, Jaloub, Mick Jagger. The charge that rock is chauvinistic is accurate. In this crime, rock is only as guilty as its accomplice Romanticism and reflects the same ideology that has inspired most modern art. Rock inspires more sexist indignation only because its brand of Romanticism labors under the added stigma of vulgarity.

120

The Triumph of Vulgarity BORN TOO LOOSE: DRUGS

The Romantic self, bound on an expedition to infinity, demands constant infusions of cosmic energy. "Sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll is all my brain and body need," says Ian Dury, giving the premier dietary law of rock. Drugs are a natural part of any Romantic regimen because they alter self in ways conducive to a nearer rapport with the infinite. The Jefferson Airplane's celebrated drug song, "White Rabbit," summarizes two of the pantheistic potentials of drugs: One pill makes you bigger, And one pill makes you small, And the pills that mother gives you don't do anything at all. Pills that leave the self intact have no place in rock's materia medica. Mother's licit prescriptions are designed to preserve the status quo and are therefore worthless. The pantheist self needs to move and can only achieve its object by growing either bigger or smaller. Compounds like amphetamines and cocaine that produce euphoric states of strength are the drugs of mythic choice for rock's Romantic optimists who would like to find themselves at the center of a universe of pure energy. Rock's speed-freak envisions a totality comprised of what the Velvet Underground calls "white light/white heat": White light, don't you know it lighten up my eyes, Don't you know it fill me up with surprise. The perfect self, of which uppers provide a fleeting apprehension, is identical with the pure energy of white heat. Speed and coke are traditional fare on the menus of rock precisely because they are comestables that expand the self to incandescent godhead. For similar reasons, rock honors the hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and mescaline that refract into its component colors the white-hot totality perceptible under the influence of amphetamines. The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," which, despite its authors' denials, rock mythology insists is about an


121

acid trip (its title can be reduced to the acronym LSD), tells of a world seen through "kaleidoscope eyes" and alive with "tangerine trees and marmalade skies." The difference between speed and hallucinogenic vision is one of quality, not of kind. Both aim to provide the self with a godlike eminence from which to apprehend its embrace of totality. Speed, cocaine, hallucinogens—any of these may do for an appetizer or as a side dish, but the main course on the menu of rock mythology is likely to consist of narcotics, the drugs that obliterate consciousness. These include sleeping pills like Seconal, hypnotics like Quaalude, and tranquilizers like Valium, but the premiere drugs of the class are the addictive opiates, morphine, opium, and heroin. From the cute insinuations about shooting smack often imputed to the Mamas and Papas' lyric, "I'm a real straight-shooter, if ya know what I mean," through the Stones' "Sister Morphine," and on to Generation X's "shooting up for kicks," rock's infatuation with narcotics has matched its interest in stimulants. This apparently paradoxical fascination with a diet designed not to expand but to extirpate the self has venerable antecedents in both pantheist literature and Romantic convention. The self can be made coterminus with the universe by expansion or by contraction. For Whitman, the route is invariably by expansion— the self should move more and more toward infinity. But an equally mystic tradition, much exploited by pantheists, invites the self to embrace negation as the royal road to godhead because God, says the medieval pantheist Erigena, "is exalted above everything that is said or understood, Who is none of the things that are and are not, Who by not knowing is the better known." The modern pantheist equates God and self, from which it is an easy leap to the paradox that one way for the self to become everything is to be nothing. The Fixx sing the beauty of being "saved by zero," and the Fall praise "the clarity of nothing." What Freud called Eros and Thanatos are two sides of a single Romantic coin which, heads or tails, is meant to purchase infinity. Keats felt he might approach the ecstasy of the immortal nightingale the nearer he sank toward "easeful Death," and typical of the modern era, he likens this approach to the "drowsy

122


numbness" induced by a "dull opiate." By suppressing the self, the adept escapes from the world's ennui and makes of his brain and body a darkened temple to be inhabited by the cosmic divine—"Already with thee! tender is the night"—or as the Ramones say, "I wanna be sedated." Narcotics provide a means of accomplishing this rite of selfannihilation, and they have been popular with each generation of moderns. Coleridge's opium reveries are the best-known Romantic example of a chemically induced state of self-suppression, "a profound sleep, at least of the external senses," during which the brain becomes the hub of pure creative experience. It matters not whether Kubla Khan was actually composed in narcotic oblivion. Coleridge says it was, and in Romanticism as in rock, the myth is the fact. Self-apotheosis by means of narcotics has not wanted for Romantic practitioners. Baudelaire's Les Paradis artificiels is the standard text for Romantic pharmacology. De Quincey describes the process in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Drinking ether enjoyed a Parisian vogue at the turn of the century. Rock has only vulgarized the conventions. Johnny Thunders, who gives the impression in performance of being so stoned on heroin that he slurs his lyrics, sings that he's "living on Chinese rocks." His audience howls its approval, because they know that Johnny has said he was "born too loose," a character whose destiny demands that he shatter the tedious impositions of normal selfhood even at the risk of self-destruction. TOO FAST TO LIVE Narcotics are a preferred drug of self-aggrandizement not only for their negative capability but because they are heroic. Romanticism and rock share protocols for a heroism of excess. Their heroes need not be brave or loyal or good. They are those whose emotions have broken out of prescribed limits, who have accomplished the highest degree of novelty, whose selves have achieved bizarre and unexpected definition. The extrovert, the hedonist, the madman, the criminal, the suicide, or the exhibitionist can rise to heroic stature in rock for the same reasons that


123

Byron or Raskolnikov became Romantic heroes—profligacy and murder are expressions of an emotional intensity that defies the limits imposed by nature and society. The Romantic hero, burning "with a hard, gem-like flame," routinely challenges death with excess, and the rocker follows suit. "Live fast, die young," the Circle Jerks advise. The Romantics died in noble excess, like Byron while fighting for Greek liberty or Shelley defying the elements in the Gulf of Spezia. The rock star perishes from vulgar excesses—the speeding car or the prolonged party. But rock and Romanticism share an aesthetic appreciation of death as the ultimate form of excess, a notion perfectly realized in Edward Onslow Ford's memorial to Shelley in University College, Oxford. The drowned Shelley's limbs glisten in Carrara marble. He is dazzling in death, and the sculpture, in emphasizing his lolling penis and languishing posture, suggests that death is the acme of postcoital abandon. Ford's monument anticipates the full-blown vulgarity of popular Romanticism, whose dead heroes Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin are similarly revered for having climaxed to eternity. The rock hero most beautiful in death is Jim Morrison, who died in his bathtub in Paris. In legend, he died of an overdose (the cause of his death has never been formally established) and was buried without autopsy or proper identification—facts which have fed the Romantic myth that self-annihilation is perfect selfrealization. The fans of the Lizard King still believe he is alive somewhere, like King Arthur. Morrison dead in his tub is the vulgar duplicate of David's "Marat," cut off in mid-sentence, arrested forever in a revolutionary youth, powerful in martyrdom, though Morrison's is a self-inflicted martyrdom. On his tombstone one fan has scratched, "When are you coming back, you bastard?" His disciple Patti Smith made a pilgrimage to his grave, pockmarked with adulatory graffiti. "Look at this grave, how sad!" a Frenchwoman is supposed to have remarked to her, "Why do you Americans not honor your poets?" "My mind moved before my mouth. I finished the dream. The stone dissolved and he flew away. I brushed the feathers off my raincoat and answered: because we don't look back," The pantheist, face forward toward infinity, views death as

124


the mysterious catalyst of the transformations that lead from one state to another. Rock's young martyrs command allegiance in death as vulgar embodiments of the Romantic energy that challenges time to make us all in all. After Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool in 1969—did he die of a heart condition or from drugs?—the surviving Stones mourned him in a memorial concert at Hyde Park, where Mick Jagger recited the famous lines from Shelley's elegy for Keats: Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die, If thou wouldst be that which thou dost seek.

The rock hero need not die in passion or glory to earn his beatitude. Vulgar death in the swimming pool or with a needle in the vein is as credible a route to eternity as the noble heroics of a refined generation. The Romantic martyr is separated from his rock counterpart by the vulgar details of the rocker's self-extinction, but their motives are governed by a single set of conventions, and even in death they are not divided. For all their notoriety, rock's dead martyrs are awesome exceptions or else they wouldn't be martyrs. Rock mythology regards their excesses with holy dread, but it also proposes a brand of eclectic moderation more suitable to the routines of life. In America, rock's pharmacological eclecticism found its spokesmen in the Grateful Dead. In "Truckin," the Dead describe the diet of rocker Sweet Jane: "Living on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine." The red wafer, Seconal, obliterates consciousness; the white powder, cocaine, intensifies it; and the vitamin C, derived from wholesome fruits and vegetables, invokes the blessing of nature upon the manipulation of self. If the ordinary rocker takes drugs at all—and reverence for excess is not inconsistent with the believer's own abstinence—he probably indulges with Sweet Jane's eclecticism but also with moderation. Perhaps he uses alcohol like David Bowie's Young Dude who says, I've had a little wine and I'm feeling fine, Gonna lose my self-control.


125

Steely Dan describes the moderate indulgences of ordinary rockers: "The Cuervo Gold, the fine Colombian." Rock's heroes have fed on the invisible meals of self-apotheosis and self-annihilation, but the average rocker makes his eucharist, if he makes it at all, out of more humble fare: alcohol, the staple of religious celebrations of the irrational from the dawn of civilization; and marijuana, a mild and transitory intoxicant. Rockers who would never themselves take drugs cheerfully applaud the music that celebrates their use, not because they approve but because they subscribe to the ideology of which the drugs are the conventional symbols: life is feeling under transformation, instinct undergoing movement. The drug conventions of rock do not have any necessary relation to the way rockers live. They have everything to do with what they believe. The drug conventions are the sacraments of a vulgar pantheism. ANOTHER GREEN WORLD Many drugs, like marijuana and alcohol, are products of the soil, and when the rocker glorifies them he pays his respects to wholesome nature. In "We're Not Gonna Take It!" the Who call smoking grass "smoking mother nature." But many of rock's venerated chemicals are synthetic compounds, like amphetamines, synthesized in the laboratory in the early part of the century and used in subsequent wars to sustain the expansive heroism of the military in quest of domination or liberty. Rock's fascination with drugs seems to involve a contradiction between love of primitive nature, which generates self-aggrandizing potions with spontaneous wisdom, and love of technology, which improves on nature's unsatisfactory productions. The contradiction illuminates the larger subject of how a self-centered pantheism of feeling can reconcile itself to the world of empirical science and its technological progeny. Critics of Romanticism confront the apparent paradox that a movement so absorbed in sublime speculations should delight in the vulgar technologies that have remade the world in the image of science. Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans' A Rebours, indulges from his refuge in Fontenay his "hatred of everything

126


commonplace and vulgar" by a retreat into the stylistic glories of church Latin, but at the same time he listens with rapture from his window to the distant whistle of the steam engines carrying the common herd between Paris and Sceaux. "Does there exist, anywhere here below," he thinks, "a being conceived in the joys of fornication and delivered in the pangs of childbirth who can compare in splendor or singularity with the two locomotives recently put into service on the Northern Line?" The apparent paradox is as much the property of rock as of its parent Romanticism. Rock celebrates pastoral and primitive Utopias while swathing its stars in polyester jockstraps and arming itself with the latest devices of electronic technology. It chants the beauty of individuality to an audience that has become a howling mob. It extols the simple virtues of honest feeling from record and video studios created on the most greedy and ambitious frontiers of electronic capitalism. But the paradox is only apparent. Primitivism and technology are two flanks of a single movement, the leading spirit of which is selfhood militant. "In his line man has done as well as the God in whom he believes," muses Des Esseintes in explaining his love of the steam engine. Man's proper home is the pastoral Eden of accomplished feeling where self is identical with the universe. In returning to this home man is justified in using every artifact of his imagination to expand the limits of selfhood till they encompass godhead. One road to this end leads through the primitive past of Romantic mythology, but another lies directly through scientific invention. Both converge on infinity. The early Romantics understood that technology was the ally of imagination, and they used the railroad as the emblem of expanding imagination in its technological incarnation. Turner's Rain, Steam, and Speed, his 1843 picture of the Great Western Railway engine crossing a trestle in a storm, is an epitome of Romanticism's use of technology. The black engine, enveloped in cloud and smoke, is absorbed in the universe of light that is Turner's medium of Romantic unity. Modern art has followed Turner in his fascination with vulgar technologies. Leger's is only the most obvious example of twentieth-century art that revels in the mechanical, and Severini and


127

Magritte continued the tradition of Turner in their portraits of the locomotive, the one in his futuristic Armored Train, the other in his surrealist La Duree poignardee, Writing ten years before Turner painted his Rain, Steam, and Speed, Wordsworth had already embraced "Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways" on behalf of Romantic poetry: Nor shall your presence, howso'er it mar The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar To the Mind's gaining that prophetic sense Of future change. In America Emerson made the same point in his essay "The Poet": "Readers of poetry see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; for the works of art are not yet consecrated in their readings; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the beehive or the spider's geometrical web." As Little Eva rightly observed in her 1962 classic, "everybody's doin' the loco-motion"—in rock as in Romanticism. The rock musician is the vulgar Romantic poet, consecrating each advance in technology as another imaginative leap toward recapturing the great order in which self becomes God. Thomas Dolby, one of the wizards of synthesizer rock best known for his single "She Blinded Me With Science," sums up his technopop in the single word "timelessness" and adds in the lyrics to "Windpower," "Switch off the mind and let the heart decide—there is no enemy." Technology is another means of switching off time to achieve a universe coincident with the feeling self. In rock iconography the rock star appears in mid-stroke with the neck of his electric guitar protruding from his crotch like a four-foot erection. The rocker's axe is the emblem of his Romantic faith in the power of technology to enlarge selfhood. When the rocker identifies himself with his guitar or his car, he is not using metaphor but stating what for him is fact. Ted Nugent tells his girlfriend in "Wango Tango" that for the rest of the night they are going to become a Maserati: Everything's triple-charged: You feel like a little fuel injection?

128


The power technology gives is not just a metaphor for the sexual power of the Romantic hero, it is a concrete embodiment of it, and the rocker thrives on the innuendo that follows from an identification of the self and its technological incarnations. In a pantheist system like rock's the concept of metaphor itself collapses into ridicule. Metaphor suggests the similarity of disparate events, and Milton asks his muse's permission to compare "great things with small." Metaphor is premised on hierarchies and discrete categories. But in pantheism all identities are interchangeable and reducible to one value—me—so that metaphor, if it still exists, becomes a means for the self to admire itself in its various guises rather than to reach an intellectual appreciation of the transcendent categories of life. Metaphor becomes a pleonasm in the sentence of life, where the single word language would have sufficed. From the time of Ben Franklin and the Shelleys, electricity has attracted the Romantic imagination because, as Mary Shelley said, it seems to embody "the principle of life." Electricity is another name for the ubiquitous energy that is the self, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein monster is the emblem of how man might harness this energy for the replication of his selfhood. Dr. Frankenstein uses electricity to animate the dead limbs which become his monstrous double, and like him, the rocker is what Marc BoIan called an "electric warrior." Rock's electrical obsessions do not contradict its longing for the primitive. They are meant to fulfill it. Nor is there any contradiction between rock's subordination of reason to feeling and its glorification of the technology which is the flower of the West's disciplined empirical sciences. Western science and its concomitant technologies are built on foundations equally comfortable to rock's pantheism. From Berkeley's idealism to Alfred North Whitehead's organism, the philsophy of science has embraced pantheism in everything but name. In his story, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borges describes the planet Tlon, where "idealist pantheism" in the tradition of Berkeley has been victorious. "Every mental state is irreducible: the mere fact of naming it—i.e., of classifying it—implies a falsification. From which it can be deduced that there are no sciences on Tlon, not


129

even reasoning." This is a fair description of what the ideological landscape of rock as well as Tlon should look like, but as Borges points out, the description is wrong. On Tlon, sciences "do exist, and in almost uncountable number." The same is true of rock. Only the man of refined taste and transcendent discrimination troubles over a paradox. The pantheist is happy to include empirical science in his universe as a powerful expression of self, a brilliant game to be used even as its premises are discarded. A song like "Don't You Forget about Me" extols the dark emotional youth-force that waits in the dark, "dancing, you know it, baby," ready to "put us back together at heart." In conveying this primitive message Simple Minds use synthesizer equipment like the Roland Jupiter 4, the Jupiter 8, the Korg 770, and the Oberheim OB-XA. Few rockers seem further removed from primitive simplicity than Brian Eno, who as a practitioner of synthesizer music works with the most sophisticated electronic equipment. The music itself is remote from the tuneful melodies of early rock and aims instead for the spontaneous surprises beloved of modernist aleatory musicians, of whom Eno is a rock counterpart. "He disliked the predictable behavior of many top-notch musicians who acted as though they had already played every possible permutation of notes," Eno's pop biographer Johnny Rogan relates. "Confronted with a seasoned session-man who almost instinctively moved his fingers from note to note, Eno would force him to play in as awkward a fashion as possible." As with experimental art music, much of Eno is so technical it sounds inhuman, and the title of his album Before and After Science explains his own interest in the difference made by the intervention of technology in modern life. But Eno is also the collaborator with David Byrne in one of rock's central statements of the primitive, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Eno's technological music may be pitched toward the future, but its imaginative roots are solidly planted in rock's pantheistic mythology: If you study the logistics and heuristics of the mystics You will find that their minds rarely move in a line,

130

The Triumph of Vulgarity So it's much more realistic to abandon such ballistics And resign to be trapped on a leaf in the vine.

These are the anapests Eno puts in the mouth of a guru in his lyric "Backwater," but the sentiment is his own. His technology, like the technology of rock in general, aims for a union of the human and the leaf, and one of his technopop albums is called Another Green World in tribute to the paradise envisioned by his rock technology, where science will have annihilated all that's made to a green leaf in a green soundwave. ART MUSIC Reduced to theory, rock's electric pantheism presents a mirror image of the doctrines that support twentieth-century experimental art music. "Let us take thought how music may be restored to its primitive, natural essence . . . within man himself as universally and absolutely as in Creation entire." "I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm." "Noise is any sound one doesn't like." "Magnetic tape music makes it clear that we are in time itself." These are not the proclamations of pretentious rockers but the assertions respectively of Ferruccio Busoni in 1907, Edgar Varese in 1917 and in 1962, and John Cage in 1958. In its love of technological noise as in everything else, rock follows the Romantic avant-garde, and it is no accident that the appearance of rock coincided with the great age of experimental music in America, the 1950s. The theories of the experimentalists are shot through with a love of the primitive, with oriental mysticism, with insistence on feeling, and with a desire to relocate performance in self—the hallmarks of rock mythology as well. The experimentalists are the linear descendents of European Romanticism, and not only do they share a 1950s art geist with rock, but a common ancestry in Romantic theory. But rock is after all a mirror image of art music. The mirror image is identical but transposed. Rock stands to art music as matter stands to antimatter: identical in makeup but opposite in


131

charge. What reverses the two is vulgarity. The experimental art musician is only a radical inside the conservatory. For all his protestations on behalf of noise and nature, he is a captive of the elite audience he hopes to supersede. Transcendence is implicit in his work, no matter what he says, and transcendence always means small audiences, refined taste, and recondite theory. Sophisticated critics have sometimes tried to ennoble rock by discovering in it the direct influence of art music. So art critics hail Frank Zappa as a descendent of Ives, Stravinsky, and Cage, a "performer of truly serious contemporary music" whose "efforts to reach the Gesamtkunstwerk (union of the arts) of Richard Wagner frequently overshadow the virtuosity of his composition." This example is illustrative. First, the influence always flows from the art musicians to the rockers, not in the other direction. Rock is derivative. It does not make new Romantic theory but borrows from existing manifestos, consciously in the case of Zappa, who grew up studying Varese, but usually by intuitive exploitation of Romantic ideas that have gained general currency. If the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, the rock musicians are the officials who take care that their laws be faithfully executed. The derivative nature of rock's Romantic instincts makes the music a target for refined opprobium, since one of the most terrible charges in Romantic jurisprudence is that of imitation. But rock's derivative Romanticism is its assurance of success. The Romantic theorist who believes that music should not be art but experience is nonetheless a theorist. His energies are verbal, academic, tendentious—the very attributes he seeks to eliminate in music. The rocker has the luxury of appropriating Romantic theory without having to duplicate the alienating intellectual contention that gave it birth. Freed from the debilitations of theory, he can be a practioner pure and simple. The art musician also suffers from the implicit transcendence of his work. Zappa's hero Varese approved a definition that called music "the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sound." The vulgar rocker rejects the notion of a transcending something called intelligence toward the realization of which all music moves. "Let it be or let it bleed," he says. The art musician solemnizes the revolutionary

132


wedding of art and life before a tiny congregation of reflective conservatory students. The vulgar rocker plies his derivative Romanticism to a feeling audience of millions. The same critic who praised Frank Zappa for his early virtuosity worried about his later albums: "Though they bear Zappa's unmistakable imprint, the albums seem more gimmicky than earlier albums, less complex musically, and on some cuts, more 'Top Fortyish.' One hopes this does not mark a new direction for Zappa." But the sins of simplicity, gimmickry, and mass appeal are the virtues of rock, and what makes Frank Zappa a major rocker instead of a minor virtuoso in his talent for vulgarity, a talent that separates him decisively from elite art. Vulgarity has always been his metier, and he himself has consistently undercut any refined suggestion in his work by a crudity as evident in the titles as in the substance of his music—Freak Out, Uncle Meat, Weasels Ripped My Flesh, We're Only In It For the Money, Just Another Band from L.A. Refined Romantic criticism stands to rock as Frankenstein to his monster. The monster is a creature of the science his master reveres, and yet the master repudiates his creation and contrives its death. But the monster lives on, pursuing its creator across the frozen wastes of their mutual contempt. So with rock, ignored or vilified by high-toned Romanticism, but nonetheless the product of the same imaginative energies to which Romanticism pays homage in the abstract. Like the monster, rock has enough vulgar wit to insist on life in spite of the contempt heaped upon it. It is Frankenstein, not his monster, who lives with paradoxes. It is high-toned Romantic theory that struggles with debilitating contradictions while its disinherited, vulgar progeny seeks the felt glow of pantheistic harmony. ELECTRICITY Electricity makes rock. Though rock without electric guitars is possible—Dylan, Jonathan Richman, the Alarm, and any number of rockers occasionally produce acoustic songs—rock as a mass phenomenon is unthinkable without electronic recording equipment to put it on vinyl, without radio and television to


133

hype it, or without the stereos, videos, cassettes, and tapedecks that give it life. The rocker is necessarily plugged in. Media experts are fond of describing the ways in which print, film, and television shape the content of what they present, and it would be convenient to reduce rock to a reflection of the records or radios that carry it. But rock is not married to any single medium. True to its pantheist instincts, it adapts to all electric modes of dissemination. Rock began on vinyl and AM radio but now dominates FM programming and commands several cable TV channels. TVs rock videos demonstrate the ease with which rock habituates itself to film. In fact, it is not so much rock that has adapted to film as film to rock. The four-minute videos featured on MTV are a new departure for film made under the impetus of the music, and the style of the videos has now become the style of much modern cinema. Rock is also at home in longer films like Performance or Stop Making Sense. Rock is only out of its depth when it leaves electricity behind. While there are innumerable books about rock, ranging from sublime journalism like Stanley Booth's Dance with the Devil to ridiculous sensationalism like Rock 'n Roll Babylon, there are in fact no real rock books, because print cannot carry sound. Glossy pictures, not fine writing, are what sell rock books, another indication of how much rock relies on the technologies that have augmented print. Rock can adapt itself to any of the transient systems that rely on electricity. Its true medium is electricity itself. Electricity is a medium that lends itself to the rise of vulgar pantheism. When he was treated to a demonstration of Edison's talking machine in 1888, Arthur Sullivan instantly understood its potential for vulgarity: "For myself, I can only say that I am astounded and somewhat terrified at this evening's experiments. Astounded at the wonderful power you have developed—and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever." Edison's innovations have made Sullivan a prophet. Electricity and its technologies are democratic forces permitting ordinary people the same access to the creation of music as was once enjoyed only by an elite. They allow the producer and the consumer to amplify the ordinary volume of life. They are noisy. They link events at a distance with virtual simul-

134


taneity and thereby destroy the distance necessary for contemplation and transcendence. So the spontaneity of the telephone quashes the contemplation of the letter. What Walter Benjamin said about mechanical reproduction applies at large to the age of electricity, in which the original gives way to a host of nearperfect replicas. The replicas are made by ciphering the original to a coded message and disseminating it to decoders all over the globe. With electricity, man can encode the universe, and as these codes more perfectly duplicate their originals, the locus of culture moves from centers of protected refinement to the vulgar self, now in possession of what before was monopolized by a refined elite. Technology first makes clumsy substitution codes like Morse's which can transmit a poor facsimile of language. Later it learns to make more complex codes that can transmit sound itself, as radio does. In the age of TV, electronics can encode data for two of the five senses with enough precision nearly to obliterate the distinction between the code and its original. Both the electronic ciphers and the machines used to decode them—radios, TVs, record players, tape decks, VCRs—have become cheaper and more widely diffused. Athletic, political, or artistic events now have no single point of origin. They occur nowhere and everywhere, playing themselves out in the everlasting now. The football game is played in my living room for me. My VCR allows me to play it when and where I want. The source of the broadcast is incidental because the copy I receive is as good as the original, and with current technology, perhaps more genuine. I know more about what happens on the field than the referees, whose mistakes I can condemn on instant replay. Electricity has destroyed the distance between the observer and the observed—a distance that elite cultures required in order to maintain the fiction of transcendence. The genuine event no longer exists in distinct place or time, secure from duplication in its mysterious communion with transcendent truth and beauty. The electric event exists everywhere and now. For the pantheist, the electronic ciphers of modern technology are not images of distant facts; they are facts themselves, as valid as what they purport to encode, and all the more valid because


135

the electric waves and currents that transport them electrically are in pantheist mythology the foundation of all sensory events. Electronic media give off good vibrations, and the universe itself is constituted of a good vibration emanating from self and extending to infinity. Refined sensibilities have for forty years now deplored the ascendancy of radio, film, and especially television over the mind of the West, and the teenager glued to his tube has become a baleful icon for the flight of our culture out of reality and into mindless fantasy. The pantheist might reply to these transcendent quibbles, "I don't recognize a difference between what you call reality and what you call fantasy. These electronic images on my radio or television are as real as the electronic impulses that constitute your so-called reality, and perhaps more real because purified by the intervention of the human imagination." SID VICIOUS: CREATURE OF THE MODERN PROMETHEUS Rock takes the vulgar potential of electricity to its limit. Like the pantheist God, the center of rock is everywhere and its circumference is nowhere. The rock fan toting his blaster or plugged into his Walkman is the center of all rock performances. "The Subliminal Kid moved in seas of disembodied sound." The rocker is the realization of the Nova criminal of William Burrough's Nova Express, "and no one knew what was film and what was not." In rock there is no original performance which the fan receives on the periphery. The aim of rock technology is to make a disembodied sound that is created forever between the stereo speakers of countless listeners. The original of a rock record is composed from disconnected tracks of guitars, keyboards, drums, vocals, strings, brass, and synthesizers, overlaid, blended, and enhanced by a producer in a studio. There is no original. In rock as it must be with electricity, artifice becomes genuine, all repetition is novelty, and the producer and consumer stand in an equal relation to the product. "I hate art," John Lydon said. "It's treating something that's supposed to be good as precious. Anyone can make a record." Electricity has confirmed Arthur Sullivan's premonition.

136


Thanks to electricity, every consumer can be a producer. Rock legend reports over and over the myth of the musical incompetent who is translated from the streets to stardom in a matter of months. None of the members of Duran Duran knew how to play an instrument six months before they became internationally famous with "Girls on Film." Rock's electronic instruments are easy to play and accessible to anyone who has the wherewithal to buy a used Fender in a pawn shop. With electronics, traditional virtuosity ends and democratic music begins. The rock star who is still learning his chords has nothing to fear in the electronic arena, where his producer will turn the sow's ear of his strumming into the silk purse of 24-track recording. On TV, he will only have to lip-synch his hits while displaying himself in manic activity for the camera. In live perofrmance his lack of skill, properly seasoned with noise, sweat, and flesh, will redound to his credit. The audience will take his incompetence first as a mark of his primitive authenticity, second as a mark of his pharmacological heroics, and last as a pledge that the most ordinary mortal can rise to stardom. The no-talent thus reinforces the myth of the primitive, the dogma of self-alteration, and the democratic bias of rock's underlying pantheism. Appealing to just these instincts, Sid Vicious, who played no instrument before joining the Sex Pistols in 1977, became a rock luminary in his two years with the group before he murdered his girlfriend and died of a heroin overdose. "You just pick a chord, go twang, and you've got music," he said. His lack of talent is what made him a star in the rock pantheon. He is the youthful Everyman suddenly transformed by the liberating pantheism in which all things are permitted and selfannihilation provides an avenue to self-realization. Sid was the ultimate creation of the modern Prometheus, a creature of electricity's democratic current. Poor monster! Electricity nourishes pantheism's democratic bias and facilitates a technological realization of the self as center of the universe. Thanks to electricity, rock is not only about the self, it is performed for the self and in the self. The rocker's headphones are a technological embodiment of the pantheist instinct that all art is made by the self for the amusement of self. Electricity has created the ideal pantheist art, and rock is it.


137

Some dreamers have hoped to harness rock to propagate the values of transcendent ideologies. Populist Catholics sponsor rock masses, trendy educators produce textbooks using rock lyrics as a vehicle for inculcating traditional values, various Protestant denominations commandeer the airwaves on Sunday mornings to broadcast uplifting advice larded with rock songs to make the message palatable to young ears, and the idea for the grotesquely misnamed rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar originated with an Anglican priest and was blessed by the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. But rock is useless to teach any transcendent value. The instigators of these projects merely promote the pagan rites they hope to coopt. Rock's electricity as much as its pantheist heritage gives the lie to whatever enlightened propaganda may be foisted on it. The rocker is simultaneously alone with himself and at one with the universe. No intermediate state of transcendence such as Christianity or schoolbook morality preaches is likely to appeal to him. He takes his pantheism neat.

CHAPTER SIX

THE ZOMBIE BIRDHOUSE AND THE GREAT ROCK 'N1 ROLL SWINDLE Rock and the World

Rock prizes the free individual and sings the authentic self; rock is a mass phenomenon and sponsors collective frenzies. There is no more contradiction between these two positions than between rock's primitive cravings and its technological ardor. The self craves its freedom because freedom is the necessary condition for its expansive identification with everything else. Possessed of this freedom, rock proposes a politics that ignores the genteel restraints of the zombie world in favor of the liberated energies of the pantheist's universe. THE ROAD TO FREEDOM Van Morrison says his love is "sweet as Tupelo honey" and adds, You can't stop us on the road to freedom, You can't stop us 'cause our eyes can see. To the rocker, the ability to alter the self until it coincides with the universe constitutes liberty. The lover makes use of his liberty when he incorporates the beloved in his definition of self. The rocker who had perfected his love would embrace the universe

138

The Zombie Birdhouse, the Great Rock V Roll Swindle

139

and attain a godlike freedom, and so every love song is potentially an anthem of liberty. The drug-taker also makes use of his freedom when he smashes the artificial boundaries of ordinary experience in order to experience new states of selfhood. In a rock lyric, any of the devices the Romantic associates with selfaggrandizement can be coupled with the longing for freedom. Ian Dury moves easily from the rock dogma that "sex and drugs and rock and roll is all my brain and body need" to the advice to "get your teeth into a small slice—the cake of liberty." "There's no hate in the point that I give," says Mark E. Smith of the Fall, "I just want to have room to live." But taking the world in a love embrace may sound more ominous to the world than to the lover, and even without hate, the demands of rock's expanding self often sound like the Nazi cry for lebensraum— both calls for freedom of a sort. Critics like George Steiner have observed with a mixture of awe and terror that rock's "new sound-sphere is global." They are right. Rock preaches world domination. Rock grew up in the 1950s during America's postwar supremacy and is the musical complement to the naive democratic sentiments that underlie the political doctrine of manifest destiny. In the myth of American -imperialism, the United States leads a world eager to be swept into the ambit of democratic order. In rock's pantheism, the act of incorporation which defines freedom is also mutual. Every self must include every other self. My gobbling up the beloved is not an act of freedom until I am gobbled up in turn. In "Colors," Donovan sings, Freedom is a word I rarely use without thinking, o yeah, Of the time that I've been loved. Like the American imperialist, the rocker wants not just the world, but the world's reciprocal love. Even at its most political, as in the music of the MC5, whose radical manager John Sinclair was silenced when a Michigan court sentenced him in 1969 to a nine-year jail term for possession of two joints of marijuana, American rock remains true to the nondenominational pantheism of Whitman. "Kick Out the Jams," the song that earned the MC5 their reputation as revolu-

140


tionaries, was shocking in 1968 largely because the chorus included the word "motherfuckers." The lyric itself is an evocation of rock's favorite stimulants—sex, drugs, and music: "I know how you want it now, child—hot"; "We got hazy, now, baby"; "Sounds they are bouncing." But in concocting this pastiche of rock conventions, none of which is overtly political, the MC5 managed to stumble in line with one stream of American radicalism. When they say they want to "kick out the jams," they not only demand the right to play their music, they also echo the lines in Song of Myself where Whitman exhorts the stifled self to Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! . . . I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

In his Guitar Army: Street Writings/Prison Writings, John Sinclair preached a vague kind of communalism that has little to do with Marx and much to do with a hippie interpretation of Whitman's democracy: "The rainbow culture is what we call it, and if it is a rainbow then rock and roll is the sun that shines through it and gives it definition. ... A guitar army is what we are—a raggedy horde of holy barbarians marching into the future, pushed forward by a powerful blast of sound." Rock eschews the precise political articulations of Romanticism's European incarnations in favor of a vulgar American poetry composed by and for "a raggedy horde of holy Barbarians." John Sinclair is only unusual for having stated rock's position as part of a manifesto for social action. Most rockers are content to take their pantheist politics in unarticulated musical doses. On their Freedom Suite album the American band the Young Rascals say, "All the world over people want to be free." Neither they nor their audience feel the need to elaborate on this sentiment, first, because in the American tradition its meaning is assumed, and second, because elaboration would destroy its purity of feeling by reducing it to a rational quibble. A number of British groups appear to have well-defined po-

The Zombie Birdhouse, the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle

141

litical agenda. On the Clash's Sandinista! album, Marx and Engels turn up in the 7-11, and on the cover of their Give 'Em Enough Rope Mao watches from horseback while the buzzards make a meal of a dead cowboy—the West inevitably devoured by its own greed as the Marxist hero bides his time. But on closer inspection the Clash's songs, always sardonically acute about what's wrong with the world, have little to say about any political program to make it right. The Irish band Stiff Little Fingers finds itself listed in the Trouser Press Guide to New Wave as the "longstanding Ulster political punk band," but one of their best-known political songs, "Roots, Radicals, Rockers, and Reggae," is pure American pantheism masquerading as Irish protest: We're all the one and one in all, So throw away the guns and the war's all gone, Throw away the hunger and the war's all gone, Throw away the fightin' and the war's all gone, Throw away the grudges and the war's all gone. Che Guevara and Cardinal Richelieu could find common ground in this brand of radicalism. Rock's radicalism looks too diffuse to have any structure, and rock's instinctive distrust of articulation does nothing to discourage such a view. But there are Romantic manifestos that spell out the larger politics behind what Whitman and rock present as unannotated emotional truth—that a free individual can annex the universe in an act of love because in his primal dignity he is identical with the mass. Rousseau's Social Contract of 1762 is the most famous of these. In Rousseau's theory, a man is free when he develops according to the dictates of nature. If he can avoid polluting contacts with civilization, he will grow up with his authenticity intact. Civilization is corrupt because it takes natural men who are at one with nature and makes them smaller, turning citizens of the universe into mere Frenchmen, for instance, or reducing cosmic wisdom to the cliches of party platforms. All social associations are bad because they diminish the human wholeness of their members. In a perfect society, says Rousseau, men will avoid all associations and retain their primitive virtue. If men in this primitive condition were ever called on to vote, they

142


would all share the same perspective on the issues because all would vote from the pure center of an identical integrity. They might not vote alike, but the coincidence of their perspective would guarantee that the result would be the dictate of what Rousseau calls "the general will." Make each self free and all selves will coincide. "We're all the one and one in all," Stiff Little Fingers sing. Bertrand Russell was fond of ridiculing the not-too-latent totalitarianism of Rousseau's political theory. "Its first-fruits in practice was the reign of Robespierre; the dictatorships of Russia and Germany (especially the latter) are in part an outcome of Rousseau's teaching. What further triumphs the future has to offer to his ghost I do not venture to predict." Rock's paean to freedom is one such additional triumph. The concert is rock's enactment of the theory enunciated in The Social Contract. At the concert, I am my most primitive and authentic—I am never more my true self. But at the concert, my free and authentic self coincides with those of all the other free and authentic selves, and together we coalesce in a general will. At the concert, I become large, or as Whitman puts it, "I contain multitudes." THE ZOMBIE BIRDHOUSE Disdaining any state between perfect authenticity and universal harmony, which it equates, rock has no time for worldly compromise: Every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world, Ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl. The alternatives the world offers the rocker are enumerated in the title of this Clash lyric—"Death or Glory." Glory awaits those who preserve the self intact, but death is the fate of those who succumb to the world. Rock's hostility toward the social order is another Romantic legacy. William Godwin, one of Rousseau's English disciples and Shelley's father-in-law, reduced his social philosophy to a Romantic epigram: "Everything that is usually understood by the term cooperation, is, in some degree, an evil." By cooperation

The Zombie Birdhouse, the Great Rock 'n Roll Swindle

143

Godwin meant those social compromises by which people place restrictions upon their freedom in order to obtain some imagined self-advantage—the cheap hood's bargain with the world. Cooperation is for Godwin what political associations were for Rousseau. The marriage contract guarantees sex and respectability at the cost of libidinal freedom; the wage contract promises a living at the sacrifice of physical health; the social contract assures safety at the price of authenticity. Cooperation of this sort is always self-limitation. Godwin's social idealism is all the more indicative of Romanticism's popular legacy for being naive. Operating from his central premise that cooperation is an evil, he preached the apparently contradictory doctrines of anarchic individualism and absolute communism, the usual pantheist confusion in which personal liberty coincides with universal justice. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and of course Shelley absorbed Godwin's teaching in various measures: The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. "The world" of Wordsworth's sonnet is the product of Godwin's "cooperation." Wordsworth uses "the world' in the sense approved by the catechism when it conflates "the world, the flesh, and the devil"—the world is a positive evil, but now for Romantic, not Christian reasons. The world is that tainted state between selfhood and godhead, the flypaper on which stuck humanity vainly beats is wings. "I had not known death had undone so many," Eliot adds of the zombie businessmen who constitute the population of "the world," and rock picks up the Romantic theme. For Iggy Pop, the world is a "zombie birdhouse" where humans have traded their primal wholeness for compromised alliances that have made them ambulatory corpses: Man is the village animal, United by the glue of our loathsome qualities.

Zombies in name or in fact make frequent appearances in rock. For the Clash in "London Calling," "zombies of death"

144


carry out the orders of the establishment. "All you zombies hide your faces," say the Hooters when they want to condemn the stupidity of mankind. Zombies fit neatly into rock mythology. The living dead who possess no energy of their own epitomize the self caught in the toils of the world, and the concept has good primitive credentials in black folklore. The zombie legend brings together two strains of rock's Romanticism. The zombie accepts whatever mask the world imposes on him: I'm a social person, I'm the creature in disguise . . . Caught like a skunk In space and time, It's a rip-off.

"Rip-off" is Marc Bolan's description of the zombie world, and one of the masks the world imposes on the beleagured self of his lyric is that of "the fleetfoot voodoo man" who dabbles in alien possession. The rocker doesn't want to be possessed, he wants to be self-possessed. The only mask the rocker will consent to wear is the mask of anarchy. The world needs its masks for its order and amusement, but, as in the Jam's "That's Entertainment," the rocker looks at them all and sees zombie horrors: A police car and a screaming siren, A pneumatic drill and ripped-up concrete, , . . Two lovers kissing amongst the scream of midnight, Two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude— That's entertainment.

The zombie world is what thwarts the lovers's attempt to reach the solitude of union. "That's Entertainment" appears on the Jam's Sound Effects album, which carries on its jacket the lines from The Mask of Anarchy that contain Shelley's 1819 remedy for "the world": Let a vast assembly be,

And with great solemnity Declare with measured words that ye Are, as God has made ye, free.

FALLEN ANGELS, VULGAR HEROES SYMPATHY FOE THE BEvii.: "Tbis «ngel, wEo is ts0w breoHJB a Ds:viL Is tuv pariicHtar frirntl," Blake wrule in Tlif Mariisge s/ ?fertrert «nrf Hell In his iUmtm-trosw Id* Pi

The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism

The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism

The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism