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March 30, 2007
I've just come across this review of Martha Bayles 'Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music by Mark Steyn in New Criterion. Steyn says that Bayles’s subtitle makes her point: “The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music:”
Rap, metal, grunge flaunt their lack of beauty: the ghetto sucks; kids are angry; what is there to be beautiful about? To which Miss Bayles sniffs: “London in a recession produced the Sex Pistols; Kansas City in a depression produced Count Basie.” As for “meaning,” by emphasizing the social context and textual analysis at the expense of the music, rock has diminished its capacity for any meaning whatsoever. To Miss Bayles, “the hardy affirmative spirit of Afro-American music”—by which she means any pop, jazz, country, blues, soul, or rock ’n’ roll tune she happens to dig—has been perverted and brutalized by the influence of European intellectual poseurs.
Steyn is of the popular music is dead school. Rap, metal, and grunge--and I presume punk ---is strictly for losers. It's dead because popular music has become both less popular and less musical.
His argument is that the half-century before Bill Haley in the 1950s were the best that American popular music has ever known, years which saw the rise of jazz, country, and blues, an indigenous musical theater, good commercial film music, and pop songs, a few of which could reasonably claim to be the only true art songs in the English language.
Steyn also has no time for rock criticism. He says that rock critics will write about anything to avoid writing about the melody, the rhythm, the harmonic structure. In many cases, it’s difficult, for the most direct example of pop as a vehicle for social protest is also the most uncomfortable reminder of how little the music matters:
No matter how idiotic the rock biz is, rock criticism will always trump it. Is anything less relevant to Elvis than the respected commentator Greil Marcus? In Mystery Train, Marcus cites a number by the punk band X as “the best song ever written about Elvis” and drools with delight over the lyric: “man in the back says Presley sucked dicks.” Miss Bayles, striving piously to concentrate on the music, sighs wearily: “Of all the distortions found in Marcus, the most glaring is his utter indifference to the fact that 1950s rock ’n’ roll was, above all, a dance craze.” For a moment, she trembles on the brink of great insight into rock ’n’ roll: those who can, dance; those who can’t, figure out some other explanation.
The music did matter in the late 1960s with Dylan's HighWay 61 Revisited, the Band's first two albums, the work of Gram Parsons, Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, The Beach Boys Pet Sounds etc etc.
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I know this a bit trite but this comes from a man who is a bellicose supporter of Eisenhower's military-industrial complex or the Pentagon death machine--where "beauty" rules!