Changing Tides (Part 3)

And so ends the sermon from Master Bangs. Although there will always be changing movements within music, its all just a joke anyway, so never fear. New will replace the old, and crazes will constantly ebb and flow with the passing of time. But the point on the PARTY is an apt one, as provided the artists don't take themselves too seriously, regardless of what they are producing, it should be enjoyed (if it is any good at all – and that is wholly different topic). The music needs to be heard, as long as it is not a psychological throw down with a furrowed brow and cynicism too overt.

But were these words for a more innocent time? In a sense, the sentiments ring as true as they did for the 70's but in a world of obviously manufactured superstars, and clear business plans, can we still argue that we are within an age when the clown is just being a clown? Lady Gaga and her clothes - her pokerface? Katy Perry, the ubiquitous, the coy woman from "I Kissed A Girl" to the tottering barbie doll that is dominating the airwaves with hit after hit? And I cannot help but mention that I could barely restrain the slight taste of bile at a snippet of Adele's gushing acceptance speech at the "oh so relevant" Grammys. You like me? You really like me?

The Guardian ran an article last month, "In Theory: the death of literature", which, admittedly, is perhaps guilty of the deeply intellectual head scratching which Bangs waxes vociferously against. However, the author, in reviewing a particular piece of overtly academic work, reacts to theories on the conundrum of emulation and repetition in the quest for originality. Has everything already been said, or is there something that is truly new and original that one can create? Is all work that we consume now - art, music, literature - merely a pastiche of something else, which in turn had also merely drawn from a predecessor? Of course, as a race, we are particularly predisposed to draw rational links between works, illusory or not. And we are certainly in a position that one cannot ever claim, at any point, to be starting completely on a virgin slate (as it were). The amount of work, and creativity, that has preceded cannot be forgotten, and in any artist's rise to competence - genius - there would be vast quantities of ideas and patterns consumed whilst learning skills. One would think that this cannot be forgotten or disposed of, but rather that it must become woven into that artist's genetic build.

In a comment to the above article by PaulBowes01, he succinctly points out the weakness in the various arguments, namely "No creative artist ever really accepts the fact of belatedness, even if he or she finds it useful - or temperamentally congenial - as a pose : a way of avoiding unwanted comparison with the giants of the past by appearing to admit defeat in advance. Creativity is always 'new again'; that's rather the point of it." I would imagine that no artist would create if they felt that they had nothing to add, nothing to say, it would seem to be a meaningless exercise that would be self-defeating in the extreme.

However, to my mind, the music industry is currently suffering from the weight of its own persona. Record companies are still struggling with the digital age, with a solution seeming to pass ever distant over the horizon. By contrast, however, I believe that the consumer is battling under somewhat extreme listener's fatigue. Radio is over-saturated with the "hits" that are played on an endless repeat until something else comes in, and the internet is awash with so many artists that it is extremely difficult to draw distinctions between them. An example that comes to mind is Girls who exploded to indie fanfare with Album - an album about, unsurprisingly, girls. It was pretty, retro, surf-rock that was sufficiently different to distinguish themselves from much of what was considered "popular" within indie circles at the time. Having said this, the backwards wink to Buddy Holly and Elvis Costello was hard to miss, and it certainly was something that the band drew criticism for. Despite all of this, and irrespective of opinions on the music, it was actually the back story of lead singer Christopher Owens that really seemed to attract the spotlight onto the band. As if to say, "you should listen to this guy because look at what he has gone through", a disappointing concession if ever there was one. It is true though, as although it does not appear to be a problem being heard (anyone want to look at how many "indie" artists are cropping up in TV series at the moment?), there is certainly the difficulty in being remembered.

I am conscious, however, that instilled in this rant is a complete ignorance of the lesson preached by Lester Bangs. I am over-analyzing, when I should be enjoying the PARTY rather than catching myself within the maelstrom of "indie commentator". This is all too serious, and too critical. Perhaps I am a product of my era, and in a nod to the film Margin Call, we are talking of a deep rooted cynicism caused by the mantra that as long as people are making money, it doesn't matter who gets hurt. It’s not an excuse, I know. But if there is any creative industry that has suffered from the interference of the fat cats, it is the music industry. One would have to think that this cynicism that we have been caught in, as a result, must be a lethal combination. I do believe that we, as consumers, have started to instill a mold of musical studiousness that is somewhere between a bewildered inability to keep up with all the new bands, and the experience to be able to quote references and genre defining characteristics. That classic situation from High Fidelity where the customer chides Cusack and cohorts for being far too superior, and creating an elite society from whence they could criticise without being willing to share the knowledge and allow the erosion of elitism. We want the music, but we don’t know how to get it without feeling robbed by the MAN, and we certainly don’t know how to still feel “unique”, even if we want to.

It is a tension that Bang himself could not escape. In firstly revolting against those people unable to appreciate the simplicity of Wild Thing but then bemoaning the consumer for being too serious, and proceeding to analyse the situation himself. In a serious fashion. But I do believe he is correct when he says that music has become overly weighted by its own facade - the glamour of the lifestyle, the music made by fans for fans, the perfect presentation of the artists, the plastic sheen that glosses the popular artists, the uniforms within the specific genres...and worst of all, the apparent necessity to "move with the times" irrespective of what that means. It was a profound disappointment on hearing Wilco on The Whole Love, with an opening track that was a blatant, clumsy, nod at Kid A. It was crass, and especially when the remainder of the album slotted more into their old ways, albeit unevenly. The point was made with their career defining Yankee Hotel Foxtrot but the difference there was that they made the album they wanted to make. The Whole Love felt like an album that marketing insisted on with the consequence that the band found themselves fighting for ground at every turn, and bullishly resisting to the last. It calls to mind the new album from The Twilight Sad, who have teamed up with a prominent electronic producer, in an effort to spruce up their gloomy post rock for the new decade. Sadly, this seems to have served to produce an album that still sounds like them, but replete with various electronic tics and quirks.

These deep rooted insecurities that we now face as a music fans is now compounded by the fact that the slow years have begun, and I am afraid that we are now knee-deep in the wait for the new craze. Chillwave or whatever electronic is the new byword, but already it seems this is being greeted by ever-increasing somberness (much as the short lived rust belt lo-fi bands such as Times New Viking, forced to reinvent themselves between debut and sophomore, as did all those bands - No Age being another example) and enthusiasm is waning already. The "new" seems to be a sound that is heavily indebted to the 80's, where braying synths are once again taking pride of place as the gut-punch riff to drive a song. Leaving aside my deeply ingrained hatred for music of this era, at least back when it came out, it was something new. People were playing with new technology, they were casting aside musical preconceptions that were so deeply ingrained by the "founders" of rock 'n' roll. Bands like Cabaret Voltaire were out there, as were any other number of do-it-yourself renegades of the late 70's and early 80's. The early punks, before they became a pastiche of themselves, were raw, bashing away on instruments like curious children without the vaguest clue as to what they were doing. The Wire, peddling their rock minimalism were different, as were their successors, the Feelies, with their metronomic nerdy take on indie rock. The Replacements were unabashed in their contempt for the era, drunkenly swaying from one disaster to the next, before the inevitable implosion in the hangover fugue.

The 80's couldn't sustain the excess, and so the novelty and innovation was inevitably short-lived before the production lines became properly established and the "boom" years began. The artists truly at the vanguard of creativity were quickly forced to grow up, and produce, or find themselves cast aside. This is a fact of life, and for whatever reason. Perhaps this is the true underlying point to Bangs' writing - his innate refusal to grow up, but fully aware that he could no longer pretend to be naive on the movement of time, and the realities of greed.

By all means, it is a necessary rite of passage for a musician to have respect for those that have come before, but one would hope that this is replete with a slight reserve for what you are doing. That slight sense of "I got my own thing now", and if you're Keith Richards recycling Chuck Berry riffs, well, play them in open G, and just go out and teach yourself as you make noise. Then again, the Stones haven't been relevant since the 60's, and Richards is now amongst the worst of the old guard. To quote W.B. Yeats, "Things fell apart, the centre cannot hold" - it is a self-perpetuating cycle, whatever you say about it.

Nowadays though, there is possibly a sense of revivalist culture that is too austere, too revert, as if to say, "my idols did this best, and I can only hope to cover, never outdo." The sounds are too alike, the patterns too formulaic. There isn't that youthful middle finger to the establishment, the impervious desire to take something, rearrange it, and brashly sound it out at the forefront of the new movement. It will come, mind, but it seems we're in that limbo whilst we all await that "new" thing to emerge. The 80's are back, in a big way, but at the moment, there are too many cover bands, too many studious revivalists that sound as if they have been waiting too long in the shade. For my part, it saddens me, but then I am a member of the (now) old guard, who is saddened to see a trend change, and a movement fade in favour of new pastures.

The PARTY never stops, and so it will just be a matter of keeping one's ears open, and waiting patiently. There are a lot of "serious" people out there - the hipsters adorn the pavements - and I think, with some amusement, on that scene from How To Make It In America, where the successful hipster designer has exchanged his wild, tattooed days for a self-sustaining co-op in Brooklyn and night-time bicycle rides. It was no surprise to see the cancellation of the show, given that "cool" seemed to outweigh substance. But for the music, there is lots already out there, so we can bide our time and keep ourselves on some form of life-support whilst we await something else. But maybe the warning should be simply that when the next "something" arrives, its not worth over-analysing. Just enjoy it - even if it may be difficult to pretend that this is all just simple.

Changing Tides (Part 2)

And with further apologies, additional excerpts from Lester Bangs in James Taylor Marked for Death (1971) - "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung : The Work of a Legendary Critic : Rock 'N' Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock 'N' Roll" (available here).

"Nowadays, thought, it seems to be getting harder and harder for musicial artists to gain true mass acceptance without at least a token mouthing of all the pieties that a large part of this generation totes around with them like a pocket rosary or spare hankie; either that or, as an alternate course,  grooming themselves after the by now patented style of the Superpersonm expected to capture the public imagination, the extravagant and ostentatious lifestyles that pass for charisma in a time when almost anybody talks about charisma but if you think about it there's precious little to be seen. A movie like Mad Dogs & Englishmen stacks its whole rationale on the notion that these people are so glamorous and fascinating that we'll be willing to sit still for a long movie of them playing  gigs and getting in and out of planes a lot not only because we want to hear the music but also because the way they live and the way they carry themselves is imbued with so much magnetic dynamism  that we've just got to see them behind the scenes of their concerts and even in their most mundane daily routines. What's ironic about it, thought, is that not only do none of the principles in this particular example indicate in the movie that they have personalities of any sort, settling instead merely to parade around in their fancy duds with little stoned smiles, but on top of that audiences everywhere are responding to this narcissistic nonsense with all the enthusiasm and interest the "stars" of the movie have not begun to bother to earn, in fact people will project their own conceptions of these people onto what they are seeing and come back bedazzled. The moral, I guess, is that as long as you carry yourself in the proper noncommittal manner you'll never have to do anything else, and your very mysterious impassiveness will implicitly confer all the charisma you'll ever need.

There have always been stars, and stars have always been created, and the public has always lived vicariously through them and invested them with everything that they don't personally have, because the whole point of the thing is to create myths and fantasies anyway. But the difference, I think, is that audiences of the past tended to demand a but more of their Superpersonalities - i.e., that they did have personalities. Even Mick Jagger, who almost certainly is one of the most interesting entertainers to come to prominence in the last decade, doesn't really have to do anything when he appears in a movie, because everybody knows that it's enough for people just to look at him and think about him as the human phenomenon that he is. Unfortunately, though, there's all these other people running around trying to pass themselves off as phenomena when they're actually just random clowns, one classic example being the movie Easy Rider, which saw kids all over responding to the two main characters as if they were heroes, when actually neither one showed enough personality one way or another to be called much of anything except boring.

What all this posturing and fake glamour results in is a vast detachment and cynicism on the part of the artists. Since it's impossible to have respect for an audience that'll take just about anything you care to dish out, and the impassive demeanor is so central to the role, a general numbnose is all that can be expected. While the majority of the people buying the records never get close enough to feel the contempt firsthand, those close to the centers of glamour and power often twist the contempt to their own purposes. (pp 69 - 71)

...

If they just don't seem to be playing your song much right now, well, stop feeling sorry for yourself, scout the terrain and see if we can figure out where to go next. Because there's always gonna be something around in the tradition. But fuck the tradition, I want the Party! Too much goddam tradition-worship around here as it is now, that's what's wrong with Creedence Clearwater and half a horde of other wasted talent that could be kickin' off doorknobs and hinges if they weren't so allfired concerned with respecting all thats stuff from the past and doing things the Right Way as learned from the old farts insteada just kicking their musical asses around the rumpus room until it might begin to sound like something new. And by old farts I mean all the pantheon of geniuses treated with reverence: Chuck Berry, who might be the greatest songwriter of all time, is an old fart, Little Richard is an old fart, Elvis is Elvis and what he should really do if he was crazy is join the Doors.

The point of such an utterly absurd suggestion is the point of this whole rambling rant, is the point of the Party, and that point is that the Emperors of Rock 'n' Roll are not naked noble savages like we thought they were at all, but the point's not that they wear clothes either, the point is that the clothes don't fit. The pants are five sizes too big and with them slingshot suspendersthose trousers're liable to hit the sawdust at any minute. And those shirts aren't revolutionary battle fatigues, they're polka-dotted bibs, and Christ, that tie, why, wait, he's actually using a cummerbund for a tie. And every last one of 'em you think wears glasses, sheeit, that's clear fucking lenses, those are the exact same Bop Glasses that Dizzy Gillespie used to wear when he walked down the streets of Harlem with bubblegum in his mouth blowing up one balloon after another because it kept his lungs in shape and it was a fine way to spend a summer afternoon. I mean, why, fuck, they're all just a buncha fuckin' clowns. They don't even have to try to be funny, they just are and can't help it, and it's the grace of their absurdity that makes them geniuses and heroes, just like rock 'n' roll and jazz both were born exactly as Jack Kerouac said of the latter in "History of Bop" : "Bop began with jazz, but one afternoon somewhere on a sidewalk in 1939, 1940, Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Thelonius Monk was walking past a men's clothing store on 42nd Street or South Main in L.A. and from that loudspeaker they suddenly heard a wild impossible mistake in jazz that could only have been heard inside their own imaginary heads, and that is a new art, bop! The name derives from an accident...Lionel Hampton had made a record called 'Hey, Bop-a-Re-Bop' and everybody yelled it when Lionel would jump in the audience and wail at everybody with sweat-claps and jumping fools in the aisles, the drummer vastly booming and belaboring on the stage as the whole theatre rocked..."

It always begins in the glorious "mistake," the crazy unexpected note kicking out sideways to let us loose again no matter what you call it. It reappears periodically every few years, the next new absurd and outrageous squeak that no one could calculate ten years after it moulders buried  under wretched excess in the slowdown twilight, but the Craze will come again in new clothes! And whenever it does it will have about as much respect for all those old farts from the sixties as most of the kids who first awoke to Stones and Yardbirds raveups have for those beboppers of Kerouac's nostalgias or for most of the titans from the fifties for that matter! Like a friend of mine who wails lifelong to Velvets Stones MC5 and even gets off marginally on the Grand Funk tapes in his car being nineteen as he is, but when I loaned him my stellar lineup of fifties classics from Chuck Berry Is on Top  to For LP Fans Only he brings them back and says: "I don't know, I couldn't really listen to 'em very much. It just sounds kind of bare without the feedback."

So what're you gonna do? Well, different people have different tastes. That's a fact. And I don't even really much care what it is myself at this point, so long as it comes from the Party line. Which is nothing to worry about, because this ain't the kind of party you join or carry around a card for; this is a kind of party you LIVE. And it don't even much matter when you do that, because the Party, though its flame may flicker low and all but gutter in these juiceless times, goes on forever. Any fool could see that those people at the Lionel Hampton concert described by Kerouac were at the Party, and if you've ever heard those old Jazz at the Philharmonic 78s like "Perdido" and "Endido" where Flip Philips and Illinois Jacquet would tear into those wild jams and end up flat on their backs in the middle of the stage kicking into the air and holding the sax up like a big pacifier and blowing jive blasts past melody while the audience of zootsuiters howled with glee, well, that was 1949, didn't no Little Richard nor any other Johnny Come Lately invent the Party or even rock 'n' roll for Chrissake because it's all the same shit anyway with just minor differences and names thought up by pensive idiots when what it all boils down to is two things:

Number One, every should realize that all this "art" and "bop" and "rock 'n' roll" and whatever is all just a joke and a mistake, just a hunka foolishness so stop treating it with any seriousness or respect at all and just recognize the fact that it's nothing but a Wham-O toy to bash around as you please in the nursery, it's nothing but a goddamn Bonusburger so just gobble the stupid thing and burp and go for the next one tomorrow; and don't worry about the fact that it's a joke and a mistake and a bunch of foolishness as if that's gonna cause people to disregard it and do it in or let it dry up and die, because it's the strongest, most resilient, most invincible Superjoke in history, nothing could possibly destroy it ever, and the reason for that is precisely that it is a joke, mistake, foolishness. The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious. I could even be an asshole here and say that "Nothing is true; everything is permitted," which is true as a matter of fact, but people might get the wrong idea. What's truest is that you cannot enslave a fool. No way to regiment the heebie jeebies or make 'em walk a straight line. And nothing better to do from here on out, now that we got cybernation and all such like, but just go to the Party and STAY THERE.

Number Two point I wanna make here before wrapping up this pontification which has been all too solemn its own self, is that the time has come for all good men and women to come to the aid of the Party; i.e., DECIDE whether you wanta jump and caper with music that's alive or moulder in the Dostoyevskian hovels of dead barbic auteur crap picking nits out of its navel and so sickly that to see it shake its ass would be a hilarious horror indeed. Well, you don't really have to choose, this is no political party even if others say it is, and anyway the whole mess is just a goddam phase, just like when Kerouac's great gleeful Bop Clowns dancing in the aisles wound down to the Venice, California "beatniks" whose dumbass totems Lawrence Lipton touted in 1959 in The Holy Barbarians: "Once you are out of your teens you don't usually dance. You never dance in any public place. That's for squares." (pp 72 - 74)

Mix 01 - 2012

1. Wild Flag - Racehorse (Wild Flag : Merge, 2011) 
2. Thee Oh Sees - Contraption / Soul Desert (Carrion Crawler / Dream : In The Red, 2011) 
3. Nirvana - Love Buzz (Live at the Paramount : Geffen, 2011) 
4. Male Bonding - What's That Scene (Endless Now : Sub Pop, 2011) 
5. Cloud Nothings - Fall (Attack On Memory : Carpark Records, 2012) 
6. Candy Hearts - Without Caffeine (Ripped Up Jeans And Silly Dreams : available here) 
7. Rob Crow - I Hate You, Rob Crow (Living Well : Temporary Residence, 2007) 
8. Modest Mouse - One Chance (Good News For People For People Who Love Bad News : Sony, 2004) 
9. Tulsa - Mass (I Was Submerged : Park The Van Records, 2007) 
10. Scoundrels - Arrogance Blues (Sniff It Up EP : Blue Horizon, 2011) 
11. Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears - (Scandalous : Lost Highway, 2011) 
12. Drive-By Truckers - Like A Rolling Stone (The Fine Print : A Collection of Oddities and Rarities 2003 – 2008 : New West, 2009) 
13. White Denim - No Real Reason (Takes Places In Your Work Space : Downtown, 2011) 
14. Hospitality - Betty Wang (Hospitality : Merge, 2012) 
15. First Aid Kit - King Of The World (The Lion's Roar : Wichita, 2012) 
16. Eleanor Friedberger - Heaven (Last Summer : Merge, 2011) 
17. Ride - Senna (Nowhere : Reprise / Wea, 1990) 
18. Dodos - Don't Try And Hide It (No Color : Frenchkiss, 2011) 
19. Marketa Irglova - Let Me Fall In Love (Live In San Fransisco : available here)

Changing Tides (Part 1)

Synth pop. Chillwave. This appears to be the music of the close of 2011, and that which has dominated most of the early releases for 2012. Beloved artists are dusting off previously redundant computer equipment (or at least in my mind, they are, as they are immediately recognizable as being in homage to the 80's) and, depressingly, one often finds already successful artists frantically trying to adapt in order to work these into the framework of an already successful model.

I find this all considerably distressing. I was recently reading Lester Bangs' excellent, if somewhat convoluted ramblings, collected in "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung : The Work of a Legendary Critic : Rock 'N' Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock 'N' Roll" (available here). There is simply no way to summarize or describe Lester Bangs, and so, with apologies, from a piece entitled James Taylor Marked for Death, which was published in 1971: 

"Boys and girls, I mean to say you'd best take one to HEART - 'cause if your school or hotrod or doper clique ever really did get that loose, you would be so heavy you would pierce the very ground and fall through to China where else where they'd put you in a zoo and feed you lentils and rice and all other manner of good green things an Red Guard kats an' kitties would bop down in droves to laugh at yer ten-buck Rod Stewart-style sculpt or tenderly abused and wrinkled leather jacket. If you take "Wild Thing" to heart and somehow attain its at least Kilimanjaroan level of godawful beauty, you will have so much sheer sheen-gleam of pure fuckin KLASS that your brain will explode like an overheated pan of rabbit gizzards on a propector's Bunsen and propel you like a teenage Nike skull-first straight outa that fuckin' school past the bells and deals and vice-principals and student stoolies and jock straps and box lunches straight into the blaring sky where I believe we just found ourselves a few pages back whilst listening to "Give It To Me". Well, you're listening to "Wild Thing" now, which is to "Give It To Me" as Charlie Mingus is to a nice boy like, say, Lee Morgan (I'm talking about writing now, I know they play different instruments, wisepuss), so it's gonna put you beyond where the other one put you, not in space because it's not that kind of song, but how 'bout in, let's say, East L.A., in 1966 natch, blasting down the streets in a souped-up shitcan with some zit-grinnin buddies drinkin the cheapest wine you could find while "Wild Thing" crashes and lunges right thru the radio loud as it'll go out the open windows so everybody can hear it and looking around sonnybitch they all do every car bulbous with noise and rollicking with drunk kids just graduated from high school and taut as high-tension wires just straining out of their bucket seats champing at the bit bursting up into summer like swimmers coming up from a drive to break the surface shoot half out of the water and grin at the sun. It's that kind of a song, 'cause it's about you, when you had a good time and went mad for real and reared for release 'cause you were too young and naive to know any better. If punk America is dying behind the curdled MSG-free dregs of Hip and all the corny Experiments in New Designs for Living people are trying to get their rocks off and find themselves in, if kids are really too smart and cool to just loon about anymore, if first day of summer means rolling one after another from new lid and plopping hour on hour in front of television or record player instead of tearing into the street and hunting out buddies and leaping and yupping till at least some of the scholastic poison accumulating like belladonna ever since September is plain crazied out of your soul, if all of that's a pipe dream and I'm just and old fat now - cranking out complaints about the New Generation regular as TB spittle- if all that's true, then THE LESSON OF "WILD THING" WAS LOST ON ALL YOU STUPID FUCKERS sometime between the rise of Cream and the fall of the Stooges, and rock 'n' roll may turn into a chamber art yet or at the very least a system of Environments.

I ain't as desperate as I sound, but "Wild Thing" is rock 'n' roll at its most majestic and for all the volume of product we don't have any "Wild Thing"s these days- a few things come close, maybe a Velvets "Head Held High" or Stooges "Little Doll," but even those are created from a standpoint of intellectualized awareness and consequent calculation. I mean, I know when Lou Reed set out to write "Rock & Roll," and that is certainly the least pretentious and most authentic of all the recent songs that take as their subject what is supposedly their form, he set out to write a tribute to the music that, as mentioned in the lyrics, has been sustaining him and his for fifteen going on twenty years now. To approach it from that perspective, though, almost automatically leads to the conclusion that the work is done to some significant extend from a position of detachment or even objectivity. It's a tribute, but in the old days you didn't need "tributes"- there were "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay," "It Will Stand," "All Around the World," "Rock & Roll Music," all to the last of them a celebration. "All around the world / Rock 'n' roll is all they play..." was a victory shivaree whooping juicemad all the long night after a war. As Ralph Jazzbo Gleason woulda said if he'd been hangin' out on that scene: "We made it. We won." And it was true. All those early songs about rock 'n' roll were successive movements in a suite in progress which was actually nothing more than a gigantic party whose collective ambition was simple: to keep the party going and jive and rave and kick 'em out cross the decades and only stop for the final Bomb or some technological maelstrom of sonic bliss sucking the cities away at last. Because the Party was the one thing we had in our lives to grab onto, the one thing we could truly believe in and depend on, a loony tune fountain of youth and vitality that was keeping us alive as much as any medicine we'd ever take or all the fresh air in Big Sur, it sustained us without engulfing us and gave us a nexus of metaphor through which we could refract less infinitely extensible concerns and learn a little bit more about ourselves and what was going on without even, incredibly enough, getting pretentious about it. We didn't exactly know what it meant in the larger, more "profound" scheme of things (although we really did know in our bones and just hadn't gotton around to turning it into a form of scholasticism and self-psychoanalysis yet), but we damn sure knew what we needed.

A while later, though, we got caught up in the whirlwind of Our Consciousness of Ourselves as Our Generation which was the most TNT-packed passel of brats since the original troglodytes and all of us started taking steps to move in and keep up (because to do otherwise would be like resigning to refrigerator heaven with Ralph Williams and your mother), to watch all the movings and shakings which passed so fast, to collate and understand and maybe someday get a piece of the action yourself so you'll be out there in the Vanguard defining where the trips of Ice Cream Truck America are gonna go next instead of sitting glumly by your record player waiting like a simp for the next phase to be handed down from the Maniacs on high.

The prime effect of this vast intense rush toward a million eddies and vectors of Involvement was that American kids begun in progressively larger numbers to take themselves with the utmost seriousness, both as individuals and as a vaguely and mystically defined mass class, to take themselves with perhaps the most seriousness they had ever displayed in this country, because for the first time they were relatively free to set their own goals. So everybody put in overtime soul-searching. Everything was scrutinized, dissected, acidized, turned sideways and inside out to gut every last drop of mystery, either that or treated with a kind of wax-paper-filtered reverence, as if mystery and obscurity was the whole show and no one had a right to disturb what was complete and holy in its primal unrationalized objectiveness. To score this vast combination Renaissance and psychic urban renewal project, however, people turned to rock 'n' roll and later to rock and finally to proudly unclassifiable tissues of offal not worthy of the name if noise, stuff so Nice and careful and positive-thinking (or painfully searching) that you wanted to take the records out of the jackets and hang them on the wall like those samplers that Granmaw and Paw used to have in their trailer that said "God Bless This Home" or a Bible verse.

But that's getting off into the usual cranky rant. What I want to get at is what we did to the Rock 'n' Roll Party by making it the soundtrack for our personal and collective narcissistic psychodramas. True, the Party did sort of hibernate for a couple of years there, and then the Beatles/Stones era brought it back full swing with all sorts of neat additions like Jelly Beans and long hair and the possibility for flamboyant proto-bohemian defiance of all law and order, even the blue laws and friendly orders. People really went crazy in the mid-sixties, it was a rock 'n' roll rampage for a while there even if the initial exhilaration of loosening that came with the onset of the drug revolution was already beginning to give way to more standardized forms and manners increasingly threatening to become as oppressive as the worst that had been determinedly tossed behind- perhaps worse, because by the end of the decade it had become obvious that perhaps the one common constraint of our variegated and strung-out peer groups was a pervasive sense of self-consciousness that sent us in grouchy packs to ugly festivals just to be together and dig ourselves and each other, as if all of this meant something greater than that we were kids who liked rock 'n' roll came out to have a good time, as if our very styles and trappings and drugs and jargon could be in themselves political statements for any longer than about fifteen stoned seconds, even a threat to the Mother Country! So we loved and loved and doted on ourselves and our reflections in each other even as the whole thing got out of hand and turned into mud and disaster areas and downs and death. If we didn't go to the festivals, too timidly academic or whatever to root with the hogs for three days, we bought books with titles like Free People, or (with more patina of importance) The Making of a Counter Culture, or for the final Pop sodacounter polemic, The Greening of America. These books told us that we were something more than what we might have thought, that our very existence and lifestyle was of vast crucial importance to America and maybe the survival of the planet. So we bought that bilge and started running off in all the directions that people are currently hurtling to Do Something, even if it's only hide out in a commune in the northern woods to pretend you're a visionary who has transcended the problem.

As much as I hate these trends entirely on their own charms and programs, what I hate even more is what they've done to rock 'n' roll. Because the Party's not over yet, but it's come might close in the last year or two. The trend towards narcissistic flair has been responsible in large part for smiting rock with the superstar virus, which revolves around the substituting of attitudes and flamboyant trappings, into which the audience can project their fantasies, for the simple desire to make music, get loose, knock the folks out or get 'em up dancin'. It's not enough to just do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is either figure out a way of getting yourself associated in the audience's mind with their pieties and their sense of "community," i.e., ram it home that you're one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth. These are not the only avenues to long green and white coke, of course. You can also do something old in a way nobody's thought of lately and mug and writhe a lot onstage to people'll think it's new (Santana); or you can take a lot of old stuff and be very serious about throwing it all together (Chicago) so people won't buy your records just to throw them on or go to your concerts just to get ripped and holler- if not to actually learn something, your fans will at least approach your products with unusual respect and the implicit constant reassurance to themselves that it is Good Music, more advanced or important, of so much higher quality than that alleycat racket the teens and proles wallow in.

Or you can play it cool and just get a guitar and start writing songs about easy things, like crises you've remembered in relationships with people you cared for, or what's going on (and I mean really going on, like Who are the men that run this country?) on that great wide world outside your window, or even just get up in the morning and open up the fuckin' window, take a toke check the street and write a song about that. Any old shit will do, almost literally anything under the sun. Just like shooting monkeys in a barrel.

When I really get dour sometimes I wonder if it'd be possible at all to write a song today like, oh, say, "Wild Thing." People are just too superconscious of every creative move made in their lives of infinite possibilities and friendly niceness to do anything anymore that's outside of all contexts or just a simple expression of something with no real ramifications, at least none that the creator consciously put there: if some clown like me wants to come along and tell you that "Wild Thing" is the supreme manifestation of Rock and Roll as Global Worldmind Orgasm plus Antespurt to the Millennium, you have the privilege of laughing in his face and telling him to shut up and go back to his orgone box. (pp. 63-67)