American rock critics consistently want Brit musicians to reflect back American music - meaning blues, country, R&B - back to them but with this overlay of the literary and the poetic. If Pazz had started earlier it would have had high placements for Rod Stewart and Van Morrison. All that changes with punk is that politics is added to the literary/poetic - Clash, Costello, Mekons. Anything that breaks substantially with that rooting in American sounds - that is too electronic or Euro - is likely to get short shrift from the US crit palate. Music where most of the action and interest is instrumental and textural likewise
I think US critics hold on to rock (and R&B, and country, and even pop) as constituting a folk continuum, which makes sense because that was the demarcating line in the 50s break with pre-rock music - the full introduction of black and rural white vernacular music into the mainstream, as opposed to it being mediated by the neutral territory of musical theater, dance orchestras, and interpretive vocalists (and which had only been hinted at in the margins - 'real' jazz, race and hillbilly records...).
ReplyDeleteI don't believe that played any significant part in the UK reaction to it, where, as just about any contemporary would retrospectively tell you, it arrived like a flying saucer, a decontextualized message from outer space. Even the folk revival there, which in the US was almost an inevitable 'wait, where did this stuff come from?' reorientation, was less linear and more syncretic from the beginning.
Neither side is inherently superior in its approach, and obviously intermingling began as soon as the British Invasion did (this is really what 'Anglophilia' in American music signifies, and vice-versa in the UK), but it does lead to a lot of confusion in terms (some of it productive, some not)
I'm talking here really about first-generation and second-generation US rockcriticdom really (obviously the comment doesn't apply to 21st century American rock writers, the Pitchfork era, etc - there's much more internationalism, more openness to instrumental music, dance functional music, proggy type stuff)
ReplyDeleteWith that first-and-second gen rockcriticism, as manifested in the first couple of decades of Pazz consensus votes.... what is interesting I think is that the theory of rock that is explicitly or implicitly espoused (rock as inherently and inextricably deep-rooted in America culture and American pre-rock musics) keeps running up against the rather glaringly contradictory fact that a disproportionate number of the major contributions and advances in rock come from Britain, where there is no organic connection to American popular culture and roots music, where rock'n'roll etc arrived as you say as a visitation from outer space. Beatles, the Stones, The Who, the Kinks... but also Pink Floyd, Led Zep, Sabbath, Bowie, etc
This results in odd things like Greil M's first book which is meant as a definitive statement of What Rock Is but is limited entirely to American artists (and "Images of America in Rock and Roll Music" is treated as the actual core substance of rock - as opposed to about six other contenders, including loud guitars, youth / generation gap, dancing, libido, etc etc).
Or you get Dave Marsh who will talk in the early 80s during the second Brit invasion (what he calls the "new pop tarts") about his lingering deep-down feeling that "these guys" (the Brits) "they just don't get it". (A sentiment of distrust you could hear even earlier from him and similar American crits vis-a-vis Bowie - image over substance, no organic relationship with the music, Iggy as the Real Things versus Bowie as Poseur). Yet Marsh is the chap who did a 600 plus page book on The Who!
The first Brit Invasion is an event that this theory of rock as inseparable from the lived grain of American experience can't quite process or work around. The massive investment in Dylan (whose actual impact on music and pop-as-the-stuff-that-sells is much smaller than Beatles) seems to be a part of this.
Haha very true about Mystery Train. I remember on first reading being utterly bemused by its selection of the four most important / interesting artists of the rock era: Presley (obligatory, I suppose), The Band (fair enough), Sly Stone (a good pick, but Marcus only scratches the surface) and, er, Randy Newman (the 70s Tom Lehrer).
ReplyDeleteYes I was similarly puzzled on first reading - but obviously blown away by the book at the same time. Perhaps it was more of a case of my patriotism being ruffled slightly! Elvis, obviously.... The Band, yes... although as time passes their importance fades, but certainly in 1975 it would be a totally righteous thing to foreground them.... Sly Stone, absolutely (the Staggerlee thing is relevatory and I think he does an amazing job capturing how all that rippled across Black American music with "Papa was a Rolling Stone" etc etc). Randy Newman was the one that threw me but then again I only knew "Short People"! I recently tried once again with the celebrated early albums but it's lost to time I think. The Tom Lehrer crack is funny (I did like Tom Lehrer - my parents had some of his records).
DeleteTo what extent is this 70s US rock crit desire to find solace in rock as an "American" music, a desire to find something to be patriotically proud about at a time when America's own sense of national self is at a low ebb? (e.g. loss of Vietnam War, Nixon impeachment, oil shock).
ReplyDeleteAre critics who came of age later (e.g. in the 80s) different? E.g. Chuck Eddy seems to have a very different set of preoccupations to Greil Marcus.