Few would claim that we’re living through a golden age for music. But [in 2011] there does seem to be an emerging consensus that this is something of a golden age for music books. 

It seems significant that virtually none of these books, major or minor, deal with contemporary music or artists who rose to prominence in the 21st Century. The past, and usually the relatively remote past—the Sixties and Seventies above all—appears to offer more for authors to chew on than post-Internet music. Partly that’s because music back then felt more connected to social and political currents, and thus seems more consequential. So much of the really thought-provoking and enjoyable music of the last decade has been meta-music that plays witty games with esoteric sources drawn from pop’s ever-accumulating archive. Yet it’s precisely because the popcult past inundates us with its instant-access availability and materiality (reissues and fileshares, YouTube’s TV clips and live footage, reunion tours and memorabilia exhibitions) that book-length analysis feels more essential than ever. Longform writing supplies a crucial element of abstraction, cutting through retro culture’s bombardment of senseless sense-impressions and allowing the clear signal of truth to emerge from the welter of fact.

What could be truer than a photograph? In Bob Gruen’s Rock Seen (Abrams Books), there are many iconic images from across his four-decade career as a legendary lensman: John Lennon posing in front of the Statue of Liberty, Yoko Ono deplaning into a pit of paparazzi, Bob Dylan’s wizened strangeness, and shot after classic shot from punk’s early days, when Gruen first made his name photographing bands like The New York Dolls, Sex Pistols, and Blondie. But ultimately what Rock Seen reveals is that even the most compelling rockpic is a mute witness. I don’t just mean that the dimension of sound is necessarily absent (one exception here is a short exposure shot of Tina Turner onstage under strobe light, an erotic-kinetic whirl of light-smeared multiple images you can almost hear as paroxysmic rhythm).

 But ultimately these pictures don’t really tell you anything. I’m biased, naturally, being a text-worker, but I think that pictures are rarely worth a thousand words. The best rock writers, operating at full-strength, can catch more of the music’s essence in a couple of sentences than all the carefully posed or fly-on-the-wall shots in deluxe photobooks. Rock photography requires an eye but not a point of view. Its raison d’etre is radically different to criticism. The photographer’s job is to make the musicians look good, or at least “cool” (which can mean inelegant or grotesque by conventional standards). They don’t have to ask difficult questions or judge the artist’s latest work. The flat inanity of Gruen’s captions--“David Bowie is the ultimate performer”, “the New York Dolls shocked people with their androgynous look”, “[the Pistols]had a reputation for being very shocking, but they offered me a cup of tea and seemed normal enough”—show that he chose shrewdly when he picked up an Olympus rather than an Olivetti.

An increasingly popular mode for presenting the rock past, oral history has the exact opposite liability to the photo-book: it makes nearly everyone look bad, invariably de-heroicizing the protagonists until they seem smaller than life. Oral historians seem particularly drawn to punk rock: there’s been a raft of books documenting city-based scenes for Seventies punk or Eighties hardcore, a trend that can be traced back to Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain’s 1997 book Please Kill Me, which billed itself as about punk as a whole but was almost entirely focused on New York....and which unfolds as one long litany of baseness, egomania, and drug squalor (history as junk, just one sordid thing after another).... unputdownable on a certain level but leaves the reader feeling vaguely degraded, like you’ve been mindlessly bingeing on reality TV.

The graft and craft involved in oral history is actually similar to reality TV’s production process: copious documentation followed by judicious editing and sequencing... What keeps the genre from rising to the level of full-blown rock literature is the absence of a synthesizing authorial voice.

Real rock history navigates a path between the unpretty facts and the instant myths that spring up around the music....

[fragment from a book review that ended up drastically rewritten / reconceived for print - 2011]

 

Dave Lee Roth, 1979

MOURNING "BECOMES-ECLECTIC"

always had this suspicion that the drive towards in-ESSENTIAL-ism – the centripetal drive away from monoculture, the canon, the idea of a music or band that has universal applicability -- while seemingly valuable in its anti-totalizing drive -- ultimately had a tendency (unintended but latent, creeping, insidious) towards inessentialism

once you rid yourself of that tyrant, THE ESSENTIAL – the thing that everyone should pay attention to -- what ultimately transpires is that everything becomes equally inessential

and the solipsistic narrative of "i like this, i don't like that" is all that's left

(and why, unless you're a personal friend, should i care about anyone's completely individual and idiosyncratic taste-patterns or journey-through-music-consumption)

if the confidence that what you are writing about could and should matter to “all” withers away... it is replaced by diffidence

and diffidence is never going to shake anybody out of indifference

the abandonment of the desire to occupy the central place means that there is never a moment of usurpation, coup d'etat, transfer of power... the throne is perpetually empty

it is an opting out of the dialectic altogether, in favour of pluralism... coalition government... shuffle politics... stasis

the end result of getting rid of "THE CENTRAL" has been that music as a (diffuse, scattered, dissipated) totality has become less central in the scheme of things

^^^^^^^^^

the consequences of the (post-broadband) revolution in listening habits = no revolution(s) in music

as once anticipated (in both the predictive and looking-forward-to senses)

the triumph of this vision can now be seen to be pyrrhic

it's a musical-cultural landscape that is flattened and voided -- placid and flaccid

as atemporality takes hold and the privatization of music experience intensifies, you just have an archival wasteland of spent signifiers, that are, fatally,not fully dehistoricized yet (and therefore not yet capable of being repurposed)

a state of entropy, i.e. music as dead energy, energy that can't be put to "work"

less and less capable of being used to generate stances

Taste-stances that are also life-stances

Taste positions that are also subject positions

what has declined in this is the role of music in identity formation

as a result musical choices (by consumers) and aesthetic decisions (by musicians) carry less and less freight

the decision of e.g. Zola Jesus to "go Goth" is far less meaningful than the people who formulated Goth as a look/sound/worldview

the struggle behind that formulation – psychological/personal, social... and just the sheer creative effort to create a new form.... is largely absent

the style/stance is taken from the repertoire of existing, established, archival stances (sound /sartorial)

And there are few consequences or resonances to its adoption – or stakes

Goths, once, risked ridicule, occasionally even attack, for the way they look

Long since acceptable, part of the menu of quasi-subcultural looks, it’s been on fashion runways, it’s underpinned mainstream movies (Tim Burton)

it’s a choice, an option, a flavor

subculture involves putting on the clothes and not taking them off – investment without divestment

today, under the aegis of plus/and aka everything/and, to side with one music and its corresponding identity does not require you to reject or oppose any other

antagonistic and nihilatory energy is not capable of being generated through your likes

perhaps all that (serious choices, taking sides, identity-as-stance-as-moral-choice) now lies outside the realm of music – back where it should be even – in politics

and people keep asking 'where's the soundtrack, the songs, for this political moment(s)?' (student protests/street riots/Occupy____)

perhaps there isn't ever going to be one, or any... perhaps it's not needed... perhaps the relationship between the two is finally uncoupled, for good

(and maybe that is "for good" in the literal sense)

 

"The Romantics constituted the ultimate wave, because the very core of terrestrial life died when they died. Surely man has never experienced, nor has he ever suffered more rapturously, the convulsions of being than did the Romantics. Their horizon flamed in the fiery gloaming of farewell, a last, irrevocable severing of the ties.

"Only a select few perceived this event. Fewer still understood its implications. Even Nietzsche confused that melancholy and overpowering radiance with the first flush of a new dawn.

"I have indulged in such descriptions merely so that the reader might be able to see the reason why we refer to these last, great bearers of the radiance of earth as the dithyrambic bards of destruction. They were surrounded by ghouls and vampires, and their creative work was never really consummated.

"The whole earth reeks as never before with the blood of the slaughtered, and the apelike masses now strut about with the precious spoils that they have plundered from the ravaged temple of life! "

-- Ludwig Klages

“The terms of approbation applied to Beyoncé could not be more rockist. Deep, meaningful, political, Zeitgeist-y, content-heavy, Arty, etc etc. The work is celebrated in the same way as Sly Stone or Bob Marley or Public Enemy etc were incorporated within rock discourse. Whereas Ohio Players, Brass Construction, Rob Base ‘It Takes Two’ etc never were, because not about capital-C Content or redeeming social value -  just about dance energy and function. So in fact this particular form of poptimism — annotative, parsing, interpretation-slanted — is just rockism with an expanded* sense of who the auteur is." 

thought circa Lemonade, newly applicable 

* But not really even expanded much, since rockism always had space for the Black Pop Statesman, always granted respect to the What's Going On move. It was the "trivial", just-pure-fun stuff made by white and Black alike that wasn't taken seriously.