by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, July 14 and 21, 2003.
Duke Ellington once had to field a barrage of questions from an Icelandic music student who was determined to penetrate to the heart of the genius of jazz. At one point, Ellington was asked whether he ever felt an affinity for the music of Bach, and, before answering, he made a show of unwrapping a pork chop that he had stowed in his pocket. “Bach and myself,” he said, taking a bite from the chop, “both write with individual performers in mind.” Richard O. Boyer captured the moment in a Profile entitled “The Hot Bach,” which appeared in this magazine in 1944. You can sense in that exquisitely timed pork-chop maneuver Ellington’s bemused response to the European notions of genius that were constantly being foisted on him. He said on another occasion, “To attempt to elevate the status of the jazz musician by forcing the level of his best work into comparisons with classical music is to deny him his rightful share of originality.” Jazz was a new language, and the critic would have to respond to it with a new poetry of praise.
Now Ellington is himself a classic, the subject of painstaking analytical studies. He occupies a Bachian position in an emergent popular pantheon, which is certain to look different from the marble-faced, bewigged classical pantheons that preceded it. The very idea of a canon of geniuses may be falling by the wayside; it makes more sense to talk about the flickering brilliance of a group, a place, or a people. In the future, it seems, everyone will be a genius for fifteen minutes. The past decade has seen the rise of pop-music studies, which is dedicated to the idea that Ellington, Hank Williams, and the Velvet Underground were created equal and deserve the same sort of scholarly scrutiny that used to be bestowed only on Bach and sons. Pop-music courses draw crowds of students on college campuses, and academic presses are putting out such portentous titles as “Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience,” “Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture,” and “Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music.”
Pop-music professors, especially those who specialize in rock, are caught in an obvious paradox, which their students probably point out to them on the first day of class. Namely, it’s not very rock and roll to intellectualize rock and roll. When Pink Floyd sang, “We don’t need no education,” they could not have foreseen the advent of research projects with titles like “Another Book in the Wall?: A Cultural History of Pink Floyd’s Stage Performance and the Rise of Audiovisual Gesamtkunstwerk, 1965-1994.” (That comes from Finland.) Ever since Ellington, Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton struck up the soundtrack to the bawdy, boozy twenties, popular music has been the high-speed vehicle for youth rebellion, sexual liberation, and chemical experimentation, none of which yield willingly to the academic mind. The pop scholar is forever doomed to sounding like the square kid at the cool kids’ party, killing their buzz with sentences like this: “From the start, hip-hop’s samples ran the gamut of genres, defying anyone who would delimit hip-hop’s palette.”
Then again, maybe it’s not a problem that so much pop-music scholarship sounds conspicuously uncool. For decades, jazz rhapsodists and rock poets were so intent on projecting attitude that they never got around to saying much about the music itself. The pioneering rock critics of the sixties, such as Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, wanted to mimic the music in their prose, and they had enough style to pull it off. Bangs, whose writings have been collected in a new anthology from Anchor Books, lived the life of a rock star, or at least died the death of one. But his writings are a better guide to the mentality of smart people who went to rock shows in the sixties and seventies than they are a reliable record of music and musicians. Discussing the Rolling Stones in 1974, Bangs wrote, “If you think I’m going to review the new ‘It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll’ album right now, you are crazy. But I am going to swim in it.” Between prose poetry and academic cant there has to be a middle ground, and pop-music studies is searching it out.
INTERROGATING BRUCE’S BUTT
One weekend last spring, a few hundred scholars, journalists, musicians, and onlookers arrived in downtown Seattle for Pop Conference 2003, entitled “Skip a Beat: Rewriting the Story of Popular Music.” The Pop Conference was created two years ago by Eric Weisbard, a former Village Voice rock critic, and Daniel Cavicchi, an assistant professor of American Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. The decision to bring scholars and journalists together was unusual. It gave the critics an opportunity to drop arcane allusions instead of having to pretend to sound like teen-agers, while the academics could loosen up a little. Weisbard and Cavicchi hope that the two worlds can cross-pollinate each other, breeding a sensibility that is scholarly but not stuffy, stylish but not frivolous.
The conference took place within the wavy-gravy walls of the Experience Music Project, a Frank Gehry culture palace, housing artifacts and bric-a-brac from a century of pop. The dress code was diverse to the point of incoherence: some of the older academics showed up in business attire, while younger ones wore T-shirts and jeans. (The divergence of styles became especially dissonant when sixties-generation scholars espoused radical political agendas while Gen X doctoral students sounded a neo-formalist, let’s-just-talk-about-the-music tone.) For three days, participants hawked their wares in a tight twenty-minute format, taking persnickety questions afterward. At any given time, there were three different panels running in the various rooms of the E.M.P., meaning that the curious onlooker had to choose among equally tempting offerings. In order to attend the Bob Dylan panel—entitled The Dylan—you had to skip panels on art music (one paper was “Changing the System: Brian Eno, Sonic Youth, and the Combination of Rock and Experimental Music”) and contemporary R. & B. (“Supa Dupa Fly: Styles of Subversion in Black Women’s Hip-Hop”).
Some of the presentations, a few too many for comfort, lapsed into the familiar contortions of modern pedagogy. Likewise, in the many pop-music books now in circulation, post-structuralist, post-Marxist, post-colonialist, and post-grammatical buzzwords crop up on page after page. There is a whole lot of problematizing, interrogating, and appropriating goin’ on. Walter Benjamin’s name is dropped at least as often as the Notorious B.I.G.’s. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu gets more props than Dr. Dre. At the Pop Conference, I made it a rule to move to a different room the minute I heard someone use the word “interrogate” in a non-detective context or cite any of the theorists of the Frankfurt School. Thus, I ducked out of a talk on Grace Jones’s “Slave to the Rhythm” album when I heard a sentence that began with the phrase “Invoking Walter Benjamin.” And I bailed on a lecture entitled “Bruce’s Butt”—Bruce Springsteen’s butt, as seen on the cover of “Born in the U.S.A.”—when the speaker began to interrogate the image of the butt, which, under sharp questioning, wouldn’t give anything away.
Scholars of this type always want to see pop music as the emanation of an entity called popular culture, rather than as music that happens to have become popular. As a result, songs and bands become fungible commodities in the intellectual marketplace. In the anthology “Popular Music Studies,” the hip-hop scholar Ian Maxwell asks the significant question “How can our analyses avoid reducing the objects of those analyses to desiccated cadavers on a slab?” His solution—a “more rigorous understanding of what an ethnographically informed approach might offer the study of popular music, nuancing that approach through Bourdieu’s reflexive criticality”—gets us only so far.
Roger Beebe, one of the editors of the “Rock Over the Edge” anthology, even looks at music as purely a media phenomenon, inseparable from image and marketing. Analyzing Kurt Cobain’s appearances on television, he says that Cobain mattered to his fans mainly as a disembodied entity, not as an individual with a voice, and that he exemplified something called “the postmodern dispositif.” Such McLuhanesque musings have been rendered obsolete as MTV has more or less stopped showing videos in favor of frat-house documentaries. Meanwhile, the Internet has become the main avenue for the spread of music. The mania for downloading music may be wreaking havoc with artists’ careers, but it is interesting to see how the ear trumps the eye when the computer takes over. Music is being consumed with no images attached—no videos, no TV appearances, not even album jackets. In the nineteenth century, the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick dreamed of a world “purely musical,” beyond politics and personality. Such a world now exists in the form of the MP3.
THE MATHEMATICS OF “SUPERBAD”
Despite minor infestations of Benjaminites, there was no shortage of up-close musical discussion at the Pop Conference. I often had the happy experience of being held hostage by an informed fanatic who convinced me that whatever he or she was discussing was the most important music on earth. The presenters tended to avoid obvious mainstream figures—there was nothing on Elvis, the Beatles, or the Rolling Stones—focusing, instead, on the margins and subtexts of pop history. There were papers on the lo-fi ideology of nineties indie rock, the Filipino d.j. scene in San Francisco, and the trailblazing transsexual punk of Wayne/Jayne County, among a hundred others. You got a sense of music as a world of jostling subcultures, each with its resident inventors and masters, its purists and populists. The conference conjured up the everlasting complexity of how songs are made, heard, and remembered.
Rock and roll has generated more self-serving myths than any other genre, and scholars have been busy dismantling them. Too often, pop history has been written as a march forward to a handful of utopian moments in the late fifties and the sixties: Chuck Berry recording “Maybellene,” Elvis appearing on Ed Sullivan, the Beatles appearing on Ed Sullivan, and Bob Dylan plugging in his guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. These events have acquired an exaggerated importance, mostly because they had sentimental value for the baby-boom generation that dominated early pop-music writing. Younger writers are especially impatient with the rock narrative—the “rockist paradigm,” they call it—and delight in cataloguing its contradictions and omissions. Consider Dylan’s famous rebellion against the folkies. At the Pop Conference, the historian Michael J. Kramer presented a paper in which he defended the folk-music movement from the stereotype that prevails in Dylan studies—the image of humorless fanatics rejecting the visionary in their midst. Kramer pointed out that the singer took a great deal of his mocking, critical voice—“humorous impurity,” he called it—from the very movement that he was supposed to have renounced. In a similar vein, Franklin Bruno, a doctoral student in philosophy who writes quirky, literate pop songs, noted that Dylan in his electric period relied heavily on the tricks of Tin Pan Alley songwriting, precisely the sort of mom-and-dad music that the singer was supposed to have left behind. “Blonde on Blonde,” Bruno said, was “a head-first dive into pop-song formalism.” Everybody must get stoned, but not before the bridge and the modulation.
Again and again, popular music has been described as a story of youth rebellion, in which each generation breaks free of the oppressive mediocrity of its predecessor. When you place these rebellion narratives end to end, they cancel each other out. Whatever is considered edgy and liberating in one generation is dismissed as bland and confining for the next. An aging genre invariably becomes a straw man against which a new genre defines itself. Dylan “plugged in” and defied the folkies. Chuck Berry sang “Roll Over Beethoven” to get the original rock-and-roll revolution under way, using classical music as a foil. The Beatles were said to have swept aside the prefab pop of the early sixties, which happened to include some of the great early Motown songs. Punk sneered at disco. Why should the love of one kind of music necessitate the knocking down of another? Schopenhauer may have had the answer when he observed that the listener is always fighting battles in his head which he can never win in life. “We like to hear in its language the secret history of our will and of all its stirrings and strivings,” the philosopher said. Music at its most potent creates the feeling that the world is about to undergo a vague but tremendous change, which is how political energies become attached to it. When the world fails to change as promised, however, the music becomes an object of ridicule.
The ultimate pop-music myth is the one that scholars file under the rubric “authenticity,” according to which only the rudest, rawest music—the primal scream of the outcast—qualifies as “real.” African-American music is usually expected to supply the perfume of the primitive. Since the nineteen-twenties, white teen-agers have used black music as the Muzak of their pubescence. Some pop historians still perpetuate this mythology, but others make a point of celebrating all that is rigorous, complex, and exalted in the African-American tradition. One of my favorite passages in pop-music studies appears in “Instruments of Desire,” an erudite paean to the electric guitar, by Steve Waksman, of Smith College. It describes how Bo Diddley came to invent his tremolando sound. “Tremolo involved an oscillation of the electronic signal,” Waksman writes, “transmitted from the guitar to the amplifier so that the volume level would fluctuate at regular intervals between extreme loudness and virtual silence.” I don’t really know what this means, but it certainly puts Diddley’s “bump-a-bump bump” in a new light. Likewise, David Brackett, the author of “Interpreting Popular Music,” lost me when he began to expound on James Brown’s “Superbad” by way of the mathematical proportions of the Golden Section, positing that various parts of the song relate to each other by a ratio of 0.618 to 1. Bach has long been subject to this sort of arcane analysis, and there is no reason that the hardest-working man in show business shouldn’t get the same treatment.
In a less pedantic vein, a paper by Portia K. Maultsby, who teaches in the department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, dismantled the clichés attached to Motown’s “hit factory,” which for a long time was accused of purveying what critics called a “diluted blackness.” She stressed Motown’s profound connections with the African-American tradition, especially jazz, gospel, and rhythm and blues: James Jamerson’s restless, all-over bass lines are electric bebop. Maultsby’s paper went hand in hand with an essay by John Sheinbaum in the “Rock Over the Edge” anthology—a devastating account of how white rockers are routinely celebrated as enigmatic artists while their African-American counterparts are made out to be simpleminded conduits of energy and fun. “The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll” once described Motown as a “wholly mechanical style and sound.” The Beatles, by contrast, were hailed as mop-top Beethovens immediately after releasing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” The Beatles were great, but they did not save music from oblivion when they arrived in America in 1964. In fact, as Keir Keightley notes in “The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock,” the blues-besotted British Invasion had the effect of putting a great many African-American session musicians out of work.
THE CRUCIFIXION MAMBO
By common consent, the tour de force of the Pop Conference was a lecture by the Cuban music scholar and producer Ned Sublette, which took place at the not very funky hour of 9:30 a.m. In the space of twenty minutes or so, Sublette conjured up the sweeping influence of Cuban music and Caribbean traditions on almost every popular form of the twentieth century. It was not so much a lecture as an all-out performance: Sublette, who also leads a Latin-country fusion band, sang, tapped, and danced the Cuban rhythms that have insinuated themselves into every breakthrough moment in American music, including ragtime (Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” uses the danzón rhythm), New Orleans jazz, bebop, rock and roll (Bo Diddley’s “hambone” beat is similar to the Cuban clave), and funk. Sublette called Cuban music “the elephant in the kitchen that pop-music historians have failed to see”; it was, he insisted, the site of the original marriage of African rhythm and European harmony.
By installing Cuban music as “the other great tradition,” Sublette did the unthinkable: he questioned the primacy of African-Americans in pop history. There were murmurs of unease when he announced that African-American music was not originally polyrhythmic. Robert Christgau, the fiercely informed critic of the Village Voice, said in the question-and-answer period that blues singers implied polyrhythm in the interplay of voice and guitar. In a way, though, Sublette’s Cubacentric reading—the book version of which will be published next year—relieves African-Americans of the burden of being the primitives of American music; they become the appropriators rather than the appropriated.
Sublette mentioned, in passing, the fascinating history of two old Spanish-American dances, the zarabanda and the chacona, which probably stemmed from the Afro-Caribbean melting pot. They spread to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and helped shape some of the masterpieces of the Baroque. In Seattle, I got to thinking about the tangled history of the chacona, or chaconne, which has appeared in so many diverse places in the past five hundred years that it could be considered one of the iconic images of the universal language. It is identifiable by its bass line: a constantly repeating, often downward-plunging figure, over which higher instruments and voices play variations. “A dance in the way of the mulatto’s,” Cervantes called it. The lyrics were bawdy and irreverent; the music was said to have been invented by the Devil. Once it reached Europe, it slowed down and took on more solemn connotations. In the hands of Monteverdi it led to the “Lamento” bass, which was well suited to the dying utterances of operatic heroines. In its most striking form, the “Lamento” proceeded down a grand, chilly staircase of semitones, or chromatic steps. You can hear this version of it in the heart-stopping final lament of Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas,” and in the “Crucifixus” from Bach’s Mass in B Minor.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a chacona-style figure reappeared in the hands of African-American musicians in New Orleans, Chicago, and, notably, the Mississippi Delta, where the Devil was again said to be active. It sounded obsessively in Skip James’s “I’m So Glad,” one of the greatest of the Delta blues, and can be heard rumbling beneath Ellington’s “Reminiscing in Tempo.” Descending chromatic basses gave a slow-marching power to some of the more ambitious rock songs of the sixties and seventies—Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Simple Twist of Fate,” Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused” and “Stairway to Heaven.” Somehow, four centuries after the lamenting bass surfaced, its meaning remained the same. It summoned up the dark comfort of heartbreak and depression: the heart descending step by step to the bottom and going back up to repeat the journey.
Universal figures such as the chacona—“memes,” as musicologists call them, borrowing from sociobiology—reveal the interconnectedness of all musical experience. If you could bring together a few seventeenth-century Afro-Cuban musicians, a continuo section led by the Master Bach, and players from Ellington’s 1929 band, and then ask John Paul Jones to start them off with the bass line of “Dazed and Confused,” they would, after a minute or two, find common ground. And very interesting music it would be, too. Purists of all genres can never stand the fact that the genealogy of music is one long string of miscegenations and mutations.
THE TIMBERLAKE PERPLEX
When, in 1943, Ellington presented his symphonic masterpiece “Black, Brown, and Beige” at Carnegie Hall, he spoke of it in the first-person plural, including his band in the creative process. Scholars often point out that African-American genres, like their West African antecedents, resist the European cult of personality: they tend to take the form of a collective ritual, not of a declamation by a charismatic star to a passive crowd. The problem with the “genius” model is that it puts up a wall between performer and audience; this is surely why so many pop musicians reject it, even as they feed on the adulation that creates it. They look warily on the archivists and commentators who crowd around any long-lasting genre. If, as another old German dude said, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, rock critics are Minerva’s vultures: when enough of them take flight, it means that something is dying.
Still, we listeners want to talk about genius. We want a language that articulates and perpetuates our passions. What’s bedevilling about pop music is that while we sense greatness in a song we have trouble saying where it comes from. It is often difficult to say who even wrote the thing in the first place. Some performers exert such a powerful presence—Billie Holiday, Sinatra, Elvis—that they seem to become the authors of songs that were actually the work of schlumpy men in the Brill Building. Then there are the rock songs that were written by committee, often in the middle of the night, and under the influence of something other than the muse Euterpe. Composers have the advantage of being shrouded in myth: we can project fantasies of omniscience upon them. Pop stars torment us with their inconvenient humanness—their tax problems, their noisome politics, their pornography collections, their unwanted comebacks. No wonder the greatest legends are the artists who die young.
Call this the Timberlake predicament. In the past year, rock critics found themselves in the faintly embarrassing position of having to hail Justin Timberlake’s “Justified” as one of the better records of the year. Timberlake, for those who have let their subscription to Teen People lapse, is the blond, curly-haired twenty-two-year-old lead singer of ’N Sync. Encomiums from certifiably heterosexual male critics such as Christgau have demonstrated that Timberlake was not getting praised for his pretty face alone. Granted, cynics may see all this as a rationalization on the part of writers who can’t admit that music keeps getting worse; they eat a Hostess Twinkie and call it a gourmet meal. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that many of the most imposing achievements in pop history had their origins in ditsy teenybopper fads. The Beatles were once a boy band, too. What happened to them in the middle and late sixties was a mysterious transfer of energy, in which disposable fame was transmuted into artistic power. The band found fame first, then it found greatness. So it would be foolish to write Timberlake off too quickly.
In any case, the songs on “Justified” aren’t really Timberlake’s. A dozen names appear in the credits, and it’s anyone’s guess how much of a song like “Cry Me a River,” the album’s best track, actually came from Timberlake’s pen, if he owns one. Every bit of the song shows the fingerprints of the hip-hop producer Tim Mosley, a.k.a. Timbaland, who is the éminence grise behind half of what is great in the Top Forty these days. He has sampled every genre under the sun, from world music to austere electronica. He likes to leave yawning gaps of silence between his speaker-puncturing beats, which inspire new kinds of vehemence on the dance floor. (As Virgil Thomson observed long ago, we dance to syncopated music because our bodies like to fill in the missing beats.) Modernist ideology accustoms us to think that experimentation takes place only on the margins of a culture, but hip-hop production is the site of some of the weirdest, wittiest thinking in pop music today.
“Cry Me a River” has no apparent relation to the 1955 standard made famous by Julie London, although a future analysis of internal structural ratios may show otherwise. The vocals are plaintive to the point of whining, but the inner voices have a cool, contrapuntal flow, creating the sort of muscular melancholy so characteristic of postwar rhythm and blues. There are at least seven layers of simultaneous activity in the song—it’s as if Timbaland wanted to see how much he could pile on without creating atonality. First there is an arpeggiated keyboard figure, followed by male voices singing a bit of Gregorian-style chant. Next comes a steady, sombre pattern that sounds a little like the minor-key vamp in Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo.” Below it are four bass notes, recurring in chacona style. Now the angelic Timberlake enters, together with a more nasty-minded rhythm section, a vaguely Indian-sounding synthesized string orchestra, and, finally, sped-up versions of all the above.
In sum, “Cry Me a River” may be the most polyphonically complex teenybopper ballad in history. At the very least, it’s not something that any idiot could have done. It has the inward delight of a song that is better than it needs to be. Popular music is full of this sort of mad tinkering; in the background of even the most ostentatiously numskulled acts may be a music geek who stays up all night trying to find a single chord. Pop-music scholars spend a lot of time describing the messages that become attached to songs, and this is a necessary part of the history of listening. Yet, when music passes from one generation to another, it leaves most of its social significance peeling off dorm-room walls, and its persistence is best explained with reference to beats, chords, and raw emotion. Which is why pop writers have to find a new way to describe musical events, and not just by offering dopey imitations of classical musicology. No one would give much credence to a style of art criticism that alluded to paintings without mentioning their shapes and colors, or an architecture criticism that refused to say whether buildings were made of stone or metal.
It was disappointing to hear from attendees at the Pop Conference that they are still viewed with intense suspicion by their colleagues in classical musicology. Increasingly, leading colleges and universities have full-time pop specialists; the musicology department at U.C.L.A. is headed by Robert Walser, the author of books on jazz and heavy metal. Given the vast quantities of obscurantism that classical musicologists have churned out in the past fifty years—the impenetrable tautologies of Schenkerian analysis, the higher-math delirium of pitch-class set theory—classical scholars have no right to dismiss their pop counterparts as anything less than serious. They probably picture themselves fighting a last stand against the armies of ignorance, but any mode of teaching that promotes close, historically attuned listening can’t be a bad thing. And those of us who write on classical music have a lot to learn from pop studies. It exposes the hard realities of how music is made, how it is paid for, and how it is consumed. To understand music only as art and not as entertainment, as classical scholars tend to do, is to dehumanize the past. For all we know, Bach may well have rolled his eyes and munched on a pork chop whenever someone asked him about his relationship with Palestrina.
Pop music is music stripped bare. It is like the haphazard funeral portrayed in Wallace Stevens’s “Emperor of Ice Cream”: a woman laid out with all her flaws intact, covered with a sheet from a chest of drawers that is missing three knobs, her horny feet protruding. Boys bring flowers in last month’s newspapers, but she is noble to look upon. Twentieth-century music, the empire of ice cream, lies before us in all its damaged majesty.
