Rock steady

ArtForum, Dec, 1995 by Jon Savage

In September, Forbes published its hit list of "Top 40 Big Money Entertainers" - one guide to what's really important in the music industry. Of the top five, three were group partnerships that, arguably, have done no work of value since the mid '70s: at number five, the Eagles (1995 earnings of $43 million); at number four, the Rolling Stones ($71 million); at number three, yes, with the tag line "Guess Who's Back" and a fetching pic from 1964, the Beatles ($100 million). Building on 1994's internationally successful Live at the BBC compilation, all parties involved in item three have since gone for the grand archive slam. The ensuing TV series and outtake albums have triggered an unprecedented media frenzy: 1995's major music story comes from a partnership that hasn't worked together in 25 years.

The past is everywhere in popular music, so much so that the issue is not so much an esthetic of quotation but more a matter of climate. Pop is no longer a post-Modernist medium (let alone a Modernist one), but an arena in which millennial anxieties are rehearsed, stirred up, and soothed within a vertiginous, century-long loop-de-loop. You want Perez Prado in the top three? It's yours. You'd like the Charleston set to a techno beat? You got it. You want to stay in 1969? Whatever you think you need. What do you mean you feel nauseous? You're meant to, because you've got the travel sickness first isolated by H. G. Wells a century ago in The Time Machine: "There is a feeling exactly like that one has on a switchback - of a helpless, headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash."

The U.K. and the U.S. are by now quite separate markets, each with its own dominant esthetic, but they share this simulpast. There are many reasons for this, and the easy one is demographic: the age range of people consuming teenage products - music, magazines, clothing, cosmetics, etc. - has increased way beyond the original 15-to-24 cohort to include anyone under 65. Another is the onset of digital technology over the last ten years, which has enabled the music industry to resell 30-year-old albums in a new format - a farce that has gotten the market through the worst of the recession. Indeed, there are now more records available from more countries and more time periods than ever before. Great, you might think, but information overload often results in confusion and powerlessness.

The perceptions of the baby boomers still dominate the theory and practice of pop music. You could see this nakedly at September's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert in Cleveland. Despite impassioned cameos from Al Green, Aretha Franklin, Lou Reed, and local hero Chrissie Hynde, what the event was really about was demonstrated by the Gin Blossoms, last-minute add-ons after no-shows by Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg. In place of gangsta rap's complex, contemporary brutalities, you got syrupy covers of the Beatles and the Byrds, all cloaking music-industry realpolitik: within a month of the show, Time Warner had announced that it was selling its stake in Dre's Interscope label, as a direct result of lobbying by right-wing politicians and women's groups.

As a card-carrying baby boomer - 16 in 1969 - I tapped my toe to "Feel a Whole Lot Better," then became uneasy. Already awakened by Sheryl Crow's cover of "Let it Bleed," unease flowered into resentment as archive clips of the Beatles and the Stones came interspersed with Radio Shack IDs on the video monitors: that's right, just another ad. As Greil Marcus writes in the introduction to his new collection of essays, The Dustbin of History, "The worry is that our sense of history, as it takes shape in everyday culture, is cramped, impoverished, and debilitating; that the commonplace assumption that history exists only in the past is a mystification powerfully resistant to any critical investigations that might reveal this assumption to be a fraud, or a jail." In Cleveland, watching Ray Davies put on his shameless, shameful cabaret, I began to hate my generation. I know that reneging on youthful promises is a sure sign of middle age, but, having benefited so conspicuously from the idea of youth, thirty- and fortysomethings ought to know better.

The experience taught me a couple of things, however, one of them being that white American pop is stuck either in the reaction against or the celebration of 1969. Noticing that Cleveland's Plain Dealer framed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame event in terms of Woodstock redux, I remembered 1969 as a year of ur-rock. The pop virtues of brevity, synthesis, and artifice had already been displaced by psychedelic excess; now excess was replaced in its turn by ideals of community and a kind of downbeat authenticity. People dressed down; they grew beards; they retreated into the eternal verities of blues, Bible, and country. Most damaging of all was the idea that you can still see in the success of a group like Hootie and the Blowfish: that you must be who you are onstage; that a star must also be an everyman; that person and persona must be the same.