All junk, all the time - rock music - Column

National Review, Nov 25, 1996 by Richard Brookheiser

LIKE a turtle egg buried on the beach, the thought warmed, out of sight, all summer. The Olympics and the political conventions helped it grow, but the key stimulus was a passing sentence in a New York Times Magazine article on megachurches, which are evangelical churches that number their congregations in the thousands. The article was discussing the music used in the services, and said something to the effect that the megachurches favored rock. Just like the conventions. Just like the Olympics. Just like everyone everywhere.

Megachurches keep their eye on eternity. In the here and now, rock is triumphant and universal. Its empire will only expand, ferreting out the few nooks it does not yet command, and filling them. Francis Fukuyama alerted us (wrongly) to the End of History. But rock has ended the history of music. There are no ideological, religious, or ethnic redoubts. I once read a profile of the commander of a Salvadoran death squad. He was a Deadhead. Iranian mullahs, Chinese Communists, skinheads, rabbis expecting the return of Menachem Schneerson, Papuan savages dressed only in penis wrappers, all listen, openly or in secret, or their children will.

What is rock? A certain set of musicians -- drums, guitars, a voice or two. A beat that, well, rocks. Lyrics. Pare down the music until it almost vanishes, as in rap; soften the beat until it becomes easy listening; give the songwriter the equipment and the ambitions of Brian Wilson: but the form never quite disappears. It hasn't changed for forty years, and it never will, because it is so easy to do well enough.

Consider the elements.

Music. The guitar is the ultimate E-Z-2-Play instrument. Why else was it the lyre of the American peasantry? If rock depended on some instrument -- trumpet, clarinet, fiddle, piano -- that required some tone of the lips or lightness of the fingers to play even barely competently, its pool of potential performers would have shrunk by 90 per cent. There is only one instrument easier to fake: drums. The low standards also apply to rock vocalists. Remember Mick Jagger when he was in his prime? Heard him now, when he sounds like a voice on the subway PA system? Mr. Jagger could actually move his notes around, but they were always harsh and homely notes. That's OK --they were good enough for rock.

Words. The rock critic Elizabeth Wurtzel, reviewing an album of covers of Cole Porter songs by rock musicians, hoped the experience might inspire rock songwriters to be a little more careful of their rhyme schemes. Wrong! The whole point is not to have to worry about rhyme schemes. If you start worrying, not everyone will be able to do it. So rock will keep on rhyming "pain" and "shame," and "stop" and "stuck."

Dancing. I was in fifth and sixth grade just after kids stopped taking solemn little lessons, in gym class or after school, in the box step and the cha-cha. Those who still dance these, and all the other dances of mankind, do it, like fox hunters or Greek scholars, as a passion or a hobby. To fulfill the necessities of social intercourse, it will never be necessary to take a dance lesson again. Slow dancing to rock is what you hope to be doing horizontally with your clothes off afterward. Fast dancing is --well, look at it, at any wedding or bar mitzvah, where even the grown-ups shake their aged hams. The abolition of dance steps was a great relief to the awkward, especially the men, who once had to lead -- no more visualizing the points of the compass, no more shame when you crunched the foot you were supposed to be guiding.

Entrepreneurs. There is a final way in which rock is easy, which impels the other three. It is easy to make a buck selling it. Because the product is so generic, primitive, and witless, the distributors and marketers can know nothing, ingest huge quantities of drugs, and still not be too addled to make millions. The fields I know best are journalism, publishing, and politics, and so I do know something about laziness and empty pretensions. But if there were ever a land of opportunity for the feckless, the modern music industry is it.

Rock is a form of popular culture that aims downward in terms of class and age, instead of aiming up. Rather than aspiring, it despires. Astronomers speak of the red shift, the change in the spectrum of the light of receding galaxies. Rock is redneck shift. The preceding phase of popular music, encompassing jazz, dance bands, and show tunes, was urban and adult. Rock is kids channeling the rhythms of bumpkins.

But the worst thing about rock is not that it fails the culture, but that it fails on its own terms. Popular music is a marker and a memory aid. Most of the important events in life -- romance, courtship, celebration -- are accompanied by it. We remember them because of their importance to us, no matter what was on the radio. But if the music is crude and blank, does not some of its crudity and blankness infect the experience, and the memory?

And while popular music mostly amplifies pre-existing emotions, at its best it can tug us, tease us, make us grow. Not rock. For all its supposedly revolutionary ethos, rock is a binary switch of angst and hormones -- Kafka without humor, or centerfolds in notes. The emotions that unsettle, like stones under a sleeping bag -- hope, regret -- are beyond its ken. And they are beyond our ken, to the extent rock stuffs our ears.