That old devil music - rock music

National Review, Feb 24, 1989 by Stuart Goldman

In its early days, rock was the music of youth

vital fresh, full of energy.

As it and its practitioners have aged,

they have taken the only way out into ugliness and evil

THEY'RE STANDING behind a railing in what appears to be some kind of warehouse. Eight or nine of them, a study in tattoos, stubble, and leather, leering, grunting, making hideous, contorted faces, seemingly in some kind of drugged or alcoholic stupor. On the other side of the railing, a huge, fat man-the guy must weigh four hundred pounds-is groveling on the floor with a halfnaked wench. Music pounds in the background. The fat guy is screaming-little pig eyes shut tight, veins near-bursting in his forehead-"WILD THING! YOU MAKE MY HEART SING! YOU MAKE EVERYTHING GROOVY! WILD THIIINNNNNG!!"

The woman, clad in a filmy negligee that reveals, well, too much, leans forward, mincing and pouting at the camera and-wait a minute! Is that . . .? Yeah, it is-it's Jessica Hahn! You remember-the one who was all over the news after her tryst with now-defrocked evangelist Jim Bakker. My, my. What wonders time doth perform. Two years after flaunting her "victim" status to every media outlet within earshot, the scantily dressed Miss Hahn is planting a big, wet smooch directly on the mouth of her buddy, comedian Sam Kinison, as the blitzed-out bunch of onlookers howls its approval.

But don't get excited. It's only TV. MTV, that is-music television, to the uninformed. Kinison and Miss Hahnsurrounded by a chorus of high-ranking members of the rock elite (Billy Idol, Slash, Steven Tyler, among others) are performing in a video of Kinison's new song (a remake of the old Troggs classic), "Wild Thing."Miss Hahn gets a chance to show off her new face and breasts (courtesy of Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner), while Kinison uses his magnum-screecho voice to make the transition from comedian to rock 'n' roll singer.

To call this video soft porn would be kind. Certainly there is nothing soft about it. This thing is ugly, man, deliberately ugly.

Let me pause for a moment to make a confession. I am a refugee from the world of rock 'n' roll. After eight years playing guitar in nightclubs and two on the road as a member of a band-recording contract, Greyhound bus, roadies, the whole bit-I bailed out in 1975 with a case of severely jangled nerves, a blown-out eardrum, and not much else to show for the "dues" I'd paid. After several more years as a pop-music critic-in which I wrote for all the usual publications-I finally threw in the towel. I didn't want it any more. No more smoky nightclubs, no more bad music. Today, I'm as foreign to the world of rock music as a fish out of slime. And it was with that attitude-that of an observer, an emigree, an alien-that I re-entered that world to see where it had gone some 35 years after its birth in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1954.

FIRST I SUBJECTED myself to a 42-hour MTV blitz (ooooh, my head!). Then some routine fact gathering. First the night table next to my bed sits a stack of magazines: Rolling Stone, Spin, Rip, Heavy Metal-copious notes scrawled in the margins. Then, a couple of days' de-tox time. When all is said and done, my reaction is . . . What in God's name happened?

First things first. Today, rock 'n' roll is the most prosperous industry in the world. The average person between 13 and 26 listens to two to three hours of rock music per day. The rest of us are bombarded by rock music-on car radios, on television, at the gym, in the dentist's office, and at the shopping mall. Most films today feature rock soundtracks. In short, there's no escape. Rock's sheer pervasiveness makes it the most profound values-shaper in existence today. Unless you are deaf, it's virtually guaranteed that rock music has affected your view of the world.

The problem is that present-day rock has little to do with the original form that began in the Fifties. Back then, the music business was populated by artists with real talent and original vision. Elvis, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, and Jerry Lee Lewis -to name only a few-all contributed genuine vitality, energy, and artistry to the music they made.

It was precisely because of this freshness and rhythmic force that rock so quickly replaced the tired popular music of the day-the last whimpering exhalation of Fifties crooners. By 1960, it had conquered and subjugated a generation.

Then, in the 1960s, rock split and went in two distinct directions. The reigning supergroups of the decade-the Beatles and the Rolling Stones-each paved the way for countless bands to follow. The Stones were the progenitors of the look, the sound, and most importantly the attitude that every heavy-metal outfit today utilizes. The Beatles' combination of cuteness and artiness (not to mention their excellent musicianship) gave birth to softer, more melodic, and less primitive groups like U2 and the Talking Heads.

To oversimplify greatly, rhythmic rock divorced ,itself from melody and ended up as a relentless percussive assault on the human ear; and melodic rock, gradually downplaying its debt to rhythm, evolved into a beatier version of the Fifties popular music it had replaced. Thus Paul McCartney, who has penned songs that rank alongside Irving Berlin's as true classics, has become just another saccharine schlockmeister; while the Rolling Stones have been transmogrified into ludicrous parodies of themselves.