Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music. - book reviews

National Review, May 16, 1994 by Mark Cunningham

MOST of us under the age of fifty who worry about the 74 decline of the West, while also trying to lead normal lives, lose a bit of sleep now and then over the Problem of Rock.

We grew up with rock, are surrounded by it, depend on it for cultural allusion, as an aid to concentration or distraction, and as a stimulus to casual reminiscence and self-expression. We also enjoy it, usually to the extent of spending thousands on recordings, tickets, sound equipment. Any attempt to reject it would not only be futile, but would feel like a kind of self-mutilation.

Then too, the familiar, superficially conservative critique is ill-informed. Much of rock isn't very good, but the same is true of pre-Fifties popular music and everything else that can be cheaply mass-produced. An ear willing to hear, a body willing to dance, can discover rock's virtues: vigor and charm, an aptitude for capturing earthly joys and sorrows, sound that encapsulates and encourages motion of body and spirit.

Some personal experiences here may illustrate. The more powerful ones that come to mind have involved rock soothing the savage breast: the Beatles' "Let It Be" and the Grateful Dead's "Touch of Grey" were of considerable solace on two occasions when I've had to absorb the fact of sudden, tragic death. The words and music to "Let It Be" combine to produce peace and acceptance; of "Touch of Grey" (with its refrain "I will get by"), perseverance and a sense of continuity. Such a talismanic, psychological use of rock makes a poor substitute for religious engagement; but for me, at leas% it was on both occasions merely a secular counterpoint to rather involved dialogues with God.

At the other extreme, rock is a necessary part of a proper carouse. Cutting loose requires good company, dim lighting, cheap booze, and a solid jukebox. As the prelude to the tenor solo of the "Ode to Joy" is indispensable to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, so too, in a more modest way, do "L.A. Woman" (on the box at Blue & Gold on 8th Street), "Heroin" (at Alcatraz at 10th and Avenue A), and "Paint It, Black" (at Downtown Beirut on First Avenue) all belong on the soundtrack of an East Village barhop.

And yet so much of rock is plainly destructive--increasingly plain and increasingly destructive as the years pass: intimately tied, in obvious ways, to the idiocy of the Sixties, the onanism of the Seventies, the cynicism of the Eighties, and the nihilism of the Nineties. More, the music itself becomes less musical--speed metal, the more "legitimate" forms of "alternative rock," rap.

Faced with this fact, there are those who just reject rock: the more seriously religious and high-art conservatives. And there are those who avoid the dilemma by rejecting social-conservative concerns, by overlooking their more disturbing implications, or by avoiding principled intellectual examination altogether: people who, in my experience at least, variously call themselves libertarians, neocons, or "just plain Republicans."

Those of us who decline to shape our ideology to fit our tastes, and vice versa, find no answers in rock criticism, which though often sophisticated is typically inspired by various leftisms. The main source of intellectual discomfort for such critics is not rock's antipathy to the good things in life, but its affinity for them.

Enter Martha Bayles, onetime Wall Street Journal art and TV critic, with Hole in Our Soul, a clear, witty, and gloriously level-headed examination of what is wrong and right with American popular music and its critics. The book is ostensibly directed at those who find no flaws in today's music, but the author is too subtle a thinker, and too great a music lover, to restrict herself to the level of Camille Paglia and other Madonna fans.

The work is a history in form and an argument in fact. The argument is that rock is, as is generally understood, a mainstream popularization of black music (blues, R&B) bred with country-western, but that that popularization is, essentially, a good thing. The force responsible for rock's ills, besides its sometimes unfortunate reactions to racial and technological changes in society, is modernism.

Starting from the work of, among others, Jacques Barzun, Miss Bayles divides modernism into three parts, two of them malign. Introverted modernism, the Art for Art's Sake school, produces nothing of interest to anyone besides the artist himself; perverse modernism, the "tear it down" camp, leaves nothing standing and erects nothing in its place.

Extroverted modernism, however, maintains the modernist insights into the difficulties of accurate perception, the tensions between truth and life, and the intrinsic value of art, while retaining traditional concerns for extrinsic expression and, especially, for the audience and for tradition itself.

To demonstrate this scheme, buss Bayles compares jazz and cubism. She finds early jazz comparable to later cubism (Picasso) in its vigor and popularity, while later jazz (be-bop), like early, colorless cubism, was over-refined and -abstracted.