The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1989 by Jacob Weisberg

Everything you never wanted to know about rock and roll.

The moment you begin to analyze rock, you lay yourself open to the charge of taking something that's supposed to be fun way too seriously. Whether it's Allan Bloom linking Mick Jagger's Dionysian revel to the decline of Western civilization in The Closing of the American Mind, or Greil Marcus applying Theodor Adorno to the Sex Pistols in Lipstick Traces, critics who dissect pop tunes too fervently always seem to miss not only the point but the pleasures. Nothing is less appropriate to the unselfconsciousness of America's great cultural innovation than the high dudgeon it inspires in certain of its academic hangers-on. Lighten up, you want to say. It's only rock and roll.

In books on Bruce Springsteen and The Who, as well in his writings in Rolling Stone and elsewhere, Dave Marsh has been as guilty as anyone of this failure to let it be. A critic's critic, he bears a special re- sponsibility for the vapid, pretentious tone that has infected rock reviewers at alternative papers and music magazines around the country. Whenever some trendy bore asserts that a new rap song is a "definitive and infectious cry, of pain from the viscera of Reagan's promised land," he is mouthing the frothy rock-cant developed by the likes of Dave Marsh.

Marsh himself remains pop's master obscurantist. His new book* offers some gems of inscrutable prose: Marvin Gaye's version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" distills 400 years of paranoia and talking drum gossip into 3 minutes and 15 seconds of anguished soul-searching." Led Zepplin's Whole Lotta Love," "becomes an essence of grunge, a ragged, nasty projection of male hormonal anguish, that's as dangerous if it's feigned as it is if it's real." When he listens to The Wind," a 1954 single by some band called Nolan Strong and the Diablos, Marsh hears "the wimp-perfection of mid-eighties Michael Jackson" and feels "spooked and confirmed." The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1,001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, is a massive compendium of such piffle-in excelsis, as the author himself might have it. Rarely do these "pseudy" adjectival phrases convey much more than a sense of "I like this a lot."

Part of what's funny about Marsh's book is the surgical precision of the rankings that accompany this quackery. Pop culture always seems to inspire list-making (So what are your 10 greatest movies of 1989, Gene?), but Marsh has managed to produce a self-parody of the whole nerdy genre. The Trammps's "Disco Inferno," we learn from his book, is the 83rd greatest single of all time, while Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" is the 772nd, and Dave Edmunds's "Almost Saturday Night" and the Eurythmics' "Thorn in My Side" aren't among the thousand best at all (that hurts). The whole endeavor is so pointless as to defy comprehension. How can one evaluate Muddy Waters's "Mannish Boy" against the Beatles' "Ticket to Ride" and Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart"? They're all great songs on their own termns, too different to yield a meaningful comparison.

Marsh is intent on making comparisons not just within genres but among them. A fan of fifties R&B and sixties Motown, he gives 17 entries to Marvin Gaye, 13 to Chuck Berry, 12 each to James Brown and Aretha Franklin, 11 to Otis Redding, and 10 to Little Richard and the Temptations. There is endless discussion of fifties combos no one cares about, like the Elegants, the Jewels, the Diamonds, the Platters, the Coasters (the Drinks, the Ice Cubes, etc.). By contrast, the Velvet Underground, Neil Young, James Taylor, David Bowie, the Talking Heads, the Psychedelic Furs, T-Bone Burnett, R.E.M., and Tom Waits all get zero entries (to mention only a few). Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Elvis Costello and all of punk are included but undervalued.

It's no accident. Marsh, the guilty white boy par excellence, admires the black, the soulful, and the emotional, while despising everything that is white, . progressive," album-oriented," and to some extent, anything that is thoughtful in pop music. He is especially hostile to claims that protest is basic to the form. Rock-as-rebellion," Marsh writes in the introduction, "is a story compiled almost exclusively by white men." If that's true, The Heart of Rock & Soul is the affirmative action plan.

It's a commonplace to say that the roots of rock and roll are in black blues and gospel. That's perfectly true, but Marsh is hung up on the idea that rock is something the white man tried to plagiarize from the brothers and never got right. That's a distortion. Elvis Presley's Sun recordings were not poor imitations of R & B hits, but a multi-racial hybrid. Though a racial divide persists in music, as it does in most aspects of American life, white and black have influenced each other to a point that it's impossible to say whether Prince and Madonna are black or white cultural phenomena.

Nor does music made by white people intrinsically lack feeling or sexual energy, as the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen demonstrate. And the assumption that "black music" is expressive rather than intelligent is a canard dispelled by the recordings of such singers as Gil Scot-Heron, Tracy Chapman, and Joan Armatrading. The ultimate source of Marsh's dichotomy is the myth that blacks are more authentic and sexually potent than whites, a stereotype the neglected Lou Reed caricatured in his song "I Want to Be Black." In this respect Marsh, the African-American wannabe, is not just patronizing but racist him- self. In fact, the best rock music is not a rhythmic expression exclusive to blacks, or a desiccated white radicalism, but a marriage of the rebellious instinct, sometimes articulate, with true feeling. Elvis Costello's "What's So Funny Bout Peace Love & Under- standing," Springsteen's "Darkness on the Edge of Town," and Sly Stone's "Stand" are all songs of this type: powerfully felt protests about the way things are, in politics, in love, in everyday life. Beat politics