Feature of The Week 1/9/12: Rock and The Pop Narcotic
Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2012 11:57 pm
To my 3DD Friends,
Below is my Feature of the Week offering, an article about Joe Carducci's book Rock and the Pop Narcotic: Testament for the Electric Church. It is a long article. The reason for its length is that I wanted to include plenty of quotes from the book so that someone who has never read it could still participate in any discussion or debate that might develop. IMO, it is one of the best books of rock criticism ever published, right up there with Lester Bangs and Nick Tosches. Enjoy
Rock and the Pop Narcotic: Testament for the Electric Church by Joe Carducci.
“The thing of it is, of course, the key. To the kingdom. What made rock and roll itself was not the notes. Notes, like guns, are policy-neutral, though also like guns, not inert. They can be made to go off.”
Thus begins Joe Carducci’s 500 plus page manifesto, Rock and The Pop Narcotic: Testament for the Electric Church. It is arguably the most ambitious piece of rock criticism ever published; an attempt at an overarching aesthetic for rock music. The book is also one of the most controversial pieces of rock criticism. When it was published in 1991 the rock critic establishment first tried to ignore or dismiss it. But like a great underground band, word of mouth put the book in the hands of musicians, record geeks and other iconoclasts who spread the word. Begrudgingly, the rock press acknowledged the book’s ambition and scope as it furiously prepared rebuttals to his arguments like frightened prosecutors who have just realized their case is going to hell in a hurry. Twenty years and three editions later, the book is required reading for every writer who wants to tackle rock criticism. It belongs on the small pile of books next to the keyboard, alongside Lester Bangs and Nick Tosches.
An aesthetic is a theory of what elements make a work of art (book, film, painting, song, album) worth considering. It seeks to explain how a genre works and separate the important work from the trash. On a practical level, an aesthetic of rock music would help you understand why some of the albums you purchase or download end up in heavy rotation for years while others fall to the back of the pile after less than a dozen spins. Most fans or geeks have no need to explain this. We do not have to justify to anyone why Zen Arcade and Let it Be became the cornerstones of our vinyl collection while T.S.O.L.’s Change Today? was sold to the used record shop for three bucks before 1984 even came to a close. But anyone who writes about or reviews rock music ought to be able to explain to an editor, fan, fellow writer or musician whose latest effort has just been given a scathing review what criteria he uses when he declares Drive By Truckers the best band in America while writing off Kings of Leon as bogus poseurs. Better yet, that criteria or aesthetic ought to be apparent to anyone reading his work.
The stakes were much higher for Joe Carducci. He wasn’t the producer of a Xeroxed fanzine or even the editor of a highly circulated magazine like Spin. Carducci was the person Greg Ginn brought in to sign bands when he decided that SST was going to attempt to be a major independent instead of a small, local label that put out records by Black Flag and a handful of other southern California hardcore bands. Carducci was the one who signed The Meat Puppets, Husker Du, Saint Vitus, Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, Bad Brains, Screaming Trees, Dinosaur Jr. and a bunch of other bands who formed the bedrock of the 80’s underground rock scene. So successful was he at finding the appropriate bands for his label that by 1986 many indie rock fans would gladly part with eight dollars for an album by a band they had not yet heard just because they were on SST. SST was the first label any aspiring punk/underground band sent their demos to. And if you are wondering why Carducci never expressed any interest in your band, read this book.
The Bottom
“To evaluate rock as music the peripherals need to be set aside. The look of a band -- where they’re coming from -- is musically irrelevant…They say Tony Bennett could sing the telephone book and be great. I’m saying the Stooges could’ve played the Tony Bennett songbook and been great. The essence of quality in rock’s musical terms is to be found in the musical interaction of the players of a guitar, a bass and a drum kit.”
“Rock music is rock and roll made conscious of itself as a small band music, as opposed to being just a temporary grouping of session players for a tour or a gig or recording date…Typically in these two forms (C&W and R&B) touring bands do not record with the artist (i.e. the vocalist) whereas in rock music the band is the artist. Musicians who first learn how to play within a band learn an individual style formed by that particular band-voice. That musician may have a hard time jamming with outside musicians because of his idiosyncratic style. But this is how the band-as-artist opened up a new inexhaustible musical range.”
The foundation of Carducci’s aesthetic can be reduced to a handful of bullet points.
-- Rock made the transition from rock and roll when the artists began to consciously conceive of their work as a band collaboration instead of simply backing up a singer. (You can debate whether this first happened with The James Brown Orchestra, Dick Dale and the Dell Tones, Paul Revere and The Raiders or The Beatles.)
-- The essence of rock is found in the interplay between the rhythm guitar, drums and bass. Vocals and soloing -- while important -- are secondary. Rock is essentially riffs, rhythm and beat.
-- Melody in the riffs, vocal lines and instrumental soloing on top of the riffs, rhythm and beat are what makes a rock band’s music interesting and memorable. “Riffs mean nothing if they are just unresolved pummeling of the air; they must serve a greater melodic structure.”
-- The challenge for anyone developing a rock aesthetic is to differentiate rock from pop. Pop is largely an industry produced phenomenon; production, marketing, etc… “Rock need only refer to Tin Pan Alley’s melodic tradition.” Everything else is irrelevant to rock.
“A music that rocks can only be an active by-product of the playing of a band. Rock is not alchemy (adding black to white and getting gold), it is transubstantiation. It’s not the notes, it’s the jam between them. It is aggressive to the point of derailing from its rhythm and is unsafe at any speed. It is not identifiable by chart position, nor even by sound (say, fuzzed out guitars), volume or speed. Its special musical value is that it is a folk form which exhibits a small band instrumental language as in jazz, rather than mere accompaniment to a vocalist as in pop. Rock is the place where rhythm and melody battle it out most intensively and in doing so they create something more. Traditional pop and folk uses of melody generally attempt to evoke a fairly refined emotional/reflective mood or trance. In rock, melody is present and its whiff of mood still distinctive, however, here it is pushed along by an explicitly physical, even carnal rhythm arrangement. The whole of the music then can be said to be a more complete metaphor for the actual human condition; we are higher aspirations pushed along by carnal drives.”
The Ride
“Poor Bruce and his rabbi Jon Landau were left stammering about how the song was not patriotic and jingoistic and all those bad things, even while the mainstream American uberboss Ronald Reagan was able to refer to the song and the artist without intoning their real attitude. Ron had grabbed the flag back from the limp-symp thieves. If the “rock” press would respond to the release of a good record by a new band half as vigorously and quickly as they rushed into print with defenses of the little boss’s intent against the big boss’s scurrilous appropriation, the public record on music would be good enough that I could be doing what I quit the record business for instead of writing and re-writing this goddamn book.”
Carducci could have simply stated his aesthetic and gone directly to his critical history of rock music and had a perfectly good book. A competent editor could have toned a few things down and focused it a bit more. Dave Marsh might have even been convinced to contribute a blurb for a few hundred bucks. The book would likely have garnered decent reviews from the rock critic establishment before fading away into obscurity as most of those projects do. But no. Carducci, after a decade and a half in the record biz had more than a few axes to grind. He was as pissed off as any broke ass musician who spent the last decade busting his ass touring out of a van, sleeping on floors and recording some of the greatest rock music ever only to have it ignored. Carducci did more than list his grievances and express his anger. If the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, Carducci took names and chopped off about 100 heads. By the time the carnage was finished at around page 245 the true rock geeks were cranking their Black Sabbath and Black Flag albums to 11 while they danced on the graves of the Jann Wenners, Dave Marsh’s, Clive Davis’ and Clear Channel Communications of the world. (“We’re gonna have a t.v. party tonight!”) And keep in mind, when this book came out Nevermind was still a year and a half away.
The book is the rock criticism equivalent of Sherman’s march or the firebombing of Dresden. Few were spared. Some, like T.S.O.L. escaped with mere flesh wounds (“And the critics, when they paid any attention, were more likely to praise rock-like facades like T.S.O.L. than the real stuff. Scammers earned extra points from the press precisely because they were trying to sell out.”) Others like Dave Marsh, Jon Landau and Jann Wenner were stripped naked, water boarded, and put on trial for treason. Their crimes?
“It is not so easy to foist a complete, fraudulent simulation of truth on a people; other sources of information must be jammed, heretics must be liquidated, and what is offered as truth must be exceedingly carefully composed. The scribes at Pravda and Ivestia were some of the most skilled writers on earth because they were trying to lie systematically and comprehensively for the ages…Lucky for me rock critics aren’t their match or it would have taken years out of my life to write this chapter.”
The rock press as we know it began in the late 1960’s. It was the progeny of an unlikely coupling; the fawning fan magazines marketed to teenagers and the student and underground press with its left wing/countercultural leanings. As rock music “matured” in the post-summer of love environment the “rock critic” began to project his own political and cultural aesthetic onto the music. This aesthetic had very little to do with the music itself. However, in the years between 1967 and 1970 most of the bands getting airplay on the budding free form FM stations shared the same hippie utopian dreams as those conducting interviews, writing feature articles and record reviews so there was very little conflict.
Things began to change in the early 1970‘s. In Carducci’s view, this was when rock artists began to consider rock as a true musical language as opposed to a hybrid of pop, folk and early rock and roll forms set to a harder beat. When the younger brothers and sisters of the student radicals of the late sixties came of age bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Blue Oyster Cult and Rush provided the soundtrack to their adolescent bacchanal. They had no need to flee the heartland for cultural meccas like The East and West Village, Haight Ashbury, Ann Arbor an the Sunset Strip. The modern rock tour brought the party to arenas and theaters across America. Just gas up the GTO, score a case of Genesee Cream Ale, a half ounce of weed and drive out to the nearest hockey arena to catch a triple bill with UFO, Bad Company and Grand Funk Railroad. The rock critic establishment was horrified.
“The music by 1970 had come to take forms that revealed bands’ awareness of rock as a true musical language -- not merely what resulted when teenagers imitated their favorite pop stars. Many of the bands that made use of the language did little exciting with it. But the critics didn’t differentiate here; they exhibited conceptual short circuit when it came to this new rock music. In their estimation Black Sabbath, Robin Trower, and Stray Dog were worse than Brownsville Station, Bachman-Turner-Overdrive, and The Raspberries. Those critics weaned on the sixties cauldron of rocked-out folk and pop idioms opted for the music of self-conscious would-be redeemers of pop music once consciousness had dawned on rock music. The less demographically appealing rock trail (be it boogie, acid-rock, hard rock, heavy metal, prog rock) was abandoned by them except insofar as they attacked it. In fact they chose a new classicism over the newer unrecipeed development of conscious (though more than a little naïve) experimentation with rock music -- ie., the music’s future… The commercial success of many of the rock bands of the 1970’s achieved as it was with little or no radio airplay and little but the obligatory negative press, fueled heavy resentments on the part of the critics and the politicos throughout the fringes of the youth culture. They could not forgive the fact that rock had left the pop trail by which alone it seemed possible to politically engage mainstream American culture.”
On the surface it might seem that little was at stake in this rift between rockers and those who wrote about the music. After all, unlike theater critics whose reviews could make or break a Broadway musical, a 1971 Rolling Stone review panning the latest Black Sabbath album had absolutely no effect on record sales or concert attendance. However, these artists knew instinctively that when their music was ignored or ridiculed they were essentially being written out of rock history. Forty years after creating some of the most influential music of the 1970’s artists like Robin Trower, Blue Oyster Cult and Mountain are mere footnotes and a band like Rush, who have been playing sold out arenas for decades, are passed over year after year by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
In the meantime, rock critics focused less on the music, concerning itself with subject matter that was peripheral at best. Their aesthetic, based on sociological and political biases, alienated them from much of the rock music offered by rock bands. What music they did champion in this period (roughly 1970 to 1975) was usually the mid career offerings of artists who first arrived on the scene in the 1960’s, singer-songwriters such as James Taylor, Janis Ian and the like or British rock artists like David Bowie. Entire genres such as prog rock, hard rock, heavy metal and southern rock were given the short shrift.
“As radio -- both AM and FM -- tightened up into formats, the rock press was preoccupied with formulating its collective political line on a number of post-sixties developments. They thereby neglected to pick up the informational slack left by radio’s decline. Rock critics were worried about the apparent failure of the revolution, the resegregation of the pop audience into funk and rock, the end of the Beatles, hair loss, and the intransigence of the mainstream culture (Nixon landslide, the Vietnam war, J. Edgar Hoover, CIA, Cointelpro, etc…) in the face of claims by “rock” culture spokesmen of absolute victory in the domestic war for the hearts and minds of the young -- the future.”
“You’d like information on the music. You get star profiles, pop sociology, conspiracy theories, liberal posturing, middle class bashing, Western civilization trashing, feminist doggerel, third world romanticism, trend mongering, cause mining, image hawking, myth fabrication, idol worship… In a word: bullshit…”
By the late 1970’s the stakes were raised even higher. An underground rock scene, beginning on the west coast and spreading to cities across America, began to take root. This underground was ignored by commercial radio, shunned by the major labels and reviled by the critics. Bands had no choice but to form their own record labels and network with bands from other cities. This music was made known solely through word of mouth, low wattage college radio stations on the left side of the FM dial and self produced “fanzines” produced by the champions of this music. It was one of the most fertile eras in rock music. The majority of rock fans heard very little of it.
This is the point where Carducci becomes part of the story. In most cases, the absence of objectivity would be fatal. But this is what makes Rock and The Pop Narcotic so compelling. People’s careers, livelihoods and legacies were effected by the critical and commercial indifference and hostility of the music establishment. Indeed, an entire decade’s worth of rock music does not exist in the minds of most rock fans. It is Carducci’s and, by extension, every musician and fan’s opportunity to lash back at the idiotic critics and careerists whose bogus aesthetic denied careers to dozens of worthy bands. And for Carducci and Black Flag it was personal.
Most of us who came of age during the 1980’s have only vague recollections about the legal dispute between Black Flag and MCA. In my junior year of high school, after reading a series of alarmist articles in the mainstream rock press about the “violent” and “neo-fascist” west coast hardcore scene, I decided to check it out for myself and purchased Black Flag’s Damaged and Dead Kennedys Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. I may have occasionally wondered why, for the next three years, Black Flag issued no follow up to their seminal album but the sheer excitement of discovering a thriving underground music scene distracted me from the mundane details of the band‘s legal disputes. Carducci brings us all up to speed, presenting a story of borderline libel and collusion where a handful of record executives, rock critics and promoters conspired to deny one of America’s most important bands the ability to release records during their peak years. That he makes his case in strictly aesthetic terms is nothing short of amazing and one of the reasons why, twenty years later, people are still talking about this book.
In a nutshell, Black Flag’s Damaged album was to be distributed by MCA subsidiary Unicorn Records. However, after reading the same sort of alarmist articles that piqued my interest in the hardcore scene MCA executive Al Bergamo decided to investigate further, contacting Rolling Stone magazine who, according to Greg Ginn, “bad mouthed us real bad.” Bergamo then declared Damaged an anti-parent record and refused to distribute it. The resultant litigation prevented Black Flag from releasing any records for the next three years.
Black Flag and SST received little to no support from the rock press during this period. However, Carducci takes umbrage to the fact that a decade later, when NWA experienced similar difficulties Dave Marsh and the rest of the critical establishment rushed to their defense.
What made Marsh bite at the conspiracy possibilities of NWA’s difficulties, and pass on those proffered by the case of Black Flag, who after all had been the target of real police harassment? Let’s examine this carefully… Or rather, let’s not. Let’s just list the signs as we on the left must objectively read them, remembering that the yahoos of the American pop audience are racist and suckers for the right-wing come on:
-- NWA are black. Black Flag were white.
-- NWA are descended from oppressed sharecroppers and slaves. Black Flag were white.
-- NWA play with “dangerous” ideas which their color renders progressive. Black Flag played with “dangerous” ideas which their color rendered fascist.
-- NWA’s audience is largely black and blacks have historically required assistance from enlightened white/Jewish liberals. Black Flag’s audience was mostly white and if it hadn’t been so privileged and non-working class it wouldn’t have been laughing at us and following such an uncommercial (non-pop) muse in the first place.
Therefore, Marsh would reason, NWA despite the presence of certain outre paints on their palette are objectively one of the progressive forces in the society, if only because ours is such a racist, exploitative one. Also he’d reason Black Flag were, due to their petit bourgeois irresponsibility, objectively despite certain aesthetic achievement and the sharing of some class enemies, part of the reactionary social forces at work during The Reagan Age. Music and any question of aesthetics are only indirectly elements in Marsh’s reasoning insofar as they may determine the size of the artist’s audience. And so the non-pop aesthetic with its smaller audience is likely meaningless to the rock critic - as - social scientist and such bands passed over… Rock criticism’s imperatives are not musical. This is, in turn, my excuse for this section having so little to do with music. Rock critics rarely discuss music.”
The Solo
In the final section of Carducci’s applies his aesthetic to the history of rock music, from the 1950’s into the 1990’s. The retrospective of each decade begins with a series of two to three paragraph articles on the ten to twelve bands he considers most important followed by a dozen or more pages where he discusses the rest. He does not take into consideration a band or artist’s popularity or critical reception when evaluating their artistic contributions to rock. There are obscure bands like The United States of America and Magma who receive the major artist treatment as well as bands like ZZ Top who were traditionally ignored by rock critics and historians. At the same time, many artists championed by critics, historians and the masses are all but ignored. Carducci sticks to his applied aesthetic.
Below are the artists he considers most important to their respective decade.
1950’s:
Louis Jordan (The Tympany Five)
Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys
Muddy Waters
Bill Haley and His Comets
Bo Diddley
Elvis Presley
Chuck Berry
Little Richard
Jerry Lee Lewis
The Rock ’n Roll Trio
Eddie Cochran
Link Wray and the Wraymen
1960’s
Dick Dale and The Del-tones
James Brown
Paul Revere and the Raiders
The Beatles
The Yardbirds
Steppenwolf
The Who
The Cream
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
The Doors
United States of America
Jethro Tull
1970’s
Black Sabbath
Led Zeppelin
The Stooges
Mountain, West, Bruce and Laing
The Allman Brothers Band
King Crimson
Robin Trower
Free
Bad Company
Hawkwind
Magma
Mahavishnu Orchestra
ZZ Top
Rush
AC/DC
The Ramones
Pere Ubu
Motorhead
The Sex Pistols
The Fall
Avengers, Sleepers, Negative Trend, Toiling Midgets
The Screamers
The Spherical Objects
Black Flag
The Descendents
1980’s
James Blood Ulmer
Flipper
The Minutemen
Saccharine Trust
Minor Threat
Saint Vitus
The Butthole Surfers
The Tar Babies
No Means No
Gone
Universal Congress of
1990’s
Nirvana
Helmet
Kyuss
In addition to the longer write ups Carducci gives an exhaustive listing of bands from each decade. This section of the book is impressive and provides the reader with many opportunities to discover new bands. The best sections are the decades where Carducci was not an active participant in the music business. If the lack of objectivity made his section critiquing the critics stronger, its absence seems to narrow his perspective on eighties bands especially, showing a strong bias towards west coast hardcore bands, especially those who recorded for SST. One also wonders if the conflicts Husker Du and Sonic Youth had with SST are the reason why those two bands did not receive the "major artist" treatment while others like Flipper, Minor Threat and Saccharine Trust did. And leaving out important metal bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica and Slayer while including Saint Vitus (an SST band) is absurd.
Carducci did not update the third edition so there nothing written about musical developments since the mid-nineties. This is unfortunate because I find myself clamoring for his opinion on dozens of developments, everything from Napster to alt. country. However, Carducci did leave the music business to pursue other things so it is understandable that he has written comparatively little about music since the second edition of Rock and The Pop Narcotic. However, his voice is an important one. With one book he has a legacy that is right up there with the best work of Lester Bangs.
Below is my Feature of the Week offering, an article about Joe Carducci's book Rock and the Pop Narcotic: Testament for the Electric Church. It is a long article. The reason for its length is that I wanted to include plenty of quotes from the book so that someone who has never read it could still participate in any discussion or debate that might develop. IMO, it is one of the best books of rock criticism ever published, right up there with Lester Bangs and Nick Tosches. Enjoy
Rock and the Pop Narcotic: Testament for the Electric Church by Joe Carducci.
“The thing of it is, of course, the key. To the kingdom. What made rock and roll itself was not the notes. Notes, like guns, are policy-neutral, though also like guns, not inert. They can be made to go off.”
Thus begins Joe Carducci’s 500 plus page manifesto, Rock and The Pop Narcotic: Testament for the Electric Church. It is arguably the most ambitious piece of rock criticism ever published; an attempt at an overarching aesthetic for rock music. The book is also one of the most controversial pieces of rock criticism. When it was published in 1991 the rock critic establishment first tried to ignore or dismiss it. But like a great underground band, word of mouth put the book in the hands of musicians, record geeks and other iconoclasts who spread the word. Begrudgingly, the rock press acknowledged the book’s ambition and scope as it furiously prepared rebuttals to his arguments like frightened prosecutors who have just realized their case is going to hell in a hurry. Twenty years and three editions later, the book is required reading for every writer who wants to tackle rock criticism. It belongs on the small pile of books next to the keyboard, alongside Lester Bangs and Nick Tosches.
An aesthetic is a theory of what elements make a work of art (book, film, painting, song, album) worth considering. It seeks to explain how a genre works and separate the important work from the trash. On a practical level, an aesthetic of rock music would help you understand why some of the albums you purchase or download end up in heavy rotation for years while others fall to the back of the pile after less than a dozen spins. Most fans or geeks have no need to explain this. We do not have to justify to anyone why Zen Arcade and Let it Be became the cornerstones of our vinyl collection while T.S.O.L.’s Change Today? was sold to the used record shop for three bucks before 1984 even came to a close. But anyone who writes about or reviews rock music ought to be able to explain to an editor, fan, fellow writer or musician whose latest effort has just been given a scathing review what criteria he uses when he declares Drive By Truckers the best band in America while writing off Kings of Leon as bogus poseurs. Better yet, that criteria or aesthetic ought to be apparent to anyone reading his work.
The stakes were much higher for Joe Carducci. He wasn’t the producer of a Xeroxed fanzine or even the editor of a highly circulated magazine like Spin. Carducci was the person Greg Ginn brought in to sign bands when he decided that SST was going to attempt to be a major independent instead of a small, local label that put out records by Black Flag and a handful of other southern California hardcore bands. Carducci was the one who signed The Meat Puppets, Husker Du, Saint Vitus, Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, Bad Brains, Screaming Trees, Dinosaur Jr. and a bunch of other bands who formed the bedrock of the 80’s underground rock scene. So successful was he at finding the appropriate bands for his label that by 1986 many indie rock fans would gladly part with eight dollars for an album by a band they had not yet heard just because they were on SST. SST was the first label any aspiring punk/underground band sent their demos to. And if you are wondering why Carducci never expressed any interest in your band, read this book.
The Bottom
“To evaluate rock as music the peripherals need to be set aside. The look of a band -- where they’re coming from -- is musically irrelevant…They say Tony Bennett could sing the telephone book and be great. I’m saying the Stooges could’ve played the Tony Bennett songbook and been great. The essence of quality in rock’s musical terms is to be found in the musical interaction of the players of a guitar, a bass and a drum kit.”
“Rock music is rock and roll made conscious of itself as a small band music, as opposed to being just a temporary grouping of session players for a tour or a gig or recording date…Typically in these two forms (C&W and R&B) touring bands do not record with the artist (i.e. the vocalist) whereas in rock music the band is the artist. Musicians who first learn how to play within a band learn an individual style formed by that particular band-voice. That musician may have a hard time jamming with outside musicians because of his idiosyncratic style. But this is how the band-as-artist opened up a new inexhaustible musical range.”
The foundation of Carducci’s aesthetic can be reduced to a handful of bullet points.
-- Rock made the transition from rock and roll when the artists began to consciously conceive of their work as a band collaboration instead of simply backing up a singer. (You can debate whether this first happened with The James Brown Orchestra, Dick Dale and the Dell Tones, Paul Revere and The Raiders or The Beatles.)
-- The essence of rock is found in the interplay between the rhythm guitar, drums and bass. Vocals and soloing -- while important -- are secondary. Rock is essentially riffs, rhythm and beat.
-- Melody in the riffs, vocal lines and instrumental soloing on top of the riffs, rhythm and beat are what makes a rock band’s music interesting and memorable. “Riffs mean nothing if they are just unresolved pummeling of the air; they must serve a greater melodic structure.”
-- The challenge for anyone developing a rock aesthetic is to differentiate rock from pop. Pop is largely an industry produced phenomenon; production, marketing, etc… “Rock need only refer to Tin Pan Alley’s melodic tradition.” Everything else is irrelevant to rock.
“A music that rocks can only be an active by-product of the playing of a band. Rock is not alchemy (adding black to white and getting gold), it is transubstantiation. It’s not the notes, it’s the jam between them. It is aggressive to the point of derailing from its rhythm and is unsafe at any speed. It is not identifiable by chart position, nor even by sound (say, fuzzed out guitars), volume or speed. Its special musical value is that it is a folk form which exhibits a small band instrumental language as in jazz, rather than mere accompaniment to a vocalist as in pop. Rock is the place where rhythm and melody battle it out most intensively and in doing so they create something more. Traditional pop and folk uses of melody generally attempt to evoke a fairly refined emotional/reflective mood or trance. In rock, melody is present and its whiff of mood still distinctive, however, here it is pushed along by an explicitly physical, even carnal rhythm arrangement. The whole of the music then can be said to be a more complete metaphor for the actual human condition; we are higher aspirations pushed along by carnal drives.”
The Ride
“Poor Bruce and his rabbi Jon Landau were left stammering about how the song was not patriotic and jingoistic and all those bad things, even while the mainstream American uberboss Ronald Reagan was able to refer to the song and the artist without intoning their real attitude. Ron had grabbed the flag back from the limp-symp thieves. If the “rock” press would respond to the release of a good record by a new band half as vigorously and quickly as they rushed into print with defenses of the little boss’s intent against the big boss’s scurrilous appropriation, the public record on music would be good enough that I could be doing what I quit the record business for instead of writing and re-writing this goddamn book.”
Carducci could have simply stated his aesthetic and gone directly to his critical history of rock music and had a perfectly good book. A competent editor could have toned a few things down and focused it a bit more. Dave Marsh might have even been convinced to contribute a blurb for a few hundred bucks. The book would likely have garnered decent reviews from the rock critic establishment before fading away into obscurity as most of those projects do. But no. Carducci, after a decade and a half in the record biz had more than a few axes to grind. He was as pissed off as any broke ass musician who spent the last decade busting his ass touring out of a van, sleeping on floors and recording some of the greatest rock music ever only to have it ignored. Carducci did more than list his grievances and express his anger. If the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, Carducci took names and chopped off about 100 heads. By the time the carnage was finished at around page 245 the true rock geeks were cranking their Black Sabbath and Black Flag albums to 11 while they danced on the graves of the Jann Wenners, Dave Marsh’s, Clive Davis’ and Clear Channel Communications of the world. (“We’re gonna have a t.v. party tonight!”) And keep in mind, when this book came out Nevermind was still a year and a half away.
The book is the rock criticism equivalent of Sherman’s march or the firebombing of Dresden. Few were spared. Some, like T.S.O.L. escaped with mere flesh wounds (“And the critics, when they paid any attention, were more likely to praise rock-like facades like T.S.O.L. than the real stuff. Scammers earned extra points from the press precisely because they were trying to sell out.”) Others like Dave Marsh, Jon Landau and Jann Wenner were stripped naked, water boarded, and put on trial for treason. Their crimes?
“It is not so easy to foist a complete, fraudulent simulation of truth on a people; other sources of information must be jammed, heretics must be liquidated, and what is offered as truth must be exceedingly carefully composed. The scribes at Pravda and Ivestia were some of the most skilled writers on earth because they were trying to lie systematically and comprehensively for the ages…Lucky for me rock critics aren’t their match or it would have taken years out of my life to write this chapter.”
The rock press as we know it began in the late 1960’s. It was the progeny of an unlikely coupling; the fawning fan magazines marketed to teenagers and the student and underground press with its left wing/countercultural leanings. As rock music “matured” in the post-summer of love environment the “rock critic” began to project his own political and cultural aesthetic onto the music. This aesthetic had very little to do with the music itself. However, in the years between 1967 and 1970 most of the bands getting airplay on the budding free form FM stations shared the same hippie utopian dreams as those conducting interviews, writing feature articles and record reviews so there was very little conflict.
Things began to change in the early 1970‘s. In Carducci’s view, this was when rock artists began to consider rock as a true musical language as opposed to a hybrid of pop, folk and early rock and roll forms set to a harder beat. When the younger brothers and sisters of the student radicals of the late sixties came of age bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Blue Oyster Cult and Rush provided the soundtrack to their adolescent bacchanal. They had no need to flee the heartland for cultural meccas like The East and West Village, Haight Ashbury, Ann Arbor an the Sunset Strip. The modern rock tour brought the party to arenas and theaters across America. Just gas up the GTO, score a case of Genesee Cream Ale, a half ounce of weed and drive out to the nearest hockey arena to catch a triple bill with UFO, Bad Company and Grand Funk Railroad. The rock critic establishment was horrified.
“The music by 1970 had come to take forms that revealed bands’ awareness of rock as a true musical language -- not merely what resulted when teenagers imitated their favorite pop stars. Many of the bands that made use of the language did little exciting with it. But the critics didn’t differentiate here; they exhibited conceptual short circuit when it came to this new rock music. In their estimation Black Sabbath, Robin Trower, and Stray Dog were worse than Brownsville Station, Bachman-Turner-Overdrive, and The Raspberries. Those critics weaned on the sixties cauldron of rocked-out folk and pop idioms opted for the music of self-conscious would-be redeemers of pop music once consciousness had dawned on rock music. The less demographically appealing rock trail (be it boogie, acid-rock, hard rock, heavy metal, prog rock) was abandoned by them except insofar as they attacked it. In fact they chose a new classicism over the newer unrecipeed development of conscious (though more than a little naïve) experimentation with rock music -- ie., the music’s future… The commercial success of many of the rock bands of the 1970’s achieved as it was with little or no radio airplay and little but the obligatory negative press, fueled heavy resentments on the part of the critics and the politicos throughout the fringes of the youth culture. They could not forgive the fact that rock had left the pop trail by which alone it seemed possible to politically engage mainstream American culture.”
On the surface it might seem that little was at stake in this rift between rockers and those who wrote about the music. After all, unlike theater critics whose reviews could make or break a Broadway musical, a 1971 Rolling Stone review panning the latest Black Sabbath album had absolutely no effect on record sales or concert attendance. However, these artists knew instinctively that when their music was ignored or ridiculed they were essentially being written out of rock history. Forty years after creating some of the most influential music of the 1970’s artists like Robin Trower, Blue Oyster Cult and Mountain are mere footnotes and a band like Rush, who have been playing sold out arenas for decades, are passed over year after year by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
In the meantime, rock critics focused less on the music, concerning itself with subject matter that was peripheral at best. Their aesthetic, based on sociological and political biases, alienated them from much of the rock music offered by rock bands. What music they did champion in this period (roughly 1970 to 1975) was usually the mid career offerings of artists who first arrived on the scene in the 1960’s, singer-songwriters such as James Taylor, Janis Ian and the like or British rock artists like David Bowie. Entire genres such as prog rock, hard rock, heavy metal and southern rock were given the short shrift.
“As radio -- both AM and FM -- tightened up into formats, the rock press was preoccupied with formulating its collective political line on a number of post-sixties developments. They thereby neglected to pick up the informational slack left by radio’s decline. Rock critics were worried about the apparent failure of the revolution, the resegregation of the pop audience into funk and rock, the end of the Beatles, hair loss, and the intransigence of the mainstream culture (Nixon landslide, the Vietnam war, J. Edgar Hoover, CIA, Cointelpro, etc…) in the face of claims by “rock” culture spokesmen of absolute victory in the domestic war for the hearts and minds of the young -- the future.”
“You’d like information on the music. You get star profiles, pop sociology, conspiracy theories, liberal posturing, middle class bashing, Western civilization trashing, feminist doggerel, third world romanticism, trend mongering, cause mining, image hawking, myth fabrication, idol worship… In a word: bullshit…”
By the late 1970’s the stakes were raised even higher. An underground rock scene, beginning on the west coast and spreading to cities across America, began to take root. This underground was ignored by commercial radio, shunned by the major labels and reviled by the critics. Bands had no choice but to form their own record labels and network with bands from other cities. This music was made known solely through word of mouth, low wattage college radio stations on the left side of the FM dial and self produced “fanzines” produced by the champions of this music. It was one of the most fertile eras in rock music. The majority of rock fans heard very little of it.
This is the point where Carducci becomes part of the story. In most cases, the absence of objectivity would be fatal. But this is what makes Rock and The Pop Narcotic so compelling. People’s careers, livelihoods and legacies were effected by the critical and commercial indifference and hostility of the music establishment. Indeed, an entire decade’s worth of rock music does not exist in the minds of most rock fans. It is Carducci’s and, by extension, every musician and fan’s opportunity to lash back at the idiotic critics and careerists whose bogus aesthetic denied careers to dozens of worthy bands. And for Carducci and Black Flag it was personal.
Most of us who came of age during the 1980’s have only vague recollections about the legal dispute between Black Flag and MCA. In my junior year of high school, after reading a series of alarmist articles in the mainstream rock press about the “violent” and “neo-fascist” west coast hardcore scene, I decided to check it out for myself and purchased Black Flag’s Damaged and Dead Kennedys Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. I may have occasionally wondered why, for the next three years, Black Flag issued no follow up to their seminal album but the sheer excitement of discovering a thriving underground music scene distracted me from the mundane details of the band‘s legal disputes. Carducci brings us all up to speed, presenting a story of borderline libel and collusion where a handful of record executives, rock critics and promoters conspired to deny one of America’s most important bands the ability to release records during their peak years. That he makes his case in strictly aesthetic terms is nothing short of amazing and one of the reasons why, twenty years later, people are still talking about this book.
In a nutshell, Black Flag’s Damaged album was to be distributed by MCA subsidiary Unicorn Records. However, after reading the same sort of alarmist articles that piqued my interest in the hardcore scene MCA executive Al Bergamo decided to investigate further, contacting Rolling Stone magazine who, according to Greg Ginn, “bad mouthed us real bad.” Bergamo then declared Damaged an anti-parent record and refused to distribute it. The resultant litigation prevented Black Flag from releasing any records for the next three years.
Black Flag and SST received little to no support from the rock press during this period. However, Carducci takes umbrage to the fact that a decade later, when NWA experienced similar difficulties Dave Marsh and the rest of the critical establishment rushed to their defense.
What made Marsh bite at the conspiracy possibilities of NWA’s difficulties, and pass on those proffered by the case of Black Flag, who after all had been the target of real police harassment? Let’s examine this carefully… Or rather, let’s not. Let’s just list the signs as we on the left must objectively read them, remembering that the yahoos of the American pop audience are racist and suckers for the right-wing come on:
-- NWA are black. Black Flag were white.
-- NWA are descended from oppressed sharecroppers and slaves. Black Flag were white.
-- NWA play with “dangerous” ideas which their color renders progressive. Black Flag played with “dangerous” ideas which their color rendered fascist.
-- NWA’s audience is largely black and blacks have historically required assistance from enlightened white/Jewish liberals. Black Flag’s audience was mostly white and if it hadn’t been so privileged and non-working class it wouldn’t have been laughing at us and following such an uncommercial (non-pop) muse in the first place.
Therefore, Marsh would reason, NWA despite the presence of certain outre paints on their palette are objectively one of the progressive forces in the society, if only because ours is such a racist, exploitative one. Also he’d reason Black Flag were, due to their petit bourgeois irresponsibility, objectively despite certain aesthetic achievement and the sharing of some class enemies, part of the reactionary social forces at work during The Reagan Age. Music and any question of aesthetics are only indirectly elements in Marsh’s reasoning insofar as they may determine the size of the artist’s audience. And so the non-pop aesthetic with its smaller audience is likely meaningless to the rock critic - as - social scientist and such bands passed over… Rock criticism’s imperatives are not musical. This is, in turn, my excuse for this section having so little to do with music. Rock critics rarely discuss music.”
The Solo
In the final section of Carducci’s applies his aesthetic to the history of rock music, from the 1950’s into the 1990’s. The retrospective of each decade begins with a series of two to three paragraph articles on the ten to twelve bands he considers most important followed by a dozen or more pages where he discusses the rest. He does not take into consideration a band or artist’s popularity or critical reception when evaluating their artistic contributions to rock. There are obscure bands like The United States of America and Magma who receive the major artist treatment as well as bands like ZZ Top who were traditionally ignored by rock critics and historians. At the same time, many artists championed by critics, historians and the masses are all but ignored. Carducci sticks to his applied aesthetic.
Below are the artists he considers most important to their respective decade.
1950’s:
Louis Jordan (The Tympany Five)
Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys
Muddy Waters
Bill Haley and His Comets
Bo Diddley
Elvis Presley
Chuck Berry
Little Richard
Jerry Lee Lewis
The Rock ’n Roll Trio
Eddie Cochran
Link Wray and the Wraymen
1960’s
Dick Dale and The Del-tones
James Brown
Paul Revere and the Raiders
The Beatles
The Yardbirds
Steppenwolf
The Who
The Cream
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
The Doors
United States of America
Jethro Tull
1970’s
Black Sabbath
Led Zeppelin
The Stooges
Mountain, West, Bruce and Laing
The Allman Brothers Band
King Crimson
Robin Trower
Free
Bad Company
Hawkwind
Magma
Mahavishnu Orchestra
ZZ Top
Rush
AC/DC
The Ramones
Pere Ubu
Motorhead
The Sex Pistols
The Fall
Avengers, Sleepers, Negative Trend, Toiling Midgets
The Screamers
The Spherical Objects
Black Flag
The Descendents
1980’s
James Blood Ulmer
Flipper
The Minutemen
Saccharine Trust
Minor Threat
Saint Vitus
The Butthole Surfers
The Tar Babies
No Means No
Gone
Universal Congress of
1990’s
Nirvana
Helmet
Kyuss
In addition to the longer write ups Carducci gives an exhaustive listing of bands from each decade. This section of the book is impressive and provides the reader with many opportunities to discover new bands. The best sections are the decades where Carducci was not an active participant in the music business. If the lack of objectivity made his section critiquing the critics stronger, its absence seems to narrow his perspective on eighties bands especially, showing a strong bias towards west coast hardcore bands, especially those who recorded for SST. One also wonders if the conflicts Husker Du and Sonic Youth had with SST are the reason why those two bands did not receive the "major artist" treatment while others like Flipper, Minor Threat and Saccharine Trust did. And leaving out important metal bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica and Slayer while including Saint Vitus (an SST band) is absurd.
Carducci did not update the third edition so there nothing written about musical developments since the mid-nineties. This is unfortunate because I find myself clamoring for his opinion on dozens of developments, everything from Napster to alt. country. However, Carducci did leave the music business to pursue other things so it is understandable that he has written comparatively little about music since the second edition of Rock and The Pop Narcotic. However, his voice is an important one. With one book he has a legacy that is right up there with the best work of Lester Bangs.