Charles Taylor

To fully understand the critical ridicule flung at “Showgirls” when it opened, you have to understand the expectations attached to it. The director Paul Verhoeven and the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas set out to make the first movie released by a major studio (United Artists) that deliberately sought an NC-17 rating. Because that meant the film’s marketing would be relatively limited, it was made on a modest budget ($40 million). U.A. was hoping that it would tap into a market that would show how movies could be profitable without a huge teen audience. Critics, too, were hoping for the same sort of commercial success, so that the 5-year-old NC-17 rating would attain the same acceptance that the old X rating had when studios released “Midnight Cowboy,” “A Clockwork Orange” and “Last Tango in Paris” with that classification. They had pinned all their hopes for commercial adult movies on “Showgirls” — and they reacted with fury when it seemed to aspire more toward exploitation than artful seriousness. The movie became a public joke, it did poorly at the box office, and the NC-17 rating was a commercial pariah and has remained so.

I first saw “Showgirls” a couple of weeks after it opened, in a sparse midweek evening crowd, and I was convinced I was watching a new camp classic. The movie had a brashness that made it more fun than many better movies, and a ferocious desire to entertain that bad movies seem to have lost. I admit that my love for “Showgirls” has to do with my love for melodrama, for displays of flesh, and above all for the disreputable, which can be a way of keeping in touch with the rude energy that’s at the heart of the appeal of movies.

But a weird thing happened when I showed it to friends after it was released on laserdisc. They were just as amused by it as I was, but their amusement was absent of any real affection for the movie. “Showgirls,” as everyone knew by then — whether they had seen it or not — was a bad movie, and thus everyone knew perfectly well how to take it.

I was no longer so sure. The film seemed less campy (and less sexy) each time I saw it. If true camp is unconscious (“seriousness that fails,” in Susan Sontag’s typically oblique and obvious formulation), then how could a movie as deliberate as “Showgirls” be camp? How could a director like Paul Verhoeven, who had consistently — and often crassly — gone for the outrageous in movie after movie, be unaware of what he was doing?

Verhoeven is not a director blessed with subtlety. When he’s entertaining, as he is in “The 4th Man” or “Basic Instinct,” it’s because he finds a way to make his calculated effrontery funny. At his worst, in “Total Recall” and “Starship Troopers” and “Hollow Man,” he operates like the sleaziest pimp, delivering the kinky, violent goods in a manner so bludgeoning that any intended irony erases itself. Verhoeven doesn’t have the sensibility to do what Hitchcock did, making moviegoers aware of their complicity in the shocks they have paid to see. The unremitting cartoon brutality of “Starship Troopers” may have been intended as satire, but the movie drips with contempt for the mass audiences that go to the movies looking for just this kind of brutal thrill; the only way to be in on the joke is to share in that contempt. And it’s just that superiority that seems to be celebrated in most of the admiring critical appraisals that have come Verhoeven’s way in the past few years. The no-hope dystopia of “RoboCop” has to be acclaimed as a dark view of the future instead of just a pulpy excuse to make a brutal but entertaining vigilante picture.

Verhoeven delivers the flesh in “Showgirls” as blatantly as he delivers the blood in other pictures. The movie is loaded with strip scenes, lap-dance scenes, topless audition scenes, lesbian scenes. And Joe Eszterhas’ dialogue is just as blatant. (“Molly,” says one showgirl to a harried costumer, “they’re gonna see a smilin’ snatch if you don’t fix this G-string”; the heroine’s former strip-club boss after she’s made the move to a big-time Vegas revue tells her, “Must be weird not having anybody come on you.”)

What’s missing in “Showgirls,” and what makes it Verhoeven’s best movie, is contempt for mass culture. For all of its deliberate outrageousness, all the points it scores off the tits-and-ass milieu, the movie isn’t judgmental about the tackiness of Las Vegas. In the Film Quarterly round table, Noel Burch tries to make the case that American critics dismissed “Showgirls” because it’s a ruthless indictment of America’s capitalist ideals. (If that’s so, then why, as Burch admits, didn’t the film find favor in France, where Verhoeven is taken much more seriously?) But no one in “Showgirls” is more ruthless than the heroine Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley), and we cheer for her at every turn, just as we do for Scarlett O’Hara at her most manipulative.

That point is a lapse in what is otherwise just about the sharpest piece in the Film Quarterly round table. Burch gets it exactly right when he says ” ‘Showgirls’ … takes mass culture seriously, as a site of both fascination and struggle. And it takes despised melodrama seriously too, as indeed an excellent vehicle for social criticism.” If I’m reading him right, Burch is saying that “Showgirls” throws critics because it refuses to hold itself as superior to its subject, to deny the fascination and attractiveness of the flashy, trashy world it shows us even as it acknowledges its ruthlessness.

In that sense, for a certain type of educated audience, the ones for whom Las Vegas and strip clubs and the desire for fame are indicative of nothing more than the shallowness of contemporary culture, “Showgirls” is camp precisely because it takes seriously something that they don’t. It isn’t hard to sense a class disdain in the sneering directed at “Showgirls.” “Despised melodrama,” as Burch so succinctly puts it, has traditionally been aimed at the mass audience. Dickens and Griffith raised it to an art form (and so did Verdi and Bizet), but melodrama is still judged to be incapable of the nuance and intelligence of “high” drama. There is, though, an overwhelming, unsubtle bigness in melodrama that provides a large, meaty satisfaction. My guess is that at the root of the high-cultural disdain for melodrama is a disapproval of emotion that can’t be tidily contained, a failure to understand how deliberate overstatement can be used to articulate a subject, and perhaps a belief that the art of the “lower orders” is beneath serious consideration.

“Showgirls,” as Noel points out, is a classic rise-and-fall-of-the-bad-girl melodrama. Nomi Malone hitchhikes into Vegas to find work as a showgirl. Starting off as a stripper, she manages to get into the chorus of a Vegas hotel revue called “Goddess” and proceeds to screw, cheat and literally push her way into the lead. Except that here, there’s more triumph than comeuppance in her fall. Nomi insists throughout the movie that she’s not a whore, that she’s operating on her terms. The struggling choreographer (Glenn Plummer) who’s attracted to Nomi tells her that working as a stripper is more honest than flashing her tits in a gaudy Vegas revue and pretending that she’s moved up in the world. The star of the show, Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon in one of the great bad-girl turns in movies), tells Nomi that everyone is a whore. At the end, when Nomi has done things she never thought she’d do in her pursuit of success, she stops kidding herself, adopts Cristal’s style and, in the movie’s last line, says that what she won in Vegas was “me.” The suggestion is that she has learned the truth about herself, and the final shot of the movie finds her on the road to Los Angeles, where, having learned the tricks of her trade, she can become a first-class whore.

What makes that finish so remarkable is that Verhoeven and Eszterhas abandon the moralism that is the price the movies have traditionally made us pay for enjoying women like Nomi. Cecil B. DeMille was the master of making audiences feel upright and moral by condemning the very things he used to titillate them, and more recently no one has worked that territory better than Adrien Lyne in movies like “Fatal Attraction,” “Indecent Proposal” and “Unfaithful.”

“Showgirls” simply refuses to put the breaks on its id, to deny or decry the material and fleshly desires of the characters, precisely because they are the very same desires that movies have always encouraged — even when pretending to disapprove of them. Movies have traditionally allowed us to enjoy the tough, salty girls in supporting roles, but it was the nice girl in the lead we were meant to root for. In Busby Berkeley’s “42nd Street,” the chorus hoofer played by Ruby Keeler gets her big chance when the star of the show breaks her leg. In “Showgirls,” Nomi gets her big chance when she pushes the star of the show down a flight of stairs.

Along with “42nd Street,” another one of the templates of “Showgirls” is “All About Eve,” except that here we experience the story through the eyes of the hungry little gold-digger out to pick off the aging star. But the “aging” star isn’t just the object of our pity. Gershon’s Cristal (she tells Nomi she named herself after the champagne) is every bit the schemer her younger rival is. Cristal, who calls everybody “darlin’” in a voice that drips with both honey and vinegar, can’t be the villain any more than Nomi is. The movie wants us to enjoy the deviousness of both these women without any moralistic wet blankets thrown on our fun.

In “Basic Instinct,” Verhoeven and Eszterhas tried to encourage our identification with the sort of character that movies usually condemn, getting us to cheer on Sharon Stone’s ice-pick killer. But the constant intrusion of Michael Douglas’ cop kept derailing that amusing perversity. He was the conventional cop hero we were supposed to root for, and next to Stone he was numbingly dull. There’s no conventional upright character here to get in Berkley’s way. Stone’s character was named Catherine Trammel. Nomi’s last name might be Untrammeled. The movie starts with her zooming down the road to Vegas and never downshifts into a lower gear.

“What happens here stays here,” says Las Vegas’ new tourist slogan, rejecting the family-friendly image it had tried to embrace. Verhoeven and Eszterhas are saying that what happens in Vegas is simply an exaggeration of what happens everywhere else. Selling it and buying it are, for them, the truth of mass culture in which we’re all happy hookers or johns. As movie messages go, that’s a bit of barroom braggadocio no different from that of the gambler who tries to pick up Nomi in the opening scenes and tells her, “Everyone sells it sooner or later.” The difference is, in “Showgirls,” that nugget isn’t held out as bitter truth but as the source of a satirical celebration of the way mass culture works.

The unapologetic lust for fame and money and the unimpeded pursuit of them are the keys to the movie’s attitude and to its style. At times, “Showgirls” seems hell-bent on doing justice to the swank that every disreputable character in movie history would have chosen if they could have lived out their most excessive fantasies. (What flights of gaucherie would Barbara Stanwyck have indulged in if she’d gotten away with it in “Double Indemnity”?) Nomi may wear a dress by — as she calls it — “Ver-sace” (rhymes with “face”), but in “Showgirls” Versace seems to have been body-snatched by Frederick’s of Hollywood. When Cristal takes Nomi to lunch, she’s dressed like a rodeo hooker in skintight lamé pants and matching midriff wrap top with accompanying cowboy hat. The predominant style of Ellen Mirojnick’s witty costume design is a trashy marriage of dance wear and lingerie. The movie takes the maxim “Dress for success” as seriously as any junior executive does. It’s just that the girls here are dressing for far less respectable — and far more spectacular — success.

It’s all part of film’s wholly artificial world. The hotel’s entertainment manager (slyly played by Kyle MacLachlan) lives in a mansion with four neon palm trees lining the swimming pool. At one point, Verhoeven includes a shot of Nomi sitting on a bench with a replica of the Sphinx and the pyramids in the background.

That’s why the complaints about the movie’s vulgarity and tastelessness missed the point. How could a movie about Vegas be otherwise? You can’t make a tasteful movie about vulgarity. And unless you exaggerate a world that’s already so exaggerated, it becomes just a gaudy, colorful backdrop. For the fantasy of Vegas, you’ve got to look at something like Stephen Soderbergh’s remake of “Ocean’s Eleven” (a movie I enjoyed). In that picture, Vegas is a playground with all the exploitation and crassness swept under the casino’s wall-to-wall carpets. The dirt is right upfront in “Showgirls,” and the joke of the movie is that it doesn’t diminish Nomi’s hunger or ours.

Vegas’ unreality (the heart of its appeal) is nowhere more evident than in the production numbers we see from “Goddess,” the show that Nomi schemes her way into. These are among the movie’s high points and were widely criticized as though Verhoeven had no idea they were ridiculous. What’s interesting about them is that they’re perfectly calibrated to appeal to the all-American desire to feel, while you’re on vacation, that you’ve stepped into a movie. Cristal emerges from an erupting papier-mâché volcano in a number that’s like the old Italian sword-and-sandal epics reimagined as a choreographed love-in. She mimes getting gang-banged in a biker number that’s like a disco version of one of the ’60s AIP biker movies. The numbers are just naughty enough to make the tourists in the audience feel that they’ve seen something daring but not pornographic. And all the money on display tells you this parade of flesh is designed to strike the audience as “classy” in a way that a night spent watching Nomi at the strip club would never be. The sleek, hard bodies of the dancers and strippers have exactly the same allure as the hard sheen of car chrome seen under an oasis of neon. (The cinematographer, Jost Vacano, shoots the entire movie to look like one yummy temptation after another.) The nudity and sex, the stripteases and lap dances here are all about aggression, the expression of characters primed to gain the next foothold on the ladder. Berkley dances with the sort of choppy, abrupt movements you’d never see in a real strip club. Nomi’s body is her fortune and she’s too impatient to resort to the soft sell. No, it isn’t erotic, but sex here isn’t the motivator, just the product.

“Hunger” is the word that most accurately describes Berkley’s fearless and untutored performance. In the early scene where she meets Molly (the immensely appealing Gina Ravera), Berkley stabs a straw into a giant soda cup, shakes a bottle of ketchup like a rabbit caught in a hunting dog’s jaws, and mashes the ketchup into a plate of French fries. In the course of the movie, she takes ravenous bites out of oversize burgers and attacks a bag of potato chips. She’s all appetite and movement, as if she were challenging Verhoeven to keep up with her. Berkley had her admirers, among them the great French filmmaker Jacques Rivette, who declared, “That woman is amazing” (he also called “Showgirls” one of the strongest American movies in years), but she bore the brunt of the jeering. One of the ironies of the critical reaction to “Showgirls” is that critics saw no contradiction in charging the film with reducing women to bodies for the audience’s delectation while treating Berkley as if she were a brainless bimbo. “Her breasts may be more expressive than her face,” wrote Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, echoing the kind of character assassination we’d expect from John Simon. But Lane, who has done more than anyone else to reduce criticism to the level of cocktail party chat and resurrect the notion of the clever, uncommitted “gentleman” critic, was not called to account for the sexism of that remark. (There is no more telling example of how much the idea of criticism and the idea of art has become devalued than the way otherwise intelligent people have been suckered into praising Anthony Lane.) Lane again: “[Berkley] can’t act, but the sight of her trying to act, doing the sorts of things that acting is rumored to consist of, struck me as a far nobler struggle than the boring old I-know-I-can-make-it endeavors of her fictional character.” That he also declared, “There is not a whisper of satire in this movie” should give you an idea of just how seriously to take him.

It’s easy to imagine that, given a starring role in a major studio movie after playing on the teen TV comedy “Saved by the Bell,” Berkley felt something like Nomi’s desire to prove herself. She works so well in the movie because she hasn’t learned the more experienced actor’s trick of self-protection. Her performance doesn’t have the conscious irony of Gershon’s or MacLachlan’s, but that would be wrong for Nomi who, if such a thing is possible, is a wised-up naif. What the role needed was (no joke intended) naked ambition, and that Berkley has in spades. For the likes of Lane it may not be what “acting is rumored to consist of,” but premeditated career moves should not be what acting consists of either. Asked by Charlie Rose recently if she had feared she was taking a chance with “Monster,” Charlize Theron bluntly and admirably answered that taking chances was an actor’s job. Berkley’s performance shows some of the fearlessness that acting is supposed to be about.

In Film Quarterly, Chon Noriega ends his contribution to the round table by saying of Berkley, “In ‘Showgirls,’ her blood is everywhere.” Noriega is referring to the way Berkley’s career crashed and burned following the movie. If Hollywood did its part to chew her up and spit her out, critics did as well. Some have survived this treatment. Jessica Lange’s wonderful parody of a breathy starlet in “King Kong” was reviewed as if she were really just the dumb blonde she played. Lang has had the last laugh. Berkley has not. She turned up as an in-joke in the truly vicious comedy “The First Wives Club” as a target for that picture’s bitchy tirade against young women. And she was added to the ranks of young actresses who have to pretend to find something irresistible about Woody Allen in his “Curse of the Jade Scorpion,” where she looked just right in the ’40s setting. On the brighter side, she opens on Broadway Thursday in a revival of “Sly Fox,” Larry Gelbart’s hilarious updating of Ben Jonson’s “Volpone.” She deserves far better than she has gotten.

And Verhoeven and Eszterhas deserve to have “Showgirls” regarded as more than an embarrassment. The most American of Verhoeven’s American movies, “Showgirls” is, like the city it’s set in, a deliberately artificial ravishing of pop culture. It’s a backstage musical, a rags-to-riches show biz exposé, a sex melodrama, and one of the great celebrations of that great movie icon, the bad bad girl. The only thing missing — thank goodness — is any desire to be reputable or moralistic or uplifting. With “Showgirls” Verhoeven and Eszterhas tapped right into the trash energy that powers American popular culture and understood how much that culture powers our fantasies of success. You get the sense they’d be appalled if they weren’t having such a great time. When Nomi comes to the realization that, as Cristal told her, we’re all whores, she’s not condemned. She’s welcomed into the fold. Near the end of “Die Hard,” Bonnie Bedelia tries to shame Alan Rickman by calling him a common thief. “I’m an exceptional thief,” he answers with a streak of pride. In “Showgirls” Verhoeven and Eszterhas are exceptional whores.

Both “Raylan” and “Justified” are contemporary westerns, moving the conventions of horse opera to present-day Kentucky. Oxycontin (“hillbilly heroin,” as it’s called in one episode) has supplemented moonshine, but much else is still the same. Raylan is the upright, no-nonsense lawman, and the villains he faces (many of them) are the type of inbred bad news who caused problems for decent, law-abiding folks in pictures like “My Darling Clementine,” “Man of the West,” and “Ride the High Country.” Raylan, like every great western hero, is burdened by his own reputation, which in his case stems from the time he gave a Miami drug kingpin 24 hours to get out of town (and blew the bastard away when he didn’t). That gets Raylan reassigned to the hometown he wanted to escape, back in the same territory with his scheming con man daddy, his ex-wife, and his high school crush, who’s just taken permanent revenge on her abusive husband.

Leonard’s novels have inspired some fine adaptations, both in movies (“Out of Sight,” “Jackie Brown,” the relatively unseen “Killshot”) and on TV (the late, lamented “Karen Cisco”). “Justified” may be the best anyone has done at capturing the novelist’s mordant, flippant tone. The various brands of mayhem that have turned up on the show are greeted by victims and lawmen alike with a “Well, whadd’re you gonna do?” shrug. As Raylan, Olyphant is what you might have seen if the young Gary Cooper had been a put-on artist. The marshal is a hot pistol who’s had to learn to play it cool. His 10-gallon hat might be the cork that keeps his inner volcano from blowing. Much of the time Olyphant, who moves through each episode in lean, clean strides, seems to be privately amused by the corruption of the fools who mess with him.

As a novel, “Raylan” is a casual endeavor, Leonard having fun with a character who’s gained a measure of popularity. It’s also a pisser. Leonard has come up with some doozies for the plot: the dimwit sons of a backwoods pot grower joining in a scheme to swipe kidneys and then ransom them back for replacement in the victims’ bodies; a female coal company exec who, annoyed with a local’s complaints about the pollution caused by strip mining, picks up a rifle and shoots the old man. The violence here has the swift kick of a good, mean joke. It makes you wince and grin at the same time.

Raylan’s a straight arrow, but he’s not a stick-in-the-mud. He’s not too upright to consider a dalliance with the transplant nurse who’s masterminding the kidney-swiping scheme or that coal company exec, who hires him as her bodyguard. (His common sense wins out — by a hair — over his libido.) The compressed form of the stories is perfect for a writer who long ago learned to pare away every extraneous word.

There’s another reason Leonard’s creation and the TV show it spawned have clicked. A hero who sees the irony in being the tall, true man of the law — and is anyway — may be the only kind of traditional hero we can believe in now. In recent years, “cowboy” has come to be an epithet denoting ill-advised American military adventuring. But what’s denigrated as cowboy behavior is almost always more appropriate to the recklessness of the outlaw that the westerner faces. Raylan keeps his own counsel, considers the consequences before he acts, tells those who oppose him what the consequences are, uses violence when it’s called for but never revels in it and would just as soon avoid it. Among the other pleasures Leonard and his Kentucky lawman provide, they’ve restored the cowboy’s good name.

Further reports on the story are sure to observe that the entire episode might have been plucked from the movies. This is incorrect. Plucked from films, yes. The story is half-ready for the art house. Strip the tale of glamour, remove any potential for excitement and you’ve not only got a greenlight, but guaranteed analysis in Cineaste, and a panel accompanying the New York opening consisting of Naomi Klein, a New York University expert on the Middle East, and any film critic dextrous enough to use “hegemony” in a sentence.

But the movies? Forget it. Hollywood is too besotted with sequels, reboots, animation to stick a toe into the real world. And the supposed change from this routine that the holiday season offers consists usually of adaptations of the kind of novels (usually Booker winners) that are purchased instead of read, or a Nancy Myers comedy in which a 50-ish divorcee (Meryl/Goldie/Diane) who has founded her own successful wrapping-paper company has to decide if her heart lies with her younger lesbian business partner (Debra Messing) or with a rakish older European diplomat (Bernard-Henri Levy).

Opportunities for film viewing in Kabul are understandably sparse. Salon’s sources in the city report that there are only two screens in operation at the city’s sixplex and they are currently offering “Speed Racer” and “Lambada: The Forbidden Dance.” Clearly, it’s time for America to intervene. Despite our massive expenditures in the country, our officials can surely afford a selection of DVDs designed to train Afghan officials on not falling for an impostor.

We suggest:

“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” (1967) — We direct Afghan leaders to the suspicion shown by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in the early part of the film toward the doctor their daughter brings home as her fiancé. The audience may consider their fears unreasonable because the doctor is, after all, Sidney Poitier and the young woman could as easily have brought home Eldridge Cleaver or Sonny Liston. But had the Afghans treated the impostor’s moderate proposals with even a smidge of the skepticism Spence and Kate show toward even such a paragon as Poitier, surely this embarrassing situation might have been avoided.

“Brokeback Mountain” (2005) — Was this individual really in close contact with the Taliban? If he had, he surely would have shown some inclination to the rugged, and all too often lonely, life that solitary figures like insurgents or closeted gay cowboys lead. Simply the mention of certain items — Ralph Lauren flannel shirts; beef jerky; a pet mule named Faiza — would have elicited a certain gleam in the eye of the real McCoy.

“Footloose” (1984) — Certainly only as dedicated a zealot as an actual Taliban leader could resist the combined lure of Kevin Bacon’s dancing and Kenny Loggins’ music. Slip the movie on during a break in negotations. Does this alleged mullah tap his feet, or nod his head sternly during John Lithgow’s fire-and-brimstone sermons? For the sake of the money you’ve just shelled out, pray it’s the latter.

“The Passion of the Christ” (2004) Four words: It’s the Jews’ fault. Sure to warm the heart of any true jihadist.

“Sex and the City 2″ (2010): Watch your man as he watches Carrie and the girls live it up in Abu Dhabi. Does he chuckle at their antics or make proclamations about profanations of the infidel harlots? (Note: The film can also be useful for other methods of recognition. See: “Brokeback Mountain.”)

Charles Taylor is a writer in New York.

You could argue that Haynes, being black himself, had a built-in kinship to the black sons and daughters of Lowndes County. But seen from the midst of our current national division, one that’s less dramatic though perhaps just as poisonous as the divisions of the ’60s, it’s hard not to read Haynes’ faith that he could reach his students — not to overwhelm them or argue them down but, in Branch’s exquisitely chosen word, “to harmonize” — as a belief in the transformative power of discourse, a belief that America, both right and left, has largely abandoned.

And if that faith is abandoned, Branch would likely argue, then Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision is a dream that has no hope of being realized.

Every year, Dr. King’s birthday brings editorials extolling how far we’ve come from the days of legal segregation (true) or lamenting how far we’ve fallen short of his example (also true). Writers complain that a day devoted to nothing more than shopping is no way to honor his legacy. The far more insidious debasement of King’s legacy can be seen every day in what passes for political engagement in America right now. In 2003, in the left political journal Dissent, Queens College history professor Michael Wreszin inadvertently exemplified that debasement when, responding to co-editor Michael Walzer’s assertion that the left needs to enter a dialogue with the people most set against it, he asked if King should have been expected “to communicate with the average white citizen in racist Mississippi and Cicero, Illinois.” And, of course, the answer is yes. King knew that if he didn’t communicate with those people, there was no hope of eroding racism. That doesn’t mean that he took a gentle line with them, or hesitated to name ignorance and brutality when he encountered it. But King’s approach depended on reaching reasonable people, people who may not have been ready to welcome black people into their homes but who, ashamed by the more repellent racism around them, were finally able to see the legal and moral arguments for admitting blacks to lunch counters and public facilities and, the toughest stretch of all, to their schools and neighborhoods.

That’s a rapprochement Wreszin can’t imagine. He writes from the blinkered depths of a culture war where the most notorious phrase of a despised president, “You’re either with us or you’re against us,” fits the mind-set of both his fiercest adherents and his most vociferous opponents. Just as politics is not possible if you’re not willing to say what people don’t want to hear, it’s not possible if you’re willing to listen only to what you want to hear.

In “At Canaan’s Edge,” which deals with 1965-68 — the years spanning the Selma to Montgomery march to King’s assassination in Memphis — Branch sticks to the facts, following the story (not just of King but of “America in the King Years”) into Vietnam, tracking J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign against King, charting the divide between the civil rights movement and the emerging black power movement, and almost never interpreting. There is a vision that comes through, though, a vision that is an implicit rebuke to the divisiveness of what currently passes for politics.

For Branch, nonviolence represents the highest form of political engagement because it must be employed at the moments when it’s most tempting to abandon the idea that engagement is even possible. Branch wants to demonstrate the political viability of nonviolence as both moral stance and practical strategy — even though he calls nonviolence “an orphan among democratic ideas” that “has nearly vanished from public discourse even though the most basic element of free government — the vote — has no other meaning.” What’s been orphaned, in Branch’s view, is an expansive vision of what it means to be a citizen.

“America’s founders centered political responsibility in the citizens themselves, but, nearly two centuries later, no one expected a largely invisible and dependent racial minority to ignite protests of steadfast courage — boycotts, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, jail marches — dramatized by stunning forbearance and equilibrium into the jaws of hatred.” In other words, Branch is saying, people who were not even allowed the rights granted them by the Constitution acted, not simply for their own freedom, but as if the very fate of the republic depended on their actions. In order to do that, they had to have faith that the potential and the possibility of America far surpassed the worst of its governance and its people.

Branch does not need to underline the irony that some in the civil rights movement, like J.T. Haynes, were World War II vets, and returned from combat only to face a homegrown fascism. Haynes was in the congregation of Mt. Carmel Baptist Church in Lowndes County on the night of Feb. 28, 1965, when Klansmen surrounded the church with rifles. (The congregation was able to leave when the Klansmen inexplicably withdrew.) Incidents like this, and the earlier murder of a 26-year-old pulpwood worker named Jimmie Lee Jackson, shot twice in the stomach by police during a night march from Zion’s Chapel Methodist Church, galvanized the response to Rev. James Bevel’s proposal for a 54-mile march from Selma to the Alabama state capital in Montgomery. The march would take participants right through the heart of Lowndes County. The violence began before the marchers even made it out of Selma.

The first attempt at a march, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, resulted in the notorious scenes of Gov. George Wallace’s Alabama state troopers and reserves on horseback ramming through marchers as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. ABC showed footage of the carnage that night, interrupting its broadcast of “Judgment at Nuremberg.” (At the point ABC cut into the film, a German couple was explaining they knew nothing about the treatment of Jews under Hitler.) A second attempt was made during which King turned back so as not to defy a court order barring the march. Hours later, the Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister who had come from Boston to join the march, was clubbed outside a cafe and later died of his injuries. The third — and finally successful — march was begun on March 21. The marchers, their ranks victoriously swollen, reached Montgomery on March 24. That night, Viola Liuzzo, a white marcher from Detroit, was shot to death as she began the long drive home to Michigan. (It was later revealed that one of the passengers in the shooter’s car, Gary Thomas Rowe, was an FBI informant who almost certainly had knowledge of what was going to happen.)

The Selma to Montgomery march takes up almost the first 200 pages of “At Canaan’s Edge.” It needs to, because it was the last great march of the civil rights movement. It was also the moment when the coalition formed between church groups like King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and student groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and others like the Congress of Racial Equality, began to fray. The deaths of Jackson, Reeb and Liuzzo, the 1964 murders of the Freedom Summer volunteers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner, and the constant threats and danger civil rights workers faced in the rural South were starting to grind down the commitment to nonviolent change. To people who had seen their co-workers beaten or had themselves suffered in jails, King’s unwavering insistence on nonviolence came to seem almost suicidal.

Branch understands the almost inhuman effort required of people not to react violently when they live in constant fear for their lives. Reading “At Canaan’s Edge,” you understand exactly why Stokely Carmichael, arrested 27 times during his work with SNCC, finally came to the point where he yelled at a crowd of demonstrators about to be tear-gassed by state troopers, “You tell them white folks in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead!” You see why Carmichael and movement figures like SNCC’s James Forman came to conclude that nonviolence would not help American blacks. More profoundly, you understand just how foolhardy a conclusion that was.

What is frequently branded radical politics in America is often just romantic fantasy, a childish impatience with anything that produces less than immediate results, mistakenly equating the compromises that politics entails with corruption. One of King’s favorite quotations, often used in his speeches, was the abolitionist Theodore Parker’s “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” That was not a means of mollifying people who had given and suffered so much — it was a way of honoring that suffering and sacrifice. It would be wrong to discount the sacrifices that the members of SNCC made. It’s not exaggerating to say that attempting to register black voters in the South at that time was an invitation to being murdered. But as SNCC became increasingly radicalized, it, along with the Black Power movement and the Black Panthers — who, with their uniform of leather and sunglasses and proudly displayed weapons, had made themselves the stars of the vigilante movie playing in their heads — came to be certain that working toward equality through the mechanisms of representative democracy was the same thing as making yourself a whipping boy for the Man.

One of the few places in the book where Branch betrays his own impatience is when he writes of SNCC, “They were no longer students or nonviolent. They no longer coordinated sacrifice beyond the wisdom and courage of the nation’s elders, nor operated by egalitarian grassroots committee. Instead, they competed for celebrity attention while reverting to youthful disputes as tawdry as snipes at their clothes.” Having given them the respect they are due, Branch is, I think, saying that finally they did not have the moral courage to live up to the meaning of their sacrifice, and that their rhetoric was less articulate than the unspoken faith shown by others who were confident that the courage they had shown and the violence they had endured would pay off in profound change. Those people understood, as a friend of mine put it, no real revolutionary ever hated his own country.

Lost in the fantasy that the system was so rotten it could not be changed, SNCC ceded the moral high ground to, among others, the president it despised, Lyndon Johnson. In Johnson’s March 1965 address to Congress on the moral necessity of passing the Voting Rights Act — along with Lincoln’s second inaugural address, it remains the greatest of all presidential oratory — Johnson showed both verbal and moral eloquence: “It is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Mayor Joseph Smitherman of Selma said that hearing a white Southern president say those words was like “a dagger in your heart.” James Forman’s response: “That cracker was just talkin’ shit.”

One of the things Branch brings back so vividly is how unfashionable Martin Luther King became in the last years of his life. I choose the adjective deliberately. There were plenty of people willing to groove on the same fantasies of rebellion. Branch records a debate in New York City where Hannah Arendt, who was shortly after to formulate her own response to the revolutionary perfume in the air in “On Violence,” argued that “violence always arises out of impotence.” From the floor Arendt was challenged by Tom Hayden, who claimed democratic means had been exhausted for ending the war in Vietnam and racism at home (especially when you give up on the democratic process), and Susan Sontag, who said that arguments about the nature of violence dodged the question of action, “whether we in this room, and the people we know, are going to be engaged in violence.”

By 1966, Andrew Kopkind, writing in the New York Review of Books, said haughtily of King, “Whites have ceased to believe him, or really to care; the blacks hardly listen.” Shortly after, in the same pages, Kopkind was extolling as the true movement the National Conference for New Politics, at which H. Rap Brown had said, “We should take lessons in violence from the honkies. Lee Harvey Oswald is white. This honky [Richard Speck] who killed the eight nurses is white.”

It’s easy to dismiss Kopkind’s effusions and Hayden’s posturing and Brown’s psychotic babble as the nuttiness that’s in the air at any given time, and that eventually fades out of vogue. But the moment-to-moment style of Branch’s prose suggests the harm that fuzzy thinking can do in its own time, draining energy and thought from the hard work of forging change, and offering escapist fantasy from the sometimes untenable choices of real politics.

Which is not to say that nonviolence doesn’t present its own set of moral problems. When Arendt finally published “On Violence” in 1969 she acknowledged that nonviolent resistance can only be employed against a democratic country. Against a totalitarian country that used violence to force compliance, nonviolence is doomed. “Those who oppose violence with mere power,” she wrote, “will soon find that they are confronted not by men but my men’s artifacts, whose inhumanity and destructive effectiveness increase in proportion to the distance separating the opponents.” And strict adherence to nonviolence can produce its own inhumanity. In his essay “Reflections on Gandhi,” George Orwell noted that Gandhi said the correct pacifist response to the Nazi persecution of Jews was that the Jews should commit mass suicide and thus rouse the world to action.

But Arendt’s arguments provide a hardheaded reply to the charge that King’s nonviolence was merely fuzzy Christian humanism unsuited to the reality of his time. “Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together rather than from any action that may then follow,” she wrote. “Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What can never grow out of it is power.”

And that, in large part, is why King’s ideas truly deserve to be called radical when the fantasies of those who claimed he was out of touch remain such dangerous nonsense. When praising those who’ve been deemed moral leaders, people tend to overlook their pragmatism as if such common-sense concerns somehow invalidated their aura of saintliness. For King, nonviolence was clearly and primarily a moral principle. But it was also a practical one. He knew that many people who had not been convinced of the need for racial equality would be, understandably, turned off by violence. Which means that, for King, nonviolence was an act of faith that people were capable of change, and that the mechanisms of representative democracy were capable of enshrining those changing attitudes into the law of the land.

With this final volume, “America in the King Years” becomes unsurpassed in the last 50 years of American biography. Which is not to say that Branch has written a perfect book. His syntax is at times unnecessarily twisted, and he can be careless about identifying the figures in the story. The last section of this epic tale is fragmented in the telling, but that is perhaps unavoidable; the story itself is fragmented and thus, not as emotionally satisfying as the stories of the civil rights movement’s earlier triumphs. As King moved his campaign into the Northern ghettos (notably, Chicago), he found problems not given to such clear-cut moral victories. And as he began to speak out against the war in Vietnam, the moral thrust of the civil rights movement began to seem blunted — though with a disproportionate number of blacks fighting the war, and with funding for the war undermining the funding for LBJ’s Great Society programs, protesting Vietnam was a logical step. (Branch is merciless in detailing how the establishment press, particularly the New York Times, said King had no standing to speak on Vietnam. Those Op-Eds were the polite Eastern version of telling King to step to the back of the bus.)

But these are minor reservations about a book that gradually reveals a large-scale vision of democracy as an act of hope thrown down like a gauntlet. If one of the marks of greatness is that a person’s stature continues to grow after he is gone, then King is one of the titans of American history. Next to his example, what passes today for a politics of opposition seems puny, snobbish, a closed circle rather than one ready to expand to allow those willing to enter. It’s heartening to pick up the paper and read of the Georgetown students who protested Attorney General Gonzales’ speech justifying Bush’s domestic spying. A dozen of them simply stood and turned their back to Gonzales while others unfurled a banner that quoted Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.” As an act of protest it was simple, elegant and to the point, devoid of the grandstanding, the sheer thoughtlessness, that marks so much political speech.

What no one seems willing to say about the red state-blue state divide is that people on both sides like it because it allows them the dual pleasures of feeling superior and having someone to hate. I don’t doubt that the Bush White House would love to stifle dissent. But there is something skin-deep about arguing for dissent in an atmosphere where the dissenters have adopted the same simplistic moral scheme of those in power. We have become so scared of appearing to be on the incorrect side of an issue, so scared of seeming to give credence to the other side, that we are willing to eliminate inconvenient facts from our rhetoric, ignore ugly echoes. (It’s depressing to hear “sovereignty” cited as a reason against going into Iraq — a war I oppose. It’s the same argument used by segregationists of the ’50s and ’60s as a way of resisting integration. Arguing for the sovereignty of a tyranny is simply a means of legitimizing the oppression of its people.)

Against the current certainty on the right and the left that the other side is beneath contempt, not worth talking to — an attitude that leaves no possibility for real change and reduces democracy to majority tyranny, no matter who is in power — we have King’s belief in the ability of people and their country to overcome the worst in themselves. In his vision empathy is not appeasement but the beginning of change. In his introduction, Branch quotes the last words of Mickey Schwerner, spoken to the Klansmen who held a gun to his head: “Sir, I know just how you feel.” That’s the challenge this story throws down to us. How can any less be expected of those of us who don’t have a gun to our heads?

I stopped listening to contemporary country music a few years back. I was tired of the anonymity of the songwriting, of arrangements that sounded like some postmodern representation of country instead of music itself. And the music that sprang up in opposition, alt-country, was usually about as much fun as sitting bare-ass naked on a splintery bench. The alt-country artists sounded as if any expression of pleasure was a sellout. If mainstream country had become the equivalent of a shiny new SUV, alt-country was a dirty window with dead flies littering the sill. A choice between that shopping-mall dominatrix Shania Twain or Lucinda Williams’ wallflower moping was no choice at all.

What does it say that two of the biggest icons in country, Dolly Parton and George Jones, and country’s biggest contemporary female star, Martina McBride, have all turned their backs on contemporary country on their new records? Parton’s “Those Were the Days” is a selection of folk-rock covers from the ’60s and ’70s; George Jones’ “Hits I Missed … And One I Didn’t” consists of songs he turned down that became hits for other artists. The Parton and Jones albums aren’t played on country radio, but for Martina McBride to release “Timeless,” consisting entirely of classic country hits, is, whether she intends it to be or not, a gauntlet thrown at the facelessness of contemporary country. (That “Timeless” entered the country charts at No. 1 — and that Lee Ann Womack’s “There’s More Where That Came From,” which, from the cover art to the sound of the music, harked back to ’70s country, was one of last year’s biggest country albums — suggests that some country fans may be willing to throw down the gauntlet as well.)

Ever since her debut in 1992, Martina McBride has been a perpetual ray of hope in country music. She’s never equaled her first big hit, “Independence Day” — the witness of a true believer delivered as a scorched-earth sermon — which, after Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” is the greatest single of the ’90s. Her choice of material, her arrangements and production, have been as slick as anything mainstream country has to offer. And some of the songs, most notably those on 1997′s “Evolution,” had a treacly self-actualization subtext (the faux feminism country music adopted as a reaction to what has been so dimwittedly read as the submissiveness of Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man”).

Why, then, do I still listen to everything McBride does as soon as she does it? Because she has never once sounded defined by the commercial slickness of her material or musicians, has never seemed to be phoning it in, has never not sounded like a real person. Martina McBride possesses one of the truest voices I know, and while I have often wished for her to travel rougher territory, I have never doubted her sincerity or integrity.

Now, when you say someone has a voice, you have to be clear what you mean. The same can be said of every Trivial-Pursuit-answer-in-waiting on “American Idol.” What separates McBride from them and from most of her country and pop contemporaries is that she’s a singer. McBride shuns vocal gymnastics; she never sings four syllables where one will do. Her voice never goes shrill; the bigger it gets, the freer it becomes. Rare among contemporary singers, McBride is emotionally unfettered and yet also has an innate sense of what to hold back, how to suggest.

McBride opens “Timeless” with Hank Williams’ “You Win Again” as if it were a statement of ethics. The utter simplicity of the song, her faith in it and her refusal to embellish become a way of returning not just herself but the entire genre of country back to priorities.

At a generous 18 tracks, “Timeless” is the most satisfying album McBride has made, largely because she’s got great material, and also because of the way the material is presented. Acting as her own producer, McBride and her manager-husband, John (who recorded and mixed “Timeless”), have used mostly analog equipment (no guitars or amps newer than 1965, for example) to give the album a fat, warm sound, the sound you’d hear when most of these songs first hit the radio.

There are covers here of songs by Ray Price, Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, Ernest Tubb and others. All are good. Two of the songs, Buddy Holly’s string-laden ballad “True Love Ways” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” the Don Gibson song that was a smash for Ray Charles, virtually copy the arrangements of the song’s best-known versions. (“I Can’t Stop Loving You” even has the white-sounding backup singers Ray used.) That’s worth noting because there’s nothing that sounds like mimicry in McBride’s vocals. For a white country singer to cover “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” a song that a black R&B master took from another white country singer, and still make her version true, suggests both chutzpah and confidence, the kind of confidence that doesn’t need to boast.

If I had to choose a song to sum up the special poignance country music is capable of, it might well be “Satin Sheets,” Jeanne Pruett’s 1973 song, which she herself promoted all the way to No. 1 after her record company told her it was “too country,” and which McBride tackles on “Timeless.” Pruett discovered it on an unsolicited tape sent to her by its composer, a Minneapolis factory worker named John Volinkaty. It’s a song about someone who’s found a life of unimagined luxury but who still pines for the true love who will give her what money can’t buy. That’s a classic setup for a country weeper, but the authenticity of the song can be summed up by one line — “tailor-mades upon my back.” That’s an example of specificity as instinctive genius. No one used to fine clothing would ever speak of it in that way, and the language reveals, as does the unalloyed carnal longing in McBride’s vocal, country’s simultaneous wish for material comfort and the distrust of it. The satin sheets and tailor-mades are distractions; emotion is the only real thing.

That’s as good a metaphor for what’s true in McBride’s music as anything could be. But the languid soaring she does on the song that closes “Timeless,” Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” sums up the album in another way. When Sammi Smith recorded it in 1971, it had the same impact on country that the Shirelles’ singing “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” had on rock ‘n’ roll in 1962. That is, it was an open expression of a sexuality women were not meant to feel, let alone acknowledge. There’s something like a swoon in McBride’s voice in the way she accentuates the verb in “I don’t care what’s right or wrong,” as if she could will herself into the abandon she’s turning to for comfort. She’s holding coldness at bay here; beneath the longing in the singer’s voice is a hardness that says she knows just how temporary the comfort she seeks will be.

Emotionally, the song is all of a piece, and yet the first line of the chorus, “Yesterday is dead and gone,” is the only untruth on the album. McBride sings each song on “Timeless” not as a part of history, as something dead and gone, but as though each were a living thing, because, for her, these songs are alive. On the best album she’s made, Martina McBride has landed nearly all of contemporary country music in a pickle: How can we be satisfied with country music as it is now when this is its living past?

If the tension between pop and soul doesn’t seem so overt in the case of Sam Cooke, it may be because many people never assumed it was there. While a large portion of the black audience already knew Cooke from his tenure with the gospel group the Soul Stirrers, when his first hit single — that sweet summer breeze of a song “You Send Me” — brought him to national attention, he was seen by a much larger audience as just about the silkiest singer imaginable.

But if the tension seemed less present in the music, it was there in Cooke’s psyche, and the conflict between assimilation and individualism is the strongest overarching theme in Peter Guralnick’s new biography, “Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke.”

Guralnick had wanted to write a Cooke biography ever since meeting Cooke’s business partner, J.W. Alexander, in 1982. Other books intervened, none more time-consuming than his two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, “Last Train to Memphis” and “Careless Love.” Anyone who’s read the Elvis books knows that Guralnick is a scrupulous and thorough interviewer. The common thread running through all of Guralnick’s work is a commitment to decency. In every interview he does, he allows his subjects the space to present themselves, and trusts his readers to use their intelligence and instincts to make their own judgments.

Still, there’s one problem with “Dream Boogie.” While Guralnick the meticulous researcher and compassionate interviewer is present, the part of him that synthesizes and brings a critic’s eye to the story is absent here. This is particularly disappointing in the long section that comes about a third of the way into the book that covers the time between Cooke’s leaving the Soul Stirrers and his finding his feet in the pop world, alternating great singles like “Twistin’ the Night Away” with brassy albums of standards, and his establishing himself as both a star and a businessman. There’s no denying that business is key to the Sam Cooke story. But there are times when you wish Guralnick would cut through the details of the meetings and negotiations and simply tell us what it meant for Cooke to set up a publishing company, what it meant for him, along with Alexander, to found the SAR record label. (You can get a more concise view of this from the liner notes Guralnick has contributed to the new CD reissues of the Cooke albums “One Night Stand! Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club” and “Night Beat.”)

It’s worth persevering, though, because “Dream Boogie” offers ample evidence that the historian-as-storyteller is still kicking around. Guralnick brings the gospel touring circuit of the ’50s and the soul circuit of the ’50s and ’60s to life and gets at how, in the temptations available on each, the sacred held no more sway than the secular. This is where his determination to let the story tell itself really does work. Guarlnick not only calls up a vanished milieu; his vivid portrayal of that scene helps to explain Cooke’s drive to move beyond it.

For all the fondness in Guralnick’s stories of traveling, boozing, womanizing (at one point, three different women gave birth to a child of Cooke’s at virtually the same time), for all the thumbnail vividness in the sketches of the characters and musicians Cooke met both on and off the road (“In mid-November they signed Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, a star on the L.A. R&B scene whose talent was exceeded only by his panache and by his ambivalence about whether he wanted to be a singer or a pimp”), the second-rateness of the chitlin circuit comes through. The performers are forced to stay in lousy hotels because the better ones are segregated, as are the restaurants. As far as the sight of a group of black men driving a new car in the South, forget it. At times it seems obvious that Cooke’s older brother, Charles, who’d had run-ins with the law, was hired as driver as much to keep him out of trouble as for the muscle he could provide.

And there was worse. For Cooke and for every performer on this circuit, there were too many examples of the dangers both within and without. The R&B singer Jesse Belvin died in a car accident caused by slashed tires, and the damage was thought to have been inflicted by white fans angered by Belvin’s refusal to play a segregated show. In the months before Cooke died in December 1964, Frankie Lymon had already been arrested for possessing heroin; he’d die a junkie four years later. The great Little Willie John would be arrested for killing a man in an argument. Ray Charles had been busted for heroin in Boston.

The horrors and humiliations of the road might have been enough to impress themselves on anyone. Cooke’s upbringing ensured they did. Cooke was the son of a conservative preacher, so it might be supposed that Cooke — who gave up sacred music for secular, who loved his women, who enjoyed all the advantages that money and being a truly beautiful-looking man brought him — was a rebel. In truth, he took his father’s advice to heart. “Respect your elders, respect authority,” Guralnick recounts it. “But if you were in the right, don’t back down for anyone, not the police, not the white man, not anyone.” It’s possible that what protected Cooke in some confrontations was the astonishment he provoked in others by being a black man who did not back down. Guralnick tells a story about Cooke’s running out of gas on tour in Memphis. Waiting for Charles to come back from the service station, Cooke was approached by a white cop who told him to move the car, to push it if he had to. “His name was Sam Cooke, and he didn’t push cars,” is what he told the cop, before finally saying, “You push the fucking car. You may not know who I am, but your wife does. Go home and ask your wife about me.” The unmistakable sexual nature of that taunt makes you gasp, as does the fact that Cooke got away with it.

“Dream Boogie” leaves you wishing that Guralnick had more fully explored how Cooke’s career embodied both the desire to integrate and the belief in black self-determination (and also how, if Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had lived, how those views might have reconciled themselves). Cooke wanted to find the widespread popularity that Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte had (Belafonte’s “Calypso” LP had spent three years on the charts), which inevitably would have meant moving more toward the middle of the road. But he also seemed adamant that that popularity would give him the freedom to move beyond pop, to meld together all his influences, and to have an audience that was primed to follow him as he did.

Guralnick records several incidents that reveal Cooke was aware of the changes taking place in pop music. He admired the Beatles. Hearing “Blowin’ in the Wind” on “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” inspired him to write “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which has rightly been called the greatest soul song of all time. And Guralnick quotes Bobby Womack, whose “It’s All Over Now” was covered and turned into a hit by the Rolling Stones, telling Cooke that this guy — Mick Jagger — couldn’t sing. Womack simply wouldn’t believe it when Cooke told him the Stones represented the future. (In fact, the Stones would soon be represented by Allen Klein, the accountant-turned-agent who managed Cooke during the last year and a half of his life. Not the least important accomplishment of “Dream Boogie” is its portrait of Klein, more complex and nuanced than others that have painted him as one of the principal villains in the breakup of the Beatles.) Could a man with such catholicity of musical taste (matched, from everything Guralnick tells us, by his omnivourous taste in reading) be satisfied with making middle-of-the-road pop?

Certainly those two recently reissued RCA recordings suggest not. “One Night Stand! Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club” hints that Cooke still had some musical integration of his own to accomplish. Recorded at the Saturday night late show in a packed Miami club in 1963, it can stand with “Otis Redding Live in Europe” as one of the greatest live albums ever. This was the show Cooke did on the soul circuit, quite different from the one he’d record the next year before a largely white audience at the Copacabana in New York City (“Sam Cooke at the Copa”), and it took RCA more than 20 years to issue it. It’s a raw show; Cooke’s voice is raspy throughout and the sort of call-and-response interaction between performer and audience marks just how fully Ray Charles and others had succeeded in bringing the fervor of gospel into R&B. The accounts of Cooke’s live performances in “Dream Boogie” suggest that he relied largely on his voice to seduce a crowd instead of the theatrics that were a staple of Jackie Wilson’s act. Whatever his physical presence was that night in Miami, you can hear, just by the vocals, what whips the crowd up, why every song is punctuated by shouts of excitement. By the time Cooke and the band reach the closer, an extended “Having a Party,” you feel as if you could die from sheer happiness, and as if you’re ready to.

“Night Beat,” which might be the only satisfactory studio album Cooke completed in his lifetime, suggests that Cooke was well on his way to merging the direct emotion of soul with the sheen of pop. Obviously taking some inspiration from the “themed” albums Frank Sinatra had made at Capitol in the ’50s, “Night Beat” aims to get the feel of the blues and spirituals (the album opens with “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and includes numbers by Willie Dixon and Charles Brown) into a relaxed late-night groove. The album succeeds in creating a sound that is both mellow and deeply emotional, which, of course, is not a contradiction in terms.

The best argument for why Guralnick the critic should be more present in “Dream Boogie” (the title is taken from a Langston Hughes poem) is that Cooke was at his most complex in his music. For much of this book, Sam Cooke comes off as somewhat indistinct. Everyone Guarlnick interviews tells us he was a charmer, highly motivated and ambitious, but they also refer to a veiled side. And while we see the flashes of temper, the ease with which he left groups and labels when he had a chance to further his own career, the callous attitude he had toward women (including his second wife, Barbara, who had fallen in love with him when she was a little girl), he remains something of an enigma — except in the music.

Cooke comes most alive toward the end, when he is both realizing his greatest popularity and suffering as he never has following the drowning death of the infant son who, because of (unfounded) doubts of his siring, he held distant in his affections. And it’s those washes of darkness and turmoil that serve Guralnick so well in the account of Cooke’s death suggesting that some sort of recklessness wasn’t out of the question. Cooke was shot to death by Bertha Lee Franklin, the proprietor of a $3 Los Angeles motel. He had gone to the motel with Erica Boyer, a hooker and, more to the point, a roll artist (someone who picked up men, took them to a hotel and, before any sex had taken place, absconded with their money). What happened there will always be a matter of dispute. Boyer claims she was kidnapped by Cooke and escaped with Cooke’s clothes when he went into the bathroom. Cooke, coming out and finding most of his clothes and money gone, started banging on the motel office, demanding Bertha Lee Franklin produce the girl. They got into a rough scuffle during which Franklin fired a shotgun into him.

Even if, as is likely, the homicide was justifiable, there are questions that have never been answered about whether, also as likely, Cooke was Boyer’s specifically chosen mark for the night. A private investigator hired by Allen Klein was on the verge of finding out, but Klein, fearing the results would damage Cooke’s reputation, dropped the investigation as he was requested to do by Cooke’s widow, Barbara. Inevitably, as with so many pop deaths (Tammi Terrell, Marvin Gaye, Kurt Cobain), all sorts of conspiracy theories have sprung up about the killing.

It was not uncommon to hear Cooke’s death talked of, bitterly, as the comeuppance that a racist society metes out to black men who got above themselves. Without diminishing Cooke, without denying Erica Boyer’s probable culpability in creating the situation that got Cooke shot, Guralnick understands the death as the sad, stupid waste of life and talent that resulted from Cooke putting himself in a very bad position.

For all the things that keep “Dream Boogie,” a solid, scrupulous, thoughtful biography, from being a truly great book, there’s no doubt that rock ‘n’ roll history, and, hell, American history, needs Peter Guralnick. His magisterial work on Elvis Presley, which can leave you feeling unmoored for days, convinced that you have just read, as Guralnick claims, “the saddest story” he knows, can stand alongside Taylor Branch’s ongoing “America in the King Years” and Robert Dallek’s two-volume life of LBJ as one of the greatest recent accomplishments in American biography. No subject Guralnick approaches in popular music is likely to have that immensity. But there are still pieces of the story of American music that call out for his perspicacity and decency and smarts.

We are in a period where, instead of turning our cultural past into the vast library it promised, technology has, by its pace, accelerated the culture of disposability. The CDs and DVDs available to us may form a library of the past, but the speed of our culture encourages us never to get past the new-releases wall. Rock journalism — God, even that name sounds like a relic — far from being the great enterprise it seemed 30 years ago, has given way to a sort of undifferentiated fandom. There is simply too much music for any critical sensibility to present a clear overview of our pop present. And so the solipsism Lester Bangs envisioned in his obituary for Elvis has, just as he predicted, come to hold all the cards. Too much pop music criticism no longer seems even interested in talking to an audience beyond the small one that will already know what the writer is talking about.

Which is why, even at the risk of seeming a mere archivist or even an old fogy, Guralnick needs to bring his talents to other figures who are in danger of becoming relics of a past that many people no longer believe they should care about. Buddy Holly and Otis Redding are just two of the titanic figures who need solid biographies written about them, as does an artist Guralnick has written about so lovingly in the past, Charlie Rich, still the least acknowledged great American singer of the 20th century. I can’t imagine how exhausting it must be to work on the scale that Guralnick does. I pray for his stamina. Our past needs the love and respect he continues to show it.