“Pigs at a pastry cart,” “eunuchs in a harem,” “a lamppost to a dog” — these are a few of the terms artists have used for critics over the last couple of centuries. Igor Stravinsky imagined reviewers as rodentlike creatures with padlocked ears. Even Nat King Cole chimed in: "Critics don’t buy records, they get them free." It’s predictable that any attempt to evaluate creativity will be met with resentment, especially when it’s the sound of bashing instead of applause.
"Critics are people you love to hate," agreed the late, legendary Lester Bangs. They’re jerks and pompous assholes, he pronounced in his infamous essay "How to Be a Rock Critic," a multiple-choice, fill-in the blanks guide. Regarded as the greatest writer in rock history, and probably its most vitriolic, Bangs is often credited with catapulting music journalism into literature. He declared that everyone possessed the credentials to be a rock critic, but although he mentored many and inspired legions, none touch his notoriety or match his flair to entertain, involve and engage readers.
When I worked with Lester during the early years of Creem magazine, I took exception to his bombast and bluster, cheap shots, snide retorts, reliance on epithets and diabolical ways. All the editors also lived together, so the 24/7 camaraderie created plenty of fallout. Yet Lester’s hysterical wit, goofy good nature, flash and flair brought ballast to the household and office. (Yeah, his room was a chaotic sty — but he did actually do the dishes.) I witnessed those all-night binges to reach a deadline, typing furiously to keep up with his thoughts and substances, to drown out the inner anguish. Our tastes diverged and I wasn’t a huge fan of his writing. Today, 21 years after his death, I read it now with new eyes.
Running the gamut from outrageous to brooding, his one-liners and treatises spared no one: Mick Jagger was a washout, Stevie Nicks a narcissist, Chrissie Hynde small potatoes, Ozzy Osbourne a moralist and Patti Smith a banshee. His pantheon of heroes, ranging from Miles Davis to the Sex Pistols, were ruthlessly skewered when they slipped (in his estimation). Bangs believed artists should take what came without whining, and he accepted a dose of his own medicine when it came time to edit his work for publication.
With "Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader," the new and long overdue collection of Lester’s work, I’ve become reacquainted with my former colleague and roommate from the distance of a less-than-perfect memory of his infectious grin and maddening opinions. Always curious how musicians reacted to his scathing coverage, I wondered if time healed wounds and wanted to offer them a chance to respond, to provide perspective to Bangs’ notorious hubris — if they weren’t still livid about it.
In the introduction to the anthology, editor and friend John Morthland explains how Bangs could turn from dumping to defending a record with equal credibility. His first published review in Rolling Stone in 1969 (reprinted in the book) slammed the MC5′s now-legendary "Kick Out the Jams" as a ridiculous, overbearing, pretentious album. He ranked the 5 with the Troggs as crude, raw, ugly noise — which would later become the very criteria he used to define the virtues of punk.
MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer felt Bangs was merciless in dismantling the band, like the new gunslinger in town taking on the baddest dude. "I believed we were the second coming of rock ‘n’ roll, messengers of music genius," Kramer acknowledges in an interview. "But in that instant, my entire ego collapsed. All my greatest fears were realized."
Lester felt some remorse after Elektra Records dropped the MC5. He became the band’s biggest fan, counting the album as an all-time classic. "He was so disarming in his apologies and his repudiation was so sincere," says Kramer. "I grew to like him. He forced us to confront our weaknesses."
Bangs used music as a vehicle to write about all kinds of stuff, always talking about it in terms of the bigger picture, says Morthland. He wrote about acts like Emerson, Lake & Palmer that other reviewers couldn’t be bothered with, placing them in a musical-historical context that included the Moog synthesizer, Charles Mingus, Mussorgsky, Mozart and Liberace.
"Anne Murray is the real thing," Bangs wrote in Creem. He glowed on about the mellow Canadian country-pop singer’s hypnotic honeyed vocals, and the enduring significance of her songs. Some may scoff at this, he suggested, but 30 years later, he’s fairly convincing, amusing — and lascivious. This from the writer who lionized Black Sabbath and derived inspiration from William S. Burroughs. Murray called him up to thank him at the time, which thrilled the besotted Bangs, though he suspected her label had set it up.
"I’m grateful to Lester," Murray says today. "He gave me his seal of approval, which came from a place where most people would not expect it."
All you could do was tease Lester and use him, says punk pioneer Richard Hell. Bangs regarded Hell as a philosopher poet, as well as a nihilist and defeatist. Although Hell says he’s seeking no revenge against critics who savaged him, he raked Bangs over the coals in a recent Village Voice testimonial, calling him a babbling buffoon and an obscene provocateur, but also admiring him for figuring out what really mattered.
When idols didn’t meet Bangs’ expectations, he could be ruthless. Miles Davis, he felt, became a worthless wretch, the Pistols turned into amoral bullies, and Lou Reed, one of his most beloved artists, was a professional zombie. Whether he was holding up high standards or was just plain high, Bangs threw down the gauntlet. He taunted artists, daring them to reach transcendence, say something important.
Composer Arnold Schoenberg alleged critics would shoot the wounded on the battlefield, but Bangs believed all was fair in love and war. When Lester interviewed Lou Reed, their verbal slugfests grew into goading sessions, fueled by massive amounts of booze and their equally massive egos. Bangs tested his icons and left bruises. Rock journalist Jaan Uhelszki, whom Lester championed back at Creem, broached the subject recently with Lou.
Reed replied, "Lester loved me so much he had to attack me every day. You know, it was so weird, because it’s not like I didn’t have my own problems. So that was some kind of weird — that somebody liked you so much that he just frothed at the mouth and tried to bite you."
Though Bangs rode Reed and his music like a roller coaster, he really did listen to Reed’s almost unlistenable "Metal Machine Music" until his death, and not for some roundabout, backhanded, half-ironic reason like "It’s so obnoxious and empties out a room," notes Morthland. Despite the trail of destruction, Bangs’ fanaticism with Reed strove to restore the exalted moment when music changed his life, when the Velvet Underground seared his soul, Patti Smith swept his breath away, the Rolling Stones still mattered and Miles "exposed me to my own cowardice in the face of dread or staved-off pain."
In calling Reed a bibulous bozo or Jim Morrison a bozo Dionysus, Lester was really talking about himself. As he once wrote, it’s "not really necessary to separate the clown from the poet." In passage after passage, whether extolling or plundering, he seemed to be examining his own foolish excesses as well as his imaginative originality. "The palooka with irony is also the nicest guy in town and man enough to show it," he once wrote of David Johansen. "It’s no longer enough to be a hostile ugly yowling asshole," he said of the Dead Kennedys. He accused Miles Davis, in his electronic period, of producing"half-thawed cryogenic doodles."
The tough inquisitor sometimes seemed too gleeful about lopping off heads. But his reason for shredding records was to seek the source of the cancer running through them, "praying for a cure." Bangs wouldn’t allow artists to phone in performances. He’d cite an entire catalog of albums and songs to prove his point, to hold them to higher standards. Lester insisted that his book about Blondie be unauthorized, reasoning that getting too buddy-buddy with the band would make him a recruit to the cause, whereas a lack of cooperation allowed objectivity.
Band members didn’t necessarily agree. “His idea of not doing a fluff piece was being a bitch,” says Chris Stein of Blondie. “We were doing a book at the same time, ‘Making Tracks,’ and so he got cranky about it.” Stein describes a series of photos in the band’s book of Lester carrying singer Debbie Harry on the beach with his hand groping her ass and his tongue hanging out. “I just think every picture is worth a thousand words,” Stein says. “He criticized her for using her sexuality while lusting after her at the same time. All I can say about Lester’s comments on us is that I wish he were around to see Britney Spears.”
Commenting about the hypocrisy of “boy critics and the male rock ‘n’ roll establishment,” Stein adds, “I think there was a lot of buried agenda Lester wasn’t even aware of himself. And I don’t know how much he believed all the stuff he was writing. I think he was just trying to stir up shit.”
Questioning Blondie’s steely demeanor, Bangs wrote: "The main reason we listen to music is to hear passion expressed. What does it say about us to dote on emotionally neutral art?"
When Bangs began performing with his own band, Stein recalls, his response was different. “Lester came up to Debbie after a show saying, ‘Oh God, I didn’t know how hard it was.’”
Bangs informed the Mekons, then a fledgling English punk band, that their music was swill. "We acknowledged it as a pretty accurate description," says guitarist Jon Langford. Impressed with the response, Bangs owned up to the send-up, and volunteered to write liner notes for the next album. He made superlative proclamations, calling the Mekons "the most revolutionary band in rock ‘n’ roll" and "better than the Beatles." Then Bangs added that, in fact, he’d never heard the album "and I never will." He never did, says Langford.
After cutting some drunken venom about Virgin Records, the British music magazine NME and erstwhile heroes like Brian Eno and John Lydon, Bangs’ stamp of approval garnered attention, and the band reconsidered its decision to break up. (As alt-rock veterans know, the Mekons are still together today.) "Lester ruined my chances at a straight life," Langford laughs.
Bangsian spew is an acquired taste. It’s not always worth slogging through 40,000 words on the Troggs. But the appeal of Lester’s prose doesn’t just stem from its gonzo style. Sometimes it’s jazz improv or anthemic rhythmic beating or Wagnerian noise. Consider his characteristic trashing of Canned Heat as "nondescript clinkletybonk tibia-rattling in pursuit of yeehah countryisms," which got him banned from Rolling Stone magazine.
"He seemed like a frustrated songwriter," notes Robby Krieger of the Doors, not an uncommon complaint about critics. Rereading Bangs’ piece on the Doors’ swelling popularity a decade after Jim Morrison’s death, Krieger chuckles, since another two decades later he’s touring Doors repertoire with keyboardist Ray Manzarek. Reflecting on the line, "[It's] going to set rock ‘n’ roll standards for a long time to come," Krieger sighs: "How prophetic."
Krieger says he liked Bangs’ writing, and offers faint praise: "I think he thought his articles were more sophisticated than anything he was writing about." But he takes exception to a remark about the Doors song "The End" being a joke. "Jim was funny as hell, but not with the music," he says. “That he took seriously. It was some of Jim’s most introspective writing." For Lester to call Jim Morrison a buffoon, he suggests, betrayed a lack of perspective on himself.
Asserting that artists wouldn’t be heroes if they were infallible, Bangs showed his own demons publicly. His songs with his band Birdland voice the vulnerability that mitigated the wisecracker’s pontification. Bangs’ writing, says John Morthland, "was always about him, the music and his relationship to that world. They weren’t separate things." At the time of his death, Lester was in transition, Morthland suggests, seeking something with as much meaning as music.
The last time I saw Lester I suggested he quit rock ‘n’ roll to write the Great American Novel. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” he answered. Some of his fiction is featured in the anthology, giving a clue as to what lurked within.
The various portraits of Bangs span from the kind, quirky rock guru in Cameron Crowe’s film "Almost Famous" to the self-indulgent, pained poet of Jim DeRogatis’ biography "Let It Blurt" and the impossible genius in the 1987 anthology "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung," edited by Greil Marcus. The Bangs enigma can’t reconcile his complexity — the ridiculous romantic and earnest friend with the unruly belligerent, the irrepressible innocent with the idealistic visionary.
Beyond the inexhaustible adjectives, Lester’s writing speaks volumes. I’m relieved, after all these years, to read writing that’s "like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head." Grateful it’s around for others to discover, I’m amazed by Lester’s mercurial mind and potent insights, startled by the immediacy, clarity and substance of the prose. To be reminded how it’s done. Mind you, it’s still true that small doses go a long way. It’s sad to wish for more too late, but this surviving legacy is some compensation for our loss of the pig and his pastry.
In the 1993 club hit “Rebel Without a Pause,” Chuck D. raps over Herb Alpert’s chirpy trumpet: "A rebel in his own mind/ Supporter of a rhyme/ Designed to scatter a line/ of suckers who claim I do crime." That incongruous hybrid of hip-hop and bouncy pop, created by the group Evolution Control Committee, sounds as startling and amusing today as it did a decade ago, and still ripe with meaning.
The wacky juxtaposition spawned its own kind of revolution, inspiring legions of the club remixes now called "mash-ups" — with one classic example being "Smells Like Booty," in which Destiny’s Child wails over Nirvana’s classic dirge and drone. Also referred to as “bastard pop,” mash-ups involves blending samples from two songs — generally, one song’s vocals atop another’s instrumental or rhythm track. The sum of the parts often surpasses the originals. The more disparate the genre-blending is, the better; the best mash-ups blend punk with funk or Top 40 with heavy metal, boosting the tension between slick and raw. Part of the fun is identifying the source of two familiar sounds now made strange — and then giggling over how perfect Whitney sounds singing with Kraftwerk.
Exploding onto Britain’s dance club scene in the last couple of years, mash-ups are cut ‘n’ pasted by superstar DJs whose aliases sound like email monikers: Ultra 396, Kid606, Anon, Mc Sleazy. Distributed free on the Internet, on bootleg CDs and on 12-inch "white labels" in U.K. shops, mash-up recordings may be becoming yesterday’s news overseas, just as they’re beginning to attract a significant audience on this side of the pond. Mash-ups are easy to create on home computers with software any competent downloader can find for free. But because the necessary artistic clearances are tough to obtain at best, mash-up devotees are bootleggers almost by definition.
As in a wrestling match or a courtroom battle, the two "mashed"acts are presented as opposing each other: "Kylie Minogue vs. New Order," "Tag Team vs. Marilyn Manson" or "The Ramones vs. Abba." Mashing the titles of the two tracks adds another layer of wit: Soundgarden matched with Joni Mitchell is "Like Woodstock." Splice the Bee-Gees with Michael Jackson and you get "Billie’s Alive"; Chris Isaak vs. Eminem yields "Wicked Superman" and Christina Aguilera vs. the Strokes turns out to be "A Stroke of Genius" (which it is).
Mash-ups might be the ultimate expression of remix culture, which has grown out of a confluence of influences: widespread sampling, DJs as performers, and the proliferation of digital technology, as well as a tangle of diverse musical styles from jungle to house to garage and techno. To lapse into postmodern jargon for a sec, mash-ups are the highest form of recontextualization, recycling toasty tunes by fusing pop hooks with grunge riffs, disco divas with hardcore licks. The groove and crunch combination melds black music back into rock, or pulls out a song’s surprising inner essence. Toss in something vintage, obscure, silly or unexpected and the duet totally transcends all musical formats and canons of taste.
"The Remix," a Friday-night show on London’s XFM radio ("where dance rocks") has proudly championed mash-ups, providing their primary on-air outlet, says James Hyman, the show’s co-host for three years. Though mash-ups are a side dish in the show’s diet of remixes, the listeners devour them, and “The Remix” has launched such hot DJs as Freelance Hellraiser, Jacknife Lee and Audio Bullys, whose work can be found on the album "The Best Bootlegs in the World Ever," a critical fave (and a bootleg itself).
Belgian brothers Stephen and David Dewaele, aka Soulwax and/or 2 Many DJs, assembled and released the nonstop, album-length mash-up "As Heard on Radio Soulwax, Part 2" (there was no Part 1, although there have been several subsequent installments), morphing Prince into Sly and the Family Stone slipping into the Velvet Underground’s "Waiting for My Man" over the throbbing "Peter Gunn" TV show theme. All 45 samples were exhaustively cleared — for the Benelux countries only. So buying the album as an import is legal (you can easily find a copy on the Web right now), even if owning and playing it in the United States is a legal gray area at best.
From Vanilla Ice to the Verve, the controversy over sampling rights and the prohibitive costs of clearance payments, potentially due to publisher, label and artist, keep mash-up bootlegs underground, perhaps contributing to their allure. Ironically, artists who sampled aplenty in the ’90s, such as the Beastie Boys and the Chemical Brothers, aren’t necessarily eager to grant permissions. Touting the "buy it don’t burn it" philosophy, Missy Elliot, whose "Get UR Freak On" has been mashed 50-plus times, tells consumers to turn their backs on bootleggers.
After radio stations received cease-and-desist letters for playing mash-ups, “Freak Like Me,” mashed by Girls on Top (aka Richard X) with Adina Howard backed by a Gary Numan track, was re-recorded with The Sugarbabes’ vocals to circumvent legal difficulties — and hit No. 1 on the U.K. charts.
Labels should love mash-ups, insists Jon McDaniels, program director of C89.5, a Seattle high school radio station whose teen DJs constantly play bootleg imports on the daily mix show. "They breathe new life into old stuff,." he says. (A current favorite is Dannii Minogue vs. Dead or Alive: "I Begin to Spin.") Admittedly, mash-ups may not inspire the purchase of Celine Dion’s CDs, but they may rekindle interest in a forgotten career. Consider the example of the proto-mash-up, Run-D.M.C.’s mid-’80s collaboration with Aerosmith on "Walk ThisWay."
It wasn’t until a landmark case in 1991 that casual sampling of borrowed material was deemed illegal, when Gilbert O’Sullivan sued Biz Markie for unauthorized use of "Alone Again (Naturally)." The judge quoted the Seventh Commandment, "Thou shalt not steal." Would hip-hop have survived that long without widespread pilfering — and where would the already crippled music business be without the rap "fad"many thought would fade?
Though credited as the grandfathers of mash-ups, Ohio’s Evolution Control Committee is more into satirical audio collage ("plunderphonics") than reinventing pop songs. When threatened with a lawsuit by CBS for sampling news anchor Dan Rather over AC/DC for a track on their latest compilation, "Plagiarhythm Nation, Vol 2.0," ECC responded that copyright law allows "fair use"of materials for parody purposes.
With Madonna and the Sex Pistols giving permission to Go Home Productions for its "Ray of Gob," mash-ups may yet go mainstream. "If it’s official, things could get interesting," suggests XFM’s Hyman. On the other hand, says Osymyso (aka Mark Nicholson), whose "Intro Inspection" crams 100 songs into a 12-minute tour de force, "Legitimizing these tracks will remove the spontaneity that made them work in the first place."
Though there are gazillions of club DJs in the U.S., it’s tough to find mash-ups on American airwaves outside a handful of free-form stations. WFMU, the legendary indie station in Jersey City, N.J., features turntable artists during the show "Re: Mixology." Program director Ken Freedman (aka DJ Jesuspants) has scheduled such renowned mashers as Go Home Productions and the Australian DJ known as Dsico, “that No-Talent Hack” (sic).
"What does it matter if the remix of Justin Timberlake’s ‘Cry Me a River’ with ‘Let It Whip’ as the track came from the label or not?" asks Sean Ross of Airplay Monitor, a radio trade publication. As long as 15 different mixes are provided for every song by labels and radio, he adds, "There’s no reason listeners won’t keep doing their own."
While a growing core of fans adores mash-ups, some consider them one-gag novelties. Some don’t get them and others — those who aren’t willing to spelunk in the darker corners of pop culture’s gray market — literally can’t get them. Disclaimers on mash-up sites generally state that music copyright is held by the artist, that remixes will be deleted on request and that listeners are downloading songs for "evaluation purposes only" and agree to erase all material within 48 hours.
After the Recording Industry Association of America succeeded in suing three students for file-sharing, launching a new front in its battle against piracy, president Cary Sherman proclaimed: "When individuals ‘share’ copyrighted music, without permission of the copyright holder, they are liable." The RIAA is now gathering evidence to prepare a new round of lawsuits in mid-August, potentially targeting anyone who downloads copyrighted music. To say the least, mash-up entrepreneurs are in the crosshairs.
"Record companies use the Web as too much of a scapegoat," says Hyman, of London’s XFM. He notes that Apple’s iTunes Music Store sold millions of songs in its first few weeks, clearly indicating that people will pay for music — they just don’t want to pay $20 for a crap album. Late to jump on the Internet bandwagon, the music industry is scrambling to recoup revenues it believes it has lost to bootleggers and file-sharers. (The industry’s own numbers suggest a catastrophic 26 percent sales drop since 1999.)
The RIAA’s refusal to accept downloading is like its fight against blank cassettes in the ’80s, says E. Michael Harrington, a music professor at Belmont University in Nashville who specializes in intellectual property issues and has served as an expert witness in copyright lawsuits. Harrington compares the industry’s effort to criminalize customers to the Titanic’s captain ignoring the iceberg: "Oh, we’re sinking. Let’s sue the passengers. Creativity is being stifled by copyright laws that are outdated, unrealistic and misinterpreted."
There are potential violations galore in the world of sampling, Harrington explains, but the law is tricky. In some cases the lack of qualitative similarity between different songs has led judges to conclude that sampling is not copyright infringement, as with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1994 decision that 2 Live Crew’s parody of Roy Orbison’s "Oh, Pretty Woman" was acceptable under the fair-use doctrine. "At its best, the law reflects our values," says Harrington. "When it’s not, it just regulates them."
As far back as Mozart, he adds, "There’s an age-old tradition of fooling around with music everyone knows and casting it in a new light, giving it new meaning." It’s a murky business when ideas of authorship and artistic control come into question. When is it filching, when is it flattery and when is it just funny?
Mash-ups may further muddy the legal waters because they can transform their original sources so dramatically. Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Musicians Against Copyrighting of Samples say they are seeking "reasonable copyright" reforms that would permit sampling. Members of Negativland, the California experimental band sued by Island Records for its 1991 parody and remix of U2′s "I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For," support a "sampling license" for remixers’ use. BoomSelection, the now-defunct online clearinghouse for bootlegs, referred to the "plundering nature of pop music" in its last-ever Web posting, crediting mash-ups with pushing the boundaries of cool. "There’s no longer any shame in loving Hall & Oates," read the site — when mixed with Daft Punk, something new and improved is created.
Mash-ups might be better understood as part of a continuum rather than a new trend. They will likely mutate further and encourage more bands like Detroit’s Electric Six, described as "White Stripes gone Studio 54." Anyone who wants to can download the vocal track to their song "Gay Bar," create their own remix and submit the new version to XFM for possible airplay on "The Remix." So far, Hyman says, the submissions have ranged from "the diabolical to the hilarious to the surreal." He has played "brave, cheeky and genius" versions backed by the "Batman" theme, reggae classics, the Village People’s "YMCA," 50 Cent and Motorhead.
In DIY culture, consumers are the producers, owning the tools of production — a laptop instead of guitar, bass and drums. The bedroom is the studio and factory machinery moves out of the nightclub onto the Internet for millions to access. The media monopolies are fighting back, but with the airwaves gobbled up by conglomerates, homespun mash-ups may be the people’s digital antidote.
Hot Aussie remix DJ Dsico “that No-Talent Hack,” who mashed Britney Spears vs. Chic to create “Goodtime Girl” — guides the budding mash-up maker with how-to lessons. Select compatible melodies (mix an a cappella vocal with a different music track — say, Snoop vs. Foo Fighters, or maybe J.Lo vs. Ben Folds). The possibilities are endless. Tweak tempos, mix and fix pitch, time loops with cheap or free software (audio apps such as Sonic Foundry, Pro-Tools Free, Cool Edit Pro, Acid, Wavelab or Peak). Arrange, adjust, upload. "You gunna be da next Freelance Hellraiser," Dsico declares. "The future is now."
From a treatise on Bruce’s butt to an essay on Prince’s half-naked ass, more than 100 scholarly presentations at a recent Seattle conference uncovered the deeper meanings of pop music. Titles like “Supa Dupa Fly,” “White Noise Supremacists,” and “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” lured some 500 academics and journalists to the second annual Pop Conference at Experience Music Project, the institution funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, from April 10 to 13. Jampacked with the politics of bebop and deconstructionist analysis of hip-hop, the conference might sound ponderous to outsiders. But then, rock ‘n’ roll has never been about following the rules or being predictable.
Actually, the full name of the presentation on Springsteen’s behind was “Bruce’s Butt: Masculinity, Patriotism and Rock’s Ecstatic Body.” In an era of acronyms, from “btw” to J.Lo, it’s somewhat daunting to burrow through “papers” with 17-word titles, interrupted by semicolons — and even more astonishing to find them illuminating, inspiring and fun.
In a frenzy at the overhead projector, Tony Mitchell of the University of Technology in Sydney flailed photos of global hip-hop acts in a kind of poetry slam, as if proving that rap exists outside the U.S. Both the style and substance of his performance wowed the crowd of fellow professors, grad students, writers and musicians.
This meeting of writers and thinkers from around the pop-culture globe was meant to find common cause, according to Eric Weisbard, head of EMP’s education department. Was it a culture clash? While some attendees wore both academic and journalistic hats, both parties came slinging lingo, peppering their papers with music-industry slang or critical terms like “conflation” and “commodification.”
This brainiac approach may seem jarring. Highbrow analysis of pop music seems, at least at first, antithetical to rock’s spirit of rebellion, wreckage and debauchery. This kind of examination seems suited to loftier subjects than punk, disco, techno and karaoke. When references to Iggy Pop share a podium with Bela Bartók, it’s not about “lust for life.” Or is it?
Through the corridors of this colorful blob of a museum built by leading postmodern architect Frank O. Gehry, past the gift shop with its Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain posters, Beatles lunchboxes, T-shirts and paraphernalia, attendees crammed into the Learning Lab to hear University of London prof Marybeth Hamilton read an intriguing account on the unearthing of a rare collection of “race records.”
“Who knew the Delta blues was discovered under the bed of a closeted gay alcoholic living in a Brooklyn YMCA?” exclaims the wide-eyed Weisbard, grabbing a bite of turkey on focaccia between panels. The former Spin and Village Voice editor who organized this hybrid seminar explains, “It’s less formal than academic conferences and more risk-taking than industry conventions.” It might also be the only music gathering with empty hallways once a session starts. Everyone seemed as content with ivory-tower pursuits as they would be at Tower Records; collectively, they’ve written more than 50 books on subjects from Muddy Waters to heavy metal.
Greil Marcus, the author of “Lipstick Traces,” “Mystery Train,” and “The Dustbin of History” (and a former Salon columnist), launched the shindig with a keynote speech that tenderly invoked a series of songs spanning time and genre — from a 1929 version of “Man of Constant Sorrow” to the snappy rendition in the Coen brothers’ “O Brother Where Art Thou?” The plaintive promise and power of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” sucked the audience into his reverie.
Early the next morning, we heard Dionysian festivals compared to mosh pits, Pentecostal speaking in tongues connected to scat singers, and the tango linked to jazz. The so-called dean of rock critics, Robert Christgau, who’s been grading record albums from A+ to F for his Village Voice column since the 1960s, likened the revelry of ancient Greeks to “Rock’s Ecstatic Release.”
The conference’s airy theme, "Rewriting the Story of Popular Music," was a revisionist’s wet dream. After all, it’s still early days for the study of 20th century tunes. While "Chicken Boogie" sounds as lively today as when it was brand-new 60 years ago, even Grace Jones’ hits are now more than 20 years old. Is this historical and sociological dissection a form of spindle-gazing contemplation to pump up the volume on "low" culture — or a worthy inquiry? Rock music isn’t rocket science, but the gobs of insightful material at the Pop Conference rendered what might seem to some a ridiculous pursuit into something sublime.
Synapses snapped when Ned Sublette of Qbadisc Records suggested that not all roads in pop-music history lead to rock ‘n’ roll. He proposed Cuban music as the elephant in pop’s kitchen, arguing its central influence from the big band era to a string of rock hits (“Rock Around the Clock,” “Daytripper,” “Louie Louie”). Dazzling his audience with facts and sound effects, Sublette described a fertile musical crescent from New Orleans to Haiti, with Havana as its clearinghouse.
Heady stuff for 10:30 in the morning, but the receptive crowd was jazzed as they dashed to soak up more. Historians, sociologists and ethno-musicologists rubbed tweedy elbows with denim-sleeved writers. With more than 100 speakers spread throughout three simultaneous sessions, it was a scramble to catch every provocative idea or insightful theory.
The “Women in Question” panel was a lively rally at Rock and Roll Grad School. Lee Ann Fullington from the University of Liverpool related her survey on the male preserve of record shops. Gayle Wald raved about Rosetta Tharpe, a 1940s blues guitarist who “played like a man.” Professor/musician Lisa Louise Rhodes reassessed rock’s sexual double standard with moderator and Austin Chronicle writer Margaret Moser, who unfurled tales drawn from her years as a groupie.
“There’s a different approach at strictly academic conferences, which can feel like a sentencing,” said Rhodes. “More than one or two slight attempts at levity are viewed as undercutting the seriousness of your work. At EMP, everyone seemed to be having such a good time.”
Both the profane and the profound filled this music nerd-fest. Speakers addressed the erasure of blackness in indie rock, the theft of blackness by white songbirds, and the preservation of whiteness in “Celtic Confederate” tunes. Yet the head trip rarely felt like a lecture. Barnard College professor Donna Gaines, an intimate of the Ramones, who wrote “Misfit’s Manifesto: The Spiritual Journey of a Rock & Roll Heart,” quoted sociologist Emile Durkheim as well as late guitar legend Johnny Thunders.
Whether participants were waxing rhapsodic on Jeff Buckley, going dissonant on the White Stripes or, like novelist and musician Darcey Steinke, offering a lyrical ode to Elvis, the proceedings often felt like George Sand lying under Chopin’s piano for a visceral listening experience.
It wasn’t all weighty. A rousing lunchtime concert by Jon Langford of the Mekons offered pithy three-chord songs and witty anecdotal commentary on his “Sorry Life in the Punk Rock Trenches.”
The “Ego Trip” round table was another crowd pleaser, struggling to answer various hip-hop-related questions, including “Who’s the next Tupac?” The collective of writers of color who self-published “Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists” offered such zingers as “Wu-Tang Clan is the Kiss of rap,” and led a singalong to Missy Elliot, advising the audience to replace “nigga” with “ninja.”
Academics, of course, aren’t hampered by such journalistic considerations as word count and deadline. “Writers have to know how to swing a sentence, how to make (occasionally) complex ideas seem simple and/or sexy,” notes Pat Blashill, a freelancer for Wired and Rolling Stone who presented “Darth Vader Was a Black Man” (on the topic of techno “Afronauts”). “Academics, on the other hand, don’t have to squeeze ideas into a small space next to photos of J.Lo in the shower.”
Blashill says he welcomes the breadth of exploration and the opportunity to grapple with larger questions. “The conference forced writers to step up to the plate and deliver bona fide ideas, and forced assistant professors to drop the $20 words.” To communicate and entertain. Arguably, if the conference’s “Discoteria” panel had happened under the twirling lights of EMP’s “A Decade of Saturday Nights” exhibit, next to Labelle costumes and Studio 54′s moon and spoon, it might have packed more punch.
One of the final panels provided a delicious sendup of academic papers by addressing “sludge,” those ubiquitous, crass formal devices found in every clichéd piano intro and guitar lick, across almost every pop genre. “The E String Scrape” featured examples from Bon Jovi, Michael Bolton and REO Speedwagon. “The Cowbell as Party-Down Signifier” cited a slew of examples, including Nazareth and Blue Oyster Cult — each excerpt drawing louder and cheaper laughs.
British professor John Street, who presented “Pop Star as Politician,” reflected on the big picture: “These conferences serve to, 1) make one feel inadequate, and 2) revive enthusiasm. This worked brilliantly on both counts.”
Despite the overwhelming blur, those gathered were stoked and insatiable for discourse at the reception. “It’s as much about building a new kind of community, as presenting ideas,” says Weisbard. “Almost every person had a different experience, which is true to the spirit of popular music.”
He’s editing a volume of conference papers for Harvard University Press to publish next year. “People care when writing is good, when thoughts are new, when culture has some zing to it,” Weisbard says. “All we can try to do is make something interesting and let the sparks fly.”
Lisa Louise Rhodes admits that being a pop fan can make her feel like an outcast in the academic world. “But at EMP, among so many bright people who think pop music matters,” she says, “it felt like coming home.”
