Peering Under a Rock Skews His Perspective : Eulogy for a G-G-Generation’s Music Rips the Usual Suspects but Is Dishonest

Last year it was Allan Bloom, the University of Chicago professor of social thought and author of “The Closing of the American Mind,” who laid the bloodied corpse of all things decent and nice at the doorstep of good ol’ rock ‘n’ roll.

This year it’s Stuart Goldman, who has written a spiteful eulogy for rock that recently appeared in William F. Buckley’s oh-so-conservative National Review.

That’s not surprising, of course: You’d expect to see something as oriented to youth (and rebellion) as rock pooh-poohed in a magazine such as the Review, designed for readers who look down their noses at public television.

But Goldman isn’t quite so easily dismissed as earlier critics such as Bloom, a curmudgeonly academician whose only contact with rock was what he had read about it in the Senate subcommittee’s white paper on lyrics.

Goldman, you see, isn’t one of their generation--one of the cultural strangers that the Lovin’ Spoonful knew you could never tell about rock ‘n’ roll, one of the old coots who inspired Pete Townshend to write, “Hope I die before I get old.”

Goldman is one of us . Not only did he write about rock for several years (many of the stories for The Times), he actually played the dastardly stuff in a band. With a bus. And roadies.

But sometime in the early ‘80s, Goldman lost his enthusiasm for rock. Which, from the tone of his article, is like saying the Ayatollah lost his patience with Salman Rushdie.

“I finally threw in the towel,” Goldman writes. “I didn’t want it anymore. No more smoky nightclubs, no more bad music. Today, I’m as foreign to the world of rock music as a fish out of slime.”

“It was with that attitude--that of an observer, an emigre, an alien--that I re-entered that world,” Goldman adds, “to see where it had gone some 35 years after its birth in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1954.”

He watched MTV for 42 hours straight. He pored over such magazines as Rolling Stone, Spin, Rip and Heavy Metal. “What,” he asks, “in God’s name happened” to the music that had, in retrospect, seemed so innocent in the hands of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and the rest of rock’s ‘50s forefathers?

Over the next four-plus pages, Goldman compiles a litany of horrors, mutants and demons that have slithered out of rock’s primordial tide pool since those early days. Bands with disgusting names, such as Scraping Fetus Off the Wheel. Songs with lyrics too graphic to print in a family newspaper.

He even torpedoes rock’s socially conscious side, from the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 up to Live Aid, Band Aid and all the other Aid-shows. “We’ve yet to see multimillionaires of the Springsteen/Sting ilk donating any significant percentage of their yearly incomes to the causes that are so beloved by them. Until that happens, I’m inclined to agree with (dum-de-dum-dum) Allan Bloom, who . . . writes off rock’s humanitarian efforts as a ‘smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love.’ ”

Trouble is, a lot of the time Goldman is right.

Too much of rock has sunk into the cultural swamp, along with an unhealthy portion of its audience. (Anyone care to defend Tone Loc’s multimillion-selling “Wild Thing” as a life- and love-affirming ode to the joys of self-actualization and mutual fulfillment through interpersonal relationships?)

And I can’t argue when Goldman says that “rock as a whole has mastered the art of turning depravity into good PR. Witness the numerous rock stars who have jumped onto the RAD (Rockers Against Drugs) bandwagon. The basic shtick is simple: Become an addict; then, after years of abuse, come clean (or at least say you’ve come clean--who checks, anyway?) in a heartfelt public statement. If this proves impossible, paying homage to a former bandmate who has died of a drug overdose will do in a pinch.”

But Goldman is so busy taking a magnifying glass to the muck stuck to the bottom of rock’s shoe that he forgets about what’s still going on above the neck.

Is there anyone under 50 who doesn’t have a story about the way a rock song offered comfort through tough times? A lyric that gave solace in the face of loss, respite in the face of adversity, humor in the face of gloom? A melody that gave a broken spirit reason to sing again?

The qualities of liberation and release that made rock’s pioneers so appealing can still be found in rock of the ‘80s--if you look in the right place.

You don’t write off all of cinema because of “Friday the 13th, Part 99,” all of TV because of Morton Downey Jr. or all of literature because of Jackie Collins. But that’s what Goldman does: He is dispatching all of rock into the same heap simply because he can point to a few pandering, sexist music videos by Kiss or song titles such as Slayer’s “Spill the Blood” and “Mandatory Suicide.”

Swear off rock, as Goldman suggests, and you also swear off the sublimely spiritual songs of Van Morrison, the hauntingly beautiful instrumentals of Mark Knopfler, the soul-stirring world beat of Peter Gabriel, the incandescent Afro-pop of Johnny Clegg & Savuka.

The problem, you see, is not so much in what we find in rock, but in where we look for it; the solution is not in lowering our standards, but in raising our sights.

And the fault, dear Stuart, lies not in our rock stars, but in ourselves.