Air Guitar

Rock criticism once seemed as ephemeral as the ‘60s underground press that nourished it. But it turns out to be one feature of that era that has not just survived but flourished in the subsequent three decades. It has now achieved a new kind of cultural status with the publication by Harvard University Press of a nearly 500-page collection of work by Robert Christgau of the Village Voice, one of the greats of the genre.

Until the mid-’60s, the only place you could read about rock ‘n’ roll was in teen fan mags. Then a few rebellious young types--guys mostly--became convinced that the music merited more serious reflection and that you could write about it with brains and style. In the Village Voice and the San Francisco Express-Times and early rock mags like Dave Marsh’s Creem and then in Rolling Stone, this new kind of music writing was characterized by “wild verbiage, polemical disputation, and lofty thoughts.” These excesses were journalistic no-nos for the mainstream magazines, but as Christgau explains, “the ‘60s were ripe for all of them.”

In a fascinating introduction to this collection of 25 years of his writing, Christgau reflects on the beginning of rock criticism, when rock and revolution seemed obviously related. “I saw pop as class warfare,” he writes; “I told myself that because it was anti-hierarchical, pop was not merely anti-authoritarian . . . but also democratic, communitarian, and even (propelled by that big beat) militant.” Today he sorrowfully concedes that these are “progressively more dubious propositions.”

But long after the dissolution of the utopian hopes of the ‘60s, Christgau is hardly alone in expecting rock to be at least subversive and preferably transgressive and that it can even “play a role in making change happen.” He still believes rock to be a music in which “one’s hopes for democracy are fortified against all the instances in which they’ve been smashed or distorted or cynically manipulated.” If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem: Christgau firmly believes that “bad music is bad for you”--all the more reason for a critic to help readers find and hear the “good stuff.”

So this volume includes 75 essays on the good stuff. All were previously published, mostly as weekly journalism in the Village Voice and mostly pegged to a live concert or new album. The earliest date is from the early ‘70s, the most recent from last year. They are arranged by decade, starting before rock with a wonderful Nat King Cole essay, and go on to cover the ‘50s and ‘60s classics, then the punk revolution, funk and black dance music, world music, the more recent semi-triumphs of P.J. Harvey and Sam Phillips, ending with essays on three “noblemen” of pop--funk-meister George Clinton, soul man Al Green and rock survivor Neil Young.

Serious writers on rock these days fall into one of three camps. The ‘60s survivors and the punk rebels both see music as an unending struggle of the authentic against the commercial. The postmodern crowd in contrast sees all previously existing sounds, whatever their style or substance, as equal fodder in providing material for mixing, for bricolage. Christgau holds to a third world view, the paradigm of the great schism. According to this analysis, American music changed forever around 1955, when Elvis, Little Richard and Chuck Berry challenged bland pop crooning and safe show tunes, and rock helped unleash “powerful new racial and sexual forces.” Advocates of the great schism theory--most of whom were teenagers in the late ‘50s--knew there was something authentic about those voices of rock but didn’t see the world of commerce corrupting their music; on the contrary, commerce provided the field on which rock ‘n’ roll contended for victory over soft pop. Topping the hit parade or going gold provided the criterion for success.

Christgau has a lot of respect for the intelligence of his readers. He takes seriously many of the issues raised by recent scholarship in cultural studies: that pop music is a collectively produced cultural practice; that it involves not just individual artists expressing themselves but a nexus that includes record execs, video makers, radio programmers and, above all, fans, all of whom shape and define the experience of the music.

Christgau writes about that nexus, but his focus is on understanding the music rather than advancing the theory. His real interests are the artists and their personas. In the end, even though he knows about deconstructing rock as a text, Christgau is an old-fashioned humanist who happily concedes that “artists create art.” He also affirms the “utopian suspicion that justice has something to do with fun” and looks for music that can “help a person do the dishes or stay awake on the interstate, get through a bad night or a good marriage”--and he’s not ashamed to add that he’s also looking for music that can help us “know beauty and feel truth.”

John Lennon once said that if you wanted another name for rock ‘n’ roll, you might call it “Chuck Berry.” Christgau’s extraordinary essay on Chuck Berry examines the rich ambiguities in Berry’s position as a middle-aged black man singing for affluent white teenagers. That didn’t weaken or subvert his genius, Christgau argues; “on the contrary, that was his genius. He never would have fulfilled himself if he hadn’t explored his relationship to the white world.” Christgau finds a uniquely American, “Whitman-esque” achievement in this music.

James Brown’s music and persona provide a striking contrast to Chuck Berry’s, because white folks have a harder time grasping their meaning and significance. Christgau writes perceptively about whites’ anxiety regarding Brown: They wish he had “remained the godfather of soul, which they have a handle on, instead of turning his genius to dance music that passeth all understanding.” If Chuck Berry is the black Walt Whitman, Christgau sees James Brown as pop music’s Charles Dickens--Brown has the same “reach, scope, heart, vulgarity, intuitiveness, [and] yucks”--as well as the same awesome “output.”

As Christgau contrasts Brown and Berry to show the relationship of blacks and whites in rock, he uses Elvis to show how mysterious early rock has become. His explanation starts with young people today watching video of Elvis’ breakthrough performance on “The Milton Berle Show” in 1956--Christgau calls it the “Uncle Milty epiphany.” The hip swiveling and leg shaking that seemed so shocking and “feelthy” (Christgau’s term) 40-plus years ago, he observes, provokes no reaction at all today. But that’s not so unusual, Christgau argues: “as art recedes in time, it requires explanation, interpretation, contextualization, perceptual work.” The shock and glory of early Elvis is “inaccessible” today without explanation, without critics and biographers writing about it. So we need Elvis criticism and Elvis history.

The Lennon essay in this volume, written shortly after Lennon was killed in 1980 (and co-written by John Piccarella), provides an astute analysis of Lennon’s place in the ‘60s, a rich song-by-song assessment of his musical achievements and a deeper and more personal study of how Lennon was able to put so much of himself into his music--so much energy, conviction, emotion and humor, so many ideas, so much love of rock ‘n’ roll. This essay is characteristic Christgau, full of feeling and ideas, without ever becoming mawkish or pretentious.

In some ways the most impressive thing about Christgau, at least to other fiftysomethings like me, is that his engagement with new music is just as intense today as it was 25 years ago. In 1979, Christgau went wild for The Clash, whose live performances he rightly described as “an ecstatic experience” more intense than anything in rock history. In 1984, he got irritated by critics who took Prince to be a serious thinker and wrote about “how tall Prince stands in the great long line of rock heroes who are full of shit.” In 1989, he went to a Public Enemy concert and found himself “in the same old rock-dream time-warp, taking in a talented egomaniac’s radical rhetoric with an audience I liked more than I liked him.” Each of these chapters provides a vivid flash of insight into a moment and a context.

Mostly, he doesn’t interview the people he writes about, but Christgau’s 1995 interview with Polly Jean Harvey leaves him astonished by her “guts and smarts.” His essay on hard-core rap dares to ask Coolio, who has made a cult of his criminal authenticity, to “lead hip-hop out of the wasteland” of gangsta bragging. He also recently helped lead listeners to the Afropop of Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour, to South African cultural treasure Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens and to the nerdy samba crooner Arto Lindsay.

Fifties and ‘60s rock was all about young people’s “exhilarating capacity for pleasure and power . . . compounded by the rage and misery that seize them every time they realize these capacities aren’t infinite.” Although rock remains youth music today, Christgau finds to his surprise that it “turns out to have a lot to say about aging as well . . . about retaining and refining flexibility and responsiveness as your emotions are weathered by loss and your physical plant decays.” The “access to direct emotion” that began in ‘50s rock turns out to allow fans who have now reached 50 to get some satisfaction.

One of the deepest satisfactions he’s found lately is listening to music with his daughter Nina. In 1990, when she was 6, she taught her dad about the pure pop pleasures of the B-52s. When she was 8 1/2, he took her to Madison Square Garden to see Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson, and he worried, as every parent does, about what he calls the “s-e-x” on stage: “[Y]ou have to negotiate between stifling (and fear-inducing) overprotectiveness and bewildering (and fear-inducing) overexposure”--which was especially problematic that year because Janet’s brother Michael had just been accused of sexual abuse of children--and Nina loved Michael. Nina “just didn’t want to know” about that, Christgau writes; “I still wonder and worry about how Nina will remember Michael, whom she’s never met and never will meet but who touches her imagination anyway. . . . [S]he dances to his music and ponders his videos,” but eventually she will find out about the charges against him, and “a wellspring of delight will turn into a lesson in mistrust.”

Especially in these later “Nina” essays, Christgau’s characteristic passion and humor, historical analysis and personal insight are at their best. This volume shows that rock criticism has grown up to be broader and deeper than anyone imagined when wild verbiage, polemical disputation and lofty thoughts first thrilled readers 30 years ago.