(Untitled)

[freakytigger]

How come rock'n'roll didn't trigger the birth of rock criticism? (i.e. why wasn't Crawdaddy or an equiv started in 1957 or 1958?)

And indeed how come swing and jazz didn't start a fanzine culture?

Comments

[robincarmody]

Some good points. You always flesh these things out much more than I can.

I think your reasons are pretty accurate: the people who took it seriously and the people who thought criticism and intellectualising were the sort of thing they either could do or particularly *wanted* to do, at that point, were for the most part not the *same* people. This is UK-specific, so apologies, but here I think the people who were excited by rock'n'roll who were in secondary modern schools for the most part thought writing seriously about things was what posh people did, a world that wasn't for them (the inferiority complex caused by failing the 11-plus and being confined to sec-mods, which often trained their pupils only to do heavy-industrial unskilled jobs which would have disappeared when that generation still had perhaps a quarter of a century's work ahead of them, was such that "not valuing your own ideas enough" was a chronic feeling in those schools), and those who were excited by it who were in grammar or private schools saw it as a means of *escaping* the very idea of writing, of language, which they saw as imposing the very fixed standards they wanted to escape via rock, and the time hadn't yet come for a halfway house. Certainly I'd suspect that John Peel - who was at one of Britain's elite fee-paying schools when he first heard "Heartbreak Hotel" - would, at that point, have regarded the very idea of writing about it as a form of embalming and thus destroying its instant impact, which had exploded his twilight-of-empire world (he wouldn't have thought it out on those terms, but would probably have instinctively come to that conclusion).

It took until about the mid-60s for the divides to come down sufficiently that literary intellectuals turned their minds to rock'n'roll and people who were into rock'n'roll were sufficiently interested in literary-intellectual culture that they wanted to use rock'n'roll to make it more open to change and less caught up in its ivory tower ("better" is too vague a word in this context, I think). You suddenly got people who knew about everything and wanted to mix it together, in a way you hadn't had before.

a propos Simon Frith, his wikipedia and rocksbackpages entries don't cite his DOB, but his brothers were born in 1942 and 1949, and I think he's between those, perhaps closer to the earlier date. He'd have been just the generation to feel the fundamental shift in British identity and sense-of-self that came with the first wave of consumerism and movement to the New Towns *as it was actually happening*, a territory he implicitly invoked in some of his later writing (specifically his February 1979 Melody Maker piece stating clearly, as some idealistic rock-leftists could not bring themselves to face, that rock music and Britain's then-powerful trade unions could never really be on the same side) but I'm guessing that his early experiences of rock were probably as they were for most of his generation - a shout of escape from the weight of imperial history around him, not something he'd have wanted to get down in words (I must admit I tend to think of the early rock'n'roll experience in terms of the dying empire its force was crushing: the American experience of it was obviously different in many crucial ways, but I think a lot of the stuff you cite above applies equally to both countries).

[koganbot]

The group that seems to be missing in action - or perhaps not missing, but whom I don't have knowledge of - would be 1950s writers in their twenties and older who already took popular culture seriously, movie reviewers, jazz critics, etc. John Hammond was a critic as well as a producer, but I don't think he ever reviewed rock 'n' roll. Nat Hentoff wrote for Downbeat in the '50s but I don't know if he'd yet turned to rock 'n' roll either. According to Wikipedia, Ralph Gleason interviewed Fats Domino, Hank Williams, and Elvis Presley for the San Francisco Chronicle, presumably not just as part of his job but because he thought they were worth the attention. He went on to co-found Rolling Stone with Jann Wenner. What I've read of his is far too sentimental, but I don't know his '50s work.

Presumably lots of local journalists covered rock as the records and concerts and riots came through their towns, maybe sometimes with a smart ear. If Otis Ferguson had lived he'd have been a natural for it (film critic for The New Republic, also wrote a hunk about jazz; was killed in WWII); Ring Lardner, too (among other things, he wrote the radio column for The New Yorker in the early 1930s); he'd have been a cranky old man hitting his '70s when Elvis came along, and I can imagine him lampooning and sneering, but with penetration in his jabs.

I wonder if Britain had a Raymond Durgnat type turning his sights on music.

[robincarmody]

Durgnat himself had a reasonable interest in pop/rock - certainly much more than any of the BFI critics did (some of the early Monthly Film Bulletin reviews of rock movies have to be read to be believed, but are symptomatic of an official British culture panicking at all-round loss of power). I don't think he was hugely knowledgeable about it, but he was broadly supportive of what it meant culturally, and highly critical of both old-establishment and New Left (which latter movement he accused of thinking the working class weren't "real" once they had adopted rock'n'roll) puritanism against it, especially in MFB/S&S criticism.

I would have linked to his 1963 essay 'Standing Up for Jesus' but unfortunately it's disappeared from the internet.

[robincarmody]

But to answer your more general point, I don't think we had a critic of that ilk *at that time* who wrote *predominately* about pop/rock, at least not pre-Beatles. The closest thing we had to it, as I said, was probably Durgnat himself, who for a while was pretty much our only film critic who was allied neither to a high-cultural orthodoxy of decorousness nor to uncritical appropriation of whatever was most popular. You can sense the Monthly Film Bulletin tentatively beginning to change by about 1964 - Tom Milne as editor gave longer reviews in the "important" bit of the magazine to Roger Corman films, wholly unthinkable before that - but it was a long, slow process which took decades. It was quicker there than at Sight & Sound, though, mainly because Penelope Houston clung on far beyond her natural time.

We seem to have diverged. Don't mind me.

[dubdobdee]

the british "durgnat type" re music would have been constant lambert, composer and critic, except he died in 1951 in his mid-40s: his son, kit lambert, was producer for the who

[dubdobdee]

"missing in action": this exact phrase is germane -- the "missing" generation is the one whose teenage years were punctuated by WW2

the post-war effect (in the US) establishes an intellectual division: the GI Bill give vets free further education if they want it (but obviousy in doing so inducts them into established corridors of thinking); against this is where the vets who aren't interested find expression

well, "the wild one" -- which brings the notion of "teenage hood" into global pop culture, as well as brando's anti-verbal lingua franca of method-derived grunt'n'lipcurl -- is basec on the semi-legendary bikje-gang incursion into hollister, california, in 1948: the bikers geing (basically) vets on speed, addicted to the planless adventure they'd discovered at war in europe or the pacific...

[dubdobdee]

1947, actually: and the hollister rally was official and respectable, but "wrecked" by a "one-percent" of "deviants" and "outlaws"

anyway, what i'm getting at is that a siginificant proportion of a specific generation of teens would have made far more potent life-structuring existential decisions while off at war -- decisively swot versus decisively blot, if you like -- and 'the wild one" versus gi-bill-student is a neat way to dramatise the gulf

rockwrite -- the invention of a subsequent generation -- is in certain ways a bridging of this existential gulf in teen-patterns

[koganbot]

Interesting that Brando's first big movie role was as a paraplegic war vet in The Men.

But I'm still curious as to why that generation didn't itself cross the gulf when it came to rockwrite, seeing as it did cross the gulf in other ways. Which is to say that, e.g., while Elvis Presley and Bo Diddley probably aren't the right demographic to become critics, and in a different way maybe Sam Phillips and Leonard Chess aren't either, what about Marlon Brando, Nicholas Ray, Alan Freed, Nelson Algren, Clancy Sigal, Robert Warshow, Leslie Fiedler, Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael? Obviously, those people all had something else worth doing than writing about popular music. But you know, people like them, their best friends, whoever?

When I'm talking about the missing in action, I'm talking about the free-floating intellectuals and bohemians, categories that didn't limit themselves to people under thirty-five who'd served in WWII.

My guess is that luck has something to do with it. That is, two or three people are not statistically significant but two or three critics could have made the difference, or two or three publishers. And this ties in with the lack of mentors and models: Ferguson, Agee, Warshow, Farber, not to mention Bazin and Truffaut, are setting the stage for potentially writing about all movies (at least any popular narrative film), but jazz and folk and blues criticism aren't leading to a discussion of all popular music, at least not in the '50s.

Also, what about, you know, women? (A question that hasn't gone away.)

[dubdobdee]

yes, the "missing generation" are actually the ones who weren't around to invent a "swingwrite" (or a "jumpwrite") really -- there WAS a jazzwrite (though it had got captured by a fairly technical jargon by the 40s: the impressionism of the early adopters (lindsay, who died young; hugues panassie) was specifically attacked as vague and musically inexact by their successors (andre hodeir in france)

the film equivalent -- bazin, kael etc -- were also very involved in organising clubs that screened movies, and therefore with writing material that got people to come to the clubs: panassie was involved in something similar with jazz, "le hot club de france"

one of the things that works for film but against (early) rockwrite is surely -- straightforwardly -- age: it was teenbeat, and you didn't get to be a writer until you'd grown out of that demographic... except that against all expectation (because of the delayed effect in the UK, and then the blowback of the brit invasion) rock'n'roll CAME BACK, and the ex-teens, now student age, were in reach writing-as-a-profession

[dubdobdee]

kael was 34 when she started writing professionally -- in her 50s when she became a name-writer

doesn't rockwrite require (a) the invention of the teenager as a distinct demographic (with its own designated music, i mean: jazz was really only this momentarily between end of WW1 and the 20s; swing ditto very briefly in the late 30s) and (b) the recognition among people-no-longer-teens that there's something uniquely valuable and different about the teen sensibility, as a counterpoint to the pressure to "grow up properly" (which in the 60s got caught up in much larger political dynamics: civil rights and anti-war and agitation for sexual freedoms)

[dubdobdee]

swing in germany under the nazis really did become the focus of an anti-establishment youth movement that was "against" the values of the grown-ups -- but it was extremely beleagured, and easily controlled/snuffed out -- (there's a chapter on this phenom in jon savage's excellent "teenage")

the other curious question to ask about rockwrite is: does it exist in any language but english? in the way we understand it to exist in the US and the UK and Canada and Australia, I mean

Who is the German Marcus? The French Meltzer?

the other shoe the needed to drop..

[dubdobdee]

... is race

r&b *wasn't* teen music in the 50s if you were black: but you didn't get to write about it for all the reasons the civil rights movement was only just beginning to be able address

leroi jones i think began writing at the end of the 50s, in greenwich village, in a beat-generation context; mailer wrote "the white negro" in 1957 in dissent magazine); the village voice -- pioneering countercultural platform -- began publication in 1955; it covered jazz i'm sure, but, being countercultural, was (presumably) very suspicious of teen-pop that early...

third shoe!!

[dubdobdee]

the "rockwrite" that did begin in the mid-50s -- in the extended sense of being artists from a different form commenting on rock'n'roll -- was pop art: invented in britain in the mid-50s, arriving in the US a little later

richard hamilton and peter blake explicitly picked up on stuff like records, badges, signs, cultural ephemera, and made it the topic of their art: this was one of the strands of art-think that lennon (and stu sutcliffe) were well aware of at point of forming the beatles: the idea that what they were doing (writing songs) could be seen as the same kind of "proper art" as work by actual real painters who'd had a world-famous show at the ICA etc was new and interesting in c.1960

but it still seems to me the permission for writers -- as self-delcared critics -- has to take time to percolate through w.r.t writing abvout teenpop

Re: third shoe!!

[koganbot]

doesn't rockwrite require (a) the invention of the teenager as a distinct demographic... and (b) the recognition among people-no-longer-teens that there's something uniquely valuable and different about the teen sensibility, as a counterpoint to the pressure to "grow up properly"

Well, this sort of is what happened, but what Tom's question is asking is why didn't something else happen? Why did it have to wait? Again, if Brando could do it (impersonate/invent the mumbling teen without being one himself) why isn't there someone of that age and ilk who four years later is willing to speak for and critique Elvis and Chuck? Or if Leo Mintz can tell his friend, the classical DJ Alan Freed, "there's something going on among the white kids who are dancing to black music in my record store," and Alan Freed can go "Holy shit!," why aren't there ex-Lost Generationers and bohos and free-floating intellectuals ready to go "Holy shit!" and pick up the pen when this stuff starts breaking big in the culture in a few years? Which is to ask why the bohos and the intellectuals fell down at what you would have thought was there natural job? And if the teen thing was relatively unprecedented (was it that much?), well, that ought to have made the "Holy shit!" even more emphatic, and the urge to write more immediate.

Not that there's an answer to my questions, but it seems to me that critics and writers are the last on the bus here, falling behind others of their kind.

Re: third shoe!!

[koganbot]

A partial answer to my own question might be that there was a market for Brando and Nicholas Ray etc.

I can imagine Warshow or Kael writing in their very different ways about rock 'n' roll (Warshow died just when r'n'r was accelerating) but the question might be who in the 1950s would print or read them?

Re: third shoe!!

[koganbot]

(So in 1961 Paul Nelson could start a mag and successfully get review copies of folk albums; but if he'd started a little mag about rock 'n' roll would the rock 'n' roll labels have thought it worth their while to send review copies? I mean, who among their customers would be likely to read criticism?)