The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism

235 Pages·1987·1.6 MB·English

by  Robert Pattison

The Triumph of Vulgarity
Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism
ROBERT PATTISON
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1987 by Robert Pattison
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pattison, Robert.
The triumph of vulgarity.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Rock music—History and criticism. 2. Music, Influence of. 3. Music and society. 4. Popular culture. 5. Romanticism in music. I. Title.
ISBN 0-19-503876-2 (alk. paper)
PREFACE
“Is not every civilization bound to decay as it begins to penetrate the masses?”
Sixty years have passed since Michael Rostovtzeff, the historian of the ancient
world, asked the question, all the more ominous for his assertion that “our
civilization will not last unless it be a civilization not of one class, but of the
masses.” Caught between the certainty that the vulgar will join civilization and
the probability that civilization cannot survive vulgarity, can we escape the fate
of Rome? The young soul rebels are already at the gates shouting, “For God’s
sake, burn it down!”
This book examines rock, the pervasive music of contemporary vulgarity,
as a way of describing the convergence of elite and mass cultures in our age.
Chapter one defines vulgarity and points out that rock is the perfect expression
of everything the classical world meant by the word.
Its admirers want to make rock appealing by making it respectable. The
thing can’t be done. Rock is appealing because it’s vulgar, and an appreciation of
it requires a defense of vulgarity. This defense is implicit in the Romanticism
and pantheism that have been staples of refined culture for the last two hundred
years, and chapter one examines how, against its better judgment, the case for
vulgarity has already been made by the elite culture of contemporary
civilization.
Romanticism and pantheism have generated their own myths about the
world. These myths may be historical or imaginative, so long as they encapsulate
Romantic or pantheistic ideas in narrative form. Whether a myth is objectively
true is of no importance to its believers. A myth is tested against the emotional
needs of the living, not the objective events of the past. I have described several
myths in this book, from that of the sexual potency of rock stars to the Satanic
predilections of their fans. In chapters two and three I look at the myth of rock’s
black and primitive roots. In these chapters, I am less interested in the historical
facts about rock’s foundations in black or primitive cultures than in what people
believe about those foundations. Rock could never have come to rest on the
foundation of black music unless it had first been launched on a tide of white
ideas about the primitive. My suggestion is that there is good reason to locate the
origins of rock in modern, Western ideas that found their classic expression in
the nineteenth century. This suggestion will, I think, prove unpopular because it
challenges an assumption shared alike by rock’s friends and enemies. But the
myth deserves a dispassionate examination, if not in the name of free inquiry,
then in the cause of more honest racial perceptions. In the case of rock, the white
man foists his own conception of the primitive on the unexplored facts of black
life. In these two chapters I have thought it best to err on the side of candor and
skepticism rather than allow the myth to pass unchallenged.
The elite schools of modern art share a Romantic heritage with the mass
culture of popular music. Vulgarity divides them, but a common set of
conventions unites them. From top to bottom, our civilization has a mythic unity
that was absent in the classical world. The triumph of vulgarity does not mean
the extermination of elite culture but the reinterpretation of that culture in a
popular mode. Chapters four, five, and six explain how rock expropriates
Romanticism’s refined traditions of self, sex, science, and social organization
and suggest a method for translating the elite conventions of Romanticism into
the vernacular of popular music.
What threatens our refined culture is no alien barbarism but its own vulgar
reflection. If vulgarity is without redeeming features, then civilization is lost,
because the triumph of vulgarity is assured, and vulgarity is nothing but a mirror
image of what now passes for elite culture. But vulgarity has all the strengths of
the Romantic pantheism that justifies it, and in chapters seven and eight I have
put the case for vulgarity as a social and aesthetic power. This is no easy job, not
because there’s nothing to say on behalf of vulgarity but because there’s no
language to say it in. There is an unacceptable language to justify vulgarity,
though, and rock is it. These chapters explain the language of rock as the
manifestation of an inarticulate social and artistic creed.
Aaron Copland said, “If a literary man puts together two words about
music, one of them will be wrong.” He was being charitable. This is not a book
about rock as music but about rock as idea. It’s worth noting, though, that rock
as music is no simpler than rock as idea. The philistine in the Modern Museum
looks at a Jackson Pollock painting and says, “Anyone could do that—it’s just a
bunch of oil hurled on the canvas.” The philistine listener approaches rock in the
same spirit: “Anyone could play that. It’s just a lot of noise. It’s only five blues
chords repeated again and again. All it takes is a guitar and a drum kit.” These
observations are largely correct, both as applied to Jackson Pollock and rock,
with the exception of the philistine’s premise that “anyone could do that.”
Consider the case of the Hollywood soundtrack artist Lalo Schifrin, who in the
1960s and 1970s tried again and again to produce suitable rock accompaniment
for the bikers, hippies, and drug fiends inhabiting the crash pads and nightclubs
of the B-movie scripts for which he composed the scores. Practice did not make
the otherwise highly professional Mr. Schifrin competent in rock. His attempts to
duplicate the sound of Led Zeppelin or the Grateful Dead always sounded like
the marriage of Dizzy Gillespie with a mariachi band. If so respected a
professional consistently failed to achieve even the semblance of rock, what
credence can there be for the philistine who thinks he could produce a successful
rock album given an afternoon off from work? Rock is the available music of
our culture, but available is not easy.
What musical quality makes rock inimitable by those who do not share the
rock spirit lies beyond my very limited musical competence to describe. I have
tried instead to explain the world of thought in which the rocker lives—a world
literally unthinkable to Lalo Schifrin. I have relied to a great extent on the lyrics
of rock to make my case. I think there are few points I make that could not be
illustrated by a score of additional lyrics. I have tried to use those lyrics which
illustrate the points with the greatest wit and diversity, but I’d be surprised if
knowledgeable readers couldn’t find a dozen of their own examples for each
argument.
There are those who believe that rock lyrics are incidental to the music, that
few people really listen to them, that at best they are chosen for sound or effect,
and that no genuine conclusion can be derived from them. If rock lyrics were
merely an embellishment to the music, there would presumably be more rock
songs that dispensed with words altogether. But a straight instrumental rock song
is an oddity. Rockers want to write lyrics and their audiences want to hear them.
The perennial outbursts of middle-class indignation at the content of rock lyrics
demonstrate that at the very least sanctimonious adults listen to them. College
freshmen who can’t recall a line of Shakespeare can cite line after line of rock
lyrics and will usually display critical contempt worthy of a Housman for anyone
so ill-informed as to misquote Bruce Springsteen or John Cougar Mellencamp.
Rock lyrics and variations on them are a favorite source of graffiti. I have seen
ordinary citizens buying breakfast in the deli at seven in the morning who found
some kind of solace in singing the lyrics of Foreigner.
I would no more want to be the one to tell the English scholar Christopher
Ricks that the lyrics of Bob Dylan, which join the poetry of Milton and Keats as
objects of his critical estimation, were a verbal antimacassar on Dylan’s
threadbare guitar-playing than I would want to inform the devotees of Ratt that
their heroes’ “Lay It Down” would please them equally were it called “Play It
Down” or “Weigh It Down.” I hesitate to think whose reaction would be more
violent or just. The words count in rock just as much as in refined poetry.
Rock lyrics may be trite, obscene, and idiotic—which is to say, they may be
vulgar—but they are certainly not incidental, and the proof of their importance is
their consistency. Many would deny that rock has consistency. They claim that
it’s useless to discuss rock as if it were a single movement when in fact rock is a
warren of subcultures and historical cults which can only be understood
separately, socially, and in historical context. Like sportswriters and sociologists,
rock critics suffer from a baseball-card mentality. The game disappears in a
welter of distinctions. At one extreme, Casey Kasem tantalizes the audience for
his weekly Top Forty Countdown with questions like, “What is the record for the
number of weeks in which there was a different number-one song on the pop
charts every week?” At the other extreme the righteous critics of the more
obscure fanzines can detect countermovements within rock movements on an
hourly basis, Many books mentioned in the bibliography to chapters two and
three give summaries of the facts and subspecies of rock. I have tried to provide
something different: an understanding of what holds the various kinds and
periods of rock together as an intelligible whole. I have taken my examples as
broadly as possible, so that Brian Eno and Ted Nugent find themselves used to
support a single argument about rock, a procedure that will seem to rock purists
what using Ignatius Loyola and Jerry Falwell as the exemplars of the composite
Christian would seem to an Episcopalian bishop. If readers find this portrait of
rock useful, the procedure will be justified in the result. But I would give it as a
rule that the two most dissimilar rock songs have more in common than do any
rock lyric and the song most like it in another musical genre. Rock distinguishes
itself from all other music by a shared ideology that crosses all its internal
divisions. Believing in this consistency, I have escaped the rock critic’s usual
compulsion to make his book absolutely up-to-date. Whatever is now or to come
in rock is inherent in what has passed.
If the key words of this argument were capable of quick and ready
definition it would have been unnecessary to write the book. I have generally
allowed the book to define terms like Romanticism and pantheism as it proceeds.
But rock itself is a vague term and one of the aims of the book is to give it better
definition. I start with the Vincentian postulate that rock is that which has been
called rock everywhere, always, and by all rockers. Elvis is rock, the Beatles are
rock, the Rolling Stones are rock, Iggy is rock, the Clash are rock, Bruce
Springsteen is rock, the Fall are rock. Rock, like the ideology out of which it
grows, is a subjective phenomenon. To be rock, music does not have to be
played on guitar or drums. It does not have to use blues chords. It does not have
to be electronic. It does not have to have hillbilly roots. It does not have to have
a black pedigree. It does not have to be sung by teenagers. None of these
conditions is either necessary or sufficient because each is a mere objective
correlative of what is first and always an idea. Frank Sinatra singing “My Way”
is old-fashioned pop in a regressive jazz tradition, but Sid Vicious singing the
same song is rock, pure and simple. The Sinatra version is an old man’s song
whose mature theme is the acceptance of life as it is. The Vicious version is a
young rebel’s denunciation of everything old, smug, and wistful. The words,
accompaniment, and all other objective criteria might be the same in each
version, and yet one would be rock and the other not. I have tried to describe the
idea of rock.
This is an American book, and those who believe that the British invented
or reinvented rock will find little comfort either here or in the facts. Without
much hesitation the Englishman Wordsworth declined the opportunity to become
the father of modern vulgarity and so of rock. The American Whitman accepted
the same invitation with alacrity. Wordsworth’s opinion of the vulgar is
examined in chapters one and four, the relation of British and American rock is
discussed in chapter three, but the poetry of Whitman necessarily finds a place in
every chapter.
I think the ideal reader for this book would be an intelligent twenty-year-old
American who likes rock and reads books. Older readers may find something
here too. Many people who have not been teenagers for some time wonder how
to account for the durability and omnipresence of rock. I have tried to provide
them with an introduction to the subject. Scholars and social commentators have
examined the relation of mass or popular culture—what I call vulgarity—and
traditional letters and learning—what I call refinement. The book has something
to say about this. There is a growing body of academics who specialize in
deciphering the social and cultural message of popular music. They may find
some of the conjectures here of interest. And historians of Romanticism may be
interested in a theory that purports to show the continuation—I would say the
victory—of nineteenth-century pantheism in the shopping-mall culture of the
late twentieth century.
If my argument is correct, I think it would tend to support the following
statements:

Ours is a more homogeneous culture than we generally allow, in which elite
and popular cultures subscribe to a single set of ideas.
Prominent among these ideas is Romantic pantheism.
In its pure form, Romantic pantheism encourages vulgarity.
American democracy provides an ideal setting for the growth of romantic
pantheism.
American democracy necessarily grows more not less vulgar.
Poe’s Eureka and the Velvet Underground are products of a single cultural
force.
What separates elite from popular culture is its unwillingness to embrace
the vulgarity inherent in its own premises.
There is more ideological vigor and consistency in the music of the Talking
Heads than in the paradoxes of the academy.
Nineteenth-century Romanticism lives on in the mass culture of the
twentieth century, and the Sex Pistols come to fulfill the prophecies of
Shelley.
Vulgarity is no better and no worse than the pantheism and the democracy
out of which it grows.
Believing in Whitman, the democrat should also glory in the Ramones.
What follows explains these contentions in more detail.
Greatest thanks to Roger Rawlings of the Alter Boys for information, criticism,
and advice the whole way through. Many thanks to Steve Allen for sharing with
me his parodies of rock lyrics, to Maury Webster and the Radio Information
Center for kind help with the figures on audience distribution in American radio
markets, and to Jorge Garcia-Gomez for advice on pantheism.
R. P.
Southampton, NY
May 1986
Chapter One
THE TRIUMPH OF VULGARITY
Rock and Romantic Pantheism
This is the age of vulgarity. School’s out forever. They’re dancing in the streets.
Love has gone to a building on fire. What’s happening?
Vulgarity has triumphed.
Champions of refinement remain. In 1980 Barbara Tuchman issued a blast
against the decline of quality in the pages of the New York Times Magazine. But
what effect can this anguished cry have when published in gray type next to the
tan young flesh in the underwear ads? The genteel build themselves neo-
Georgian mansions, but the fortunes that support their Augustan airs are made in
sitcoms, drugs, and cheeseburgers. On both sides of the Atlantic, knights of the
New Left and the Old Right prepare for the last great battle in the West, in which
refinement will go forth to slay vulgarity. But the struggle is over. The dragon
has long since won the victory.
Vulgarity finds itself condemned on all sides by enemies as disparate as
President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, who wants to restore the legacy of
cultural refinement, and the Marxist critic Theodor Adorno, who looks to
socialism to purge the world of its capitalist crudities. But vulgarity by its nature
is impervious to condemnation. The point is not to condemn it, which has been
done without success, but to describe it, which has yet to be undertaken. Since
we live in a vulgar world, and since the world seems likely to become more not
less vulgar, the time has come not only to say what vulgarity is but to enumerate
its benefits alongside its sins.
Rock is the quintessence of vulgarity. It’s crude, loud, and tasteless. Rock is
vulgarity militant, and modern vulgarity is one incarnation of Romantic
pantheism. This is a book about the nature of rock and about the contours of
Romantic vulgarity.
VULGARITY
Horace, the least vulgar of poets, opened the third book of his odes with an
incantation against the uninitiate mob: “Odi profanum volgos et arceo,”
I hate the vulgar mob and keep my distance.
Let the tongue be silent. I am the Muses’ priest
And sing a song not heard before
To youth.
Horace borrowed the language of Roman religious ritual to sanctify his hatred of
the ordinary. His is the classical definition of vulgarity. Everything common is
profane. No beauty is possible without shunning the unrefined multitude. A new
generation of cultivated taste must bring to life the same rule it has learned in the
temple: “Let the tongue be silent!”
Horace’s word for the mob comes into English and French with little
change of form and none of meaning. David Hume, writing in 1757, might have
been composing a gloss on Horace’s definition of volgos: “the vulgar, that is,
indeed, all mankind, a few excepted.” In vulgarity, there is no east or west. The
vulgar includes almost everybody. It embraces the “them” of “us and them.”
Only a handful of mankind has the refinement that rises above vulgarity. This
handful may be lopsidedly aristocratic, but membership is not confined to any
one order. Horace himself rose from the ranks of the lower orders. A hundred
years ago, Matthew Arnold devoted the better part of Culture and Anarchy to
developing Horace’s attitude into a principle of social organization. All social
classes are equally defective. The populace is raw, the middle classes philistine,
the aristocracy barbaric. Only those who practice “sweetness and light” and find
“their best selves” can overcome the inherent vulgarity of the human condition.
Let the genteel few who have risen above the common herd rule the world.
Vulgarity is common. The great mass of men who lack refinement are
vulgar. But inside a man vulgarity is not a presence but an absence. Vulgarity is
the absence of cultivation. All men are born with the emptiness of vulgarity
inside them; few ever fill the void. “The vulgar” is the language of the people,
the language ordinary men learn without education. The Vulgate was once the
Bible of Greekless Latin speakers.
If lack of cultivation is the inward mark of vulgarity, delicate authors agree
that the outward and visible sign of this deficiency is noise, the mingling of
sound without rational order. “Let the tongue be silent!” Horace admonishes
youths who would transcend vulgarity. The cultivated man thinks, speaks, and
acts with reasoned restraint. The furthest remove from vulgarity is perfect
silence, Horace’s sacro silentio. Man in his natural state is a selfish ranter.
Thersites, the only commoner among the aristocratic Greeks who fought at Troy,
is an ugly, self-seeking lowlife. But before Homer presents his physical
deformities, he has identified him as a vulgarian by his speech. Thersites talks
too much. His words are akosma—ranting, undisciplined, chaotic. “Rank
Thersites,” Shakespeare called him. Noise, unchecked by the contemplative
powers of inner cultivation, is a reminder of the chaos before creation. The