Robert Pattison - The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism

The Triumph of Vulgarity

Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism

ROBERT PATTISON

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright 1987 by Robert Pattison

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pattison, Robert.
The triumph of vulgarity.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Rock musicHistory 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 Gods 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 cant be done. Rock is appealing because its 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 rocks black and primitive roots. In these chapters, I am less interested in the historical facts about rocks 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 rocks 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 Romanticisms 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 theres nothing to say on behalf of vulgarity but because theres 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. Its 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 thatits just a bunch of oil hurled on the canvas. The philistine listener approaches rock in the same spirit: Anyone could play that. Its just a lot of noise. Its 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 philistines 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 livesa 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 Id be surprised if knowledgeable readers couldnt 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 cant 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.