For the past forty years and more, a fraud has been perpetrated on the Western world.
Since at least the first issue of Rolling Stone magazine appeared in 1967, it has been a common assumption that popular music, particularly rock and roll, is about social change. The story has become an Ur-text for any child growing up in America -- or England or the rest of the world for that matter. It is a pop culture creation myth: In the beginning the world was void, without sound, thought or feeling, when Elvis Presley descend, Prometheus-like, to bring eroticism, fun and rebellion to the dull gray world.
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And as the Church Fathers followed Jesus, others came to carry the message of social revolution forward: the Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Who, Nirvana.
Nirvana is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its album Nevermind. It was, according to the press, an "album that changed everything." The heavy metal hair bands were instantly vanquished, replaced by something with gritty authenticity. Nirvana's leader and head writer was Kurt Cobain, a diffident drug addict with a powerful punk voice. It was music about real life.
Frankly, I was bored.
It wasn't that Nirvana was a bad band. They were, in fact, brilliant. But I never understood what all the excitement was about. To me, Nevermind was a well-constructed punk-pop record with a few dashes of heavy metal. It had good songs.
But "the beginning of everything"? A "revolution"? Please.
The smart pop music critic Simon Reynolds has argued that the Sex Pistols 1978 record Never Mind the Bollocks was not the beginning of punk, but the end of heavy rock. After that, Simon posits, began a genuinely new movement in pop music, a modernist movement spearheaded by bands like Talking Heads, Joy Division, and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
These were groups with genuinely challenging sounds, and hearing them just emphasized that the Sex Pistols were the end of something, not the beginning. And Nirvana was a more authentic and grittier Bon Jovi, not a launch into the avant-garde.
I had worked in a record store in the 1980s and knew pop music pretty well, and to me Nirvana was simply not that different or interesting. In fact at the time Nevermind was released in September 1991, I was captivated by a record called Funeral at the Movies by a local D.C. band, Shudder to Think. Shudder to Think was music that was challenging in ways that Nirvana was incapable of.
The songs cam eat you at odd angles. Singer Craig Wedren's vocals sounded like they were beamed in from outer space. It represented what the best of modernism always has -- the ability to do something startlingly new and beautiful while acknowledging the past that got you there. Shudder to Think sounded like Picasso had formed a punk band.
They were also truly fearless and dedicated to their art. When Nirvana was signed to a major label, Geffen, they released Nevermind, a conventional rock album with some great songwriting and big pop hooks. When Shudder to Think was signed to major label Epic, they delivered Pony Express Record, one of the most challenging rock and roll records of all time (if it can even be called rock and roll). It's the kind of record it takes six months to begin to get. It remains an intoxicating and difficult listening experience.
Shudder to Think never made it big, but their songs have a depth and elemental energy that makes them, even today, sound more modernist and exciting that Nirvana. The band broke up in 1998.
One of their last albums, 50,000 B.C., was considered a misfire because it was a stab at more mainstream pop music. But there is nothing wrong with mainstream pop music.
The great fallacy that sits at the center of the rock-is-rebellion thesis is that the cultural explosion that occurred when rock and roll began carried such a heady charge because it was not about overturning societal norms. In fact, the music was reinforcing orthodoxies that are as old as mankind.
Put simply, most rock and pop songs, from Chuck Berry through the Beatles and including the latest single from Coldplay or Justin Timberlake, are about love. Not polygamous, destructive, selfish love, but about love for one other person, monogamous love, spiritual live that transcends the laws of nature -- "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "She Loves You," "My Love."
Pop songs are about heavenly love and the attempt to attain such love on earth. Nothing is more revolutionary or challenging.
The difference is, Nirvana rubbed their pop sensibilities with punk grit in order to retain "authenticity" -- which is paradoxically a phony move. Shudder to Think was a genuinely weird and gifted group that decided to play it honestly and straight when they did write more mainstream pop songs. One of the popiest is "Day Ditty." The song simply express the wish to spend some time in a garden with a lover and "spin dizzy circles."
It seems the antithesis of the revolutionary ethos that is supposedly part of rock and roll, but it is in fact a deeply revolutionary song.
For one thing, it is honest where most radical pop songs today are not even based in reality. It's a point made by John McWhorter in his book All About the Beat: Why Hip Hop Can't Save Black America. McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is actually a fan of hip-hop music; thus his criticism of the form avoids the hysteria of some conservative condemnations of rap.
He knows the music of Outcast, Ice Cube, Pete Rock, and Public Enemy. The conclusion he draws is nuanced, but also blunt: Some of hip hop music is sonically clever and lyrically poetic. But none of it has anything to do with revolution.
Rap, in fact, is about -- to steal a line from Madonna -- striking a pose.
It is a pose of, as McWhorter notes, "the upturned middle finger," the angry toe-to-toe facedown, the predatory bully. It has much more to do with 1960s street theater than with any kind of realistic social change. At one point McWhorter compares the lyrics to a song by rappers KRS-One and Marley Marl to the actually facts on the ground.
The rappers claim that there is no employment, a charge that McWhorter calmly deconstructs with facts and welfare reform, faith-based initiatives and a program by the evil Bush administration to help ex-convicts go back to work. But to rap about these things would mean losing one's "edgy street cred." This is essential to the self-image of many on the left, including Georgetown professor and rap champion Michael Eric Dyson, who comes in for a particular shellacking by McWhorter.
McWhorter, a linguist dissects a Dyson claim that rap "is neither sociological commentary nor political criticism, thought it may certainly function in these modes through the artists lyrics." Here Dyson manages to have it both ways: rap is just pop music and doesn't serve as social criticism -- except when it does.
There is an element of healthy rebellion in many rock and roll songs, but it is a theological rebellion as old as man himself.
In hearing the existential alienation in the music of a band like Radiohead, or the sadness of the blues, humans are reminded of their fallen nature and the brokenness of the world. Yet the same music, in the beauty of the sound created in those same songs point to the beauty of the eternal. In the best of pop songs, it creates a sensation of experiencing a kind of holy sorrow -- sadness at the state of things yet a consciousness that there is truth and goodness and beauty beyond the world.
Which brings us back to "Day Ditty." Shudder to Think's leader and singer, Craig Wedren is a cancer survivor. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1997. I hadn't listened to "Day Ditty" for years before I wrote this piece, and a revisit revealed a dark spiritual center in the song:
I want to walk through the garden with youSpin as you circleI want to walk through the garden with youSpin as you circle
And now, I'm so tiredCan you help me sleep?Or go home'cause I might not live another dayAnother dayAnother day
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