When I saw Kurt Cobain staring back at me, it was yet another sign. Perhaps the final sign.
America has completely absorbed rock and roll. The art form has become as much a part of America culture as the Super Bowl. It's no longer considered dangerous, but art.
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This is as is should be.
It was New Year's Eve, and I was at the Hamilton, a massive and sparking new restaurant and music venue in Washington, D.C. not far from the White House. The Hamilton is in a space that once held a Borders book store. If every former bookstore space is put to such use it will be a wonderful gift to American cultural life. The owners have created something quite spectacular.
On New Year's Eve the Hamilton was hosting a benefit for the Music Maker Relief Foundation, which raises money for old blues musicians "to gain recognition and meet their everyday needs." It was a fantastic three hours of music.
The lineup included guitarist Cool John Ferguson; baritone Luther "Captain Luke" Mayer; singer, songwriter and pianist Ironing Board Sam; Pat "Mother Blues" Cohen, a longtime New Orleans vocalist now living in North Carolina; guitarist Big Ron Hunter; former Percy Sledge and James Brown guitarist Robert Lee Coleman; and guitarist/vocalist Albert White.
Surround the concert room of the Hamilton are portraits of rock and roll greats: Elvis, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, the Ramones, Kurt Cobain. I felt like I was in a museum -- in fact, many of the portraits had hung in museums. Art critic Hilton Kramer once wrote (The Triumph of Modernism) about how modernist art was accepted by the bourgeoisie, even if slowly.
Picasso became part of mainstream culture. And it was a good thing -- the masses accepted genius.
The exact same thing has happened with rock and roll. And everyone knows it except the rock critics. Or if they do, they lament that there is no one left to shock anymore.
In Slate, Ann Powers wrote that she was reassessing Lady Gaga, who hadn't made it onto her year-end top ten list. She hadn't taken into account how truly "transgressive" Gaga is. But Gaga performed at Times Square for the world to see, even lowered the silver ball with Mayor Bloomberg. Nobody lost any sleep.
In this post-postmodern age, the old academic rock critics resemble the prog-rock dinosaurs that punk displaced. The online site Slate recently ran their annual "Music Club 2011," a conservational series of columns about popular music that they run every year. This year's participants included Ann Powers, Jody Rosen, Nitsuh Abebe, Jonah Weiner and Carl Wilson. All you need to know about the series can be summed up in this quote from Ann Powers, who is the author of the book Rock She Wrote and who writes a music column for -- shocker -- NPR:
"I could spend weeks unpacking the relationship between ‘strategic misogyny' and replicating sexism (the rising wave of Web-based feminist writers do just that day in and day out, and this year some awesome female musicians gave them a great soundtrack) and still be at square one. And the related issue you raise, of whites exoticizing racial ‘others' and those same signifying insurgents fighting to define themselves -- is central to the history of American popular music, from Jump Jim Crow to Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All."
Everything changes except the avant-garde. In reading the Slate Music Club, or rather attempting to, I was struck by how utterly irrelevant deconstructionist, postmodern, academic and race-obsessed the writing is. The talk of the "otherness" of rap (in this case used to excuse misogyny), the celebration of "transgression," the degrading of a stunning artists like Adele just to gain a little street cred -- it's all so 1995, if not 1972.
One of the portraits in the Hamilton is of Frank Zappa. Zappa was a favorite of Vaclav Havel, the former President of the Czech Republic. Havel died on December 18th -- the day before the first entry in Slate's two-week Music Club series. How sad, and how typical, that over the course of those two weeks none of the critics even thought of mentioning Havel and how Zappa's music, along with the music of the Velvet Underground, helped to bring down communism.
But then, they probably think that's a bad thing.
Powers and the other writers have not seemed to grasp how completely the middle class has absorbed rock and roll. "Sympathy for the Devil" could be played at a high school basketball came and all the parents would do is groove out -- even at a Catholic school. And all of this is a very good thing. Rock and roll is now arguable the most diverse and exciting form of modernist art extant.
People don't read novels, and modern art is crap. But rock and roll offers everything from the electronic poetry of Radiohead to the strange sounds of Bon Iver and the straight-up pop off Allstar Weekend, and that's just the beginning. Go on iTunes and you'll be able to find everything from Beyonce to St. Vincent to one of my favorite records, Jon Hassell's unclassifiable Last Night the Moon Came Dropping It's Clothes in the Street.
We are living in a golden age of absolute musical freedom and seemingly endless innovation. Rock as revolution? Revolution's over, dude. The people won.
This is evident from the comments section in Slate's Music Club. When your own readers are saying things like they did, the rock wags seem like the last five people trying to hold up the Berlin Wall:
"This is often the problem with music criticism. The people who do it for a living usually have a facility with words and language, but not much of a feel for music. So we get a useless analysis of lyrics or the positioning or philosophy of the artist, mired in context without any appreciation of what it is, which is MUSIC."
"Rap has gone so far downhill its not even funny, they don't even look for rappers anymore, they look for someone who can recite some prepared lines and throw out a hook."
"Articles like this are the reason I find Slate truly wanting. First, the title downgrades a singer much more talented than the writer/critic."
"Not to be mean, but this dig on Adele seems like something critics say to be contrarian (already pointed out) or demonstrate some kind of "cred". Save it. Sometime "pop"ular music is that way for a good reason, because a talented artist (and writers, production, etc) shared a wonderful catchy tune with all of us."
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearReligion and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
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