uTopianTurtleTop

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. B. B. King

I thought [Psychocandy] was a good record, but in a real cold way. I always tried to get my British friends to explain to me why they're so big and important and controversial over there. I've got some smart British friends, but they never could explain it to me.

I don't like Robert Cray, and I particularly dislike his new album [Strong Persuader]. What really puts me off about him is that you just can't do blues in the self-conscious way you can do a lot of other things. You can't get up and say, "Ladies and Gentlemen, now I'm gonna do a blues song," without immediately sounding ridiculous. There's something very demagogic about that. The Bonzo Dog Band could do it, but they were supposed to be ridiculous.

As for me -- Cray’s OK, neither here nor there. I wouldn’t object to people finding his persona smarmy -- I love McCartney but I find his persona smarmy -- big deal, so what. But that’s not what Marcus says -- he isn’t speaking specifically, he’s generalizing about how black people should act. Cray is ridiculous because he acts like the blues is a form of middle-class entertainment.

I’m wishing right now I had a bigger B. B. King collection, because in my mind’s ear I can hear him saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, and now we’re going to play . . . ” I know beyond a doubt that black musicians said “Ladies and gentlemen” at jazz shows, and, of course, a lot of jazz musicians play blues. But not the low-down real-deal authentic-issimo “woke up this morning saw my woman do the dirty with the devil” type blues.** No, no, for Marcus, woe betide the “so-called” bluesman who stands up straight, looks his public in the eye, and plays music!

What a condescending, controlling, embarrassing, white liberal fool, dissing the black musicians for acting middle class. What, Greil, does Baker “put on airs,” is she “uppity”? And is Cray not “authentic” enough for you? Not authentically what?

By the way, I’m not the first to raise these questions with Marcus. I don’t remember where I read it now, but I do recall someone calling him to the carpet for pulling up the Stagger Lee myth to discuss Sly Stone -- black culture is about pimps and hustlers, see? No matter that Sly Stone’s songs mostly have nothing to do with that. Greil Marcus is down with the people! He knows what the jive-hepcats are really on about!

*

Regarding Simon’s invocation of Nietzche -- one slippery philosopher. It’s been years since I’ve read him, but in a discussion of music it might do well to recall that he was, among other things, a music writer. His first book -- The Birth of Tragedy -- connected Wagner to Greek tragedy. Nietzche later renounced the portion of the book that praised Wagner and devoted two subsequent books to denouncing Wagner’s music. He did so at the height of Wagner’s cultural power, and at some personal cost -- he and Wagner had been friends. But he went his own way, and described his journey as “self-overcoming.”

“Self-overcoming” is the exact point of Carl Wilson’s Celine Dion project, which Simon criticizes. Self-overcoming, going against his own personal grain, and going against the grain of the consensus of his subculture.

I want to know what’s at stake for Simon that he feels compelled to say, “Seems to me ‘Celine = shite’ is a truth we'd do well to continue to hold self-evident.” Who is this “we” that Simon feels he’s speaking for?

The rhetoric of invective is about using musical preferences to keep the boundaries of tribal identity. When I was in junior high, my tribe liked prog and hated disco (Emerson Lake & Palmer was my first concert). When I got older, my tribe liked disco and hated prog, and I followed suit again. I’ve since tried to rekindle my affection for ELP, and while I sometimes like some mildly polyrhythmic textures in the instrumentals, I haven’t been able to like the singing (not the fault of the boomer critics who taught my tribe what rock meant).***

Simon’s prediction that Carl’s quest is doomed to failure may come true, but I’m betting that Carl will succeed -- from what I can tell from hearing him read his EMP paper, he’s on his way. Whatever the case, invoking Nietzche to defend a sense of tribal identity through musical taste feels like a stretch. Love or hate Celine Dion or Anita Baker or REM as you hear fit, but please keep your dislike, should you have some, to what they sound like and not how they dress, and please don’t worry about how “we” feel about it.


*My last Marcus post was mushy on the question of playlists, but I agree with the points that Carl and Joshua Clover have made: that the playlist can tell one a lot about oneself. As a tool for self-examination, it’s rich stuff. As a tool for examining Greil Marcus or Stephin Merritt, it’s presumptuous.

**Please note: This bit of satirical invective is aimed at white people’s (apparentely such as Marcus) romanticization of country blues, not at country blues itself, which I love. The great jazz critic Martin Williams turned me on to Robert Johnson when my parents gave me the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz as a birthday present in 9th grade; Johnson’s great track “Hellhound On My Trail” represents country blues on the collection.

***10 years ago my friend Jake London wrote an excellent paper on the process by which the boomer critics who had loved the bubblegum music of their own youth shamed the next generation out of loving the bublegum music of our youth. All sorts of cognitive dissonances ensued as we kept on loving ELO (for example) even though we had been trained to think that they were supposed to be trivial. Jake’s paper predicts a lot of subsequent and recent squabbling over the meaning of rock. As one professional music writer friend who has read the paper said drunkenly one night (the wine and the friendship preclude me from revealing his name), "I think of it as a classic piece of rock writing." It is. Highly recommended.


Morning after after-thoughts: After posting last night I pulled out my B. B. King comp. It begins with cuts from Live at the Regal from 1964, and it starts with an announcer: “Ladies and gentlemen . . . the King of the Blues, B. B. King!” The penultimate cut is “Playing with my Friends,” a duet with Robert Cray. Cray sounds great -- they both do. Cray is totally out of the B. B. King tradition, and Marcus’s dismissal of Cray totally applies to King. I glanced at Marcus’s chapter on Sly Stone & Stagger Lee in his book Mystery Train this morning. Drugs, pimps, murders, “angry rapes” -- I really truly think that Marcus exoticizes the sordid elements of African American culture and can’t deal with post-’60s African American musicians who don’t live down to his exoticizing expectations.

Color me “riled up.”

Stephin Merritt’s “anti-authenticity” crusade is in response to thinking like Marcus’s, and Marcus continues to be a revered and hugely influential thinker.



Still later: Carl comes to his own defense with passion and eloquence. Something my hasty defense of him did not make clear: I do not know, either, whether Carl will end up liking Celine Dion. When I predicted his success, I meant he would succeed in doing interesting thinking and writing, and he would succeed in not scorning people he disagrees with aesthetically. The first success being a critical success; the second success being, for reasons Carl states beautifully, a human success.