uTopianTurtleTop

The Man

[Additional later thought below.]

[Later thoughts: I was feeling dubious about this post even before the Anachronist knocked it down a peg in comments. I remain dubious about putting a moral value on playlists, but this morning I remembered my excuse for this exercise in Marcus-bashing (as if I needed one!): 2 of the 3 chief advocates for the moral value of checking playlists for diversity have expressed admiration of Marcus, and the 3rd, I'd be willing to bet, is a fan as well. Merritt is comparatively un-influential.]

The Merritt Affair has spun so far afield that it may be hard to remember that the whole thing started when some critics got hinky about a playlist that Merritt put together, insinuating that Merritt may be racist. The charges have since been rescinded, mostly. I still think Merritt can be really irritating, not for his playlists, but for descending to intellectual dishonesty in order to yank people's chains, saying his music is so white that the Ku Klux Klan could dig it.

The playlist question -- it's interesting, it says something about what musical vibrations vibe most vibingly with oneself. But digging only music made by people of one's own color doesn't make one a racist. A good friend of mine only digs punk and country and their offshoots (as far as I can tell). He grew up in the south, went to college in the north, served in the Peace Corps for two years in Costa Rica, and has devoted his career to anti-poverty work. One night a couple years ago we were hanging late night at a party, people were passing around the guitar, and a Mexican friend of ours was having her turn with it, singing -- beautifully -- old Mexican ballads. My friend who'd stationed in Costa Rica requested a couple tunes and had a great time, and it's the only time I remember him interacting with anything other than punk or country or their alts. I've known the guy for a long time, roomed with him for a while, and nothing has ever, ever indicated, "racist."

When it comes to the institutions of music dissemination, a person's position can play a role in institutional patterns of exclusion that can fall along racial lines but are more apt to fall along class or gender lines, at least in America. Some critics want to require other critics to make their music coverage representative of the racial diversity of America. Merritt was playing the role of critic when he made his playlists that drew enmity, ire.

I had never gone for the playlist game, but the Merritt Affair has felt a little too pat, so here goes my contribution: 1993, "In the Fascist Bathroom: Writings on Punk 1977 - 1992," by Greil Marcus. In 387 pages of music writing, here are the works by black people he discusses in the book:

a longish paragraph praising stuff by the English Beat and UB40;
a paragraph praising singles by Funky 4 + 1 and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five -- the only mention of rap in the book, which he calls "South Bronx Dada";
a sentence praising David Henderson's Hendrix bio;
3 stray phrases in praise of reggae musician Augustus Pablo, 2 on Bob Marley, and 1 on Lee Perry ;
3 positive paragraphs on and a few stray mentions of Prince;
a paragraph in praise of Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff";
a few pages plus some stray mentions blasting "We Are the World";
plus a handful of African American musicians mentioned in his article on rock deaths in the 1970s.


Out of the 387 pages of music writing, in an era covering the birth and explosion of rap, Prince gets 3 paragraphs and rap gets one. His take down of "We Are the World" constitutes the majority of his coverage of music by black people in the period.

Meanwhile, from the same book, there's this from 1987:

[Song title omitted] was rough, harsh, hard to follow. From its opening notes it was a maelstrom, excitement and nothing else. It was an assault, a hammering, the singer moaning and threatening, pleading, and damning; it didn't let up for a second.

Coming two thirds of the way through the performance, the requisite instrumental break should have provided a rest; instead it raised the stakes. When [name omitted] dropped his words for a guitar solo -- a shattered, severed solo almost drowning in a dozen more overdubbed guitar parts, the off-beat rhythm chasing his lead, then overtaking him, then seeming to wait for him to catch up, which he never quite did -- the song began all over again. Ten years later, I flinch every time it comes on the radio, knowing what's coming, knowing that no matter how completely I can predict what's going to happen, I won't be able to catch up: the instrumental passage supersedes not only the singing that precedes it, but the ability of memory to enclose it.

A passage like this captures one of Marcus's chief charms as a writer: his ecstasy in giving himself up to ravishment by music. Great stuff, if not quite as great as this passage from Walt Whitman -- but what music writing is as great as Whitman? It marks Marcus as a deeply subjective romanticist in the Paterian tradition -- the moment of encounter between the artwork and the person -- the irreducible moment, the miraculous moment. I love Pater.

I don't happen to share Marcus's ecstasy over this particular song, which I do like and have heard dozens of times, though for the life of me I can't remember the guitar solo. I was surprised that I didn't have a vinyl copy of it when I checked today, though I do have the group's immediately previous LP, which I picked up for a couple bucks at a thrift store some years ago. The song has a tricky lively rhythm and a catchy tune but mostly strikes me as . . .

Well, it's pretty cool. The song is "Go Your Own Way" and the group is Fleetwood Mac and the singer-guitarist is Lindsey Buckingham, a singer who mostly doesn't register with me, and a guitarist who doesn't register with me at all. That's my problem, not Marcus's -- his writing does have the virtue of making me want to hear the song again. I listened to side one of the album that preceded Rumours this evening, and I enjoyed the hits as I always do.

Here's the thing, though, for critics inclined to hold other critics' playlists to a Merritt-orious level of scrutiny: Marcus gives Fleetwood Mac's album Tusk 4 long and complimentary paragraphs (braver than Dylan's John Wesley Harding! he says), plus 3 complimentary graphs and a few stray complimentary references to "Go Your Own Way" (the above quote took in parts of two of the paragraphs), comparing it favorably to the Clash, among other things. That's more ink than Marcus gives to Prince, reggae, rap, funk, and disco combined -- more positive ink than he gives to all of black music in the period.

Wow.

I mean, whatever, right? -- "free to be you and me" and all that -- but still -- this is a book about the spirit of punk -- and he thinks Fleetwood Mac has more of the spirit of punk than Chuck D? More than Run-DMC? More than Bob Marley? More than Living Colour? George Clinton?

Different strokes for different folks!

And here's the other thing.

Marcus was waxing ecstatic about a Fleetwood Mac song in 1987, ten years after it came out. Nothing wrong with that, but just the year previous he blasted Anita Baker for making genteel, effete music (which I have discussed here before), and here he is getting all goo-ey about Fleetwood Mac, who, come on, are pretty damned genteel. Love affairs of the well-to-do, who present themselves as well-to-do -- not at all unlike Anita Baker, except not as interesting singers, not as nuanced, not as subtle, not as gutty -- and often in softer tones. One of my favorites is "Over My Head," from the album preceding Rumours, and while I love its airy lilt, it can hardly be said to be less effete than Baker. Even the rocking tunes -- some of the rhythms have spice, but it all fits in great on easy listening classic rock radio.

Easy listening classic rock is exactly how I hear them; terrific rhythm section and a handful of terrific songs. That a champion of their music would viciously denounce Anita Baker's stuff for being genteel and effete shocks the hell out of me, but as I consider it, I have no doubt that Marcus's opinion would be loudly hurrah'ed by legions of classic rock yahoos, liberal and conservative, bigoted and progressive.

[Later thought: I apologize for the phrase "classic rock yahoos." A moment of exasperation. I have no beef with classic rock fans -- I'm one myself. I was trying to refer to those hypothetical classic rockers who would cheer on the ad hominem quality of Marcus's diss of Baker -- it's the delight in ad hominems that's yahoo-ish. And if you feel that my bringing this up is a case of pots and kettles, well, let's put that kitchenware to use, make some tea, and have a talk.]

Last week-end I picked up “The Da Vinci Code,” figuring, why not? I typically read a mystery-thriller or 2 every year. My mom liked the book, Leonardo rocks the canvas, the counter-Biblical theorizing is reminiscent of ye olde Robert Graves goddess mythology -- so I jumped in.

The book is a Page Turner.

The master-narrative of a thriller is a striptease. The author always knows more than the reader, and reveals what he or she knows bit . . . by . . . tantalizing . . . bit, usually bringing the reader to the brink of revelation before veering off in another direction, the almost-revelation occurring at the moment of maximum narrative tension, at a moment of Grave Danger. Dan Brown does all of this very well, and often with the twist that the Characters at any given moment have seen more of the Naked Body of the Truth than the Readers.

But -- and here’s the thing -- the Final Big Revelation -- that doesn’t disappoint at all. Surprisingly warm and human and even understated. Intellectually dorky, OK -- bloodlines, and the nonsense of “most direct descendants” (what would an Indirect Descendant be?) -- but as a story, it’s . . . heartwarming.

The book is full of zippy riddles and has a sense of humor and likable characters -- even the bad guys are likable, for the most part. And if I’m going to get sucked into a paranoid striptease narrative -- because the thriller is always a paranoid plot machine too, with Death lurking around every corner and behind every veil -- I’d just as soon lose myself with characters I like.

Most of the thrillers I’ve read, I don’t remember much about them afterwards. Harry Potter books too (I’ve read the first 3). I have a guess that this one might stick with me longer, because the imagery is pre-locked-in. And because I like the characters.

Fastidious reviewers have objected to Brown’s prose, even boasting of not being able to make it through the book. I noticed Brown's newspaper-ese too -- the clunkiness tripped me up once or twice -- but so what. His riffs got speed and hooks.

The rhetoric of disdain and/or apology for Brown's prose echoes now-mostly-discredited apologetic tones that middle-class strivers used to adopt when talking about liking popular music or TV or movies, and in the same publications that would never compare an Usher song unfavorably to a Schubert Lied, as used to be common. It's become bad form to denounce "bad music," but "bad prose" is still fair game.

And after all, what's not to like about zippy riddles, effective narrative striptease, and likable and sometimes humorous characters?

Pop it open!

Not sure I see the racism in Marcus's comment. The way I read it, he's referring to a particular strain of black pop that he doesn't like--I don't think it's a condemnation of black upward mobility in general. I'd guess there's just as much "genteel, effete" white music he despises as well, but he's discussing Anita Baker, and she DID basically come out of an Adult Contemporary black pop tradition (markedly different in sound than a lot of white AC). I don't necessarily understand his antipathy to that sound in general--I'm actually starting to believe that punk rock ruined Marcus's ears, even if it inspired his best writing--but I don't think his motives are racial so much as they're musical. -- posted by scott : 7:05 PM



Scott,

Thanks for your comment. You're the 4th person to say this or something quite similar to this to me, but the first to say it publicly; the other three have been back-channel. I agree that Marcus probably dislikes white Adult Contemporary just as much, and I'd be surprised if he really were a bigot in his everyday relations and political beliefs. Still, what he said here is troubling.

First, off the top of my head I can think of two incidents in his book "Mystery Train" where he applauds white performers for boasting of their own wealth -- Elvis and Randy Newman. In 1975, boasting of wealth was "populist" to Marcus; he's continued to re-print the book and with new material, but I'm not aware of him having renounced these moments.

Second, he's conflating the Pointer Sisters' stage shtick with Anita Baker's sound in explicitly racial terms, when the two don't have anything to do with each other, other than both acts are African American women with lush sounds and white collar personae.

Third, I don't know much of the Pointer Sisters, but what I do know, they were at least at one point self-consciously retro (until they covered Springsteen very nicely), and Anita Baker never was; I'm guessing the "Black Tie Recommended" incident happened during their retro phase.

I would be OK with him saying that the Pointer Sisters printing "Black Tie Recommended" on their tickets was a ridiculous instance of class politics that has nothing to do with music (even though I disagree -- it sounds like campiness to me, and campiness was part of their shtick); and I'd be OK with him saying he can't stand genteel, effete music; but for him to say Anita Baker is ridiculous because the Pointer Sisters printed something campy on their tickets, when Baker and the Pointer Sisters don't have a whole lot in common -- well, "racist" may be too strong a term, but then again it may not. In any case, it's messed up, and it exemplifies the dynamic that the Merritt Affair brought to the foreground: How the institutions of legitimacy work to exclude the music of "uncool" people, in this case, African Americans with white collar personae.

Marcus was speaking off the cuff, which can be the most revealing -- but also the most forgiveable -- circumstance to make utterances.

Thanks again. -- posted by John : 9:25 PM

His father, Mr. -, sold insurance with Uncle John, and he was a talker. Once before a meeting with a potential client, he said to John, ‘If I start talking too long, interrupt me with a question.’ And after a while John raised his hand and asked something, and Mr. - answered the question and kept talking, and John asked another question, and he said, ‘That’s estate planning, ya dumb shit!’

He and John worked for months to sell a group health insurance policty to a large Battle Creek manufacturing company. After they worked out the deal with the executives, there was a meeting with the employees, and a black guy had a wife with a medical condition, and he was worried about how transferring the insurance would affect her coverage. Mr. - answered the question, but the guy still wasn’t sure so he asked his question another way, and Mr. - said, ‘It sounds like we have a nigger in the woodpile.’

They lost the contract. As they should have!

she knows a place where the music is fine and the lights are always low

There has never been a great difference between rhythm and gospel songs except, of course, for the lyrical content; in fact, the latter are far more rhythmic where staging is concerned. It is essentially the fervour, the animation and boundless spirit of gospel singing that Presley admires, and which has been absorbed into his own dynamic performances. . . . Presley favours beat and ballad singers alike, . . . -- which leads to this possible answer for the ‘Why?’ of his unprecedented appeal: Elvis Presley, by combining the four fields (country, gospel, rhythm and pop) into perfect unity, is unique in music annals and experience.

(Quoted in The Penguin Book of Rock & Roll Writing.)

It should be fairly common knowledge by now that the first stylistic forebear of rock ’n’ roll was Negro rhythm and blues and that the second was a secularized version of Negro gospel music.

[T]he Stones had a wild stage act, . . . they put on the best pop show I ever saw: final bonanza, hysterical and violent and sick but always stylized, always full of hype, and Jagger shaped up genuinely as a second Elvis, as heroic and impossible as that.

We never see the headlines
about breadlines
today,
and when we see the landlord
we can look that guy
straight in the eye