DM had a curious hang-up about commercial success - not seeing it as the guarantor of value and meaning exactly, because much of the charts is pap.... but he regarded the absence of commercial success as vitiating...
But the idea of rock-as-pop was running into problems by the time of the Velvets and Stooges... the best music was not necessarily charting
Roxy Music: Decadent, But What Is That?
Newsday, February 23 1975
The British rock band had been up all night, doing to their midwestern hotel what British rock bands are famous for doing. In the morning, their manager was presented with a bill for $1,500 damages, which he peeled off his roll nonchalantly.
The hotel manager, meanwhile, was explaining that he didn't really mind. "I've often wanted to do the same thing myself," he said.
The rock band manager looked at his charges and winked. They winked back. He peeled another $1,500 off his roll. The hotel manager began by kicking in the TV set.
Decadence has become the fashionable term in rock this year. What I have just described is presumed to be a part of the phenomenon, though only on the part of the band and its manager. Was the hotel manager decadent? "Well, in order to be decadent you don't have to be wealthy, but it helps to be able to afford it," said Bryan Ferry, lead singer of Roxy Music, a group that can't yet afford $1,500 damage bills.
Decadence is not a trend, though it has some of the attributes of one. It is just part of the ever expanding vocabulary of the rock fan, who five years ago was taught to spell psychedelic by the Grateful Dead, and last year learned what androgynous meant from David Bowie. But decadence encompasses both the drug culture of the Dead and the sex culture of Bowie, the New York Dolls and Alice Cooper. In fact, that sort of polymorphous sexual culture might be what the American Heritage Dictionary means when it notes that the original decadents — a group of 19th Century French and English writers — tended toward "over-refinement."
The American Heritage adds that the decadents "found inspiration in the macabre, neurotic or morbid." The Rolling Stones sum up the rock meaning of the term in the central lines from their greatest album, Exile on Main Street, "Kick me like you kicked before/I can't even feel the pain no more."
But it is Roxy Music, a five-piece British group, that has been chosen, by listeners and critics alike, as the ultimate example of rock decadence. Rolling Stone magazine called their latest album, Country Life, "decadent cabaret." But no one, least of all the group, seems certain what that means.
Is Bryan Ferry decadent? "When I'm at home, away from all this, I probably lead what might be considered a very decadent life," he said, "but that doesn't mean I have 7-year-old boys chained to my radiator."
But surely Roxy Music is decadent? "You ought to ask our drummer, Paul Thompson, about that," saxophonist Andy McKay said. "He didn't even know who Oscar Wilde was. Now he does. 'Oh, you mean that fag,' he says."
And, indeed, Paul Thompson is the best argument that Roxy Music is not quite what it seems. He's a large, awkward (except on stage), ruddy-cheeked Geordie kid, with an accent right out of A Hard Day's Night. He dresses as those who tend toward chunkiness must, and he can be as innocent as Ferry and McKay can be cosmopolitan. "I don't really approve of eating ducks," he said glumly at dinner one night in a Manhattan restaurant. He speared a piece anyway. "Why not?" someone asked. "I like ducks," he replied, ruefully chewing on a drumstick. One thing about decadents: they don't have compassion for ducks.
Thompson is deceptive. Roxy Music did emerge from an art school tradition of British rock, the same one that produced the Beatles, Who, Kinks and Yardbirds. Of Roxy's three founders, the uni-nominative Eno, and Ferry and McKay, only McKay was academically trained in music. Ferry was schooled in painting, Eno in sculpture. Guitarist Phil Manzanera was a musician but an experimental one.
Paul Thompson changed them. "I really think that choosing Paul as the drummer saved the group," McKay said. "He's not any sort of intellectual like the rest of us. He's just been trying to drum as best he could ever since he got out of school." McKay is right, of course. What makes Roxy Music interesting is its resolution of one of rock's central conflicts: the fight between the Americanized rock and roll tradition and what was added later, the Europeanized experimental and classical traditions. Bryan Ferry and Andy McKay are fascinated by America, but they play like Europeans. Paul Thompson never will be anything but an Englishman, but he has American music down pat. As with Charlie Watts, a 4/4 beat is home to him.
The group's other preoccupations make the decadence charge more plausible. The name harks back to the '30s, and Bryan Ferry's lyrics often have the flavor of the Berlin of Cabaret. The group's album covers all feature half-naked women, in the pin-up calendar tradition of the '40s; on one of them, the model is a sex-change.
As Andy McKay and Phil Manzanera like to point out, the music is not particularly decadent. The charge really stems from Ferry's obtuse, fey lyrics, which are as full of ennui and dissipation as anything Cole Porter or Noel Coward has written. Unfortunately, Ferry's lyrics rarely mean anything; the real trick is the way they fit his voice. He can sing about Texas as though it were an orgy, about "the thrill of it all" like the most jaded dilettante. Because the music is often ominous, the charge sticks.
Most interestingly, however, Ferry has made a pair of solo albums that come very close to defining what it is about rock that incurs the charges of decadence. The albums, These Foolish Things and Another Time, Another Place, treat a variety of rock oldies — from Dylan and the Stones to Leslie Gore and Dobie Gray — with the same enervated dispassion given to 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes' and 'These Foolish Things'. It is all very mordant, all of it more enraptured with style than meaning. Because Ferry is the most stylized singer in rock, the irony is even heavier.
The point, of course, is that rock is part of the same tradition that Porter and Coward were part of. There is no mistaking Porter and Coward's decadence, of course, but rock and roll, with its fascination with sex and death and the places where they intermingle, is equally decadent, from its root. Porter never wrote a lyric more morbid than Elvis Presley's great masterpiece. 'Mystery Train', nor more jaded than Dylan's 'Sooner or Later (One of Us Must Know)'.
Bette Midler's juxtaposition of Broadway and rock makes much the same statement, of course. But, for all that they may be taken as exemplars of decadence, Roxy Music is really a way out. As with most things, the only way to beat the ennui, to avoid becoming a dilettante, is to create a form that wrings meaning and commitment from just those things. And, as has been the case for 20 years, the best way to do that is find yourself a rock and roll band.
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Decadence, in the conventional view of how history works, is always seen as the maggoty phase in a society before the barbarian reinvigoration of fascism.
Marsh, being firmly on the left, often seemed to be worried about a form of fascism manifesting itself through rock.
And fair enough really given Bowie's talk of dictators being needed and the "visions of swastikas" wafting around and out of Iggy and Lou Reed....
Here's where the fascism-fear and the burgeoning Anglophobia conjoin and erupt: his infamous review of Queen's Jazz, in Rolling Stone, 1979.
Anyway, it shouldn’t be surprising that Queen calls its album “jazz.” The guiding principle of these arrogant brats seems to be that anything Freddie & Company want, Freddie & Company get. What’s most disconcerting about their arrogance is that it’s so unfounded: Led Zeppelin may be as ruthless as medieval aristocrats, but at least Jimmy Page has an original electronic approach that earns his band some of its elitist notions. The only thing Queen does better than anyone else is express contempt.
Take the LP’s opening song, “Mustapha.” It begins with a parody of a muezzin’s shriek and dissolves into an approximation of Arabic music. This is part of Queen’s grand design. Freddie Mercury is worldly and sophisticated, a man who knows what the muezzin sounds like. More to the point, you don’t. What trips the group up, as usual, is the music. “Mustapha” is merely a clumsy and pretentious rewrite of “Hernando’s Hideaway,” which has about as much to do with Middle Eastern culture as street-corner souvlaki.
But it’s easy to ascribe too much ambition to Queen. “Fat Bottomed Girls” isn’t sexist—it regards women not as sex objects but as objects, period (the way the band regards people in general). When Mercury chants, in “Let Me Entertain You,” about selling his body and his willingness to use any device to thrill an audience, he isn’t talking about a sacrifice for his art. He’s just confessing his shamelessness, mostly because he’s too much of a boor to feel stupid about it.
Whatever its claims, Queen isn’t here just to entertain. This group has come to make it clear exactly who is superior and who is inferior. Its anthem, “We Will Rock You,” is a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you. Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band. The whole thing makes me wonder why anyone would indulge these creeps and their polluting ideas.
On one level, he's not entirely wrong... but on another level, it's absurd to take something so camp that seriously.
That the debut gets two stars where everything else gets one suggests that on a gut level he couldn't quite deny what his body told him which was that on Q: Are We Not Men? Devo were radically reinventing rock while still rocking, hard. (And despite the dread Anglo touch of Eno).
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To close, an acerbic two-parter in which Marsh takes the measure of his chosen field, Rock Criticism, ten years into its life. This was published in Rolling Stone at the end of 1976, start of '77.
The Critics' Critic
There's been nothing but grief since Newsweek (or was it the Sunday New York Times!) decided that rock critics invented Bruce Springsteen. Only a moron would have made such a claim, yet it was dignified by serious consideration.
More ran the obligatory dissection of the so-called hype. Robert Christgau, the Village Voice's putative Dean of American Rock Critics, discerned a Rock Critic Establishment consisting of himself, John Rockwell of the daily Times, freelancer Paul Nelson, semi-retiree Jon Landau and me. Elton John attacked Rockwell on the radio. Even the New Yorker ran a short story, "At Lunch with the Rock Critic Establishment," which happened to be the most moronic of the lot.
I have been uncharacteristically silent on the matter, but only partly out of common sense. Most of what's been written is too dumb to require response. And besides, all one has to do is glance at the charts to see that the effect of rock critics on the American record buyer is about equal to Gus Hall's sway on American presidential elections. Still, a couple of those pieces — Christgau's and one written by Peter Herbst, a frequently excellent critic who writes for the Boston Phoenix — were worthwhile reading. And, taken as a whole, they've given me the notion that someone out there is interested in the issues surrounding rock criticism, which is a first in my seven-year experience. Such scrutiny couldn't have come at a less opportune moment. Although just where rock began or ended has always been a matter of opinion, there used to be a consensus on its stylistic traits: a steady beat, some semblance of melodic hooks, an instrumental lineup that includes guitars, bass, drums, often keyboards and horns, and a basic verse-chorus-bridge song structure. Plus, of course, a measure of spirit.
Lately, the spirit of much criticism has turned away from these values, as though their usefulness had been exhausted. Today a record by Eno, which sounds like nothing more than an extended radar blip, has a better chance of acclaim than a well-crafted set of songs by Rod Stewart. Most criticism now seems concerned with expanding rock's form, apparently in order to eventually discard it, rather than using it to full advantage.
But my conviction that the possibilities of the backbeat have yet to be exhausted remains firm.
The greatest rock is still made within the limits of its traditional conventions — listen to 'Tumbling Dice' or 'Born to Run', 'Won't Get Fooled Again' or Rod Stewart's 'Tonight's the Night'. Neither the primitivism of the Ramones nor the avant-gardism of the Mahavishnu Orchestra can duck the fact that the greatest rock is still made within its classic value system.
Little rock criticism is concerned with music, because most rock critics are less concerned with sound than sociology. This can have depressing consequences. For instance, Springsteen's success is defined in terms of his critical cult, "punk" imagery, or his dramatic stage show. Hardly anyone has discussed his inventive use of song structure (multiple bridges, for example), his extraordinary guitar effects, or the simple power of his voice.
There's a good reason for this though. Most rock isn't worth discussing except as phenomenon, a result of working within a restrictive format. (Most symphonies would suck, too, if there were 4000 released a year — or even 40.) But it cripples criticism when everything is seen as event, nothing as art. At some point at least, the critic must deal with the work itself, rather than the circumstances surrounding it. A glance at any group of record reviews will tell you that most critics see the sound as a secondary issue. Gossip, event, phenomenon, psychology, lyric writing, all take precedence over music.
But most criticism has struck out lately, even as an analysis of phenomenon. This is partly because most critics fail to understand the basic rock phenomenon of the Seventies: it is now a huge business. Only recently has anyone begun to recognize this change, which posits a drastically different set of circumstances than existed in the Sixties. A classic example is a recent Village Voice article by Geoffrey Stokes, whose book, Star-Making Machinery, is the first attempt to come to terms with rock as a major industry. In discussing records which move from black audiences to white, or country to pop, Stokes presumes that any record on the pop chart has successfully crossed over in marketing terms. But if a country or soul record needed only to make Number 90 on the pop chart to be considered a pop hit, any Top Ten hit in those minority markets would do so. Record companies would hardly spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to force the issue.
One of the fundamental assumptions of phenomenological rock criticism has been that the record companies run by guesswork. This has never been true, as a glimpse at the history of the Brill Building will tell you — even 15 years ago the return on the investment of all those songwriters' weekly salaries could be calculated. Today, even large corporations are aware of the formula: steady touring, an album every 9 to 12 months, a reasonably disciplined and melodic songwriting approach and you too can have a hit — at least once. (Only talent sustains success.) The record companies also know that this process takes time — usually three or four albums' worth. Indeed, they're taking the long-range view, unlike the critics — how many artists have been written off as losses because of a bad album or two, even major ones like the Rolling Stones or John Lennon? But then, thoughtful analysis of a career is considerably less useful for self-promotion than attacking an icon.
The Critics' Critic II
Rock criticism is now often seen in many quarters as more important than rock itself. Many critics carry this one step further by superimposing their own, frequently arbitrary, standards upon performers.
A classic, sad example is Robert Christgau, whose "Consumer Guide" in the Village Voice was once a model of cogent, witty criticism. Lately, Christgau has grown arrogant and humorless — the raves are reserved for jazz artists, while even the best rock is treated condescendingly unless it conforms to Christgau's passion for leftist politics (particularly feminism) and bohemian culture. While he is far too shrewd to let his dislike for apolitical or middle-class performers affect his A plus to E minus rating of them, the tone of the writing is now snotty — it lacks compassion, not to mention empathy, with current rock.
The Christgau example is particularly dispiriting because when he lightens up on the ideology, he remains one of rock's most perceptive analysts. There are any number of parallel vices: the punk-rock critics, led by Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer, celebrate cultural garbage — televised wrestling, franchised foods, Quaaludes — and often wander into racism and sexism. Unfortunately for the punks, some mass culture artifacts are just garbage — Bangs and Meltzer usually know the difference but most of their followers and fellow punk critics do not, as a glance at an issue of Creem, their main outlet, quickly shows.
Pseudoacademics, on the other hand, insist that rock parallels literature and the resulting articles are often as opaque and obtuse as the worst scholarly papers. Currently, the most notable examples of pseudoacademicism are Ken Emerson (a liberal) of the Boston Phoenix and the Voice's Tom Hull (a Marxist) and Perry Miesel (a doleful structuralist). It is perhaps worth noting here that genuine academics, such as Jim Miller and Simon Frith, who make their livings as college professors, are among the most lucid critics, because they're not trying to earn respectability.
Today, the worst trend is toward amateur psychology. Here, offhand remarks, casual lyric references, gossip and rumor are manipulated to fit the critic's ideas. For Stephen Holden, for instance, the rumor that the Bee Gees are unhappy about parting with producer Arif Mardin means that: (a) their new album has production flaws; (b) their record company has done them an artistic disservice by joining a conglomerate for which Mardin doesn't work. The possibility that the Bee Gees may have already exhausted Mardin's bag of tricks is never discussed.
Each of these approaches can be useful, of course, and everyone (including myself) uses all of them at one time or another. But they are principally useful in writing about ideas, rather than rock itself. What all of these critical "schools" share is a tendency to value concepts more than results: Patti Smith became the critics' darling mostly because the idea of a tough, female rocker was so appealing. The problem is that her music (as opposed to her poetry or her poses) is so doggedly sloppy and mediocre that it cripples the concept.
Rock is not a nihilistic sideshow or a lifestyle manifesto. Like any living art, rock is in the process of development, and its first obligation is to internal integrity. That is why form is so important — rock does not encompass everything from the Carpenters to the Mahavishnu Orchestra, at least not artistically. Despite much contemporary theory, rock's links are not to the improvisatory tradition of jazz so much as to the songcrafting tradition bounded by Robert Johnson and, perhaps, George Gershwin. Like country and blues, rock is a music of limits which may be exploded but never discarded. The brilliant way in which Rod Stewart's 'Tonight's the Night' extends the elegant formalism of Sam Cooke's soul is a perfect example.
This is the essential strength of the music, which has much more to do with beauty, elegance and gracefulness than with an orderly set of ideas; externally imposed ideas can never bring order to it. But the critic's job ought to be just that — to find a way to give rock an artistic order. If the rather ancient approaches listed above will not suffice, what will?
What is necessary, it seems to me, is not a new critical perspective. All of the tools listed above as sins are valuable. They are self-defeating only when used exclusively: the psychologist rarely concerns himself with politics, the punk never bothers with Art in its classic sense. Any of these approaches might make rock criticism respectable, but none of them can make it meaningful. For that, a greater flexibility is in order.
