Musically, my Songbook is grounded upon Martha Bayles’s theory of American popular music, and my last post gave an account of what I believe I’ve learned from her. In the next several posts, I’ll be providing some elaborations upon or reactions to her theory.
That theory is presented in Hole in our Soul, published in 1994. How did Bayles envision pop groups returning to more soulful sounds?
1) The primary cure was for artists to learn the methods of the various strands of the Afro-American tradition that gave the music blues and swing.
2) This could happen in more or less obviously rootsy ways. What artists come in for praise in Bayles’ final chapter? In roots music generally, Bonnie Riatt, Dire Straits, Lyle Lovett; in country, the various “mavericks” such as Willie Nelson, and the honky-tonkers; in contemporary R+B, groups like Boyz II Men trying to bring more melodic elements into hip-hop; in “new wave” folks like Elvis Costello who “made the journey home from camp” to the R+B elements they loved, or groups like the Culture Club who while sounding very contemporary on the surface, were deeply influenced by classic soul; in jazz, Wynton Marsalis and other “neo-classicists.” Some of these examples I am skeptical about, particularly her singling out The Police as worthy of special praise for deriving a new pop sound from reggae and jazz. Likewise, this was a list put together in the early 90s, and certain trends did not wind up impacting the music as much as she hoped.
3) One of her repeated hopes is that the pattern of pop artists employing jazz-trained musicians will again become common, as happened quite a bit with classic soul; the flip side of this is that jazz musicians will return to greater openness to pop opportunities, particularly recognizing their own musical need for interaction with dancing audiences.
4) While Bayles defends the popularity of oldies radio among the young, and celebrates the bands who strayed from punk or new wave dogmas into more R+B like territory, she is wary of outright revivalism. There is a passage where she notes that it is something that black musicians and audiences almost never fool with: trad jazz, Northern Soul, the rockabilly revival, the ska scene—these are, particularly the last three, not associated w/ Afro-American audiences, whatever the attraction the initial ska revival had to Jamaicans in Britain.
5) There is a telling passage in which she criticizes bluegrass as being, from its beginning, too much of a “purist stronghold.” Rules, such as the “no-drums” rule, are too zealously adhered too. Preservation is almost as problematic, then, as revivalism. Had her book come out a few years later, surely she would have heaped praise on Allison Krause, precisely for bending bluegrass in more pop-friendly directions.
6) So it looks like the ideal Baylesian pop artists are those who learn from the roots, but who “mix it up” a bit, who avoid revivalism and/or purist preservationism. She’s surely pleased, as Peter and I are, at the success of Adele.
I do part ways with Bayles somewhat, in that I think pop music has quite a bit to gain from the “purists” and “retro-maniacs,” and particularly in its ongoing period of post-1970s confusion. Maybe I do so because the idea that somehow a band like the Police were better than a retro band like that I experienced first-hand like The Paladins, is one I simply cannot accept. But I have arguments that are less “you-had-to-be-there” experience-dependent. First, I think the retro rock and rollers have simply been proven to be largely correct about older analog amplification and recording techniques. Second, there is something about the retro and purist spirit which seems increasingly necessary to pull off the “root doctoring” that Bayles recommends.
I’m going to flesh out these arguments by, yes, talking about the Bangles.
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What you’ll notice about “I’m in Line” is that sonically and sartorially, the Bangles were in full retro rock and roll mode when they did this—it’s from their first E.P, around 1983, which was followed up around 1984 with an excellent L.P. called All over the Place. It was only in 1986, with the release of In a Different Light, from which the hit singles “Manic Monday” and “Walk Like an Egyptian” were taken, that the Bangles dropped the retro style. (Live, things were another story; i.e., they rocked, they rolled, and they remained a band that sounded just fine playing a Yardbirds cover.)
Let’s do some comparing and contrasting. How do the retro-ed Bangles sound when compared to a) the Go Gos, a band that had retro proclivities, but ones half-cloaked behind up-to-the-moment production and New Wave stylings, and b) to the post-1986 Bangles, once they had made their sound much more contemporary, i.e. more “80s” than “60s”?
a) Comparing “I’m in Line” to “Our Lips Are Sealed” we can hear that the latter definitely has a catchier melody; i.e., we can understand why it became a hit. But we can also hear, and even see—look at the way Belinda Carlise has to dance!—that it is a less rhythmically dynamic piece. While the repeated quick drum break is fun and the can you see them! chorus injects infectious enthusiasm, the overall rhythm of the song is just passably danceable. It invites that kind of half-committed swaying, or over-committed back-and-forth flopping, that black comedians exaggerate when they want to make fun of white people dancing, or that my wife and call the “Peanuts prance” after the way Linus, Lucy, and the gang dance . “I’m in Line,” however, is aggressively percussive from note one, such that it will accommodate mediocre Peanuts dancers, but give the better ones plenty to work with. And the guitar sound is not softened nor back-grounded the way it is “Our Lips Are Sealed, but is right there, Beatles-style, pushing you along with its clank-ety echo and jerky attack. I say it’s the Bangles, or at least their record, we’re going to want playing at our party.
The Go Gos seem to have been an attempt to inject the basic features of the girl-group sound of the mid-60s into the sound of today, and see where it goes, whereas the Bangles seem to have been a purist 60s thing, involving a collision of the early Beatles with the Mamas and the Papas, but conducted with devotion to far more than the ‘basic features’ of these respective sounds.
b) Songs like “Manic Monday” and “Walk Like an Egyptian” seem to be the result of the Bangles deciding to give the non-purist approach of the Go Gos a go of their own. Unfortunately, hip producers’ notion of what sounded “contemporary” was even lamer in 1986 than it had been in 1982, and the original fans of the Bangles found the near-total ditching of 1960s production values, and the replacement of starkly jangly guitars with ones lost amid cushions of synths, rather disappointing. A “sell-out.” The Bangles did gain newer fans, however,(“Egyptian” was irresistible, even if the popularity of something as limp as “Manic Monday” remains mysterious), and in their live shows they remained true to themselves. I do not know what they’ve since said about the change, but I think their original sound was clearly superior. I don’t care if it must be labeled as “retro” and had some relation to them wearing vintage mod gear. It simply sounds better.
25 years later, when they’ve recorded a new album, the sound they’ve chosen is far more like their earlier one than that of their late-80s hit-making. It’s funny–for the Bangles in 1986 to have remained truer to their core artistry would have required them to dig-in their heels about their 60s sound. I imagine I understand how tempting it was to think that their anachronistic-regarded sounds could be adapted to be made palatable to a wider audience, and someone probably told them that by doing so they would keep the rock and roll spirit alive in contemporary pop. And unquestionably, doing so got them through the door to allow for more music making, whereas we don’t know how their career would have gone had they done otherwise.
In 2012, however, there is a much broader opinion, particularly amid indie rock artists, that 50s-to-early-70s amplification and recording techniques are superior to what followed. The case is at least strong enough to continue to cultivate some of those techniques. Many now feel, regardless of their having rock and roll retro proclivities or not, that analog sound is at least slightly better than digital, which is why records and turntables are selling again, and why, to take one example among many, a rising classical music star like the Russian pianist Valentina Lisitsa announces that her new recordings will be analog. So on this issue, at least, the retro rock and rollers have been vindicated.
So it’s ever-more ridiculous that some kind of major objection would be posed against a band wanting to use vintage instruments and to leave synthesizers and such out of the mix. The 80s fetish for synths and the production techniques that went with them now seems more than a bit bizarre: maybe a song like Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” really had to have those synths in it to work, but our suspicion is that it was a capitulation to a narrow-minded conception of what was with-it, and that an organ or a horn-section would have done nicely instead. And again, it was these same narrow-minded notions, which consigned the records by the two greatest bands of the 80s, the The Tell-Tale Hearts and the Paladins, to the “too retro to play” file. A mistake, and an injustice.
So, let’s say it’s the early 80s, and you’ve been called in to advise a band like the Bangles or the Go Gos. They want to know: given the basic shape of their sound, should they be forthrightly retro, or should they try to sound as contemporary as possible? What should you say? In hindsight, I think the answer for the Bangles is clear: they should have kept more to their original retro sound–All over the Place walked the line between retro and contemporary about as well as possible. And while it’s harder to argue with the Go Gos’ hits, which were pretty darn good hits, I do think that in terms of pure excellence, the answer should have been: get more retro—don’t footsy around so much with 80s production and simple rhythms, and get Jane’s guitar out there where it can be heard!
And here’s the kicker: myself, or someone who similarly appreciated what the very best rock and roll revivalists were accomplishing in the early 80s, would have been more likely to give that correct advice than Martha Bayles. She’s ultimately too scared of the “revivalist” charge. She probably would have told the Bangles to “mix it up,” to follow commerce’s imperatives, and thus to go that dreary Different Light path.
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Here’s the other argument. I want to ask, how was it that the Go Gos, the Bangles, and what the heck, let’s throw in Allison Krause too, got devoted to their music, so that it could even become a question of how to best present it and record it? And the answer is obvious, particularly in the latter two cases: it was through the purist spirit, the spirit that said, rock and roll reached a peak in ’65-‘66…and I’m going to learn as much as I can about it –or– country reached a peak with Bill Monroe and co.…and I’m going to learn as much as I can about it. That is, even if the Bangles were right in 1986 to go the contemporary route, and I would have given them narrow-minded and career-killing advice by keeping them more retro, the truth is there never would have been a Bangles in the first place without the spirit of retro. The incipient young Bangles did not say around 1980, as perhaps an incipient Billie Holiday did around 1930, “what are the contemporary sounds that we can plug into and make music to.” No, for them, “the contemporary sounds” came with a large asterisk, an asterisk that said, “well, the contemporary* sounds were quite a bit better twenty years ago.” Just as Billie Holiday had to hang out at the whore-house to hear the latest Louis Armstrong records playing(hence her famous saying that, had the church been playing those records, she would have been hangin’ out there), the Bangles had to get into the obsessive labor of re-collecting the records of the recent past to hear the sounds that were going to nourish them. And we grant that their doing this was a much less organic thing than what Billie did. But the bottom line is this: our times have not been ones like the 1920s-1960s when a promising young musician could just plug herself into some main channel of the contemporary sounds to arrive at her own excellence. I.e., in our era there is something about the retro spirit, that put-the-blinders-on so-as-to-focus purism, that can be the best pathway to musical excellence.
I’ll leave you with a last comparison. Perhaps the post-1986 Bangles’ best hit was the ballad “Eternal Flame.” It’s pretty good, as contemporary ballads go. I’m glad it was a hit, happy for the persons who courted to it or otherwise cherished it. But my taste says that this, a song Susanna Hoffs sang with the Paisely Underground “all-star” group Rainy Day, is a better balladic instance of her Bangles-esque artistry. Yes, it’s a cover. Yes, it’s very simple, and very retro, zeroed in on a certain ‘66-‘67 hippie vibe. But is it not superior? Is there any iron-clad reason a young artist of today could not make a recording similar to that one, and not have it become a hit? What is it that absolutely destines public taste to cling to the glossy production values that would keep it from becoming one? Would “Eternal Flame” have sounded better recorded that way? The success of artists like She & Him, the late Amy Winehouse, and now Adele are signs that questions like those remain open ones.
February 24th, 2012 | 12:21 am
Bayles’ litany of latecomers of setting a recovery of root down is pretty good. I am particularly struck by her insight regarding Boy George and Culture Club. I was never a big fan as a young man, but somehow growing up in the 80s vis a vis Empty V and regular pop radio, I was familiarly immersed in this band’s oeuvre. I guess I liked Culture Club as much as I liked 80s version ZZ Top. Musically these bands were inescapable.
Bayles is right that Culture Club were, beneath the surface, as much about a recovery of “soul” music as were more obvious candidates like the Fine Young Cannibals.
From the early 90s there is–somewhere–a video of Boy George (in his immense transgender effeminacy) singing the hits of Culture Club on MTV’s Unplugged. This was before all his drug troubles, or at least before they became out of hand. Regardless, he and his band played some of the most spectacular R&B music I had heard on TV in a while. It sounded both authentic and sincere, at least authentic and sincere for an Englishman of troubled gender (a la Judith Butler) singing such songs.
So Culture Club deserves more respect as a recovery of or at least perpetuation of a true importance of “soul” than its at the time bizarre and silly image would lead a typical listener to believe.
February 24th, 2012 | 9:53 am
With the Culture Club, it’s feels ridiculous to say anything more than what is undeniable if you close your eyes: “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” is a great song, as pop songs go. On the basis of that alone I’m sure John’s report about the excellence of the unplugged Boy George is accurate.
February 24th, 2012 | 11:56 am
Wasn’t the ‘New Wave’ you promote self-defeating? Boy George’s exhibitionism would seem to be what brought Culture Club to the attention of the world, just as the late Amy Winehouse was celebrated for her brief bohemian life. That they may have been purists, or a brief meter of what we’ve lost musically was overshadowed comprehensively by the performance art that Ms.Bayles and you seem to find cancerous.
It’s a sort of musical Quietism.
Then again, I am of the opinion that anything that can be described as “new” to an existing convention is the last rites and ossification of that artifact [New Wave, New Coke, Neo-Scholasticism...] Your admiration for the Paladins and the other purists is noble and the only way to actually combat the more poisonous aspects of modernity is to pretend it doesn’t exist but then, you have to be prepared to live in an impossible bubble and risk losing any sense of mass media and confronting the problem head on- zealots can hold the line but they can’t win converts.
And I cannot help but recognize that what you are describing intellectually is what Kurt Cobain, for all his petulance, cowardice and inconsistency; described in his own tumult both musically and in his morose life, however inchoate. I know you are keen to focus on the 80s’ and have a disliking for 90s’ ROCK, but your whole songbook and its struggles with perverse modernism can be intuitively heard in Nirvana’s Nevermind. There is no other album that better encapsulates and capitulates to the failure of modernity with one man’s desperate attempt to hold onto something through the perversion.
From Gravity’s Rainbow [which seems to have inspired Smells Like Teen Spirit] to the appropriation of other writers (particularly beats) transgressions and attempting to tame it in something altogether altermodern- and unlike the popular narrative, his cowardice and need to fit in belied what was a rather conservative and conventional musical sense and weltanschauung.
Take Come As You Are for example, which is a blues riff with lyrics taken directly from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms [every line of the song is a part of the dialogue between the Nurse and Henry- and the refrain "I don't have a gun" can be found when the Lieutenant is confronted by the Italians who are carrying out executions for "treachery." Is not "A Farewell to Arms" the founding novel of the Modern Individualized Man who has no allegiances with family, tribe or nation- a man who refuses to dance to protect his individualism- a Will to Secure if not precisely (at least in the American mold) a Will to Power?
I'm not as perceptive as the lot of you, but I believe you are ignoring the prescience of the moment that someone like Mr.Cobain, as an actual outsider saw:
It's well and good to talk about revivals and recovery but as good as Culture Club was, they could not and they left no auricular children; these things died by the 1980s' (or with the last mass audience to grow up close to the transition and break from the past) and there was little left of it, on a national [popular?] scale, even by the time Mr.Cobain came around. There is no going back, and all we have left is to talk with the same nihilistic language:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuDLOYLIhpI&
February 24th, 2012 | 8:41 pm
MPB, I’ve never dove into Nirvana’s lyrics…but on the basis of the more well-known songs, they seem pretty strong in a zietgeist-attuned way. Probably I should give Nevermind a good long listen. As you detect, I have a kind of visceral hostility to grunge. Overall, the idea of the alternative set themselves>/i> redoing hard-rock was too much for me to take in the early 90s. And since I had always disliked the Bauhaus-styled hyperbolic evocations of modern bleakness, the grunge practice of adding such post-punk angst to the heavier moments of hard rock was no plus for me, but a combination of elements already bad enough on their own.
My (perhaps fatally uninformed) initial response to Nirvana’s most famous lyric, here we are now, entertain us, is basically to say, “What are you complaining about? Either you have what it takes to deliver great and profound art, and no Kurt, neither you nor most rock artists usually do, or, you accept the fact that you are in the entertainment business, and you don’t ask, the way Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Roy Acuff, Bennie Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Muddy Waters, Buddy Holly, Dick Dale, the early Beatles, the early Temptations, and Johnny Cash all didn’t ask, for audiences that come to you for some grand purpose or message. All those artists, Kurt, were grateful for audiences who basically just wanted to be entertained. Your expectations have been screwed up somehow by this Rock and especially Punk imperative that it all mean something major. That it be some rescuing response to Modernity. If that’s what you’re after, then why aren’t you studying classical composition, or how to be the next Hemingway or Percy? Is Rock really capable of serving the ambitions you have for it? Is that Bob Dylan moment that repeatable? And Bob at least knew enough of the blues that he could move a dance-hungry crowd, whereas Kurt, we’re not so sure you could.”
Maybe that’s unfair, MFB, but it doesn’t have that tone of resignation to modernity/nihilism that pervades your comment, and seems key to your admiration of Nirvana. The same modernity that made Cobain a star also has preserved the sounds of the Paladins, Johnny Cash, etc., and so whatever “language,” including the language of blues dancing, that goes with such sounds can thus to some extent be ours, especially if we don’t demand in advance, as Cobain does in that song you linked, that everyone only talk to us in “their own language” which gets presumed to be a nihilistic/hyper-modern one.
Resistance is not futile. Indeed, to tweak the title of one of Lawler’s books, we are Stuck with It. That is also an unavoidable part, an authentic part, of our “own language.”
But MPB, thanks for calling my attention to “Talk to Me.” It does raise this very important question of what it means to be authentic, particularly in regards to one’s “class” and education, a question that, as I’ll explain a couple Songbook posts from now, was essential to the creation of the Rock sound and stance.
February 25th, 2012 | 10:32 pm
Wow! MPB, good comments. I think you have presented a dilemma of the relationship between “neo-ism” and the problem of purity that is a needed conversation. Plus I never knew the Hemingway-Nirvana connection. I learned something. Good comments!
February 28th, 2012 | 2:31 pm
Thank you Mr.Presnall,
I don’t think many people have made the Hemingway-Nirvana connection, (even though the lyrics are literally a line-for-line stolen from the dialogue between the nurse and Lieutenant,) because of the way the band and Kurt Cobain marketed themselves. We are discussing a rather sensitive to the point of pusillanimity character who compulsively lied about who he was. And the band, to his own consternation, was sold as the “alterna-RAWK” anti-heroes: first as uneducated and unwashed simpletons from backwoods Washington then later as accidental savants speaking for a generation. After all, for all the talk of genius and art associated with Mr.Cobain by rock literati and the public alike, very few people seem to have taken the time to actually think through his innuendo…perhaps its because attributing the myth to him has always been more important than anything that could be truthfully said.
I wish not to psychoanalyze too much here, but most of his personal distress and anguish seems to be from an inability to “be authentic” to what he was attempting to fit into. This is why Nevermind particularly encapsulates the spirit of what Mr.Scott’s Songbook is elucidating. You get the sense from the album that he is saying, “Something is wrong here” even if he cannot, or will not, put his finger on it. And unlike the other alternative rock bands which either embraced the transgressive (Sonic Youth and Alice in Chains) or had full control of that rock idiom Mr.Scott is talking about (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins,) you get the sense from Cobain that he is totally overwhelmed by the rock medium and isn’t “making a counter-cultural statement” but criticizing the whole exercise, including the punk rock and feminism which inspired this particular album.
Mr.Scott’s criticisms aren’t too off- if he wanted to make art then he should’ve studied and he shouldn’t have whined about his fame. But I do not believe these criticisms get to the heart of the matter or trenchantly describe Cobain’s problem. He wasn’t the myth he presented himself as:
-All his lyrics, which throughout interviews he claimed to have written on the fly or in a William Burough’s cut-and-paste style were actually crafted over months and years in his journals. Even the playlists to his albums he would fret over- then when it came time to hand it over to the studio, he would pretend to make it up on the spot. He practiced the appearance of a punk rocker more than he was one.
-He constantly made up stories about who he was: he never lived under a bridge, his first concert wasn’t a punk rock show but Todd Rundgren; he was constantly embarrassed, criticized and dismissed by his artsy-friends for being too “mainstream.” The influences closet to his heart were the early Beatles albums (with the Beatles being his favorite) old bluesmen and New Wave bands. And I have heard first hand that when he moved to Olympia and started hanging out with his more educated peers going to school there, he’d reveal his naivete by playing them records by bands like the Paladins…Cobain and Krist Novoselic [the bassist] started as a Creedence Clearwater Revivial cover band.
*Here’s their 1988 cover of Bad Moon Rising:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrYia-5u3q8
-And unlike the gloom and dreariness that hovers over his legacy and the band in general because of his suicide; if you read those early interviews and reviews of their shows, Nirvana wasn’t a “serious” band (like, say Pearl Jam was and still is) but charming, quirky, constantly joking and meant to entertain.
…which leads to Nevermind, which is a frustrated and confused refutation of the feminist punk rock/DIY collegial alternative rock movment he found in Olympia, particulary in his relationship to Bikini Kill’s Tobi Vail- the paramour that thoroughly inspired the whole album if not each particular song.
The original title of the album was “Sheep” and split into a girl side and a boy side. Hit songs like Smells Like Teen Spirit and Lithium were originally apart of the “girl side” and seem to embody the frustration he felt in courting a woman who rejected all traditions, down to actual boyfriend-girlfriend relationships, as being patriarchal. This was both fascinating and repulsive to a man from a damaged home who for all his talk in the press about supporting feminism, obsessed over his masculinity and even wrote, (now more morbid considering what’s occurred,) in his journals that if he ever had a child he’d marry the mother and if divorce was imminent, he’d kill himself.
This comment is too long to go into detail about each song, but that most famous lyric, the one which captures the zeitgeist: “Here we are now, entertain us” is the strongest rebuke of that spirit he saw around him. As the album grew larger, the criticism and resentment he held for the audience he wrote it for (educated kids embracing perverse modernity) became turned on his audience in general. “In Bloom” was no longer about his best friend who used the medium to seem authentic while picking up women, but “frat boys” who came to his concerts to impress females. “Lithium” was no longer the confusion a female displays in the new post-marital world to his frustration in trying to form an actual relationship but a criticism of the “phoniness” displayed by the world at large when they started celebrating him as a rock star. The whole point of the album seems to have been to stick it to those peers who could never accept him because he wasn’t hip enough and had no formal education to make “art” which turns into out and out resentment when the world picks up the album and in interview after interview seem to miss the point- something Mr.Scott rightly criticizes. Yeah, it is whiny and not something one should expect but: In the end, he wasn’t educated enough to know better, nor was he educated enough in the idiom to be taken seriously by his peers, the one thing he seems to have wanted; there was no escape from the rock paradigm for him. A man like Mr.Cobain, sixty years ago, would pick up on the Johnny Cash idiom and run with it; it’s not something you learn in a school, which is the ultimately something Nevermind speaks of: what is celebrated as primitive is being perpetuated by our educated class, and the only way in the door to make a living at it is to be educated enough to be primitive. Chuck Berry, if born later, would have been swept up in the same culture. You don’t learn rock&roll in math class, you get it from what your peers do and seem to want and these idioms don’t really exist when you have to consciously go out of your way to play them.
I don’t mean to sound defeated and my interest here may seem like admiration but it is more so a fascination because it was Nirvana that clued me into what Mr.Scott is now writing, even if I wasn’t able to cogently explain what it was exactly disturbed me and I’ve been trying to reject or cope with. Without getting too personal, I’ve lived an unusual life where I’ve come into contact with some of these people and the culture they perpetuate. So if I sound defeated, it is only because these idioms, as mentioned, are being lost. For example, I’ve tried my best in keeping all my musical interests to the locale I’ve resided (I’ve never gone to a big rock show) or embracing older classical forms that are still played.
But such a position finds one quickly isolated from their peers in a bad way. You know how many dates have gone poorly because I wasn’t familiar enough with what’s on the net or in a subculture now a days? Or sitting at the piano, or with a guitar, to play fifties rock and roll with people who are both unfamiliar with it or hold disparaging connotations to that sort of music? I’m in my late 20s’ now, I’ve been around the world and sadly lived a bohemian life [I'm a horrible failure at trying to embrace bourgeois living no matter how hard I've tried] and my experience has informed me that things don’t look so pretty when you have a constant barrage of perverse modernity creeping into everything; where is the space for someone like me to adapt? Nirvana, and Mr.Cobain were a failed attempt at such an adaptation.
February 28th, 2012 | 11:34 pm
I like long comments like this one, MPB. I’m impressed w/ your commitment to support local musicians, and older forms.
And I’ve never read anything that made we want to learn more about Kurt Cobain. A CCR cover-band! Now that is cool! I had always read he was some big metal-head prior to getting turned on to alternative/punk.
As for some of your broader points, we we’ll have other posts to go into them I suppose, but I do agree that Cobain likely couldn’t escape the rock paradigm.
Interesting tid-bit about contemporary dating there, too.
February 29th, 2012 | 12:57 pm
Mr.Scott,
I’ve gone on long enough about this but I’d just like to say that I look forward to the continuation of the series, even if the gavotte will not be returning to fashion.
March 18th, 2012 | 11:22 pm
[...] last Songbook post could have been titled What Martha Bayles Has to Learn from Retro Rock n’ Roll. This post could [...]
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