It was a year ago that I unleashed my first Carl’s Rock Songbook entry upon the world. It’s time to look back and see what’s unfolded so far.
Maybe another day I’ll link all of these, but for now I’d call your attention to the SEARCH FIRST THINGS box over on the upper right-hand corner. Simply paste the title there, or enter in “Carl’s Rock Songbook”.
1. The Zombies, “Time of the Season”
2. The Zombies, “Changes”
3. The Zombies, “Friends of Mine”
4. The Poetic Wisdom Paradox, Amplified
5. U2, “New Years Day”
6. Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind”
7. Duke Ellington, “Come Sunday,” and The Velvet Underground, “Sunday Morning”
8. Bob Dylan, “Masters of War”
9. Marilynne Robinson, “I Miss Civilization”
10. Rock and Roll Patriotism
11. Rock and Roll Patriotism Defended
12. The Who, “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and “My Generation”
13. The Ramones, “Bliztkrieg Bop”
14. Rock, Rock, Rock, Rock, Rock n’ Roll Grad School
15. Rock’s Social Geography
16. Rock’s Leftism
17. What Rock Does Well
18. David Bowie, “The Prettiest Star”
19. A Muse for the Middle
20. 9-11: The Day the Rock Muse Died?
21. David Bowie, “Sunday”
22. Joe Pug, “I Do My Father’s Drugs”
23. The Beach Boys, “That’s Not Me”
24. Simon and Garfunkel, “I Am a Rock”
25. Simon and Garfunkel, “Sounds of Silence”
26. The Three Stages of Modernity
27. Are There Anti-Abortion Rock Songs?
28. Intermediate Modernity
29. Cary Grant Did Acid
30. The Byrds, “Why?”
31. The Beatles, “Eleanor Rigby”
32. The Zombies, “A Rose for Emily”
33. The Waterboys, “December”
34. The Kinks, “Waterloo Sunset”
35. Robert Pacilio, “Rock of Ages”
36. Crystal Castles, “Baptism”
37. XTC, “Life Begins at the Hop”
38. The Gravedigger V, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday”
39. What Martha Bayles Said
40. The Bangles, “I’m in Line”
41. The Cramps, “Goo-Goo Muck”
42. The Who, “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere”
43. Roll Over Beethoven?
Occasionally, a reader comment or a holiday (or the number seven!) will elicit a stand-alone Songbook post, but otherwise, I’ve been providing bundles of connected posts. Some of these bundles center around particular songs or artists, others are more thematic.
Songbook posts 1-4 provide the following: a reading of the three songs, especially “Time of the Season,” a sketched analysis of the entire Odessey and Oracle album, and a consideration of the sexual revolution’s relation to rock. #4 makes its own Plato-related point, but also provides a final judgment of “Time.”
Posts 5-9, with #7 excepted, are about rock and the historicist pacifist hope, with #9 connecting such “pacifism” with the mainstreaming of anger-expression. These are the most overtly political and bitingly conservative of the Songbook entries, and the ones that elicited the most comments.
Entries 10-13 introduce readers to my Martha Bayles-schooled stance that distinguishes rock from rock and roll, and which regards it as aesthetically inferior to it. (This is also developed in 37-39 and 41.)
14-19 all concern “rock intellectualizing,” but they contain some of my most important (and briefest!) statements yet about the overall rock phenomenon and its relation to democratic modernity.
20-22 use the tenth anniversary of 9/11 to consider the contemporary unease/ambivalence of rock’s leftism.
23-25, 31-32, and 34 analyze Loneliness and Individualism songs.
26, and 28-30, jumping off of “The Sounds of Silence,” presents my theory of the three stages of modernity exhibited in the 20th century.
36-43 is a yet-to-be completed series that overall, is trying to interweave two fairly subtle topics together. First, it is trying to articulate how contemporary rock seems to be in a pattern of Perpetual Repetition, but how that mode is different from the Retro Rock and Roll stance that arose in the late 70s/early 80s—this is very much a response to, or a working out of my own thinking in the light of, Simon Reynolds’ fine book Retromania. Second, it is trying to more thoroughly explain, and in the light of my Tocquevillian/Liberal Education sociology of middle class music/identity, why the transition from rock n’ roll to Rock occurred in the first place, and why it set a certain pattern of middle-class mixtery-music that was doomed from the beginning to fall into its now-obvious mode of Perpetual Repetition.
There is no question that 36-43 have been the longest and most involved posts of the Songbook, and that they have strayed from the more accessible Songbook pattern of grounding things in a discussion of a well-known song. I promise I will return to that pattern soon enough, once I get my main ideas in this area expressed.
The best posts are probably 34, 25, 6, and 1-3 taken as a package. Perhaps the funniest is 14, the most historically informative is 38, and as I’ve said elsewhere, 15 is key.
But what do you say? Or, do you have any suggestions, or requests?
P.S. I do think my Songbook deserves to eventually win for itself a significant place among the works seeking to interpret the overall rock phenomena, but for now it remains a peculiar feature of Postmodern Conservative, and unknown to those who would most benefit from it, the handful of sane pop-culture theorists, and the more general class of intellectually open rock hipsters. It’s too early to tell if it will get lost in the shuffle of disposable internet-commentary, or not.
May 1st, 2012 | 12:24 pm
In honor of the first anniversary of the CRS:
Rock, Rock, Rock, Rock, Rock n’ Roll Grad School!
I’m just tryin’ to get my P-H-D
Rock fun, Rock n’ Roll Grad School
And they’re Straussin’ it up at U-T, B-C
Rock fun, Rock n’ Roll Grad School
I Don’t wanna study stats!
They just wanna Mansfield hat!
Rock, Rock, Rock, Rock, Rock n’ Roll Grad School
O baby… Rock fun
O baby.. Rock Fu-un
Rock, Rock n’ Roll Grad School, Yeah
May 1st, 2012 | 5:00 pm
Happy birthday, Songbook.. An impressive body of reflections. I was touched when your former teacher made an appearance. And ‘Karl Marx’ was touchingly juvenile (or was it ‘Carl Marx’?).
May 1st, 2012 | 11:36 pm
Yes, when I was a college radio DJ my air-name was Karl Marx. I always presented it ironically, occasionally trotting out some Russian-accented phrases of ridiculous anti-capitalist propaganda, but not-so-ironically, I was also attending meetings of the Democratic Socialists of America in those days. The official M. Harrington line was that Lenin spoiled Marx…I don’t think I fully bought that, as my pacifist inclinations and Christian faith made a full admiration of Marx, what little I knew about him, impossible. But the letter X was cool in those days, and so was shocking Reagan Republicans with the name.
I’m glad you liked the Robert Pacilio post, Paul. He was a great one.
May 3rd, 2012 | 4:59 pm
So you are one of those NeoCons, huh? j/k
May 3rd, 2012 | 11:31 pm
Are there anti-abortion rock songs? Check out the Sex Pistols’ song “Bodies.” It’s pretty grisly.
May 4th, 2012 | 11:46 am
Dan, yep, that’s the obvious song to think about, which I did talk about in that post: http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2011/11/21/carls-rock-songbook-27-are-there-anti-abortion-rock-songs/
Anymouse, I don’t believe in Neo-Cons. None exist. Not at least, in the bogeyman way they’ve been described since around 2004.
But more seriously, a big part of my moving rightward in the mid-to-late 90s happened through essays found in publications like The New Republic, Dissent, The Atlantic, etc., essays that would lead me to even read ones from The Public Interest. I guess that makes me something of a neo-con in the original sense of the term.
May 4th, 2012 | 2:30 pm
Carl,
I’ve enjoyed reading the songbook entries, which bring up what might be a little bit of an obvious but maybe senstive question: what was your experience of, and what do you think of the main boomer critics? Marsh, Christgau, Bangs, etc. ?
Did you get anything from them? Does their (at least for Marsh and Xgau) doctrinaire left-slant ruin their work for you? etc. I called this question “sensitive” because I’m not sure you want to name them by name, but such a discussion seems inevitably looming/inherent in this project.
May 5th, 2012 | 3:42 pm
Interesting…danbk, but I probably give the impression that I read more rock criticism than I really do. I vaguely remember reading Marsh and Christgua in Rolling Stone and they are not particularly fond memories–but I have not read the anthologies that give you their best pieces. Bangs I like, but if I ever address his work in the Songbook it would probably be to criticize his lionization of Iggy and shock-tactics. Robert Palmer I despise, or rather, have a ton of issues with, while respecting his leg-work. There, it’s a matter of my having real issues with some of the dominant Boomer-critic narratives that get established–in Palmer’s case, in the PBS history of rock and roll. I like some of what Greil Marcus does.
Writers that are more about books than reviews are more my thing. Martha Bayles is my favorite, and I really love Geoffrey O’Brien’s Sonata for Jukebox. But I do need to learn who the best close analysts of lyrics are, and if there were a critic who did more formal music analysis, that would be interesting too. Any recommendations?
May 7th, 2012 | 11:50 am
Carl Scott,
I’m afraid i can’t be of much help in recommending boomer (or other) rock critics. I’m about your age, and haven’t read really read any in years. I went through a period in late adolescence where i read alot of Rock critics, especially Marsh and Christgau, who are also some of the more blatantly (left) political ones. College taught me that Ideas and history are much more interesting and important than pop music, so I have only kept up sporadically with either music or any writing about it. Yet, it often takes me by suprise how powerful the music can still be, even when you think you’ve grown indifferent to it.
I’ve long looked myself for better musicological analysis of rock, but haven’t found much. I tend to be suspicious (dismissive?) of lyric analysis, which probably isn’t fair, so I can’t help you there either.
I actually haven’t read Marcus’s “Mystery Train”, although I did read one of his essay collections. He made less of an impression on me than Marsh and Christgau, who both have brasher, more “American” writing styles. Essay collections from the two, Marsh’s “Fortunate Son” and Christgaus “Grown up all wrong” are suprisingly still in print. Whether they are worth your time, I don’t know. If you are like me, your “serious reading” list is likely to be longer than your lifetime has left, so any pop music reading will be optional. Marsh writes from an angry “old left” working-class polemical bent, and has a particular fondness for american-roots oriented stuff. Christgau is famous for writing very short, haiku-like record reviews, dense with cultural references, ideas, and riddles. It’s perhaps a fascinating minor literary form he’s developed. His end-of-the year “Pazz and Jop” summary essays when he was at the village voice are also good. They are available free, as are most of his album reviews, on his website.
I liked the Martha Bayles book, although since my tastes have always run “blacker” than most rock fans and I was already familiar with the conservative cultural commentary, it pretty much told my what i already knew.
Looking forward to more song book entries..
May 11th, 2012 | 2:45 am
Carl, I’m still not that much on board with what you’re selling (your analysis of what’s happened and whether it’s good or not), but I find it fascinating.
When you get the time, how about taking on this meaty My Bloody Valentine interview? Shields is a great talker, and he seems to connect rock (krautrock, britpop, early shoegaze) elements with what you consider rock’n'roll (he did analog takes on electronic hip-hop that was emulating past soul records in its sound). That his band is a lot of people’s favorite doesn’t hurt his claims.
February 11th, 2013 | 11:03 am
[...] my Rock Songbook about to get underway again, I’d like to make a few observations about how I see it fitting, and [...]
March 22nd, 2013 | 9:32 am
[...] the day of vindication of Paul Cantor, Brian Anderson, and our Peter Lawler, not to mention my Carl’s Rock Songbook is at hand, right? Let us all turn to sites like Acculturated, and if we’re Catholic, [...]
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