Smithson Rocks Out!

Technology and Culture, 2004

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2009

This is a review/essay of Understanding Rock, edited by John Covach and Graeme Boone (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). It addresses each of the essays in the book but also more deeply the issue of analysis of popular music and the tendency to overlook African-American musical elements in the music of European or European-American artists. In this respect it draws heavily upon Toni Morrison's 1989 essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.”

Based on a review of representative theories about a unique aesthetics of rock music, this article problematizes assumptions about performance and/or recording as aesthetic objects and suggests shifting the debate to our understanding of the elements involved in the experience of rock in different contexts. In conclusion, it posits the possibility of identifying prevalent poetic patterns in musical experience that could become the subjects of future communications studies.

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2017

High Fidelity's January 1958 issue marked the 10-year anniversary of the long playing record (LP) with a pair of critical takes on the cultural impact of what everybody agreed was a stunningly successful new distribution channel for music. In less than a decade, the world had filled up with new records, enabling an unparalleled abundance of new listening experiences. But, editor Roland Gelatt (1958) noted, as the trickle of recorded repertoire grew into a steady stream and then a raging flood, the careful attention of the consumer was perhaps the first thing to wash away: I am writing this article after having listened on successive evenings to new recordings of La Sonnambula and Der Rosenkavalier, each of them a distinguished recreation. Two decades ago, either of these sets would have constituted the opera issue of an entire season. We would have had months to savor it without competition; indeed, it is very possible that we would have acquired it in installments, act by act, to spread the expense. Today, the two operas are pebbles in an avalanche. (p. 40) Music, he noted, had become much cheaper than previously: a pair of Mozart concerto recordings, which had once cost the equivalent of 10 meals at a decent restaurant, now fit onto an inexpensive, unbreakable LP which could be bought on casual impulse. Naturally, the purchaser valued it less. Gelatt anticipated two generations of sociologists by noting a temptation to "omnivorous listening" in all this abundance; with so much on offer, how was one to choose? The same fear of plenty seems to haunt rock critics today, but it's now data that seems to proliferate without limit; Ian Penman (2017), writing about David Bowie, longs openly for an earlier, more innocent time when, he says, "rock mattered" because it was almost impossible to find out anything about it: In the days when such figures were active you had to be satisfied with an occasional music-press annual, or the lyrics printed in your girlfriend's Jackie, or, if you were really lucky, a title like The Sociology of Riff (no photos or illustrations). Maybe one of the reasons the 1970s were such an incredibly creative time is that we weren't all reading biographies and blogs and tweets about (or even by) our heroes, who in turn weren't thinking about the best way to "grow their brand" exponentially through a social media arc. All that unmediated space waiting to be filled! (p. 21) Against this endless drumbeat of critical dyspepsia and scarcity worship, Ben Ratliff's Every Song Ever stands out for its generous embrace of omnivorous listening as the characteristic mode of sonic creativity in an era of peak musical abundance: "The teenager listens with near boredom and absolute confidence. He is engaging, identifying with the song: he has a sense of dominion over the song and the medium. He can take that song or leave it. There are a million others like it. He's got the power. He is the great listener of now" (p. 4). Ratliff is also a great listener, and the structure of Every Song Ever-after a framing introduction, it presents 20 short chapters devoted to modes of listening that cut across genre and history-is designed to let him show off his skill. As one reads, one comes to anticipate the moment when Ratliff will go walkabout, using his new phenomenological yardstick to erase the distance between closely related musical experiences that contingencies of race, class, gender, time, and space have torn asunder: You realize the power of a short silence when you hear it in a song. You realize it in the middle of Metallica's "All Nightmare Long," in the tiny break before James Hetfield takes a gulp of air to keep singing, or at the end of the

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2017

High Fidelity's January 1958 issue marked the 10-year anniversary of the long playing record (LP) with a pair of critical takes on the cultural impact of what everybody agreed was a stunningly successful new distribution channel for music. In less than a decade, the world had filled up with new records, enabling an unparalleled abundance of new listening experiences. But, editor Roland Gelatt (1958) noted, as the trickle of recorded repertoire grew into a steady stream and then a raging flood, the careful attention of the consumer was perhaps the first thing to wash away: I am writing this article after having listened on successive evenings to new recordings of La Sonnambula and Der Rosenkavalier, each of them a distinguished recreation. Two decades ago, either of these sets would have constituted the opera issue of an entire season. We would have had months to savor it without competition; indeed, it is very possible that we would have acquired it in installments, act by act, to spread the expense. Today, the two operas are pebbles in an avalanche. (p. 40) Music, he noted, had become much cheaper than previously: a pair of Mozart concerto recordings, which had once cost the equivalent of 10 meals at a decent restaurant, now fit onto an inexpensive, unbreakable LP which could be bought on casual impulse. Naturally, the purchaser valued it less. Gelatt anticipated two generations of sociologists by noting a temptation to "omnivorous listening" in all this abundance; with so much on offer, how was one to choose? The same fear of plenty seems to haunt rock critics today, but it's now data that seems to proliferate without limit; Ian Penman (2017), writing about David Bowie, longs openly for an earlier, more innocent time when, he says, "rock mattered" because it was almost impossible to find out anything about it: In the days when such figures were active you had to be satisfied with an occasional music-press annual, or the lyrics printed in your girlfriend's Jackie, or, if you were really lucky, a title like The Sociology of Riff (no photos or illustrations). Maybe one of the reasons the 1970s were such an incredibly creative time is that we weren't all reading biographies and blogs and tweets about (or even by) our heroes, who in turn weren't thinking about the best way to "grow their brand" exponentially through a social media arc. All that unmediated space waiting to be filled! (p. 21) Against this endless drumbeat of critical dyspepsia and scarcity worship, Ben Ratliff's Every Song Ever stands out for its generous embrace of omnivorous listening as the characteristic mode of sonic creativity in an era of peak musical abundance: "The teenager listens with near boredom and absolute confidence. He is engaging, identifying with the song: he has a sense of dominion over the song and the medium. He can take that song or leave it. There are a million others like it. He's got the power. He is the great listener of now" (p. 4). Ratliff is also a great listener, and the structure of Every Song Ever-after a framing introduction, it presents 20 short chapters devoted to modes of listening that cut across genre and history-is designed to let him show off his skill. As one reads, one comes to anticipate the moment when Ratliff will go walkabout, using his new phenomenological yardstick to erase the distance between closely related musical experiences that contingencies of race, class, gender, time, and space have torn asunder: You realize the power of a short silence when you hear it in a song. You realize it in the middle of Metallica's "All Nightmare Long," in the tiny break before James Hetfield takes a gulp of air to keep singing, or at the end of the

Collection Building, 2008

Popular Music & Society, 2010

Intervening in the ongoing debates in the United States about the decline of public intellectualism, this article suggests that rock critics, especially those writing in 1960s New York, should be re-imagined as public intellectuals. Coinciding with the moment when commentators lamented that public intellectualism began to wane, rock critics participated in the vigorous defense of popular music as a legitimate field of intellectual scrutiny, using the forum of alternative journalism to do so. As such, rock critics deserve a secure place not only in the history of popular music studies, but also within the general narrative of American intellectual history.