In the last month, there have been several major surprises in the culture war over popular music. First, one of the music world’s most liberal magazines issued a blistering rebuke of rock’n’roll’s prevailing solipsism and spoiled-brat ethic. Then a respected classical-music critic published a ringing defense of nonclassical music in a distinguished conservative magazine. And a terrific new album was released that reclaims the positive, pre-punk rock’n’roll traditions. Taken together, these events bode well for those of us who are cultural conservatives but often are made to feel that we are somehow betraying the cause because we like pop music.
The broadside against rock came in the pages of Melody Maker, the British music weekly. The Maker is usually one of the most glib celebrants of rock excess, yet in his assessment of the new album by R.E.M. — forefathers of alternative rock and recent recipients of an $ 80 million deal with Warner Brothers — critic Paul Lester sounded like a schoolmarm scolding a recalcitrant child. After establishing that R.E.M.’s New Adventures in High-Fi is one long gripe about the “problems” of rock fame, Lester rejected the new album as nothing more than “a mean-spirited indictment of the system that has indulged [R.E.M.’s] every whim.” He called the band’s thirtysomething lead singer Michael Stipe “the oldest whining teenager in town,” who complains of his fame yet does everything in his power to cause scandal — in this case, by singing incendiary lyrics like “I can’t say that I love Jesus.” As for the sound of the band, Lester was unequivocal: Put on this album, and “feel gravity’s pull as you freefall onto your bed from boredom.”
As if Lester’s shellacking weren’t surprising enough, critic Terry Teachout, who caused a minor tempest last year by exposing the racism of some black jazz musicians, published a piece in the September issue of Commentary about the canonization of Duke Ellington by what passes for the jazz intelligentsia. Teachout noted that many black jazz critics who are not musicians are prone to lose themselves in their admiration for Ellington, often with disastrous results.
Albert Murray, he pointed out, has compared Ellington not only to Aaron Copland and Charles Ives, but to Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville. Stanley Crouch, writing in the New Yorker, called Ellington “the most protean of American geniuses” and elevated him to the company of Mark Twain, Buster Keaton, Fred Astaire, and Orson Welles.
“There is nothing to be learned by directly comparing a threeminute blues like Ellington’s ‘Ko-Ko’ with a 45-minute symphony by Copland,” Teachout wrote. “The composer of the former was incapable of composing the latter (and vice versa), yet both were masters of American music, each in his own way?
The acknowledgement that Ellington is a “master” is somewhat astonishing. The most conservative perspective on American popular music appears, of course, in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: “a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy” was Bloom’s assessment of rock’n’roll, a genre that owes quite a lot to Ellington. Yet Teachout makes the argument that comparing pop forms — in this case, blues — to classical forms is like comparing sculpture and painting. They are two different idioms, says Teachout, and can be individually appreciated as such. Songs are not symphonies, and vice versa. Once it is intellectually acceptable to think that music idioms can be as different as apples and oranges, it becomes possible to love the polyrhythmic jazz stylings of Nat King Cole, the twang of Hank Williams, and the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms with equal passion. It even becomes possible to have different predilections within the same idiom: You can live for Wagner and snore through Mozart, adore Crowded House and deplore R.E.M. It’s called acquiring taste.
The simple acknowledgment of different musical idioms, and that there can be high and low achievement within those idioms, opens up a new kind of acceptance for conservative music fans who can’t stand the noxious clamor of most punk and rap yet don’t want to jettison the Beatles and Boys II Men with it. It also spells relief for rock’n’rollers weary of the infantilism of groups like R.E.M. who want to develop appreciation for classical or jazz.
It also means I don’t have to feel guilty about my enthusiasm for Miracle of Science, the wonderful new pop album by Marshall Crenshaw. Crenshaw made his mark in the early ’80s, and his return is as unexpected as Lester’s and Teachout’s articles. The Detroit native first arrived in 1982 with a self- titled debut album that left reviewers fumbling for superlatives. A protege of Buddy Holly (an image that Crenshaw, with his 1950s buzzcut and horn- rimmed glasses, did nothing to discourage), Crenshaw offered what was often described as “beautifully crafted pop” that borrowed from rhythm-and-blues and Motown as well as Holly and launched him onto many year-end top-ten lists. To the Irish Catholic conservatives I was growing up with at the time — and their parents and kids — Crenshaw was the red-blooded American alternative to the punk New Wave music prominent then. While bands like the Dead Kennedys and Generation X sneered and R.E.M. first began to pout, Crenshaw had the anachronistic temerity to write joyful, innocent, hook-drenched songs with titles like “Girls” and “Rockin’ Around in NYC.”
Unfortunately, Crenshaw’s luck didn’t hold out. After a disappointing second release the critics began to keep their distance, then remained lukewarm for ten years, despite excellent efforts like Downtown and Life’s Too Short. By the early 1990s pop had a new king, grunge, which had exploded out of Seattle on the sound of a band called Nirvana. To teenage hipsters — the only people who exist, according to record executives — Crenshaw’s songs seemed about as relevant as swing.
Now, all indicators point to the death of grunge — ear-splitting Seattle bands Pearl Jam and Soundgarden have both gotten lousy reviews for their latest albums — and Crenshaw has reappeared with his first studio album in five years. Following the reign of grunge and the re-emergence of punk, hearing Miracle of Science is like taking a warm shower after spending the day herding pigs.
From the opening chords of “What Do You Dream Of?” — a pop song that actually elevates rather than degrades the fairer sex — to the fadeout of the closing “There and Back Again,” Miracle of Science is an album of truly great songs in a field where the mediocre — hell, the rotten — is hailed as genius. (Most overused term in rock criticism? “Brilliant.”) These are songs with melodies to rival the Beatles” — even Rolling Stone, in its review of Miracle of Science, called Crenshaw “one of the supreme melodists of rock’s last 15 years” — and lyrics about what pop songs should be about: girls, cars, trains, summer nights. Crenshaw even allows himself a little ironic dig at his trendchasing critics, smirking his way through a cover of the 1965 hit “The In Crowd.”
One should not get the impression, however, that Crenshaw is a Pollyanna. The standout track on Miracle of Science is “Only an Hour Ago,” a rumination about getting in a car to leave behind “ten kinds of misery.” With its choppy Buddy Holly chord structure and evocation of the open road, “Only an Hour Ago” is classic American pop, expressing melancholy with more depth and spirituality than a thousand heavy-metal chords. Crenshaw doesn’t deny that life can be full of trouble; yet unlike so many of his peers, he knows the sound of that sorrow should invite rather than repel. Like a blues singer, he conveys his anguish with a minor chord and whisper rather than a wall of guitars and meandering self-absorption.
Unsurprisingly, my conservative Catholic friends from high school, many of whom are parents now, see Crenshaw’s new album as the kind of music that offers common ground with their kids. Unfortunately, the rock’n’roll press — with the exception of Lester and Teachout-isn’t any more interested in families than Hollywood is. Despite the fact that Crenshaw is a “supreme melodist,” Rolling Stone buried his three-star review in its back pages in deference to R.E.M., which got four and a half stars for New Adventures in Hi-Fi. “They say it’s always darkest before the dawn,” Mark Kemp’s clich- ridden review of R.E.M. said. “For R.E.M., these have been dark days indeed.” Oh, yeah, that $ 80 million deal is a real horror show. They can have it. I’d rather hang out with Crenshaw. He’s no Mozart, but then, he’s not supposed to be.
Mark Gauvreau Judge is a Washington, D.C.-based writer.
