WARNING! WARNING! GIGA-POST! THIS ENTRY COULD KILL TOKYO IF IT COULD WALK! WARNING!
Originally, this post was going to be a brief review of the last book I've read, Joe Carlucci's "Rock And The Pop Narcotic: Testament For The Electric Church". I finished it a couple of days ago, and in that small span of time I pondered as how to best get across what I really thought of the book. I've read a lot of music criticism/journalism (the lower left corner of my bookshelf is dominated by books by Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Simon Reynolds, Richard Meltzer, etc), and I've found most of what I've read to be interesting, intellectually engaging, and a source of great new music to hunt down but with the exception of Reynolds' and Joy Press's "The Sex Revolts", no book about music has really tied my brain into as many knots as Carducci's book has. This long, mammoth post before you is my attempts at unraveling those knots.
"Pop Narcotic" (which I shall henceforth refer to as "P.N. for brevity's sake) is divided into 2 sides. The first half of the book is where Carducci puts forth his theory of what is rock music, while the B-Side of P.N. is his outlining the history of rock music. While that might not initialing seem that impressive (there are many, MANY histories of rock floating around in the critical ether), Carducci's rock history is dazzling in its scope and in its dense detail. If anything, his history of rock proves that the man has a colossal record collection: usual suspect bands like the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols are discussed alongside literally hundreds of obscure surf, garage, and hard rock bands. The history spans from the birth of rock in the Fifties all the way up into the early 90's (sadly, Carducci has yet to release an updated edition that takes into consideration any rock music made since the coming of Nirvana). The book is worth its cover price just for that history; however, it's A-side is what makes the book such a rewarding and tricky read. While Part One begins as an explanation of what Carducci considers to be rock music (and he also defines what he thinks separates rock music from pop music), it really is a long, involving, and brilliant hatchet-job on the rock community's critical establishment. P.N. savages music critics so thoroughly and so concisely, it's a small wonder that some of Carducci's victims (like well-deserving targets Robert Christgau and Dave Marsh) haven't tried to letter-bomb the bastard yet. As much as I love reading about music (and as much as I thoroughly disagree with the quote that states "writing about music is like dancing about architecture", a quote attributed to both Elvis Costello + Frank Zappa), I can see exactly where Carducci is coming from in his book. But before I get into what he's saying in Part One of the book (and the things he says in the book that I strongly disagree with), I'd like to take a moment to discuss the whole idea of criticism in general, and why I think it's a profession/institution worth defending, even from as eloquent and perceptive a detractor as Carducci.
In many respects, kicking film and music critics around is fashionable (I'm not going to discuss literary criticism, simply because I don't read much of it). Whether one can attribute this to an anti-intellectual attitude that is rampant in the States, or jealousy over the fact that they get paid to do this for living (I'll admit it: I'd love to get paid to write about music and films; being a professional geek must have its perks), or simply thinking they're all pretentious twats who wouldn't know good music if it bit them in the ass, I don't know. All I do know is that I have yet to visit a single music board or talk to a person in a record store who doesn't at some point take a pot shot at critics. I always get riled up about this, to a degree, which on the face of it seems silly, because I am not an actual critic. I take offense for a simple reason: without music and film criticism, I would not be the person I am today.
A brief cataloguing of the past musical sins of the Emperor Norton: at one point in my high school days, I owned records by Korn, Limp Bizkit, Creed (who I tried to see in concert, but ended up seeing Rage Against The Machine instead), Lenny Kravitz, 311, Stone Temple Pilots, Linkin Park the Hall Of Shame goes on and on. My sole exposure to good music was my older brother Greg. Whenever I hung out with him, he'd be playing great stuff that I was totally deaf to at that time: Violent Femmes, The Smiths, Pavement, The Pixies, Jane's Addiction, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cocteau Twins, etc. I wasn't much of a music fan at that point in my life; I bought records and went to concerts and watched Total Request Live simply because it seemed like the sort of thing I was supposed to do. My moment of clarity came one day when I was chilling at a B. Dalton's and reading an issue of Q Magazine (an otherwise pitiful Brit music mag that spends way too much jerking off Oasis) that had a list of the 100 Greatest Records since 1980. Something about the way the writers described the sounds of their selections resonated with me. I remember grabbing a pen and paper and writing down the entire list. Taking what little money I had on me at the time, I went to Best Buy and bought the first two records off the list that I could find: Husker Du's "Zen Arcade" and Nick Cave's "No More Shall We Part". The Cave record I kinda liked at the time (in retrospect: who the fuck would pick "No More" as the best record Cave's ever done? "No More" over "Tender Prey" or "From Her To Eternity"? Puhlease!), but I couldn't even begin to get into "Zen Arcade". It was too noisy, too unpleasant. I had listened to a lot of shitty metal at the time, and none of it was as corrosive and brutal to my ears as the fuzz-drenched production on "Zen Arcade".
Several months later, Christmas came along and I got a gift card. I went back to the same Best Buy to use my card, and I picked up The Beatles "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and My Bloody Valentine's "Isn't Anything" (which was in the middle of that Q list). Walking out of the store, I popped MBV in my CD player first. My musical epiphany/awakening/colossal mindfucking came from the first track on the album, "Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside)". I hadn't heard ANYTHING like it. It was sensual and violent, lovely and unpleasant, the music full of turmoil and jagged edges while the vocals were lazy, laconic, and coy. I remember pulling out the liner notes and studying them, trying to figure out how they made the sounds they made on that first song: the guitars (which at the time I didn't even recognize as being guitars, as they sounded like no guitar I've ever heard) sounded like sharp claws raked across a blackboard, or the wails of a baby whale, or the caress of a saw. My brain struggled for ways of explaining that beautiful, confounding noise. I played that track 12 times back to back, unable to think of anything else, unable to pay attention to anything else. A month later, I went to Zia records and sold almost all of my records, and started buying up other records on that list, like The Replacements and Mercury Rev and so on. My entire conception and appreciation of music had been changed, thanks to a small descriptive paragraph in a magazine.
The other important event in my development as a music fan was stumbling onto a used copy of SPIN'S Alternative Record Guide (the 1995 edition). That book quickly became my bible. Its selection of artists was eclectic and strange and occasionally crazy (what are ABBA, AC/DC/ and Kiss doing in an alternative record guide?), and some of the writers were insufferable (the worst offender: Rob Sheffield, whose writing style seemed to prophesize the ironic, jackass I'm-so-clever commentary of VH1's I Love The 80's by almost a decade), but it talked about a lot of fringe stuff I had never heard of (hell, I'm STILL trying to find some of the records it name checks). Some of the albums it talked about, like the first Suicide album and Gang Of Four's "Entertainment" and The Slits "Cut", I spent years trying to find (having no access to the Internet and the fact that they never showed up in any of the record stores I went to made these records are as rare and desirable as a Sasquatch corpse; hell, I didn't even get "Entertainment" until I stumbled onto it in a shopping mall in France 3 years ago). Without that Record Guide, I wouldn't have heard about 80% of the artists currently residing on my CD rack.
The point I'm trying to establish here (albeit in a long-winded fashion) is that critics can be invaluable as tour guides. They can point you to the good stuff, and offer interesting information and perspectives on things that you already care about. They were my lifeline in a state in where there is a very small independent music scene, where I had no access to the Net for years and none of my friends had similar tastes in music. A lot of people in the indie scenes seem to derive a good amount of their music tastes from their peers; having no peers at the time, I had to hit the books and make friends with people like Reynolds and Bangs.
Getting back to P.N., Carducci seems to have no beef with critics like Bangs and Reynolds, and other crits like Byron Coley (whom I owe a debt of gratitude for turning me on to the Germs and the Flesh Eaters). Rather, Carducci's beef lies in how often music critics refuse to talk about the music, and spend more time talking about politics and fashion statements and sociological concerns. Carducci's logic is that great bands like The Minutemen were ignored for years by the critical establishment because they played a working class style of music (Carducci makes the point that traditionally working class derived rock styles like garage rock, surf, hardcore, early punk, heavy metal, etc. were given little critical notice when they were at their most vital, and history seems to confirm his theory) and didn't kowtow to fashion; rather, critics spent more time rubbing the feet of artists like U2 and Bruce Springstein for having messianic ambitions and being politically correct. It is in this blistering, venom-laced critique of political correctness that Carducci gets the most mileage (and its where I side with him the most; it gets rather ridiculous reading articles published on sites like PopMatters, where they spend more time discussing the cultural subtext of an artist's work and its underlying political sensibility than actually talk about the music itself). Carducci rails against what he sees is the overwhelming Leftist bias in the music crit community (in my case, guilty as charged, Joe). Based on his writings, its easy to see that Joe tends to be on the conservative side of things; however, in spite of his near-constant bashing of academia and liberals, Joe doesn't come off as a raving looney-tunes tool like Hannity or Coulter, but comes off more like a Black Sabbath fan who likes saying "fag" hundreds of time just to piss off his hippie vegan friends. No joke on the Black Sabbath thing, by the by; I've never seen a critic give Ozzy and the gang a sloppier blowjob than Carducci, who makes them out, alongside the Minutemen, to be the unsung heroes of rock history (and he promotes that view so well that I dug out my Sabbath records and after giving them a whirl, I've got to agree with him that "Supernaut" is like one of the greatest songs ever). The point where I start to disagree with Carducci is in his dismissal of New Wave music and artists like David Bowie, and in his assertion that hip-hop isn't really music because it isn't "authentic" (I.e. it isn't played by a band). And while he's very good at tearing apart other people's political viewpoints, he seems unwilling to reveal his own (which is a bit cowardly, for one, and it also makes it hard at times to understand where he's coming from at times; is he saying this because he believes it, or is he saying it just to get a rise out of the reader?).
One of the reasons why I strongly recommend the book is that Carducci has a real insider's perspective on the music industry (as he was a part of SST Records back in the 80's). He discusses his dealings with groups like Saccharine Trust, Meat Puppets, Husker Du, etc. and it makes for very interesting reading (it also serves as a nice supplement to Michael Azzerrad's excellent book on 80's indie rock, "Our Band Could Be Your Life"). I do hope that he decides to update the book in the near future, as I'm curious to hear what he thinks about the prevalence of Twee-ness in modern indie music (not to mention that I would love to read paragraphs of Joe tearing new assholes out of horrible music phenoms like rap-rock and The Strokes). It was refreshing to read a book on music that didn't approach it with the same Ivory Tower, sensitive new age guy mentality that plagues the critical community. Even if I disagree with a lot of Carducci's opinions, I find his tone and style of writing to be as refreshing as a can of Sprite on a hot day.
Then again, if you're reading this and you don't give a damn about music criticism, I do apologize for wasting your valuable Net surfing time.
Originally, this post was going to be a brief review of the last book I've read, Joe Carlucci's "Rock And The Pop Narcotic: Testament For The Electric Church". I finished it a couple of days ago, and in that small span of time I pondered as how to best get across what I really thought of the book. I've read a lot of music criticism/journalism (the lower left corner of my bookshelf is dominated by books by Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Simon Reynolds, Richard Meltzer, etc), and I've found most of what I've read to be interesting, intellectually engaging, and a source of great new music to hunt down but with the exception of Reynolds' and Joy Press's "The Sex Revolts", no book about music has really tied my brain into as many knots as Carducci's book has. This long, mammoth post before you is my attempts at unraveling those knots.
"Pop Narcotic" (which I shall henceforth refer to as "P.N. for brevity's sake) is divided into 2 sides. The first half of the book is where Carducci puts forth his theory of what is rock music, while the B-Side of P.N. is his outlining the history of rock music. While that might not initialing seem that impressive (there are many, MANY histories of rock floating around in the critical ether), Carducci's rock history is dazzling in its scope and in its dense detail. If anything, his history of rock proves that the man has a colossal record collection: usual suspect bands like the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols are discussed alongside literally hundreds of obscure surf, garage, and hard rock bands. The history spans from the birth of rock in the Fifties all the way up into the early 90's (sadly, Carducci has yet to release an updated edition that takes into consideration any rock music made since the coming of Nirvana). The book is worth its cover price just for that history; however, it's A-side is what makes the book such a rewarding and tricky read. While Part One begins as an explanation of what Carducci considers to be rock music (and he also defines what he thinks separates rock music from pop music), it really is a long, involving, and brilliant hatchet-job on the rock community's critical establishment. P.N. savages music critics so thoroughly and so concisely, it's a small wonder that some of Carducci's victims (like well-deserving targets Robert Christgau and Dave Marsh) haven't tried to letter-bomb the bastard yet. As much as I love reading about music (and as much as I thoroughly disagree with the quote that states "writing about music is like dancing about architecture", a quote attributed to both Elvis Costello + Frank Zappa), I can see exactly where Carducci is coming from in his book. But before I get into what he's saying in Part One of the book (and the things he says in the book that I strongly disagree with), I'd like to take a moment to discuss the whole idea of criticism in general, and why I think it's a profession/institution worth defending, even from as eloquent and perceptive a detractor as Carducci.
In many respects, kicking film and music critics around is fashionable (I'm not going to discuss literary criticism, simply because I don't read much of it). Whether one can attribute this to an anti-intellectual attitude that is rampant in the States, or jealousy over the fact that they get paid to do this for living (I'll admit it: I'd love to get paid to write about music and films; being a professional geek must have its perks), or simply thinking they're all pretentious twats who wouldn't know good music if it bit them in the ass, I don't know. All I do know is that I have yet to visit a single music board or talk to a person in a record store who doesn't at some point take a pot shot at critics. I always get riled up about this, to a degree, which on the face of it seems silly, because I am not an actual critic. I take offense for a simple reason: without music and film criticism, I would not be the person I am today.
A brief cataloguing of the past musical sins of the Emperor Norton: at one point in my high school days, I owned records by Korn, Limp Bizkit, Creed (who I tried to see in concert, but ended up seeing Rage Against The Machine instead), Lenny Kravitz, 311, Stone Temple Pilots, Linkin Park the Hall Of Shame goes on and on. My sole exposure to good music was my older brother Greg. Whenever I hung out with him, he'd be playing great stuff that I was totally deaf to at that time: Violent Femmes, The Smiths, Pavement, The Pixies, Jane's Addiction, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cocteau Twins, etc. I wasn't much of a music fan at that point in my life; I bought records and went to concerts and watched Total Request Live simply because it seemed like the sort of thing I was supposed to do. My moment of clarity came one day when I was chilling at a B. Dalton's and reading an issue of Q Magazine (an otherwise pitiful Brit music mag that spends way too much jerking off Oasis) that had a list of the 100 Greatest Records since 1980. Something about the way the writers described the sounds of their selections resonated with me. I remember grabbing a pen and paper and writing down the entire list. Taking what little money I had on me at the time, I went to Best Buy and bought the first two records off the list that I could find: Husker Du's "Zen Arcade" and Nick Cave's "No More Shall We Part". The Cave record I kinda liked at the time (in retrospect: who the fuck would pick "No More" as the best record Cave's ever done? "No More" over "Tender Prey" or "From Her To Eternity"? Puhlease!), but I couldn't even begin to get into "Zen Arcade". It was too noisy, too unpleasant. I had listened to a lot of shitty metal at the time, and none of it was as corrosive and brutal to my ears as the fuzz-drenched production on "Zen Arcade".
Several months later, Christmas came along and I got a gift card. I went back to the same Best Buy to use my card, and I picked up The Beatles "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and My Bloody Valentine's "Isn't Anything" (which was in the middle of that Q list). Walking out of the store, I popped MBV in my CD player first. My musical epiphany/awakening/colossal mindfucking came from the first track on the album, "Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside)". I hadn't heard ANYTHING like it. It was sensual and violent, lovely and unpleasant, the music full of turmoil and jagged edges while the vocals were lazy, laconic, and coy. I remember pulling out the liner notes and studying them, trying to figure out how they made the sounds they made on that first song: the guitars (which at the time I didn't even recognize as being guitars, as they sounded like no guitar I've ever heard) sounded like sharp claws raked across a blackboard, or the wails of a baby whale, or the caress of a saw. My brain struggled for ways of explaining that beautiful, confounding noise. I played that track 12 times back to back, unable to think of anything else, unable to pay attention to anything else. A month later, I went to Zia records and sold almost all of my records, and started buying up other records on that list, like The Replacements and Mercury Rev and so on. My entire conception and appreciation of music had been changed, thanks to a small descriptive paragraph in a magazine.
The other important event in my development as a music fan was stumbling onto a used copy of SPIN'S Alternative Record Guide (the 1995 edition). That book quickly became my bible. Its selection of artists was eclectic and strange and occasionally crazy (what are ABBA, AC/DC/ and Kiss doing in an alternative record guide?), and some of the writers were insufferable (the worst offender: Rob Sheffield, whose writing style seemed to prophesize the ironic, jackass I'm-so-clever commentary of VH1's I Love The 80's by almost a decade), but it talked about a lot of fringe stuff I had never heard of (hell, I'm STILL trying to find some of the records it name checks). Some of the albums it talked about, like the first Suicide album and Gang Of Four's "Entertainment" and The Slits "Cut", I spent years trying to find (having no access to the Internet and the fact that they never showed up in any of the record stores I went to made these records are as rare and desirable as a Sasquatch corpse; hell, I didn't even get "Entertainment" until I stumbled onto it in a shopping mall in France 3 years ago). Without that Record Guide, I wouldn't have heard about 80% of the artists currently residing on my CD rack.
The point I'm trying to establish here (albeit in a long-winded fashion) is that critics can be invaluable as tour guides. They can point you to the good stuff, and offer interesting information and perspectives on things that you already care about. They were my lifeline in a state in where there is a very small independent music scene, where I had no access to the Net for years and none of my friends had similar tastes in music. A lot of people in the indie scenes seem to derive a good amount of their music tastes from their peers; having no peers at the time, I had to hit the books and make friends with people like Reynolds and Bangs.
Getting back to P.N., Carducci seems to have no beef with critics like Bangs and Reynolds, and other crits like Byron Coley (whom I owe a debt of gratitude for turning me on to the Germs and the Flesh Eaters). Rather, Carducci's beef lies in how often music critics refuse to talk about the music, and spend more time talking about politics and fashion statements and sociological concerns. Carducci's logic is that great bands like The Minutemen were ignored for years by the critical establishment because they played a working class style of music (Carducci makes the point that traditionally working class derived rock styles like garage rock, surf, hardcore, early punk, heavy metal, etc. were given little critical notice when they were at their most vital, and history seems to confirm his theory) and didn't kowtow to fashion; rather, critics spent more time rubbing the feet of artists like U2 and Bruce Springstein for having messianic ambitions and being politically correct. It is in this blistering, venom-laced critique of political correctness that Carducci gets the most mileage (and its where I side with him the most; it gets rather ridiculous reading articles published on sites like PopMatters, where they spend more time discussing the cultural subtext of an artist's work and its underlying political sensibility than actually talk about the music itself). Carducci rails against what he sees is the overwhelming Leftist bias in the music crit community (in my case, guilty as charged, Joe). Based on his writings, its easy to see that Joe tends to be on the conservative side of things; however, in spite of his near-constant bashing of academia and liberals, Joe doesn't come off as a raving looney-tunes tool like Hannity or Coulter, but comes off more like a Black Sabbath fan who likes saying "fag" hundreds of time just to piss off his hippie vegan friends. No joke on the Black Sabbath thing, by the by; I've never seen a critic give Ozzy and the gang a sloppier blowjob than Carducci, who makes them out, alongside the Minutemen, to be the unsung heroes of rock history (and he promotes that view so well that I dug out my Sabbath records and after giving them a whirl, I've got to agree with him that "Supernaut" is like one of the greatest songs ever). The point where I start to disagree with Carducci is in his dismissal of New Wave music and artists like David Bowie, and in his assertion that hip-hop isn't really music because it isn't "authentic" (I.e. it isn't played by a band). And while he's very good at tearing apart other people's political viewpoints, he seems unwilling to reveal his own (which is a bit cowardly, for one, and it also makes it hard at times to understand where he's coming from at times; is he saying this because he believes it, or is he saying it just to get a rise out of the reader?).
One of the reasons why I strongly recommend the book is that Carducci has a real insider's perspective on the music industry (as he was a part of SST Records back in the 80's). He discusses his dealings with groups like Saccharine Trust, Meat Puppets, Husker Du, etc. and it makes for very interesting reading (it also serves as a nice supplement to Michael Azzerrad's excellent book on 80's indie rock, "Our Band Could Be Your Life"). I do hope that he decides to update the book in the near future, as I'm curious to hear what he thinks about the prevalence of Twee-ness in modern indie music (not to mention that I would love to read paragraphs of Joe tearing new assholes out of horrible music phenoms like rap-rock and The Strokes). It was refreshing to read a book on music that didn't approach it with the same Ivory Tower, sensitive new age guy mentality that plagues the critical community. Even if I disagree with a lot of Carducci's opinions, I find his tone and style of writing to be as refreshing as a can of Sprite on a hot day.
Then again, if you're reading this and you don't give a damn about music criticism, I do apologize for wasting your valuable Net surfing time.
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
And I've read a lot.