Near the end of his fascinating new book, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll (Oxford University Press), Elijah Wald gives the lie to his own somewhat sensational title. “History is often written as a series of conflicts, whether the wars are between nations or artistic styles,” he writes. “Battles tend to be more exciting to read about than marketplaces, though cultures have met far more frequently in trade than in war, and there are always more countries coexisting than fighting.” In other words, people imagine the history of American pop music as a series of aesthetic revolutions not because the Billboard charts are actually a war zone but because they just like to think in terms of conflict. Aside from the occasional symbolic coup—Nirvana knocking Michael Jackson out of the number one spot, for instance—sudden paradigm shifts are much rarer than periods when different sounds share the charts.
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The slow give-and-take between popular styles that tend to share fans and even overlap musically doesn’t make for an exciting story, so it doesn’t matter if it’s more true. That’s why one widely accepted history of rock looks like this: First there was jazz, country, and the blues. Then jazz lost its subversive wildness and turned into boring, sanitized big-band stuff that rich white folks liked, so blues and country joined forces to make rock ‘n’ roll. Rock transformed pop music, freaked out the grown-ups, and was eventually elevated from teenybopper soundtrack to art form by the Beatles.
In a 2007 essay for the Onion‘s A.V. Club blog, Steven Hyden writes, “Rock history, unlike regular history, is written by the losers.” By “losers” Hyden means music obsessives who don’t share mainstream tastes and tend in their retellings to inflate the importance of cherry-picked acts they can appreciate in hindsight—to repurpose a phrase from his essay, they focus on what people should’ve listened to, not what they actually listened to. (Nearly every music critic, myself included, is a loser in this sense.) For example, it’s clear from a present-day viewpoint that the Velvet Underground have been massively influential—you can draw a line connecting them to almost every alt-rock band that exists, even the ones with platinum-selling records—but when they were actually making albums almost no one knew about them. When we talk about the late-60s rock scene, shouldn’t we be talking in terms of bands almost everybody had heard of at the time—like, say, the Turtles?
No one, not even a loner weirdo like Jandek, makes music in a vacuum, completely detached from the pop mainstream and his or her potential audience. Wald argues that nobody should be trying to, since how many people music appeals to in its own time is at least as important as how many rock writers it appeals to in 30 years.
Tuesday 6/9, 6 PM, 57th Street Books, 1301 E. 57th, 773-684-1300
