Richard Kostelanetz
Pop Publishing (1970)
“Pop publishing” characterizes not coffee-table gifts for Daddy but books, usually paperback, about pop culture—rock music, movie stars, the comics, even football players. These books exploit a pre-established popular interest, rather than persuade the reader to pay attention to something unfamiliar; and since rock music has become America’s most popular popular art, superseding film and television (both constrained by censorship and cynicism), the most conspicuous recent pop books intent to capitalize on rock’s success. Like other unprecedented phenomena today, pop books do not normally get noticed in the review media, which, perhaps by definition, are too conservative to acknowledge what did not exist a decade ago.
Pop songs are the journalism of music, which is to say pop is more direct and accessible, more explicit in its messages, more faddish, shorter and still melodically repetitious, subservient to currently dominant conventions, unashamedly transient and, most important, more commercial than “art” or “literature.” Both pop music and journalism are intended not for the few, as is most serious writing and musical composition, but the many (which may, however, include “the few”). A successful pop composer can earn more royalties annually than Cage, Copland, Babbitt, Boulez, and Stravinsky combined.
Art is more free than pop, however, because a truly contemporary artist is not limited by either his available materials (such as his groups’ instrumentalists), established artistic conventions, or the demands of a mass market. The criterion of “Will it sell a million now?” for instance, scarcely informs the creation of the best contemporary art. Critically, there is simply no reason to regard rock as musically consequential—rock musicians make no discernible contribution to “contemporary music,” not even to that comparatively negligible tradition of “the song.” Not only does the epithet “rock criticism” approach a contradiction in terms, but the claims for rock’s importance are usually made by nonmusicians unable to tell the difference between a John Cage and an Aaron Copland.
As pop music has minimal relationship to today’s avant-garde music, so do pop books stand to genuine contemporary literature and criticism. And neither the songs nor the books get any better if promoted, or classified as “art.” Still the best beat for social dancing, rock inspires almost universal enjoyment among the young; yet just as one song or rock group is better than another, so discriminations can be made about pop publishing. “I resent that [pop] classification,” one publisher told me. “It makes books sound not serious; some are very serious.” We both agreed that one of the best pop books documented the greatest film stars of all time—The Marx Brothers at the Movies (1968) by Paul D. Zimmerman and Burt Goldblatt.
The most obvious pop vehicle is the “personality book,” based upon the established success of s certain performer. Arlo Guthrie (1969), Leonard Cohen (1969), and Judy Collins (1969) all contain some lyrics and melody lines with spare guitar-chord accompaniments, as well as abundant full-page pictures of Our Star. Pop tunesmiths are also collecting just their lyrics into books of “poetry,” such as Janis Ian’s Who Really Cares (1970) and Jim Morrison of The Doors has collected two privately published booklets of poems not yet put to song—The Lords and The New Creatures (1970). However, the style of even the best of these ditties bears as much relation to modern poetry as promotional jingles or The Atlanta Constitution do to William Faulkner. Examples of embarrassing language include Morrison’s “Modern life is a journey by car,” or this stanza:
Kill hate
disease
warfare
sadness
If written by an assistant professor at South Dakota College, these lines would have never gotten into public print. (And how, pray tell, to quote the last line of Leonard Cohen’s much-rendered “Suzanne”; is it possible that “you’re sure that she can find you ‘Cause she’s touched her perfect body with her mind”?) Perhaps the liberties of rock inevitably dredge bad verse, even out of recognized “poets.”
Rock at its best is not art, nor does it pretend to be; and pretentious esthetic claims made on its behalf invariably dampen the fun. It is impossible for any head honed on modern verse to read Richard Goldstein’s The Poetry of Rock (1969), although the words in print often evoke melodies and singers’ voices in one’s mind. (If you do not already know the tunes, forget it.) Another songbook-without-melodies is The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics (1969), edited by Alan Aldridge, who asked various visual artists to “interpret” familiar Beatles’ songs. The results are not consequential contemporary paintings but lovely examples of currently fashionable styles in commercial illustrative art, which, need I say now, is analogously the journalism of modern painting. The line of capitalism dependence runs something like this. The lyrics would fall flat without the pictures, the pictures would have no value without the Beatles; so as the illustrations exploit the Beatles and the lyrics exploit the illustrations, everyone involved exploits a popular enthusiasm.
There is potentially more seriousness in books about rock—whether a single personality, a particular group, or the entire phenomenon. The rise of the Beatles spawned a spate of “monographs”; and just as the Beatles’ early eminence has never been surpassed, so no book on a single group approaches Michael Braun’s evocative reportage in Love Me Do (1964). Unskeptical journalistic potboilers include Hunter Davies’s hopelessly “authorized” The Beatles (1968), Julius Fast’s The Beatles: The Real Story (1968), Pete Goodman’s Our Own Story by the Rolling Stones (1965) and Mike Jahn’s “unauthorized” but no more illuminating Jim Morrison and The Doors (1969).
Of the more general studies of rock, most of which are published in hardback, (and, thus, perhaps designed to last longer than most superficial pop books), I find that Nik Cohn’s Rock From the Beginning (1969) is critically capricious but thorough and unusually informative; Charles Gillett’s The Sound of the City (1970) is well-researched, though often erroneous; Paul Williams’s Outlaw Blues (1969) is gossipy, unperceptive, unpersuasive add sub-literate; Carl Belz’s The Story of Rock (1969) seems descended from the uncomprehending perspective of a professorially ambitious Martian who cannot dance; most of the reviews collected in [Richard] Goldstein’s Greatest Hits (1970) simply were not worth reprinting; and Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia (1970) is critically concise, extremely knowledgeable, marvelously readable and probably as “definitive” as its transient subject allows. What rescues Griel Marcus’s Rock & Roll Will Stand (1969), an anthology collecting from many hands of varying competence what could not be written by one alone, is a single brilliant, vividly technical essay on rock’s musical evolution by a musician-turned-graduate student named Langdon Winner. More stylish extended criticism appears in Richard Meltzer’s highly literate and extremely witty Esthetics of Rock (1970), where genuine insights are spectacularly twisted into evasive ironies and back into penetrating insights again—a Borgesian technique particularly successful with material as semi-serious as rock. “Socrates here has spoken of tragedy and comedy alone alone as a matter of drunken brevity,” Meltzer writes. “John Lennon, in a similar position, would group together many more things, likely tragedy, comedy, pornography, melodrama, structured philosophy, mathematics and psychology, history, limerick, babble. Dulled beyond speech he might still indicate his conception of the One as dulled beyond speech.”
Rock invariably inspires writers, from Tom Wolfe to teenagers, more to kinky prose than critical discrimination; but once the arch metaphors and typographical tricks are cleared away, it becomes painfully clear that few worthwhile statements can be made about rock, or about journalism—not as much can be said about art. All the books mentioned so far, except Meltzer’s, are particularly wanting in imagination, as the words in most of them are as simplistic and obvious as both the images and the assertions.
The first thing to be noted about J Mark’s Rock and Other Four-Letter Words (1968) is its superiority to the Columbia record of the same title, which is a pointless tape-collage. Secondly, the book embodies an extremely spectacular design done by Marks himself; not only do individual pages call attention to their appearance, as contrasting styles of type are mixed with various illustrative material and the page’s rectangle is continually split into variously arranged sections, but the book achieves a sequential visual rhythm that is sustained, in a virtuoso performance, for over 250 pages. Its only peer as an extended sequential collage is Apollo Amerika (1970) by the German visual poet, Ferdinand Kriwet, whose book is an essentially post-journalistic memoir of the American moon-landing that, because its pages are predominantly visual, could well be issued here untranslated. (Given American publishing’s taboos on innovative design, however, this seems unlikely.)
Although Rock and Other Four-Letter Words successfully matches a revolution in the commercial art of book-design to an earlier revolution in popular music, Marks’ book-length “essay” is trivialized first by its journalistic purposes—to present a diffuse panorama, rather than a pointed or discriminating commentary—and then by its photographs, mostly from Linda Eastman (now Mrs. Paul McCartney), that are too heavy and obvious; for the tragedy that is such a playful and inventive design is undermined by such familiar photographic merchandise. These defects notwithstanding, Rock and remains one of the most inventively designed books of the past decade—not the sort of gray, inconspicuous layout that wins awards from grayheads, but one to be admired and imitated by other young book-designers.
A subsidiary industry lies in books about the culture of rock, which means not the performers but their audiences. The queens of the latter—or maybe just the jesters—are salaciously introduced in Groupies and Other Girls (1970), which was culled from the pages of Rolling Stone magazine the year before. The 400,000 at Woodstock last summer (and the million more who wished they were there) comprise the most likely customers for pop publications, and that event in itself is memorialized in a Life magazine special (1969); in Woodstock Report (1969), which was also culled from Rolling Stone; and in much of Anders Holmquist’s The Free People (1969), which exhibits exceptionally artful photography and a contagiously warm regard for human subjects. Abbie Hoffman’s Woodstock Nation (1970), slickly subtitled “A Talk-Rock Album,” tells less about its title than its author and the post-Chicago, pre-trial evolution of his politics; and that last connection raises the fact that most pop publishing extends, if not popularizes, the “hip culture” of rock, drugs, way-out dress, unrestrained affection, antimilitarism, and counter-bourgeois values. In this respect in particular, it differs as much from earlier forms of “mass culture,” to quote an archaic term, as the new books about pop differ from their predecessors. No longer do the idols resemble Pat Boone or even Frank Sinatra, for now they are, the hypocrisies of wealth nonwithstanding, sexual-political radicals.
The new quarterly US (born in 1969) is customarily mentioned with “pop publishing,” because its editor, Richard Goldstein, is a successful rock critic and the book reflects his enthusiasms. Its telling feature is essays by very young writers on phenomena every young reader knows—Charles Starkweather, boxing, college rebellions, feminism, anti-war protests, astrology, the fifties, Bob Dylan; and most of these contributors are, like Goldstein himself, “rock critics” who have established themselves in older magazines—Michael Lydon, Ellen Willis, Jon Landau, Robert Christgau. Indeed, the first two issues suggest that US was founded to fill the particular need of allowing rock critics to write on other subjects; and in this respect, it addresses itself to the cruel truth that the established magazines are more open to young writers specializing in “kiddie” subjects—what the old boys cannot, or will not, do themselves, such as reviewing rock. Nonetheless, as every young critic knows, the same editors who scarcely care whether a young critic prefers pop group Y to group Z generally take an overwhelming authority over the same young writer’s judgements on more serious art and literature. Indeed, since established magazines generally regard aspiring writers as interchangeable and fail to honor the integrity of the serious young critic, those intending to write on non-kiddie subjects would obviously be well advised to follow Goldstein’s example and found their own journals, just as the pioneering producers of rock necessarily founded their own record companies.
Notwithstanding Goldstein’s limited conception of critical seriousness, US is more open to young writers and to innovative writing (including, let me confess, my own visual poetry) than its obvious competitor, the closed-neo-Jewish-academic New American Review. However, literate young writers, as distinct from the subliterate, would be less disturbed by US if publishers would sponsor similar organs for less poppish young writers; for if they do not, and if young writers fail to fill the breach, there is every reason to fear that literature and criticism as living traditions will come to an end.
Pop publishing deals in admitted ephemera; and even the most successful of these books generally has a commercial life scarcely longer than a best-selling rock record. Rock and Other Four-Letter Words, which came out a little more than a year ago, has already passed through the stores and was, the last time I looked, impossible to purchase. These books also fall victim to the faddishness intrinsic in pop; for just as this year’s new ideas become next year’s common piety, so the early photographs of the Beatles with their shortish “long hair” of 1963-64 now inspire amusement, and the “psychedelic” posters of 1967 already seem campy. Perhaps rock itself will be more transient than some young pop critics think, and thus pop books should be printed on newsprint that quickly disintegrates. Like yesterday’s newspapers, but unlike literature, these books will not convey the same immediacy or impact several years from now; but to rephrase an old adage, that’s the pop business.