Review by New York Times Review
"ROCK AND ROLL can never die," Neil Young sang nearly four decades ago, and he was right. Unless . . . did he mean that more as a plea than a promise? Discuss in 1,000 words, citing at least three supporting examples from other Young lyrics (live variants and unreleased songs permissible). And then put down your pencils and consider this: Not only has rock 'n' roll neither burned out nor faded away, but it has endured long enough that critics, journalists, scholars, musicians and just plain fans who have been writing about it with some level of serious intent since the early 1960s have now been enshrined in an excellent new volume from the Library of America, "Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop From Elvis to Jay Z." The editors, Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar, novelist and critic/academic respectively, define their mission thus: "It's too early for canon formation in a field so marvelously volatile - a volatility that mirrors, still, that of pop music itself. . . . Instead, we tried to make a feast." At that they have succeeded, with a vision of pop and pop criticism as one big chopped salad - the mongrel bounty of America: rock, soul, rap, doo-wop, heavy metal, punk, Prince, Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, Grace Slick, Axl Rose, The New York Review of Books, Harvard University Press. . . . All presented and accounted for! Skipping obvious choices (no "I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen"), Lethem and Dettmar have compiled an eclectic 50 pieces by 50 eclectic authors, beginning with Nat Hentoff's perspicacious liner notes for "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" (1963); continuing with essays, reviews, profiles, trade reports, histories, fanzine logorrhea and more by writers such as Amiri Baraka, Eve Babitz, Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis and Kelefa Sanneh; and ending with an excerpt from Greil Marcus's "The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs" (2014) about an art video of a guitar being dragged down a road by a truck - a tour de force essay in its own right, but one that also serves as commentary and illumination on pretty much everything else in the book. If there is a common thread to pull at - aside from the centrality of racial cross-pollination and appropriation in American pop, and the infinity of things to say about the Beatles - it might be a nagging feeling of loss, a belief that the music was better whenever you happened to be 13 and a fast song or a good beat first got your heart pumping faster and suggested a whole big world beyond whatever boundaries you thought were ruining your stupid teenage life; as with martinis, the first sip is invariably the best sip. Of course, you expect day-the-music- died rue from the Big Chill generation. But here is Camden Joy (pen name of Tom Adelman, born in 1964), lamenting the unfulfilled promise of 1990s indie rock as if it were the proverbial "hippie dream" (Neil Young again) - or maybe the 1980s Mets - in a wonderfully run-on sentence I will excerpt but a small portion of: " . . . generation-defining classics were on the tips of the Breeders' and Uncle Tupelo's tongues when the band members turned on one another . . . and . . . everybody from the Posies to Pearl Jam to Archers of Loaf never figured out how to make an album entirely important from start to finish, forgetting the point of pop stardom is to bring together huge clumps of otherwise unaffiliated folks. . . . " There is truth in that last sentiment, even if you disagree with the critical particulars leading up to it: Most of us still seek togetherness from pop, the thrill of joining something larger than ourselves - a moment, a party, a movement, a tribe. Writing in 1977 on the occasion of Elvis Presley's death, Lester Bangs was already bitter about the splintering of pop's audience (and he, who would die in 1982, didn't know the half of it). Here is the conclusion to that acerbic, unflinching obit: "We will continue to fragment . . . because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis's. But I can guarantee you one thing: We will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won't bother saying goodbye to his corpse. I will say goodbye to you." AMONG THE GREAT PLEASURES of reading an anthology like this, as I hope I've just demonstrated, are the ways ostensibly unrelated essays echo, inform and contradict one another across genres and decades. But unless you are hopelessly cheerful (and if you are hopelessly cheerful, these writers won't be your cup of tea anyway), you don't pick up a collection this rambunctious expecting to adore every single piece, and I didn't. Still, I found myself highlighting insights, jokes and startling turns of phrase from nearly every writer. Some are learned, some passionate, some angry, some hilarious, some borderline bonkers, some - the best - all of the above. (Disclosure: With one exception, I wouldn't say I'm intimate with or even really know the contributors to this collection, but I've met and shared meals with several of them, as well as one of the editors. The exception is Nick Tosches, whom I had the privilege of editing at Vanity Fair for a decade or so. His 1982 biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, "Hellfire," is excerpted here. I will refrain from commenting on it except to say that, like all of Nick's writing, it speaks better for him than anyone else can.) I hesitate to name any favorites, because I have too many, but I suppose I have some critical obligation here. For access, it's hard to beat Stanley Booth's fly-on-a-wall report from 1969, in which Otis Redding and the guitarist-producer Steve Cropper write and record what turns out to be "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay," shortly before Redding's death in a plane crash. "That's a mother," the keyboardist Booker T. Jones concludes when the session is finished - not a bad day's work. On a more personal note, here is Donna Gaines, writing in 1987 on Lou Reed and his former band, the Velvet Underground - an essay that digs deep into the symbiosis between fan and musician: "Unconsciously, I think I've internalized Lou Reed more than anyone else. Like everyone else I loved the Velvets. And at least one song on every solo album has broken offsome of the ice around my heart. . . . He says all the creepy things I can't put into words. Often I'll say something wise to myself. Then I'll realize it's a Lou Reed proverb I've picked up offmy turntable. I'm talking, but it's his voice." What makes this piece even more remarkable is that Gaines doesn't actually like Reed all that much. And speaking of giving the Devil his due, Lethem and Dettmar include a thoughtful, funny excerpt from the critic and novelist Chuck Klosterman's 2001 memoir, "Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth Daköta," in which Klosterman explains how, while growing up in the 1980s at a remove from sophisticated tastes, he and "the guys in my shop class" found affirmation in the "poofy, sexist, shallow" antics of hair metal bands. His life changed, Klosterman writes, when he was 11 and his older brother came home from the Army with a cassette of a 1983 Mötley Crüe album. "This may make a sad statement about my generation (or perhaps just myself )," he confesses, "but 'Shout at the Devil' was my 'Sgt. Pepper's.'" That is a good lesson to take away from this collection: On any given day, at any given hour, the sun is shining somewhere and someone is hearing his or her own "Sgt. Pepper's" for the first time - maybe even the real "Sgt. Pepper's." But somewhere else it's cold and raining and there's nothing but oldies on the radio. BRUCE HANDY is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of "Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children's Literature as an Adult," which will be published in August.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 11, 2017]
Review by Library Journal Review
The Library of America series features a black-and-white photo of the author against a black background underscored by a patriotic ribbon and is as iconic as apple pie. It's fitting that the cover of an anthology capturing the groundbreaking and rebellious nature of rock and roll defies this convention. Inspired by Phillip Lopate's introduction to American Movie Critics, Dettmar (English, Pomona Coll.; Gang of Four's Entertainment!) and Lethem (A Gambler's Anatomy; Chronic City) successfully canonize rock and pop writing as a distinctive branch of American letters. A survey more than a chronological history, this collection pulls from the multiplicity of genres embedded under the rock moniker: jazz, punk, rap, and even experimental music. As a corollary, the multitude of voices in this collection are varied and diverse-especially noteworthy in a genre historically dominated by white men. From Jessica Hopper's deconstruction of gender politics in emo music to Kelefa Sanneh's musings on the limitations of Jay-Z's lyricism as poetic text, this compilation is a stark reminder that rock and pop music are often simultaneously a disdain for and reflection of the society, culture, and time period in which it is produced. VERDICT Recommended for all libraries, especially academic venues with a strong music or pop culture collection.-Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
