Book Review / Alison Powell
Yes, You Can Say No, But the World Will Have to Go
Darby Crash of The Germs
Eric Weisbard. Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 323 pages.
Henry Rollins, most notably of the hardcore punk band Black Flag, once said, “I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.” The idea that the definition, the refining of the self, is only possible through the trying on of various personas, is one familiar to philosophers and pop culture theorists alike. The joy of re-imagining one’s self must come partially through the sheer potential of it; if I dye my hair this color and start speaking German, maybe I can escape my Midwestern upbringing. If I convert to this religion, perhaps I can “not be like my parents.”
In the late 1930s, North Dakota native Norma Deloris Egstrom experienced her own personal metamorphosis. Born the seventh of eight children, her mother died when she was 4. She grew up under the tyranny of an abusive stepmother, Min, and the way she escaped was through work—waitressing and singing for low pay on local radio stations. One day, a radio personality in Fargo who was fond of her songs renamed her Peggy Lee, starting off a storm of reinvention that traveled all the way to Los Angeles where she became a legend. In 1942, she had her first hit, “Someone Else is Taking My Place.” Peggy Lee was taking poor Norma Egstrom’s place.
Peggy Lee went on to perform for vast adoring audiences, well into her old age, even wheelchair-bound. She fought for equal compensation for musicians, fueled by a conviction that she’d never be poor again. She used to quote Emerson: “God’s will will not be made manifest by cowards.” The catalyst that allows us to reinvent ourselves may be deceptively superficial, it’s true, but it also takes courage to allow a name, a haircut, a move across the country to be our present identity’s undoing, and to allow a new self to take its place. So a personal revolution from small-town North Dakota victim into artist, into icon, allowed the young Norma Egstrom to resist being overtaken with melancholy, futility, an upbringing surrounded by competing siblings and a frightful stepmother. Being an amazing singer is not enough. She had to transform herself into someone different, someone more powerful, more animal, in order to become the chart-topper who sang “Fever” with the devil-may-care seduction that shot her to stardom.
Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music is a collection of essays from the Experience Music Project Pop Conference “where... academics and other culture-mongers come together to stretch the boundaries of pop music culture, criticism, and scholarship,” and the collection concerns itself mostly with the reinvention not of selfhood, but of narrative and myth through song. Part and parcel of this discussion is the question of how resistance, subversion, and agency (those pervasive culture studies trade words) make themselves apparent in the transformation of one musical narrative into another.
A moment in Peggy Lee’s career serves to illustrate this approach. Those of you familiar with her heart-wrenching, downright existential “Is That All There Is?” will likely be gratified to learn that the origin of the song was not, in fact, a hedonistic desire by the writers to get everyone “to have a ball.” Instead, the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were prompted to write the song because of an appreciation for Thomas Mann’s 1896 short story, “Disillusionment. “The story features a clergyman’s son whose witnessing of his family’s house catching fire leads to a strange kind of religious disenchantment: “’So this,’ I thought, ‘is a fire. This is what it is like to have the house on fire. Is that all there is to it?’” He presents a litany of other disappointing, apathy-inducing experiences (“the dry agonies of baffled lust”) and finally concludes, “So this is the greatest pain we can suffer. Well, and what then—is this all?”And “so I dream and wait for death. Ah, how well I know it already, death, that last disappointment! At my last moment I shall be saying to myself: ‘So this is the great experience—well, and what of it? What is it after all?’”
A little over a half century later, and Leiber and Stoller have made Mann’s story contemporary in a song, which will soon be transformed again by the detached, half-wilting, half-sung, half-spoken, masterful delivery of Peggy Lee. The chorus of the song is: “Is that all there is? / If that’s all there is, my friends / Let’s keep dancing / Let’s break out the booze / And have a ball / If that’s all... there is.” The chorus is interspersed with dramatic memories—the singer watching her childhood home burn down, the singer at the circus (of this “marvelous spectacle”: “there’s something missing”); the singer left by her first love (“and I thought I’d die, but I didn’t, and when I didn’t I thought to myself ‘Is that all there is?’”—as if the not-dying is itself the disappointment).
Franklin Bruno, the author of the essay “‘Is That All There Is?’ and the Uses of Disenchantment” is uninterested in the reinvention of the Mann story in and of itself. His thesis lies not in the reinvention of the literary in music, but rather, simply, the fascinating history of this great song and what it meant for audiences, and for Peggy Lee and later, Polly Jean Harvey. It is perhaps this that makes it one of the essays which stands out in this collection. Other essays are preoccupied with a theme of the reinvention of identity through musical borrowing, of the transference of power through music—this approach most commonly understood, for example, in the rightful preoccupation of many culture theorists with how white rock and roll co-opted the inestimable heights of African-American music. It is almost as though the main tension in culture studies which focuses on pop music is between a desire to shed a hundred variations of a song to find its “original identity” and an opposing desire, perhaps more theoretical, to articulate the great shell-game of musical attribution as itself a shell game. The latter, more postmodern approach ultimately must determine that all identities—sexual, gender, racial, regional, etc.—are, in fact, persuasive myths of our own making. The tension between seeking the authentic or revealing that the very concept of authenticity is, in fact, a ruse, is productive when it spurs on good scholarship. But reading a collection of essays like these together feels a bit schizophrenic, making a straightforward essay like the one about Peggy Lee’s career and the mystery of “Is That All There Is?” a sort of relief.
Two other essays in the collection, Lavinia Greenlaw’s funny and self-deprecating “On Punk Rock and Not Being a Girl” and Drew Daniel’s memorial to The Germs’ Darby Crash (and her youth), “How to Act Like Darby Crash” escape this cyclical conversation by being articulate and compelling about, simply, “What Rock Music Means to Me.” And it seems that a collection of essays like these may make for a more fluid and purposely celebratory compilation. That is not to say that academics can’t, or shouldn’t, write about pop and rock music. There’s nothing about popular music that might make it less applicable to scholarship, and we enter in a strange space of being nostalgic about the present if we try to isolate pop music from the academy. Still, who was it who said, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”? We must acknowledge the ways music cannot be read as a literary text; its lineage is less, well, delineated, than what we might find when in a Shakespearean tragedy, where we can cherry-pick the Ovidian references. A singer may manipulate a line a hundred ways in performance; a ragtime pianist like Jelly Roll Morton surely altered key story lines in his “Murder Ballads” differently every time he performed (alone or with an audience) this 80-minute masterpiece. So maybe music is fundamentally more amorphous and living and sloppy and resistant to definition than other kinds of texts.
So it follows that pop music would be less neatly “readable” when it comes to the construction of social identity through song. Griel Marcus powerfully begins his essay “Death Letters” with the 1930s Harlem poet Melvin B. Tolson’s “Sootie Joe” line “Somebody has to black hisself up / For somebody else to stay white,” and goes on to ask why “old music” (by which he means Old-Time music) “seems to be heard, today, as punk. It’s heard as music of values: the values of harshness, cruelty, even sadism...The values of say your piece and get off the stage: get it over with, tell the truth as you see it and then shut up. There’s a sense of affinity, not the smell of a raid on someone else’s culture.” So instead, he tells us, young hipster audiences fetishize Dock Boggs’s “Sugar Baby,” Son House’s “Death Letter Blues” and Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman” (see the movie Ghost World, which Marcus calls a “modern punk movie”). Marcus swiftly and convincingly defines the “punk reinvention of old American music...[as] people taking the ancient sound as a foreign language in which you could say absolutely anything, mean every word, and pretend you were only kidding.” This may be as good as any definition of the best of pop music.
Some of the essays in this collection strain more with a need to neatly categorize various social identities through song, trying to demonstrate how the metamorphoses of these songs cleanly reflect a changing America. The mildly bewildering “Whittling on Dynamite: The Difference Bert Williams Makes,” attempts to show how Bert Williams’s blackface band “Two Real Coons” legitimizes Spivak’s precarious notion that “subaltern speech may be halting and self-defeating...but subaltern song is different.” To be fair, the author eventually argues that “authenticity is relative,” which is possibly the most important—and certainly most accurate—argument in the collection. “Magic Moments, the Ghost of Folk-Rock, and the Ring of E Major” by David Brackett loses its way when Brackett tries to use E Major to trace a lineage of “magic moments” and “cross-racial ventriloquism” where folk-rock demonstrates its affinity to and separation from African-American hymn and blues groups. An essay by Jason King also stumbles by ill-advisedly taking on the task of defining “vibe.” The title of the article is “The Sound of Velvet Melting: The Power of ‘Vibe’ in the Music of Roberta Flack”; there is, it must be said, something slightly absurd about an academic discussion of what constitutes “vibe” or a “magic moment”—especially when what’s at stake is an attempt to explain racial borrowing (in the case of this article, to show how a singer like Flack can be defended against arguments that she is the African-American version of Olivia Newton John. Of course she shouldn’t have to be defended from such an absurd, essentialist claim; yet rather than making that point, King relies on the awkward assertion that the sole thing Flack and John have in common is their ability to “[produce] getting togetherness”).
There is a way, of course, in which articulating the lineage of American music is useful—that’s why we cherish our musicologists, that’s why we know Elvis became Elvis only because of the history of African-American rhythm and blues in the South—but there’s something discomfiting about the desire to produce clean and articulate racial conversations out of the transference of narrative in song. It may leave someone wondering, is that all there is? It can feel as though there is something paradoxically inauthentic about the forceful prioritizing of identity politics on these songs. The thing that makes Dock Boggs’s masterpiece “Sugar Baby” work is not that the song marks a crucial moment of intersection between African-American and hillbilly music, although that’s key. What really makes the song tick is the moment when the singer cries, “‘Who’ll rock the cradle, who’ll sing the song? Who’ll rock the cradle when you gone?’” and then answers, for the wife he has just killed, “I’ll rock the cradle, I’ll sing the song / I will rock the cradle when you gone.” The creepy pathos here is more complicated, and powerful, than we’re able to attend to if our antennae is only tuned to regionalism, race, and sexuality—in short, the politics of identity.
On the other hand, rock and roll and pop music are about nothing if not finding one’s identity and articulating one’s roots; if only, in the end, to destroy the discovered self. Brackett reminds us of the wonderful scene in Ghost World when the main character—a brilliant geek and an obsessive music collector (played by Steve Buscemi)—goes to a bar and, attempting to explain to a blonde at the bar the difference between blues and ragtime, is interrupted by her exclamation, “‘If you’re into blues, you’ve got to be into Blueshammer!’ which turns out to be the white trio the old man is opening for. They come storming onto the stage, the apotheosis of fake, of cultural theft and blues rape, smashing out their own ‘Pickin’ Cotton Blues.’” The reason the moment in the film is funny is because its cringe-worthy; all music fans—especially fans of “Old-Time” music—negotiate a social contract which stamps a gold star on authenticity. These fans are often as cynical and skeptical as the rest when it comes to the reinvention of identity. Still, there is a need—a deep, nearly patriotic need—to believe in an authentic American musical voice that is constantly co-opted by other American posers, if only because locating and defending the Real Thing gives us all something to do. It’s no crime to romanticize authenticity. The very act may be a way to praise wholeness—the birth of something before it is marred by co-optation, bastardization and confusion. That kind of romanticization bears its heart in articles that try to build themselves around the justification of such a thing as the “magic moment” or “vibe.”
“The Buddy Holocaust Story: A Necromusicology” by Eric Weisbard, reminds us why rock “strikes some as so miraculous and others as an unbearable travesty of privilege impersonating impression.” The subject of his essay is a young man named Bill Tate, who in the late 1970s capitalized on postpunk Americana with such songs as “Give Me Your Love or I’ll Destroy the World” (which included the couplet “Yes you can say no / But earth will have to go”). The legacy of “Buddy Holocaust” ended (or began) when he killed himself by driving into a median on the Corona del Mar Freeway in Los Angeles at the age of 21. A friend called Tate’s version of pragmatic nihilism “a response to the cold war and his inability to find a sexual partner.” The story is a tragedy; it also problematizes a reading that says multiple, swapping non-personas are at the heart of rock and roll (or any kind of compelling, moving art, for that matter). There are real artists behind this music. Yet the identity of one overlaps with the next who covers their song. Of course, the cover will often be mistaken for the original. One author notes this happens every time someone sings Bobby Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” at a karaoke bar and opens with “Here’s my favorite Reba song...”
Sure, the overlapping identities comprising the history of American music can’t logically lead us to the conclusion that the self in rock and roll is a moot or outdated notion. But a conversation about the meaning of pop music should have other avenues to saunter down than social-identity politics. The actor Shane West, who performed with the remaining members of The Germs well after Darby Jones’s death (in order to promote a documentary about the band), reportedly got permanently tattooed with Jones’s tattoos. When he’s on stage singing Darby Jones’s line, “I am not one I’m two” over and over and over again, doesn’t this encourage us to consider more the idea of the postmodern fragmentation of the self (if not multiple personality disorder) rather than an “authentic,” singular, individual or group experience of the world?
Perhaps rock music is always about the reinvention of the self; this at least complicates the assumption of a real individual lineage. Weisbard argues persuasively that “being sophomoric, partially educated but sure that you know it all, irrationally committed to impossible positions, so full of yourself that you burst, is as much a vital part of the rock masquerade as blackface or drag.” Indeed. And these qualities, one assumes, remain unmarked by culture, and are instead blessedly, stupidly human, purely everyone’s. Maybe nihilism in rock music (from Boggs’s murder ballad to Buddy Holocaust opening a concert with “This is not going to be too mellow. In fact, if you leave during a song you’ll be shot”) is not about whittling down to the “real” self but instead exploding the self in reinvention, a philosophy of multiple personas. This kind of multiplication, the endless potentials for who we might be, perhaps leads us to better understand who we really are even if it scares or disappoints us: a response to the cold war and our inability to find a sexual partner. Yes you can say no but earth will have to go. I will rock the cradle when you’re gone.
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