I am not sure what’s wrong with me, but I don’t like rock music. I sometimes admire the artistry of guitarists, sitar players and pianists, and I like the sheer intensity of Elvis, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, and even Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. But when I tune into the lyrics, I get upset. Most people think of these lines by CSN (without Neil Young, good on him) to be lovely. I just find them exasperating:
If you can’t be with the one you love,
Love the one you’re with.
CSNY was supposedly part of the great revolution of the 1960s, but I have always found those lines revolting. It seems to confuse love and sex, and that sleight of hand is almost always operating in rock music. Patti Smith, a poet whose recent memoir The Bread of Angels is wonderful, had one hit single (from the album Easter). It was called “Because the Night”, but on the cover of the album we see her spaghetti top strap is off her shoulder. She leers provocatively at the viewer. She looks pretty done for, and we are supposed to find it appealing.
I also don’t know why rock musicians are so invested in socialism. Socialism is stupid. I never understood how anyone could have listened to the post-punk group The Gang of Four. It’s sick to ballyhoo the cannibals of Chinese Maoism. Or take the lovely anthem by Thunderclap Newman. The falsetto singing seems to imply eternal peace, but then out pop these lyrics:
Hand out the arms and ammo
We’re gonna blast our way through here
Because the revolution’s here
And you know it’s right
And you know that it’s right
Guns are noisy. Anything that requires noise can’t be good.
There was a brief hiatus when John Lennon turned against Maoism in “Revolution” (the B-side to “Hey Jude”):
You say you got a real solution, well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan
But if you want money for minds that hate
All I can tell you, Buddy, is you have to wait
But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow
Lennon then says about violent revolution “you can count me out”. After that, he lost popularity, so changed it back to “count me in”.
The celebration of violence and authoritarian regimes disgusts me, but you’d think that rock stars were all for it. Out of all of rock, there is very little that makes any sense. Lennon briefly woke up before he was blown away by a fan. My friend Jake cried. I tried to be patient.
I watched Ten Years After play their hit “I’d Love to Change the World” at Woodstock on TV. The song discusses British overpopulation in the lines “Population keeps on breeding / Nation bleeding / still more feeding / economy”, and then these snarky lines:
Tax the rich, feed the poor
Till there are no rich no more
Why should government have all the money and leave the rest of us to beg? There is real sorrow in this, and an actual brain.
The Stones sang “Sympathy for the Devil” (they also sang about liking rock’n’roll, who would have guessed), and the Ramones sang “Blitzkrieg Bop”, which were both humorous. I enjoyed the stupidity of the Ramones and never took them seriously. But it is probably worth mentioning that the guitarist of the biggest punk band in the world, Johnny Ramone, was a supporter of the Republican Party. Anyway, I didn’t take the Sex Pistols seriously either. But Dionysus must have blood, and the rock stars died young in great swathes to staunch his thirst. Keith Moon, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Sid and Nancy, Kurt Cobain, Joey and Johnny and Dee Dee and Tommy Ramone. They were dying to entertain us.
When Cat Stevens got off the Peace Train and joined the jihadis against Salman Rushdie I wondered if musicians had rocks in their head. Is Valerie Solanas lurking behind Bikini Kill? Maybe Kathleen Hannah would have shot Andy Warhol again if she could. Like there were no better choices around.
On the other hand, the Kinks’ “Twentieth Century Man” bemoans socialism.
This is the twentieth century
But too much aggravation
It’s the age of insanity
What has become of the green pleasant
Fields of Jerusalem?
…
You keep all your smart modern writers
Give me William Shakespeare
You keep all your smart modern painters
I’ll take Rembrandt, Titian, Da Vinci and
Gainsborough
I don’t know if rock was ever meant to be a vehicle for thought, rather than inane posturing—from Bo Diddley and his macho sense of himself, to Iggy Pop, or what have you in Buddy Holly, or the Richie Valens song “La Bamba”, which proclaims that he is not merely a working sailor; he is the actual captain.
Still, here is the Kinks’ response to the Labour Party:
I was born in a welfare state
Ruled by Bureaucracy
Controlled by civil servants
And people dressed in grey
Got no privacy, got no liberty
Cause the twentieth century people
Took it all away from me
The few lines I seem to like are when the general noise ratio is somewhat turned down, but I love James Brown when he sings “Hot Pants (She Got to Use What She Got to Get What She Wants)”. Rock music is all curves and zigzags. As long as there is a video, I can generally put up with it.
Lately, I’ve been trying country music, as it talks about fathers and sons, and it makes me cry. But then I realized that I hate to cry. I have listened to very old lyrics such as “Gimme that Old Time Religion”, but I can’t quite cross over. So far, I only like one country song: “Tulsa Time”, sung by Don Williams, but the reason I like it is that there is a dance video with kids.
Classical music and opera? Is that for people who like long meetings? I can listen to Erik Satie, as I love his monochrome wit. It is like minimalist painting. That, and 4’40 by John Cage are my favorites. I can listen to those twice a year. Musicians seem to need massive audiences. I sat next to the lead singer of Kansas (the guys that brought us “Carry On Wayward Son” in 1976) once on an airplane as he sniffed cocaine. He had missed his band jet while involved in an orgy and he talked about UFOs and said he made $25,000 in a single night. I hate crowds. I prefer to be in a museum where I can be completely by myself. I go to concerts, but I can’t wait until they’re over, so I can talk to myself walking in a park on my way to shoot hoops, hoping against hope that nobody will show up with a boom box.
