Music: Are you a rockist? And other aural occupations

1. The Rap Against Rockism
By KELEFA SANNEH

BAD news travels fast, and an embarrassing video travels even faster. By last Sunday morning, one of the Internet's most popular downloads was the hours-old 60-second .wmv file of Ashlee Simpson on "Saturday Night Live." As she and her band stood onstage, her own prerecorded vocals - from the wrong song - came blaring through the speakers, and it was too late to start mouthing the words. So she performed a now-infamous little jig, then skulked offstage, while the band (were a few members smirking?) played on. One of 2004's most popular new stars had been exposed as. ...

As what, exactly? The online verdict came fast and harsh, the way online verdicts usually do. A typical post on her Web site bore the headline, "Ashlee you are a no talent fraud!" After that night, everyone knew that Jessica Simpson's telegenic sister was no rock 'n' roll hero - she wasn't even a rock 'n' roll also-ran. She was merely a lip-synching pop star.

Music critics have a word for this kind of verdict, this knee-jerk backlash against producer-powered idols who didn't spend years touring dive bars. Not a very elegant word, but a useful one. The word is rockism, and among the small but extraordinarily pesky group of people who obsess over this stuff, rockism is a word meant to start fights. The rockism debate began in earnest in the early 1980's, but over the past few years it has heated up, and today, in certain impassioned circles, there is simply nothing worse than a rockist.

A rockist isn't just someone who loves rock 'n' roll, who goes on and on about Bruce Springsteen, who champions ragged-voiced singer-songwriters no one has ever heard of. A rockist is someone who reduces rock 'n' roll to a caricature, then uses that caricature as a weapon. Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.

Over the past decades, these tendencies have congealed into an ugly sort of common sense. Rock bands record classic albums, while pop stars create "guilty pleasure" singles. It's supposed to be self-evident: U2's entire oeuvre deserves respectful consideration, while a spookily seductive song by an R&B singer named Tweet can only be, in the smug words of a recent VH1 special, "awesomely bad."

Like rock 'n' roll itself, rockism is full of contradictions: it could mean loving the Strokes (a scruffy guitar band!) or hating them (image-conscious poseurs!) or ignoring them entirely (since everyone knows that music isn't as good as it used to be). But it almost certainly means disdaining not just Ms. Simpson but also Christina Aguilera and Usher and most of the rest of them, grousing about a pop landscape dominated by big-budget spectacles and high-concept photo shoots, reminiscing about a time when the charts were packed with people who had something to say, and meant it, even if that time never actually existed. If this sounds like you, then take a long look in the mirror: you might be a rockist.

Countless critics assail pop stars for not being rock 'n' roll enough, without stopping to wonder why that should be everybody's goal. Or they reward them disproportionately for making rock 'n' roll gestures. Writing in The Chicago Sun-Times this summer, Jim DeRogatis grudgingly praised Ms. Lavigne as "a teen-pop phenom that discerning adult rock fans can actually admire without feeling (too) guilty," partly because Ms. Lavigne "plays a passable rhythm guitar" and "has a hand in writing" her songs.

Rockism isn't unrelated to older, more familiar prejudices - that's part of why it's so powerful, and so worth arguing about. The pop star, the disco diva, the lip-syncher, the "awesomely bad" hit maker: could it really be a coincidence that rockist complaints often pit straight white men against the rest of the world? Like the anti-disco backlash of 25 years ago, the current rockist consensus seems to reflect not just an idea of how music should be made but also an idea about who should be making it.

If you're interested in - O.K., mildly obsessed with - rockism, you can find traces of it just about everywhere. Notice how those tributes to "Women Who Rock" sneakily transform "rock" from a genre to a verb to a catch-all term of praise. Ever wonder why OutKast and the Roots and Mos Def and the Beastie Boys get taken so much more seriously than other rappers? Maybe because rockist critics love it when hip-hop acts impersonate rock 'n' roll bands. (A recent Rolling Stone review praised the Beastie Boys for scruffily resisting "the gold-plated phooey currently passing for gangsta.")

From punk-rock rags to handsomely illustrated journals, rockism permeates the way we think about music. This summer, the literary zine The Believer published a music issue devoted to almost nothing but indie-rock. Two weeks ago, in The New York Times Book Review, Sarah Vowell approvingly recalled Nirvana's rise: "a group with loud guitars and louder drums knocking the whimpering Mariah Carey off the top of the charts." Why did the changing of the guard sound so much like a sexual assault? And when did we all agree that Nirvana's neo-punk was more respectable than Ms. Carey's neo-disco?

Rockism is imperial: it claims the entire musical world as its own. Rock 'n' roll is the unmarked section in the record store, a vague pop-music category that swallows all the others. If you write about music, you're presumed to be a rock critic. There's a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for doo-wop groups and folk singers and disco queens and even rappers - just so long as they, y'know, rock.

Rockism just won't go away. The rockism debate began when British bands questioned whether the search for raw, guitar-driven authenticity wasn't part of rock 'n' roll's problem, instead of its solution; some new-wave bands emphasized synthesizers and drum machines and makeup and hairspray, instead. "Rockist" became for them a term of abuse, and the anti-rockists embraced the inclusive possibilities of a once-derided term: pop. Americans found other terms, but "rockist" seems the best way to describe the ugly anti-disco backlash of the late 1970's, which culminated in a full-blown anti-disco rally and the burning of thousands of disco records at Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1979: the Boston Tea Party of rockism.

That was a quarter of a century and many genres ago. By the 1990's, the American musical landscape was no longer a battleground between Nirvana and Mariah (if indeed it ever was); it was a fractured, hyper-vivid fantasy of teen-pop stars and R&B pillow-talkers and arena-filling country singers and, above all, rappers. Rock 'n' roll was just one more genre alongside the rest.

Yet many critics failed to notice. Rock 'n' roll doesn't rule the world anymore, but lots of writers still act as if it does. The rules, even today, are: concentrate on making albums, not singles; portray yourself as a rebellious individualist, not an industry pro; give listeners the uncomfortable truth, instead of pandering to their tastes. Overnight celebrities, one-hit-wonders and lip-synchers, step aside.

And just as the anti-disco partisans of a quarter-century ago railed against a bewildering new pop order (partly because disco was so closely associated with black culture and gay culture), current critics rail against a world hopelessly corrupted by hip-hop excess. Since before Sean Combs became Puff Daddy, we've been hearing that mainstream hip-hop was too flashy, too crass, too violent, too ridiculous, unlike those hard-working rock 'n' roll stars we used to have. (This, of course, is one of the most pernicious things about rockism: it finds a way to make rock 'n' roll seem boring.)

Much of the most energetic resistance to rockism can be found online, in blogs and on critic-infested sites like ilovemusic.com, where debates about rockism have become so common that the term itself is something of a running joke. When the editors of a blog called Rockcritics Daily noted that rockism was "all the rage again," they posted dozens of contradictory citations, proving that no one really agrees on what the term means. (By the time you read this article, a slew of indignant refutations and addenda will probably be available online.)

But as more than one online ranter has discovered, it's easier to complain about rockism than it is to get rid of it. You literally can't fight rockism, because the language of righteous struggle is the language of rockism itself. You can argue that the shape-shifting feminist hip-pop of Ms. Aguilera is every bit as radical as the punk rock of the 1970's (and it is), but then you haven't challenged any of the old rockist questions (starting with: Who's more radical?), you've just scribbled in some new answers.

The challenge isn't merely to replace the old list of Great Rock Albums with a new list of Great Pop Songs - although that would, at the very least, be a nice change of pace. It's to find a way to think about a fluid musical world where it's impossible to separate classics from guilty pleasures. The challenge is to acknowledge that music videos and reality shows and glamorous layouts can be as interesting - and as influential - as an old-fashioned album.

In the end, the problem with rockism isn't that it's wrong: all critics are wrong sometimes, and some critics (now doesn't seem like the right time to name names) are wrong almost all the time. The problem with rockism is that it seems increasingly far removed from the way most people actually listen to music.

Are you really pondering the phony distinction between "great art" and a "guilty pleasure" when you're humming along to the radio? In an era when listeners routinely - and fearlessly - pick music by putting a 40-gig iPod on shuffle, surely we have more interesting things to worry about than that someone might be lip-synching on "Saturday Night Live" or that some rappers gild their phooey. Good critics are good listeners, and the problem with rockism is that it gets in the way of listening. If you're waiting for some song that conjures up soul or honesty or grit or rebellion, you might miss out on Ciara's ecstatic electro-pop, or Alan Jackson's sly country ballads, or Lloyd Banks's felonious purr.

Rockism makes it hard to hear the glorious, incoherent, corporate-financed, audience-tested mess that passes for popular music these days. To glorify only performers who write their own songs and play their own guitars is to ignore the marketplace that helps create the music we hear in the first place, with its checkbook-chasing superproducers, its audience-obsessed executives and its cred-hungry performers. To obsess over old-fashioned stand-alone geniuses is to forget that lots of the most memorable music is created despite multimillion-dollar deals and spur-of-the-moment collaborations and murky commercial forces. In fact, a lot of great music is created because of those things. And let's stop pretending that serious rock songs will last forever, as if anything could, and that shiny pop songs are inherently disposable, as if that were necessarily a bad thing. Van Morrison's "Into the Music" was released the same year as the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight"; which do you hear more often?

That doesn't mean we should stop arguing about Ms. Simpson, or even that we should stop sharing the 60-second clip that may just be this year's best music video. But it does mean we should stop taking it for granted that music isn't as good as it used to be, and it means we should stop being shocked that the rock rules of the 1970's are no longer the law of the land. No doubt our current obsessions and comparisons will come to seem hopelessly blinkered as popular music mutates some more - listeners and critics alike can't do much more than struggle to keep up. But let's stop trying to hammer young stars into old categories. We have lots of new music to choose from - we deserve some new prejudices, too.

Correction: article on Oct. 31 about rockism - favoritism toward traditional rock 'n' roll over producer-driven genres like disco, rhythm-and-blues and hip-hop - misstated the Web address for the Internet forum I Love Music, where rockism is often debated. It is www.ilxor.com, not ilovemusic.com.


2. The Perils of Poptimism
Does hating rock make you a music critic?
By Jody Rosen

By far the most-discussed piece of popular music criticism of the past several years—at least among pop music critics—was Kelefa Sanneh's October 2004 New York Times article, " The Rap Against Rockism ," which took a long-running conversation in music-wonk circles to the pages of the Gray Lady. For those who haven't caught up with the debate, rockism is … well, no one quite knows what it is. On the Web site rockcritics.com , a " Gallery of Rockism " highlights the lexical confusion, excerpting "Erroneous, Bizarre, and Occasionally Illuminating Usages of Today's Number-One-With-a-Bullet Buzzword." As far as I know, the Oxford English Dictionary hasn't bothered to define rockism (despite the term's apparent U.K. origins), but a Wikipedia entry , somewhat awkwardly, tries: "The fundamental tenet of rockism is that some forms of popular music, and some musical artists, are more authentic than others … [that] authentic popular music fits the rock and roll paradigm." Sanneh himself chose to define by example: "Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher." Perhaps the most cogent gloss came from frequent Slate contributor Douglas Wolk, who wrote last year in Seattle Weekly that the rockists regard rock as "normative … the standard state of popular music … to which everything else is compared, explicitly or implicitly."

The term may be slippery, but it's a useful framework for considering how ideas about taste and authenticity have infected writing and thinking about music over the years. And not just in the rock era: All who have sought to separate high from low, art from trash, the folk-authentic from the synthetic-mass-marketed, the bad new from the good old—the folk revivalists in the 1950s, the Dixieland jazz purists in 1940s, the Victorian parlor-song champions who blasted Tin Pan Alley ragtime in the 1910s—were, in their way, arch-rockists. Undoubtedly there were plainchant rockists back in 13 th -century France, thumbing their noses at that god-awful polyphony.

One thing's for sure: Most pop critics today would just as soon be accused of pedophilia as rockism. This was certainly the case among the journalists, academics, and geeks who gathered at the 2006 Experience Music Project Pop Conference last month. (Full disclosure: I attended and gave a paper. And am a geek.) At EMP, rockism talk was so prevalent that it became a kind of running gag: When the Los Angeles Times ' Ann Powers invoked the term in her paper, she quipped, "Got it in there!" The conference's theme was "'Ain't That a Shame': Loving Music in the Shadow of Doubt," and many speakers seized the moment to tackle the question of guilty pop pleasures, reconsidering musicians (Tiny Tim, Dan Fogelberg, Phil Collins) and genres (blue-eyed soul, Muzak) long maligned in rock discourse.

In fact, the wholesale rejection of "guilty pleasures" is a hallmark of the anti-rockist backlash. It's part of a new generation's reaction to the conventional wisdom, forged by first-wave critics in the 1960s and '70s, that enduring pop music art is a thing made by singer-songwriters using traditional rock instruments on long-playing albums, and that pop hits reside on a lower aesthetic plane, a source of fleeting, and often shameful, enjoyment. There is a name for this new critical paradigm, "popism"—or, more evocatively (and goofily), "poptimism"—and it sets the old assumptions on their ear: Pop (and, especially, hip-hop) producers are as important as rock auteurs, Beyoncé is as worthy of serious consideration as Bruce Springsteen, and ascribing shame to pop pleasure is itself a shameful act.

Lest anyone think I'm getting set to make a straw-man argument about poptimists: I more or less am one. The poptimist critique of rockism squares with my sense of musical history and resonates with my taste. I love hip-hop and commercial R&B and Nashville country and teen pop, and have spent much of my professional life listening to and writing about pre-rock Tin Pan Alley pop, a genre that rockists insult by ignoring completely. I'm not so crazy about most indie rock, never cared much for Neil Young, and will listen to the new Pearl Jam album only out of a sense of professional obligation. I think Britney Spears' "Toxic" is one of the greatest songs of the new century, that the Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way" was one of the great ones of the last, and that R. Kelly's "Ignition (Remix)" is as transcendent as any Holland-Dozier-Holland Motown classic I've ever heard—and what's more, most other critics I know agree. In fact, arguably today's two most influential pop critics, Sanneh and The New Yorker 's Sasha Frere-Jones (who was also Slate 's music critic), are firmly in the poptimist camp, although I doubt they would use such a ridiculous term to describe themselves or their tastes.

This turn of events isn't all that surprising. Inevitably, each generation of critics will swoop in to adjust the excesses of the previous, and besides, current pop is dominated by sonically adventurous hip-hop and dance music while rock's commercial power and cultural influence is on the wane. I also suspect that many of my colleagues, like me, have embraced the anti-rockist critique with particular fervor as a kind of penance, atoning for past rockist misdeeds—for the party line we'd swallowed whole in our formative years and maybe even parroted under our bylines.

Poptimism, in other words, is a pure product of the zeitgeist, and as such, it's probably wise to keep an eye out for its perils, lest what began as a necessary corrective devolve into, as Sanneh wrote of rockism, a caricature used as a bludgeon against other music. At the EMP conference, a couple of papers brought the dilemma into focus. One was Randall Roberts' talk on the Rolling Stone Record Guide and the "creation of the canon," a whirlwind survey of the magazine's record guide from 1984. The guide virtually ignored hip-hop and ruthlessly panned heavy metal, the two genres that within a few years would dominate the pop charts. In an auditorium packed with music journalists, you could detect more than a few anxious titters: How many of us will want our record reviews read back to us 20 years hence? Sanneh ended his Times manifesto by writing, "We deserve some new prejudices," and listening to a previous generation's blunders you couldn't help but wonder: How am Iblowing it?

One rule of thumb, I suppose, is to not replace one flawed canon with another. Last October, Blender magazine published a special " 500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born " cover story, focusing on music released since 1980. (More disclosure: I write for Blender on freelance basis and contributed to the "Greatest Songs" feature, although I had no part in choosing the songs.) This was a kind of poptimist stunt, an answer to unrepentant rockist fogeyism of Rolling Stone 's 500 Greatest Songs list , which that magazine had issued some months previous. Now, to be fair, Blender has a deeply irreverent editorial stance and specializes in tongue-in-cheek E! Television style lists (e.g., "The 50 Most Awesomely Dead Rock Stars"), and what's more it was a pretty damn good list, filled with hip-hop and dance-pop and, yep, hair metal. It was also refreshing not to read for the 100 th time how the "Satisfaction" guitar riff came to Keith Richards in his sleep, how "Respect" captured the spirit of the civil rights movement, and how incredibly frigging groundbreaking it was for Bob Dylan to release a 6-minute-long single. Still, there's something a bit show-offy about ranking Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" the 32 nd best song of the past quarter-century—if you're going to include Springsteen-style rock bombast, why not the real article instead of a blowsy karaoke version?—and ultimately, the Blender list seemed to embody the pitfalls of the anti-rockist backlash: poptimism as a glib exercise in pseudo-populism and in tweaking the boomers instead of a real effort to engage history and figure out what makes good music and why.

Ideally, poptimism shouldn't be about critics working through their daddy issues and straining to prove that they're hipper than Greil Marcus. It should be about openness to all kinds of music—including music that seems to embody rockist ideals. Back at the opening panel discussion at the EMP conference, the singer-songwriter Stephin Merritt (of Magnetic Fields fame) professed his love for all pop music "except roots rock," a line that elicited hearty guffaws. (He said other things at the panel that caused a stir—but that's another ball of wax .) Of course, had Merritt said "except hip-hop" or "except country," there would have been gasps of horror all around, and those laughs laid bare the poptimist prejudice: It's not cool to pick on Kanye or Shania, but those rockist avatars, the earnest heartland rockers, are fair game. Where does that leave poor Johnny Mellencamp?

I don't doubt that Merritt genuinely hates roots rock; I'm not about to load John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band onto my iPod, either. Everyone, even a critic, has a God-given right to his or her musical loathings. The question, for those of us who make our living at this, is how to talk about the music we love, and hate, intelligently and non-ideologically. It's easier said than done. One of the best papers I saw at the EMP conference was Canadian writer Carl Wilson's attempt to come to terms with his distaste for Céline Dion, whose massive, gazillion-record-selling, worldwide popularity and almost universal loathing by music critics (himself included) presents a quandary. "A critical generation claiming to swear off all bourgeois elitist bias seems at least obliged to account for the immense popularity of someone we've collectively deemed so devoid of appeal," Wilson said. "Those who find Celine … tacky, gauche, kitschy … must be overlooking something, maybe starting with why those categories exist." One of Wilson's tentative conclusions is that critics should spend some time trying to understand other's tastes rather than building ideological buttresses to bolster their own.

That's a sensible and humane suggestion, and critics would do well to bear it in mind not just when reckoning with The Céline, but other unfashionable performers and genres—Dave Matthews and frat-boy jam-band music leap to mind—that unlike, say, teen pop, aren't easily reclaimed as camp or saluted for their cool production values. In the meantime, poptimists might spend some time reflecting on what rockists got right . Rockism was a product of its own historical moment, a time when rock critics had to face down snobs on both their right and left flanks who dismissed the idea that pop music could ever be art at all. It's a pity that critics succeeded in beating back the cultural elitists by creating their own high-low hierarchies within pop, but to the extent that Madonna and Jay-Z are today spoken of as "artists" without anyone batting an eye, we all owe rockists a big-up.

It's also helpful to recognize that some truths lurk within rockist rhetoric. Traditional rock critics may spend too much time fetishizing, as Sanneh put it, "the underground hero," but if you ignore pop's fringes, you are probably missing tomorrow's chart-topping sound. (Remember that weird "techno music" that emerged from Detroit in the mid-'80s?) Sometimes pop music is crass and exploitative and vapid, and sometimes confessional songs delivered over Spartan folk-rock accompaniment do deliver emotional truths that high-gloss pop elides in its quest for the broadest possible appeal. The year 1966 was an awfully good one for pop music. So was 1972. Dylan does write one hell of a song, and I still haven't heard anyone who sings like Marvin Gaye. I'd never swap my record collection for a Mojo magazine subscriber's, but in a lot of ways the rockist canon-makers were spot on.

And it pays to remember that these categories mean little to the people who actually make music. Think of all the times that rock gods act like pop heroes and vice versa. Two of the best disco songs ever—"Miss You" and "Emotional Rescue"—were recorded by "The World's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band," the Rolling Stones. That supreme rockist icon, the concept album, was created by a pop singer named Frank Sinatra nearly two decades before the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The rockist-poptimist polarity is often false, and even when it's not, must we choose sides? The overriding sentiment in those corners of the Internet where music nuts gather to discuss such issues is: I want both kinds of music, I want all kinds of music—and then some. Thanks to new technology we can gorge ourselves on the stuff like never before, and thanks to the shuffle feature all the old categories and genre distinctions start to look silly and melt into the digital haze. I shivered slightly the other day when I realized the song count on my iTunes had topped 11,000, but there's still plenty of room left on my 60 GB gadget, and I intend to fill it. Maybe the real guilty pleasure in 2006 is gluttony. As I reach for the mouse and click download again, I'm reminded of a song by ABBA, those capital-P pop wizards we have learned to love without apology: Gimme, Gimme, Gimme.

(Jody Rosen is Slate 's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at slatemusic@gmail.com)


3. The real thing?
By James Parker

AN APPARENTLY INNOCUOUS article by music critic Jody Rosen of Slate magazine entitled ''The Perils of Poptimism," in which he discusses the critical schools of ''rockism" and ''popism" and tenderly suggests that perhaps it is time for these crumbling oppositions to be retired, has triggered a webwide tizzy. Music writers, who notoriously have nothing better to do, are re-fighting the ancient battle Valkyrie-style in cyberspace, and Rosen has been accused of (among other things) ''pop gluttony"-"a non-discriminating, non-taxonomizing ingestion of all the varieties of music we can jam on a 60 GB iPod," writes Rob Horning on the website PopMatters.

Some clarification may be in order. Rockist is a pejorative term first developed by the British music press of the '80s-roughly equivalent in moral force, at the time, to ''sexist." Antihegemony was in the air, and bands were routinely being screened for their ''ideological soundness." To be rockist, in this context, was to be guilty of a complex conflation of offenses. The rockist was white, male, straight, possibly bearded, certainly guitar-infatuated. He stuffily venerated the Important and the Real, and hated slick rhythm-based pop music. He was simultaneously a leftover from the folk-rock earnestness of the '60s and an entirely new kind of elitist, who preferred 15 minutes of tooth-rattling feedback to one song by Miami Sound Machine.

An actual self-declared rockist, of course, is a rare bird indeed: Rockism is something of which one accuses others. Popism, on the other hand, is proud: It delights in artifice, flash, the here-and-now, the buzz and twinkle of the hit. Rosen is being a popist, or ''poptimist," when he writes in his Slate article ''I think that Britney Spears's 'Toxic' is one of the greatest songs of the new century." (Actually, he's being a rockist-the construction of ''greatness" being a rockist endeavor-but anyway....)

In the invisible halls of discourse, rockists and popists supposedly clash most viciously over the idea of ''authenticity." Does the singer write his own songs? Play his own instrument? Is he from the Mississippi Delta? The working class? To the rockist, chewing on his beard, these are questions of the utmost gravity. To the pippety-poppety-poptimist, not at all.

Categories have their place, of course, but rockism and popism will only get us so far, as Philip Auslander's new ''Performing Glam Rock" (Michigan) reminds us. Long before rockism was invented, it had been popistically subverted-by rock musicians. According to Auslander, the beginnings of the process were discernible even at Woodstock-that muddy cradle of authenticity-when the bogus doo-wop act Sha Na Na came swaggering on with gold lamé suits and carnivorous Italian accents, taunting ''hippies" and doing hits from the Fifties. These were not immobile virtuosos, groaningly authentic, singing songs of the times-they were an act . ''We know we've succeeded," said group founder Rich Joffe later, ''if people go around saying, 'Are they for real?"'

Auslander finds in Sha Na Na's aggressive theatricality ''a harbinger of glam rock spectacle," and a gateway into the world of costumes, characters, slippery genders, exaggeration, and celebratory inauthenticity that was definitively ushered in by Marc Bolan (of T Rex) and David Bowie in the '70s. In glam rock, the howl of guitar-hero feedback blended with the shrilling of the teeny-bopper, and the rockist embraced the popist amid layers of comedic/erotic pageantry. ''[Bolan] turned his profile to the audience," writes Auslander of a T Rex performance of ''Jeepster," ''put his hand on his hip and squealed girlishly, then crouched into a Chuck Berry-like duck walk, stood back up part way and Charlestoned with his knees bent....None of these movements had any specific formal or thematic association with the music being played or the effort and pleasure of producing it. It seemed, rather, that Bolan performed them for their own sake."

Now really-what could be more rocko-poptimistic than that?

(James Parker's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail cultural.studies@globe.com)


4. Greatest song since you were born:
Michael Jackson, "Billy Jean"

Once upon a time — before the courtroom dramas, the serial plastic surgeries, the nights spent in hyperbaric chambers and the play dates with Corey Feldman — Michael Jackson was just a run-of-the-mill 24-year-old musical genius, driving a burning Rolls-Royce with a melody stuck in his head.

It was the summer of 1982. Jackson was on Los Angeles’s Ventura Freeway, commuting home after a day in the recording studio, where he and producer Quincy Jones were working on the follow-up to the singer’s smash solo debut, Off the Wall . As Jackson recalled in his 1988 autobiography, he was “so absorbed by this tune floating around in my head” that he failed to notice the smoke billowing out from the undercarriage of his luxury sedan.

“We were getting off the freeway when a kid on a motorcycle pulls up to us and says, ‘Your car’s on fire.’ Suddenly we noticed the smoke and pulled over and the whole bottom of the Rolls-Royce was on fire. That kid probably saved our lives.” But not even that brush with death could shake Jackson’s obsession with his work in progress. “Even while we were getting help and finding an alternate way to get where we were going, I was silently composing additional material.”

The song was perhaps the most personal Jackson had ever written, a guilt- and fear-streaked paternity drama inspired by the singer’s run-ins with delusional female fans. Jackson had been working on it for months and was certain that he had something special on his hands.

“A musician knows hit material. Everything has to feel in place. It fulfills you and it makes you feel good,” Jackson would recollect. “That’s how I felt about ‘Billie Jean.’ I knew it was going to be big when I was writing it.”

Jackson was right: “Billie Jean” was, to say the least, “hit material.” Released in January 1983, the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks, held the No. 1 spot on the R&B chart for nine, sold more than a million singles and launched pop’s biggest-ever commercial juggernaut, Thriller , which has sold upwards of 47 million copies worldwide, more than any album before or since.

But the song’s place in history transcends mere numbers. “Billie Jean” shattered MTV’s color line and went a long way toward destroying the racial apartheid that had prevailed on commercial radio for decades. Ushering in the modern music-video era, the single also pioneered a new kind of sleek, post-soul pop music whose echoes can be heard to this day. Above all, “Billie Jean” marked a coming of age, the moment when a former kiddie singing star blossomed into a new generation’s equivalent of Elvis and the Beatles — the late 20th century’s preeminent pop icon.

Not bad for a song that, to this day, remains one of the most sonically eccentric, psychologically fraught, downright bizarre things ever to land on Top 40 radio. Jackson’s previous solo hits had been awash in the lush sounds of disco, but “Billie Jean” was almost frighteningly stark, with a pulsing, cat-on-the-prowl bass figure, whip-crack downbeat and eerie multi-tracked vocals ricocheting in the vast spaces between keyboards and strings. Over the years, listeners have grown used to Jackson’s idiosyncratic vocal style — the falsetto whoops, “hee-hees,” James-Brown-on-helium grunts and gonzo diction (“the chair is not my son”?) — but in 1982 no one had ever heard anything quite like it, which only heightened the song’s unsettling effect, the sense that “Billie Jean” was a five-minute-long nervous breakdown, set to a beat.

This weirdness wasn’t accidental. Bruce Swedien, Jones’s longtime studio engineer, remembers: “When we recorded ‘Billie Jean’ … Quincy told me, ‘Okay, this piece of music has to have the most unique sonic personality of anything that we have ever recorded.’ Jones had Jackson sing vocal overdubs through a six-foot-long cardboard tube, and brought in jazz saxophonist Tom Scott to play a rare instrument, the lyricon, a wind-controlled analog synthesizer whose sour, trumpet-like lines are subtly woven through the track. Bassist Louis Johnson ran through his part on every guitar he owned before Jackson settled on a Yamaha bass with an ideally thick and buzzing sound.

Swedien, meanwhile, turned his search for the perfect beat into an arts-and-crafts project, hiring carpenters to construct a special plywood drum platform, ordering a custom-made bass drum cover, using everything from cinder blocks to specially designed isolation flaps, all to capture just the right imaging on the snare and hi-hats. “See if you can think of any other piece of music where you can hear the first three drum beats and know what the song is,” Swedien has said. “That’s what I call sonic personality.”

A major component of that personality almost didn’t survive the final cut. “Billie Jean” opens with an unusually long bass-and-drums intro — Jackson doesn’t begin singing until the 0:29 mark—that Jones wanted to trim but Jackson vehemently insisted be kept.

“I said, ‘Michael we’ve got to cut that intro,’” Jones recalls. “He said, ‘But that’s the jelly!’” — Jackson’s personal slang term for a funky beat is “smelly jelly” — “‘That’s what makes me want to dance.’ And when Michael Jackson tells you, ‘That’s what makes me want to dance,’ well, the rest of us just have to shut up.”

It was Jackson’s dancing, as much as his singing, that propelled the “Billie Jean” phenomenon. On May 16, 1983, more than 50 million viewers watched Jackson debut his famous moonwalk in a mesmerizing performance on the Motown 25 television special. Then there was the “Billie Jean” video, in which Jackson slinks and whirls through a fantasy cityscape, with a sidewalk that lights up like a disco floor underfoot. MTV rarely aired videos by black performers, and when they refused to show “Billie Jean,” CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff went ballistic. “I said to MTV, ‘I’m pulling everything we have off the air, all our product. I’m not going to give you any more videos. And I’m going to go public and fucking tell them about the fact you don’t want to play music by a black guy.’” “Billie Jean” was promptly put in heavy rotation, and neither Jackson nor MTV ever looked back.

Those video images have lodged permanently in the cultural memory. But it’s Jackson’s songwriting that makes “Billie Jean” such a riveting psychological drama — the real thriller on his landmark album. Few songs have provided so much fodder for armchair Freudians: paranoia, sexual terror, temptation and shame mingle in lyrics that lurch from outright denials (“The kid is not my son”) to seeming admissions of guilt (“This happened much too soon/She called me to her room”). Today, “Billie Jean” seems more than anything like a parable of the twisted relations between celebrities and their fans, a theme dramatized in the video, in which Jackson is pursued by a creepy gumshoe in a trench coat. Count on the most famous man in the world — a guy who has had audiences tearing at his clothes since he was 10 years old—to deliver the great artistic statement on celebrity stalking.

Whatever its larger autobiographical and historical significance, “Billie Jean” is first and foremost a dance track. Untold millions of radio and MTV plays have not reduced the power of a song that simply explodes out of the speakers.

“‘Billie Jean’ is hot on every level,” says Greg Phillinganes, a legendary L.A. session musician who played keyboards on the song. “It’s hot rhythmically. It’s hot sonically, because the instrumentation is so minimal, you can really hear everything. It’s hot melodically. It’s hot lyrically. It’s hot vocally. It affects you physically, emotionally, even spiritually.” Twenty-three years on, Michael Jackson can rest assured: No one has made smellier jelly.


5. Blacklisted
Is Stephin Merritt a racist because he doesn't like hip-hop?
By John Cook

Stephin Merritt is an unlikely cracker. The creative force behind the Magnetic Fields, Merritt is diminutive, gay, and painfully intellectual. His music is witty and tender. He plays the ukulele. He named his Chihuahua after Irving Berlin. And yet no less an influential music critic than The New Yorker 's Sasha Frere-Jones has used that word—"cracker"—to describe him. Frere-Jones has also called him "Stephin 'Southern Strategy' Merritt," presumably in reference to Richard Nixon's race-baiting attempt to crush the Democratic Party. These are heady words, part of a two-year online campaign of sorts by Frere-Jones (also a former Slate music critic) and the Chicago Reader music contributor Jessica Hopper to brand Merritt a racist. The charge: He doesn't like hip-hop, and on those occasions when he's publicly discussed his personal music tastes, he has criticized black artists.

The bizarre case against Merritt came to a head last month at the Experience Music Project's annual Pop Conference. Merritt was the keynote speaker, and in a panel conversation he described "Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah," from Disney's legendarily racist 1946 musical Song of the South , as a "great song." He made clear, according to a partial transcript of the panel provided by his band mate Claudia Gonson, that he did not actually like Song of the South , calling it unwatchable and saying that it has just "one great song. The rest of it is terrible, actually."

This was too much for Hopper, who was in the audience and had already written on her blog that she intended to confront Merritt. She walked out in anger and wrote , falsely, that, "I did not have to ask Stephin Merrit [sic] of Magnetic Flds whether he was racist, because his nice, long elucidating comment about his love, NAY, obsession with racist cartoon, Song of the South, served as a pre-emptive answer. It's one thing to have 'Zippitty Doo Da' be your favorite song. It is another to lay in for Uncle Remus appreciation hour amidst a panel—('I love all of it,' he says)."

Of course Merritt had said no such thing. Later, when confronted with a transcript of the panel, Hopper retracted her comments. But not before other bloggers picked up the meme. Frere-Jones linked to a list of favorite recordings of the 20 th century—one for each year—that Merritt had written for Time Out New York six years ago and noted that few of the artists or composers were black. I have never met Merritt, and I have no idea whether or not he hates black people. But neither do Sasha Frere-Jones and Jessica Hopper. The evidence on which they base their claims and insinuations—the fact that Merritt doesn't enjoy listening to select black artists and doesn't like most hip-hop—is flimsy stuff. Moreover, the whole of their sustained attack against Merritt is founded on the dangerous and stupid notion that one's taste in music can be interrogated for signs of racist intent the same way a university's admissions process can: If the number of black artists in your iPod falls too far below 12.5 percent of the total, then you are violating someone's civil rights.

"I've obviously said it already," Hopper told me when I asked her flat-out if Merritt is a racist. "I think there's some real questionable shit in what he thinks about race and music." Asked where that "questionable shit" can be found, Hopper referred me to a 2004 Salon interview in which Merritt said that he liked "the first two years of rap," including the first Run DMC record, but that he finds contemporary hip-hop boring and—wait for it—racist. "I think it's shocking that we're not allowed to play coon songs anymore," Merritt said, "but people, both black and white, behave in more vicious caricatures of African-Americans than they had in the 19 th century. It's grotesque. … It probably would have been considered too tasteless for the Christy Minstrels." In the same interview, he made the moral error of not liking OutKast, whose single "Hey Ya!" was at the time serving as America's background music: "I'm desperately sick of hearing it."

Around the same time, in a New York magazine interview , Merritt again dared to publicly express his boredom with OutKast and furthermore said of Justin Timberlake: "I'm not really exposed to him except as a photographic image. He gives good photo shoot." Of Beyoncé and Britney Spears: "[Spears] would be absolutely meaningless if we didn't see pictures of her. Beyoncé is not famous for her songs, she's famous for that outfit. Which is not necessarily a bad thing."

A reasonable person would understand two things from these comments: 1) that Merritt believes contemporary popular music, whether it's produced by white people (Timberlake and Spears), or black people (Beyoncé), to be more concerned with selling an image than recording and performing songs; and 2) that, like much of America, he had heard as much OutKast as he cared to. Frere-Jones, who writes cogently and seriously about hip-hop and plays guitar and sings in his own carefully disorganized (and quite good) rock band , surveyed the above and reacted as though Merritt had stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama's Foster Auditorium and declared that OutKast shall not pass. "[N]ote how eager Merritt is to dismiss Beyoncé, OutKast, Britney, and Justin, not just as singers and songwriters but as bearers of meaning. That's a bias. Two women, three people of color and one white artist openly in love with black American music. That's who he's biased against. You could say there's no pattern here. … You would then, hopefully, let me get a taste of whatever has made you so HIGH."

The final count in Merritt's indictment is a Playlist he wrote for the New York Times ' Sunday Arts and Leisure section in May 2004. According to his band mate Gonson, the Times presented Merritt with a stack of forthcoming CDs to write about. He chose seven, and all of them were by white artists. To which Frere-Jones responded : "The new idea for Playlist at the New York Times is to find some rockist cracker and let him loose. … Let's watch Stephen [sic] Merritt swing a scythe through the fields of popular music with a blindfold on. Huh! Seven 'great' new pop records and not a person of color involved in a single one. That's one magical, coincidence-prone scythe you got there, Stephen."

I would refute Frere-Jones' posturing, but upon inspection there is no argument to refute. There is nothing but innuendo and implication. Frere-Jones is either too cowardly or too prudent to call Merritt a racist, but he doesn't have to—he lets sophistry do the work for him. It would be one thing if Frere-Jones were just some disgruntled OutKast fan with a MySpace page. But he is in fact a disgruntled OutKast fan with access to The New Yorker 's pages and all the credibility and authority that go along with that. He ought to take the things he writes on his blog seriously.

I asked Frere-Jones what, precisely, he was trying to say about Merritt, but after promising to reply via e-mail, he never did. So, we are left to assume that his argument is something along the lines of: In order to not be racist, you have to like Beyoncé, or at least pretend to. Or we could give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he simply means that you must like, or publicly profess to like, some minimum number of black artists relative to the total number of artists you like. Which puts him in an awkward position with respect to Merritt, considering he has no earthly idea what other artists Merritt listens to, or why.

And even if he did: If black artists are underrepresented in my CD collection relative to the frequency with which black people are found in the general population, does that make me a racist? To even begin to believe that it does, you have to first maintain that racial preferences somehow logically relate to music preferences; that racists avoid music made by black people, and that people who aren't racist don't pay attention to the race of the artist when evaluating music. Both propositions are ludicrous. Anybody who has been to a frat party knows that people can simultaneously a) entertain racist attitudes and b) enjoy listening to hip-hop music created by black people. (In fact, Merritt's argument is that the latter tends to reinforce the former.)

By the same token, perfectly reasonable nonracist people take race and ethnicity into account in their musical preferences all the time. Hopper herself, whom I presume Frere-Jones would certify is kosher when it comes to the race-music axis, has complained bitterly on her blog of the "whiteness"—which she describes as "purposeful," "icky," and "dangerous"—of Merritt's music. So, if it sounds dangerously white, we can infer that she'd like it to sound like something else. More … what?

The closest thing to a coherent argument that can be gleaned from what Frere-Jones and Hopper are saying is that a genuine respect for our common dignity and humanity requires that we enjoy listening to hip-hop, and that we bend our intuitive aesthetic judgments about music to a political will—like eating our vegetables and avoiding dessert. "Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah" may be catchy and delightfully mindless, but an understanding of its context requires you to reject its charms. And Beyoncé may be trite and boring, but your subtle racist ideology provokes that reaction, so you must find a way to appreciate her music.

And if you can't? Try harder, cracker.

(John Cook is a writer and musician in Chicago.)


6. The Revenge of the Intuitive
Turn off the options, and turn up the intimacy.
By Brian Eno

I recently spent three days working with what is possibly the most advanced recording console in the world, and I have to report that it was a horribly unmusical experience. The console, which has more than 10,000 controls on its surface and a computer inside, was designed in such a way that music-making tasks once requiring a single physical switch now require a several-step mental negotiation. My engineer kept saying "Wait a minute" and then had to duck out of the musical conversation we were having so he could go into secretarial mode to execute complex computer-like operations. It's as though a new layer of bureaucracy has interposed itself between me and the music we want to make. After days of tooth-gnashing frustration, I had to admit that something has gone wrong with the design of technology - and I was paying $2,000 a day in studio fees to discover it.

Years ago I realized that the recording studio was becoming a musical instrument. I even lectured about it, proclaiming that "by turning sound into malleable material, studios invite you to construct new worlds of sounds as painters construct worlds of form and color." I was thrilled at how people were using studios to make music that otherwise simply could not exist. Studios opened up possibilities. But now I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. This transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse. Musicians enjoy drawing on that finesse (and audiences respond to its exercise), so when muscular activity is rendered useless, the creative process is frustrated. No wonder artists who can afford the best of anything keep buying "retro" electronics and instruments, and revert to retro media.

The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates "more options" with "greater freedom." Designers struggle endlessly with a problem that is almost nonexistent for users: "How do we pack the maximum number of options into the minimum space and price?" In my experience, the instruments and tools that endure (because they are loved by their users) have limited options.

Software options proliferate extremely easily, too easily in fact, because too many options create tools that can't ever be used intuitively. Intuitive actions confine the detail work to a dedicated part of the brain, leaving the rest of one's mind free to respond with attention and sensitivity to the changing texture of the moment. With tools, we crave intimacy. This appetite for emotional resonance explains why users - when given a choice - prefer deep rapport over endless options. You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits it keeps becoming something else.

Indeed, familiarity breeds content. When you use familiar tools, you draw upon a long cultural conversation - a whole shared history of usage - as your backdrop, as the canvas to juxtapose your work. The deeper and more widely shared the conversation, the more subtle its inflections can be.

This is the revenge of traditional media. Even the "weaknesses" or the limits of these tools become part of the vocabulary of culture. I'm thinking of such stuff as Marshall guitar amps and black-and-white film - what was once thought most undesirable about these tools became their cherished trademark.

The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn't just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one. A responsible designer might try to overcome this limitation - probably the engineers at Marshall tried, too. But that sound became the sound of, among others, Jimi Hendrix. That sound is called "electric guitar." Or think of grainy black-and-white film, or jittery Super 8, or scratches on vinyl. These limitations tell you something about the context of the work, where it sits in time, and by invoking that world they deepen the resonances of the work itself.

Since so much of our experience is mediated in some way or another, we have deep sensitivities to the signatures of different media. Artists play with these sensitivities, digesting the new and shifting the old. In the end, the characteristic forms of a tool's or medium's distortion, of its weakness and limitations, become sources of emotional meaning and intimacy.

Although designers continue to dream of "transparency" - technologies that just do their job without making their presence felt - both creators and audiences actually like technologies with "personality." A personality is something with which you can have a relationship. Which is why people return to pencils, violins, and the same three guitar chords.

(Brian Eno is a composer, record producer, and visual artist living in London.)