Images of America in Rock’n'Roll Music
November 22, 2011
“Images of America in Rock’n'Roll Music” is the subtitle of Greil Marcus’s “Mystery Train” and, to me, the key to reading it. I’m still not sure how I feel about this book or whether I want to read it again. Of course I admire it, like any musicologist and probably any popular music scholar. I’m just not quite sure I like. In fact I’m quite sure I don’t but it’s hard not to feel apologetic about disliking such a legendary piece of writing.
To be fair, I like it more now than I did when I was reading it. I felt misled because I expected it to be a book about music, which it is not (I also thought it would be a highly subjective semi-historical account, which it is also not). It is a book about something greater, some fundamentally American archetypes which uses musical examples to prove a not-very-musical point, and a very vague and slightly controversial one at that.
However, there are things you have to admire and respect about it and you always need to remember when it was written and judge it in its context (that of 1975). It is important and it certainly is well written. The balance between detailed album reviews and a much larger picture is maintained perfectly and one can easily say that the book is as much literature as it is music criticism and I truly love it for that.
However, there are some things about this and about Lipstick Traces, the other Greil Marcus book I’ve read (two of the many). The biggest is this passion for stating matter of opinion as matter of fact. Very effective journalistically but highly un-academic, in my opinion. And not to my taste. I’ve had too much of a world full of people who feel that the music they listen to is far superior to the music preferred by the plebs. I can’t stand it when it comes to classical music, can’t stand it when it comes to jazz, certainly can’t stand it when it comes to rock.
Even after that mini-rant I still feel apologetic. (It’s Greil Marcus, for God’s sake!) The book is good, probably brilliant, still “probably the best book ever written about rock”. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. So I don’t. Like it, that is.But I do have to admit there are sometimes ideas of his (aggressive, they’re all aggressive) or maybe opinions, that I agree with. And I’m going to end with one of those, out of the chapter on Randy Newman:
“Rock’n'roll is suffering from that old progressive school fallacy that says if what you write is about your own feelings, no one can criticize it. Truth telling is beginning to settle into a slough where it is nothing more than a pedestrian autobiography set to placid music framed by a sad smile on the album cover.” This only seems to have gotten worse in 35 years…
