October 24, 2000
Why are we doing this?
That's the question I have to ask myself after finishing Let It Blurt, Jim DeRogatis' biography of rock critic godhead Lester Bangs. Why do I even fucking bother? What's the point of all this scribbling about a facet of pop culture that most people treat as just another item on the knick-knack shelf of their lives? For most folks music is just background noise, to be experienced while focusing the important parts of their gray matter on something, anything, else: working, cooking, driving, reading, exercising, fucking—even sleeping. It's not any kind of real art to most people in that it doesn't engage us completely, doesn't take us away from the task at hand and out of ourselves, carry us bodily into an unknown universe comprised of notes and scales, adolescent howling and insanity, joy and lust and desperation. Or at least it doesn't seem to be doing that, not the way a painting or sculpture or book or even a TV show or film does, the way these things can be called art. To appreciate these things, to even experience them properly, even if they're utter feces, we have to put down everything else and give them our full attention. Even someone sitting in a half-empty theater mercilessly heckling the pap on screen has to be engaged enough with the film to come up with the appropriate zingers.
But we treat music differently. Unless it's accompanied by moving images—unless it's a video or concert film or even a live concert itself, which we paid good money for and expressly set aside the time to experience, qualifying it as an event (even though too many of us talk, drink and flirt our ways through said event), like going to a play or an art museum or to the park—we think of music as something that fills the silent space around us in a vaguely pleasant way. Most of us don't react to the radio in the office or the CD in the bedroom unless we don't like it—and even then we'd rather just mutter "Turn off that crap" (never questioning why the noise offends us) rather than expend the energy it takes to cross the room and turn it off. Sure, we all talk about having a favorite album, or one of us might exclaim, "Oh, I just love this song!" when some top 40 hit from last month or last year or last decade comes on, but how often do we sit down and actually listen to that favorite album or song, doing nothing else, not even reading the lyric sheet? How many times have you sat down in front of the speakers and put on that album by Bob Dylan or Black Sabbath or Joshua Bloom or Mozart or whoever the fuck it is and turned the full power of your frontal lobes onto the experience of absorption? Probably not very often, I'd wager, if at all. I'll bet if you thought hard about that Radiohead album you profess to adore you'd realize that you can't remember any of the lyrics beyond a monotonously repeated catch phrase, can barely hum more than one tune, and probably couldn't say what any of the songs are "about" if there was a snarling Doberman at your crotch held barely in check by a wifebeating neo-Nazi demanding an answer.
There are exceptions, of course. There are plenty of folks out there for whom music is as essential to their state of well-being as food, sleep and masturbation. For whom a Wayne Kramer riff or a Duke Ellington piece or a Beethoven symphony is the breath of life itself. These people usually do one of two things: they become musicians or they become critics.
Musicians aren't my concern here: they're following a higher calling as profound and divine as anything that inspires a prospective priest. They do what they do because they can't fully express themselves any other way. (Just like any kind of artist.) But critics—just what part of ourselves are we expressing except that part that usually causes our friends and family to shake their heads and comment disdainfully, "Know-it-all?"
I should point out that I'm specifically speaking of rock critics. Jazz and classical critics arguably perform a useful service by (a) explaining the finer points, or at least pointing to representative examples, of a music that's a hundred or more years old and ain't usually on the radar of a Great Wad that doesn't want to put in the time and energy to get it for themselves, and (b) beating the drum for musics that same Wad would ignore and forget about if these know-it-alls weren't keeping the faith. (Neither jazz nor classical musicians are particularly good at, or even concerned with, self-promotion, and record companies prefer to spend their marketing budgets on music that'll give them lots of zeros after the $$ on their annual reports.) But those of us who write about rock (or pop or rap or country or folk or whatever), well, we find ourselves in a different position. We're either giving our informed opinion about an album millions are going to run out and buy regardless of what we say (Madonna and Garth Brooks are pretty much critic-proof, despite the reams of paper devoted to exploring every facet of their music) or we're desperately stumping for, some might even say whining about, some obscure, long-suffering "visionary" who couldn't attract even the tiniest of cult followings if he called himself Jim Jones and offered a special on Kool Aid. Our friendship is cultivated by publicists, but our words are ignored—as long as we force some rag to give us column inches and mention the name of the current project/product several times they don't care what we say. Musicians tell us they appreciate what we wrote but most of them either never read it or forget about it as soon as they finish. And music fans—well, let's face it, folks, most fans, whether they're reading Rolling Stone or Flipside or Pop Culture Press couldn't give a flying monkey fuck what we have to say. Our friends say, "Oh, I saw your piece in the newspaper," but they don't read it. Our families say, "Congratulations, you had a piece published," but they don't read it. The only two other fans of the righteously obscure band you badgered your editor to let you write about might say, "Cool! Keep the faith, dude," but they won't read it either.
Part of the problem is that rock criticism is just another form of consumer guide. We write about this stuff with an air of authority that's often so thin it's impossible to breathe in, along with the arrogance that we know best, and then expect Joe IT Tech to follow our advice and run out and purchase the latest masterpiece by the Underground Legends. Well, let's just rip those rose-colored glasses off our smug faces and trample 'em into the soil, shall we? No one cares what we think. When was the last time you heard someone, anyone, anyone at all, tell you he or she ran directly to their local Tower (or, Cthulu forbid, their local indie record store) after reading your review of the latest Lee Hazlewood reissue and, in a frenzy brought on by your passionate, witty prose, picked it up, no, snatched it, no, ripped it off the shelf as if possessed by some demon screaming in the most animal part of the brain, "You must hear this album RIGHT NOW!" Probably never. Unless, of course, it's one of your peers. One of your fellow scribes has probably told you, at least once, "Hey, man, I read your piece about the new De La Soul record and decided that I had to get it!" ("What's the name of their publicist?") Yes, folks, the ugly secret that rock critics have been trying to hide for a good 2 1/2 decades now is that the only people who base their acquisition decisions on a record review are...other rock critics.
'Twas not always thus, my children. The Lester Bangs bio brings that home like a desperate housewife telling her wayward husband she'll swallow. Rock criticism was originally fueled by passion much the same as that which drove the musicians themselves. The ones who started it all, Dave Marsh and Richard Meltzer and Paul Williams and Greil Marcus and their immediate followers like Lillian Roxon, John Marchland and, especially, Lester Bangs, were driven by twin desires—their utter devotion to the rock they loved and the burning need to write about it. Why can't we write about this uniquely American form of art/entertainment the way Pauline Kael writes about films or the way Oscar Wilde wrote about poetry? Why the hell not? Write about what you know, they say, and if what you know is what you love to listen to, write about that. No shame in that, is there?
Lester was the king. There were only two things, drugs notwithstanding, important in his life—music and writing. He combined the two better than anybody. He wrote long, impassioned diatribes about why he loved this band or why he hated that singer or what it all means, goddammit, as if what he was putting down was as important as the scrawling on the Rosetta Stone. He didn't merely voice his preferences in colorful language—he explored why he felt the way he did about an artist or piece of music, even if he wasn't sure himself and changed his mind later. He wasn't so much interested in breaking a piece down into its component parts or analyzing it line by line—for Lester it was all about how the music affected the lizard part of his brain, how it ripped out his soul, reshaped it to suit itself and slipped it back into his body when he wasn't looking. He didn't want to tear something apart and beat its pieces into the ground (unless he really hated it)—that might kill the magic, even if it was well-hidden. Like all great writers he couldn't resist poking at that which most dominated his life, his love of music. He could be vicious toward what he didn't like, and he made a few enemies in the biz. But driving his writing was the overriding principle that the music mattered, that it was just as important as any other form of art, American or otherwise, and just as essential to a happy life as deep breaths and orgasms.
And that's what's missing now. Do we really feel like the music we profess to love matters? Do we really feel the same passion for this music as do those who create it? And if we don't, should we even waste our time and energy on it? When Bangs was alive, people read what he had to say, people outside the music industry even, and reacted. They bought the records he praised or damned, firing off their own opinions at his mailbox. He received more letters at Creem in the 70s than all the other writers combined, probably more than all rock writers from every rock magazine that ever existed combined. People listened to what he had to say, because he made the music important to them. Who's doing that now? Sure, there are plenty of Bangs imitators out there, but they usually adopt his chemically imbalanced writing style or emulate his life-shortening bad habits, thinking that's what made him special, not his analytic wit or depth of feeling. They miss the point pretty fucking completely. They think they're carrying on his legacy when in reality they're just perpetuating a myth that has little to do with what he wrote.
So who's making the folks who don't play or write about rock care? No one. We're either glib bullshitters in love with our own phrasing, or starstruck buttlickers currying favor with musicians and publicists cuz we think it makes us cool. We dare not offend, unless it's to call attention to our wicked way with words. We don't put any real effort into what we write, because that would mean putting an equal amount of effort into listening to what we're writing about, and I don't think any of us are willing to give up that much mindshare.
Most of all, not one of us is willing say what he or she really thinks.
Maybe it's the current state of the culture itself; we treat music as just another commodity, another product on the shelf next to the cereal, shoes and DVD players. But that's why it's so important that we champion the music we love with all the passion and intelligence we can muster, and I know we can muster a little, at least. If this music really, truly matters to us, we have to use our alleged talents to make it matter to everyone else.
Do it for Lester. 
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