motifs

Andrew Chester

Second thoughts on a Rock Aesthetic: The Band

In replying to Richard Mertons comment on my first article, in NLR 591 I take the opportunity to clarify and correct some of my own positions, and also to attack, some basic errors in Mertons conception of the aesthetic status of rock music and its relationship to politics. I willingly concede to Merton that the regional autonomy of the artobject from the other instances within a social formation should not be confused with an idealist independence from it. I did not intend to claim such an independence, though I admit that in attacking the reductionist position I may have bent the stick too far in the other direction, particularly in my last paragraph. Nor did I intend to reject the ABC of Marxist criticism, i.e. the importance of studying a popular art in relation to its shifting social base, but this was not what I was concerned with in this article. What I did attempt, in the very limited framework of a book review, was to raise some of the questions which would have to be solved in order to found a canon of rock musical criticism. Merton despite some excellent critical insights, refuses to accept this problem, and this leads him into a quite different enterprise, rock political criticism. Firstly, insistence on the dissociable character of artistic devices, while in itself correct, is used by Merton as a pretext for dismissing the task of studying also their inter-relation. Merton excels in discussion of rock lyrics, but disarticulation of a lyric from the complex musical totality runs the risk of involuntarily subsuming this lyric under the category of literature, and applying pre-existing critical canons foreign to the genre. In the absence of an analysis of the function of lyric in rock performance in general, and in the work of the group discussed in particular, there are no grounds for the sweeping judgements of artists that Merton freely dispenses on the basis of lyrics alone. Merton merely hints at this articulation when he speaks of the alloyed, computed
1

See For a Rock Aesthetic, NLR 59 and Comment, NLR 59.

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sounds of the Beach Boys, which presumably fit (Brian) Wilsons lyrical celebration of the US cultural universe; when he dismisses Dylan on the basis of one or two examples of self-pitying verseconveniently disregarding the greater part of Dylans oeuvreone wonders whether Mertons taste for tempting literary inversions ( false poetry/poetry of the false) is not prevailing over serious analysis. The difference between the poetic and the musical functions of lyric, and the pitfalls of confusing the two, can be illustrated by a simple, almost trivial, example. In Long Tall Sally Little Richard sang: well long tall sally shes real sweet shes got everything that uncle john need. Once written, this couplet is immediately banal. But in the song the fact that the vocal line is broken after got and not after sweet produces an aesthetic charge that depends precisely on the tension between the verbal and musical messages that a sung lyric carries. Merton claims that, although in his discussion of the Stones he deliberately refrains from adding a single word about the other materials (melody, instrumentation, vocalism) which combine with the lyric to produce the musical constructs in question, nevertheless there would be no difficulty in demonstrating that they would extend the line of analysis here taken. In this instance that may be true. I am not sure that the articulation is always so simple. Mertons second point is that, while rock music cannot claim the creation of a musical art of a complexity comparable to Vivaldi or Telemann, its true merit and significance is that it is the first aesthetic form in modern history which has asymptotically started to close the gap between those who produce and those who appropriate art (Mertons emphasis). It alone thereby prefigures, amidst its innumerable poverties and confusions, the structure of future art in a liberated social formation: communism. He opposes this combined aesthetic/cultural legitimation of rock to my hyperbolization of the possibilities of the genre. But what precisely is involved in closing the gap between producers and appropriators? Is this a social gap, or one of artistic appreciation? Mertons description of rock as a peoples music strongly implies the former. But this is very dangerous ground. Sections of the Left still echo the populist defence of folk, skiffle, etc as forms desirable because everyone can join in. If the social distance between producers and appropriators is at issue, then all forms of avant-garde and experimentation are threatened as anti-popular and therefore anti-communist or counter-revolutionary. A rabid campaign on just these lines was run against this years Camden Festival by certain left-wing groups; in fact the limited space that such festivals provide for avant-garde forms is generally the only positive feature of these otherwise turgid municipal ventures. The real gap between producers and approptiators that rock music has tended to bridge is that of musical appreciation. It is not that rock is a limited form and therefore close to the masses. Rock music, as it has grown to maturity in the last few years, has in fact cultivated an aesthetically sensitive mass base, which, even allowing for all its mystifications and illusions, is continuously sharpening its critical faculty. I would not want to quarrel with Merton on the nature of art under communism; there are no conceivable scientific grounds for such prophecies. The case is rather that the
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critical sophistication of the student rock audiencea stratum of nonworkers, but a plebeian oneprefigures a situation in which the working masses also will have sufficient free time for the demanding tasks of artistic production and appropriation. The meaning of the term, peoples music and of the gap between those who produce and those who appropriate art are crucial questions. Mertons implicit answers can be seen at work in the canon he employs to appraise the Stones development. For our purposes, the most important element of (Street Fighting Man), which situates it well beyond even, say, the Doorsis the non-equation of music and politics in it. (Mertons emphasis.) Mertons whole analysis in fact reduces the Stones development to one of ideological progress alone. The Stones have reached a high point because they recognise the non-equation of music and politics, and are thus able to harness their musical medium to a political message. The reason that this is also good art (of a kind) is that the message (solidarity with the oppressed) is expressed via the devices of derision, patronisation, etc. This sophistication is apparently sufficient to rate Salt Of The Earth as an extraordinary construct, one of the boldest yet most delicate that British rock has ever achieved. But the generosity of this judgement has an aura of unreality. The devices cited as translating the Stones ideological progress into a artistic construct are entirely non-specific to the medium of rock musicor any form of sound. There is scarcely an indication why Salt of the Earth, or indeed the whole of Beggars Banquet, could not be discussed in exactly the same terms if it were not heard at all. True, Factory Girl is punctuated by the raucous echoes of a factory siren, and we can assume that Jagger and Richards derisive lyrics are also sung with derision. But this is like judging the performance of a play by the writers stage directions. Merton does not even see the integration of lyric into the musical structure as a problem, as is shown by his remark that a return to the heavy rhythm and blues style for which the group won its early fame may have seemed the safest option in the increasingly uncertain musical conjuncture of 1969. The rhythm and blues style is here seen as a purely contingent factor. The crisis of British rock, for which Beggars Banquet is the strong solution, is a priori assumed as soluble by ideological development alone. We are here at the heart of Mertons mistake. Lyric, and the ideological themes it supports, are for him not merely a level that can be dissociated for analytical purposes; this level is implicitly taken as dominant in the complex musical totality. No wonder there would be no difficulty in taking the other materials into account. For Merton never questions that these are subordinate, mere material for ideological expression. At best, the music is coherent; at worst, there is tension between the genre and the group, as on Their Satanic Majesties Request, but the sole source of this tension is the ability of the other materials to serve the (dominant) ideological theme. This in turn explains Mertons use of the term peoples music. The narrowing gap between producers and appropriators is not just social: it is, more precisely, ideological. The real value of rock music for Merton is as an index of the consciousness of
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its social base, to be encouraged as it discards mystifications and moves towards a revolutionary anti-capitalist consciousness. I would not want to decry this instrumentalist attitude. Rock music may provide Marxists with a sensitive political barometer, and they may quite legitimately seek to harness musical practice to political requirements. But this must be clearly distinguished from an appraisal of rock as music. One group that will serve as a test case for Mertons conceptions is The Band, to which Merton pays tribute: yet out of (Dylans) vapourings emerged groups like the Byrds and The Band. In the process of discussing this group, I will attempt to answer some of the questions raised in my earlier article. Despite Mertons compliment, I believe The Band is singularly impervious to his critical canon. On all readings Merton should find the group aesthetically barren. The matter of their lyrics seems to echo the sentimentality of the country music industry. Elderly sailors longing for retirement, unfaithful servants (and slaves Jawbone?), the demise of the South in the Civil War. Even the more realist themes of storm, crop failure and agricultural unionism are far removed from social criticism; they are treated with resignation, and bear no relation to the life of The Band or their audience. The Band would not think of using the second-order devices that play such an important role in Mertons critical canon, nor can these be discovered as objective structures in their work. At first sight The Band might not seem to register well on the pure musical criteria that I have supported. Their music is far from experimental or avant-garde, and they are not prodigous instrumentalists. However I precisely want to attack the thesis that defines the basic musical structure of rock music as inherently restricted, on the basis of criteria by which groups like The Band would be playing a very uninteresting music indeed. Is rock music a genre which cannot compete with, for example, Western classical music as an aesthetic object, for want of formal complexity, and so needs the consolation prize of cultural significance that Merton holds out? I believe this is a capitulation to bourgeois ideology. Adequate space for formal elaboration is certainly the necessary basis of all significant aesthetic expression, but the notion of complexity hides many ambiguities, and the opposition that Merton accepts between rock=simple and classical=complex, is in fact one constructed on the basis of the specific mode of complexity of classical music itself. Western classical music is the apodigm of the extensional form of musical construction.2 Theme and variations, counterpoint, tonality (as used in classical composition) are all devices that build diachronically and synchronically outwards from basic musical atoms. The complex is created by combination of the simple, which remains discrete and unchanged in the complex unity. Thus a basic premise of classical music is rigorous adherence to standard timbres, not only for the various orchestral instruments, but even for the most flexible of all instruments,
2

This statement is most strictly true of classical music in the narrower sensei.e. as opposed to romantic. But post-classical serious music only marginally departed from the extensional principle until the post-1945 era of electronic experimentation.

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the human voice. Room for interpretation of the written notation is in fact marginal. If those critics who maintain the greater complexity of classical music specified that they had in mind this extensional development, they would be quite correct. The rock idiom does know forms of extensional development, it cannot compete in this sphere with a music based on this principle of construction. Rock however follows, like many non-European musics, the path of intensional development. In this mode of construction the basic musical units (played/sung notes) are not combined through space and time as simple elements into complex structures. The simple entity is that constituted by the parameters of melody, harmony and beat, while the complex is built up by modulation of the basic notes, and by inflexion of the basic beat. (The language of this modulation and inflexion derives partly from conventions internal to the music, partly from the conventions of spoken language and gesture, partly from physiological factors.) All existing genres and sub-types of the Afro-American tradition show various forms of combined intensional and extensional development. The history of jazz is largely a transition from one to the other, later punctuated by a reaction against Europeanization and a return to the roots. The almost purely intensional form of the rural blues has only received critical attention in the past decade or so, and still largely remains a minority preserve. The 12-bar structure of the blues, which for the critic reared on extensional forms seems so confining, is viewed quite differently by the bluesman, for he builds inwards from the 12-bar structure, and not outwards. Complexity is multi-dimensional and by no means strictly quantifiable, and the aesthetic capacity of a musical form cannot be measured by complexity alone, but the example of the country blues shows the complete adequacy of a purely intensional mode of construction to an immensely subtle and varied project of aesthetic expression. If jazz aimed to transform intensional into extensional, musical structures, rock sought a reverse path. The founding moment of rock music was the creation of a white analogue of blues vocalism, which was achieved in its classical form with Presleys Sun recordings of 195455. Taking elements from both blues and country sources, the qualitative novelty of rock, first only effected at the vocal level, was a singing style that fitted into the framework of country songs rather than 12-bar blues, and whose modulations and inflexions were determined in the first instance by the cadences of Southern white speech and gesture. The primacy of the vocal that characterizes both blues and rock is almost inevitable in an intensionally constructed music which still uses instruments designed for extensional expression, and was noted in the fifties, not so much by the titans of Southern rock, Presley and Lewis, for whom this development was almost intuitive, but by the more articulate of their disciples. Thus Eddie Cochran: In rocknroll the beat is only supplementary to the human voice. Its the voice, coupled with an extraordinary sense of emotion, which lends to rocknroll a personality not sensed in other types of music, (from an interview in New Musical Express 1958). The conceptual pair of extensionality/intensionality is a step towards con79

structing a matrix for critical examination of the contemporary rock scene, and obtaining a purchase on the more strictly musical levels of the total product. Sixties rock derives essentially from the attempts of middle-class students in the early sixties to reproduce, at a more sophisticated level, the music that they had appropriated in the fifties, without at the time being able to work in it. After the demise of fifties rock, these musicians explored the roots and relatives of the rock genre, delving both into white country music (via urban folk/ protest), but more fruitfully into the rural and urban blues. The idiom of the blues, which took some years to learn, was the key to the production of sixties rock, and opened up very substantial new fields of musical development. (British rhythm and blues in the sixties had a similar birth, though its development was mediated by its national setting.) But the limitation of sixties rock has been its inability to achieve a real integration of its adopted musical materials. In general, its intensional development is derivative from the blues, and its extensional development is parasitic on the European tradition. Paradoxically, though rock is recognized by both musicians and audience as a well-defined musical category, the insterstices between rock and other genres seem far more habitable than the mainstream itself. Solutions adopted by major US groups include acceptance of a derivative musical identity (blues groups such as Canned Heat), extensional elaboration of rock/blues formal elements (Grateful Dead); reliance on theme/lyric/stance and other non-musical levels (Doors/Country Joe); backsliding into country and western (Byrds) or jazz (CTA, BS & T); fifties revivalism (Creedence Clearwater). Even Jefferson Airplane, perhaps the most impressive group of the sixties generation, whose music is least obviously parasitic on other forms, depend in the last instance on contrapuntal and harmonic structures that are firmly in the European/extensional tradition. Closely connected with the failure of sixties rock to achieve the new synthesis it explicitly aims at is the gross disparity between the calibre of its instrumentalists and its vocalists. Middle-class (male) white youths learnt blues guitar well enough to be accepted as equals by black musicians; their singing rarely rises above mediocrity, a fact that demands psychoanalytic explanation. The one major group that, for all its limitations, is firmly anchored in rock as an independent genre, is The Band. They alone among important contemporary groups work at a purely intensional development which continues the enterprise begun with fifties rock. This is the reason why they manage to produce work of musical value yet without significant lyrics or theme, without experimentalism, without recourse to a merger with other genres, and without any problems of presentation: the music alone speaks. It is no coincidence that The Bands history has run an entirely different course to that of other sixties groups. Their origins are working class, and all except Levon Helm are Canadian. They were formed as far back as 1959, as backing group for the Arkansas-born Canadian rock king Ronnie Hawkins, and the strange death of rocknroll passed them by. Later their work with Dylan in his most creative phase (196466) widened their horizons of composition and production, and after Dylan stopped touring they retired (like Dylan, but with very
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different consequences) to up-state New York to work for the first time at their own music. Their intense professionalism and the rigour of their collective instrumental work have never been endangered by the demand of being cultural symbols as well as musicians (the ruin of such promising groups as Country Joe/Doors), and these qualities are absolute requirements of the ultra-sensitive capacity to turn thought instantly into sound that intensional construction demands. An important determinant of The Bands particular style is that, unlike fifties rock (and mechanical attempts to revive this project, such as Creedence Clearwater), they do not rely on a unique vocalist. Given the role of the human voice in rock music, this absence determines both the vocal style affected by all four of The Bands singers, and its instrumental style. Lacking the vocal genius that the genre was originally designed for, The Bands vocals continuously strain against the upper limits of the male register (the region most responsive to changes of timbre), and even strain to emerge at all. Simultaneously, the backing instruments have a far more important role to play than in fifties rock. The simple country rhythms of guitar and acoustic bass (no drums) were sufficient against the virtuosity of a Presley. The Band has to rely predominantly on its rhythm section (a misnomer) for intensional development. Presleys vocal lines, designed to carry the whole musical message, could glide securely over a rhythmic backing that served only to underpin them. In The Bands music, the vocal constantly hesitates and hangs on a note while drums and bass build whole structures of arrival and non-arrival, anticipation and resolution, on the bridge passages between chord changes. The best example of this is the opening track on Music From Big Pink, the Dylan song Tears of Rage, where these unconscious devices condense in a superb musical construct. Here the verbal message of the lyrics is clearly subordinate to the music, whereas the reverse is true even on Dylans rendering of the song accompanied by The Band on the basement tape. Dylan still works at delivering a verbal message. On Music From Big Pink the verbal message is a residue left after the lyrics have been bent to serve as a vocal line. What comes through more strongly than the precise events described, are the connotations of the lyrics as a whole. The theme of filial ingratitude perfectly matches The Bands own performance, in which the music appears to have so painful a birth. The Bands construction is astonishingly pure rock, whose aesthetic values are purely musical. It is not a synthesis that will propel the music on a radical forward course. This will not happen until or unless the problem of rock vocalism is solved. I am not suggesting that very different departures, such as cross-fertilization of rock with certain serious forms (e.g. Velvet Underground or Soft Machine) may not be a more secure way forward, and may not be from certain perspectives more aesthetically rewarding. There is no question here of a rank order a conception quite alien to materialist criticism. Yet the extensional constructions of the experimental groups lead away from rock to realms where quite different critical canons must be applied. To conclude, I would like to attempt some partial answers and correctives to the set of questions presented in my earlier article.
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Structural Co-ordinates and Socio-cultural Base. The internal co-ordinates of a musical form are not mechanically determined by its social base. The relationship is one of compatibility. Musical practice has a relative autonomy, and to each social group correspond certain acceptable genres. Analysis of this compatibility is an important and so far almost unexplored question which will require both historical materialist and psychoanalytic explanation. The role of lyric in rock music has been a major theme in the present discussion; as for dance, it is the intensional development of rhythmic inflection that made possible the qualitative break in dance styles that took place once rock music had been appropriated by its new audiences. Dominance of the Vocal. What I attempted to grasp with this expression is in fact the dominance of intensional over extensional modes. In rock music, the overwhelming primacy of the vocal has been reduced with the development of electronic instruments and techniques, but rock remains a genre dominated by the vocal, which only tends to disappear in the frontier territories. Music and Ideology. Artistic projects will continue to be distorted by ideological mystifications until dialectical materialism is generally accepted (and appropriated) as a world outlook. By aesthetics is the politics of art I meant to stress the importance of the ideological struggle against these mystifications, and of materialist analysis of artistic problems, by critics and the direct producers themselves as a requirement for the progress of all forms of art.

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