Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music

The Who, the Velvets, and the new wave bands… shared… conception of rock-and-roll; their basic aesthetic assumptions have little to do with what is popularly known as “art rock.” The notion of rock-as-art inspired by Dylan’s conversion to the electric guitar -- the idea of making rock-and-roll more musically and lyrically complex, of combining elements of jazz, folk, classical, and avant-garde music with a rock beat, of creating “rock opera” and “rock poetry” -- was from the rock-and-roll fan’s perspective a dubious one.[1] At best it stimulated a vital and imaginative eclecticism that spread the values of rock-and-roll even as it diffused and diluted them.[2] At worst it rationalized a form of cultural upward mobility, concerned with achieving the appearance and pretensions of art rather than the reality -- the point being to “improve” rock-and-roll by making it palatable to the upper middle class. Either way, it submerged rock-and-roll in something more amorphous and high-toned called rock.[3] But from the early sixties (Phil Spector was the first major example) there was a countertradition in rock-and-roll that had much more in common with “high” art -- in particular avant-garde art -- than the ballyhooed art-rock syntheses: it involved more or less consciously using the basic formal canons of rock-and-roll as material (much as the pop artists used mass art in general) and refining, elaborating, playing off that material to produce what might be called rock-and-roll art.[4] While art rock was implicitly based on the claim that rock-and-roll was or could be as worthy as more established art forms, rock-and-roll art came out of an obsessive commitment to the language of rock-and-roll and an equally obsessive disdain for those who rejected that language or wanted it watered down, made easier.[5] In the sixties the best rock often worked both ways: the special virtue of sixties culture was its capacity for blurring boundaries, transcending contradictions, pulling off everything at once. But in the seventies the two tendencies have increasingly polarized: while art rock has fulfilled its most philistine possibilities in kitsch like Yes (or, for that matter, Meat Loaf), the new wave has inherited the countertradition, which is both less popular and more conscious of itself as a tradition than it was a decade ago....

The Velvets were the first important rock-and-roll artists who had no real chance of attracting a mass audience. This was paradoxical. Rock-and-roll was a mass art, whose direct, immediate appeal to basic emotions subverted class and educational distinctions and whose formal canons all embodied the perception that mass art was not only possible but satisfying in new and liberating ways. Insofar as it incorporates the elite, formalist values of the avant-garde, the very idea of rock-and-roll art rests on a contradiction. Its greatest exponents -- the Beatles, the Stones, and (especially) the Who -- undercut the contradiction by making the surface of their music deceptively casual, then demolished it by reaching millions of kids.[6] But the Velvets’ music was too overtly intellectual, stylized, and distanced to be commercial. Like pop art, which was very much a part of the Velvet’s world, it was antiart art made by antielite elitists. Lou Reed’s aesthete-punk persona, which had as its obvious precedent in the avant-garde tradition of artist-as-criminal-as-outlaw, was also paradoxical in the context of rock-and-roll. The prototypical rock-and-roll punk was the (usually white) working-class kid hanging out on the corner with his (it was usually his) pals; by middle-class and/or adult standards he might be a f*ck-off, a hell-raiser, even a delinquent, but he was not really sinister or criminal. Reed’s punk was closer to that bohemian (and usually black) hero, the hipster: he wore shades, took hard drugs, engaged in various forms of polymorphous perversity; he didn’t just hang out on the corner, he lived out on the street, and he was a loner.[7] (pp. 55-56)

In post-September 11 America, the inescapably topical is also enveloped in history and myth. In the gap where the towers used to be rise many ghosts: of our Cold War alliance with Afghan mujahedin, the Gulf War, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the Iranian hostage crisis, Vietnam, the Israeli-Arab war of '67, World War II, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, World War I, the Civil War, the American Revolution, and beyond, back before the New World, the New Eden, was envisioned. The American imagination will be taxed with demands for unquestioning unity and generic patriotism, will be burdened or inspired by our sense of loss and defiance, identification and separateness, new tensions between individual and collective. And irony (which in some quarters has been prematurely pronounced dead) will be very, very important. [Bold face mine.]