When Rock Criticism Found Its Voice

Tom Carson

           

AP Photo

Newly out from University of Massachusetts Press, Devon Powers's Writing The Record: The Village Voice and The Birth of Rock Criticism—which'll cost you a whopping $80 for its 160 pages in hardcover, making the paperback's $22.95 price tag seem almost reasonable—is the first work of intellectual history I know of whose heroes are a couple of guys I used to see around the office during my own tenderfoot days at the paper in question. Don't blame me for both being uncommonly interested and feeling time's icy fingers do the Charleston on the nape of my neck. Reading Rick Perlstein's Nixonland was weird enough; that Perlstein was too young to have any first-hand memories of the Nixon era demanded a certain, how you say, adjustment. Still, it's not as if I used to run into Tricky Dick at the soda machine.
So let's get my personal acquaintance with Powers's two protagonists out of the way. Richard Goldstein, author of the Voice's seminal "Pop Eye" column from 1966 to 1969, is someone I never exchanged more than a few pleasantries with during my later stints at the paper. On the other hand, Robert Christgau, the Voice's rock-crit colossus for almost 40 years until he got the boot in 2006, not only gave me my start as a reviewer but remains a valued friend, albeit one I'm lucky to see once a year. Fortunately, Powers's time frame—mid-'60s to early '70s, with considerable and shrewd preliminary sussing of the Village's history as a bohemian lodestar and the Voice's Ike-era origins—cuts off well before the punk-crazed batch of Voice contributors I belonged to came into the picture.
That spares you any quarrels between her analysis and my experience. Since I wasn't around then, I can read Writing The Record as a fascinating gloss on my elders and betters before I ended up as one of their youngers and worsers. Not least because my crowd was well aware of climbing aboard a pop-crit bandwagon overseen by the people who'd helped invent the wheel, Powers's claims for Goldstein and Christgau's importance get no dissent from me.
The book is a spruced-up Ph. D. dissertation, and it does show. Powers has a habit of explaining the argument she's about to make, then why she wants to make it, then the conclusions we should draw now that she's finished—leaving the reader, at times, scrambling back to the preceding pages to find the elusive paragraphs where the argument itself is hiding. She's uninterested in atmosphere or dramatic incident, though Goldstein and Christgau—both of whom she interviewed—probably could have supplied her with revealing and colorful anecdotes a-plenty.
She's also dances around private lives, unlike her subjects. In different ways, both Goldstein and Christgau made going public with theirs part of their trick bag. Their intellectual inventiveness may be what lasts, but even more than most intellectual inventiveness, it didn't take place in a vacuum.
Still, that's how it goes with pioneering works—which, in its modest way, Powers's is. At that level, Writing The Record's virtues far outweigh its faults. Her take on the Village as bohemia's 20th-century petri dish (though no more, and thanks, NYU) rightly stresses "the neighborhood's consistent Janus face—alive and moribund, hip and square, an impoverishment of its former self and raging in a way it never had before." She's equally right to emphasize how little intention the Voice's founders, Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, had of fomenting any sort of revolution, cultural ones included. Even I hadn't known that the paper's coverage of the Village folk scene was stuffily antagonistic until they realized they were blowing it in the wind.
Better yet are the quotes Powers piles up to remind us of how entrenched—not to say rabid—hostility to mass culture was at midcentury among reputable intellectuals. That means not only professional aesthetes, who understantably had other loaves and fishes to fry, but left-wing eggheads. You can only gasp at one Bernard Rosenberg's declaration, in a 1957 volume called Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, that "No art form, no body of knowledge, no system of ethics [emphasis added] is strong enough to resist vulgarization." Yep, it's all been downhill since the Sermon on The Mount got translated out of the original Aramaic.