It's Only Rock 'n' Roll?
by
Jeff Schwartz
American Culture Studies
Bowling Green State University
jeffs@bgsuvax.bgsu.edu
Postmodern Culture v.6 n.2 (January, 1996)
Copyright (c) 1996 by Jeff Schwartz, all rights reserved.
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Review of:
Simon Reynolds and Joy Press. _The Sex Revolts: Gender,
Rebellion, and Rock 'n' Roll_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
1995.
[1] _The Sex Revolts_, which appeared this past spring from
Harvard University Press, is unquestionably a major
publication in the field of popular music studies. But it
is also a deeply troubling one, one which points to
significant problems concerning the status of popular music
within the academy, and particularly within cultural
studies.
[2] Reynolds and Press offer a typology of cultural narratives
of gender which dominate rock, mainly the rebel, who must
escape the smothering femininity of mother, home, family,
committed relationships, etc. for the freedom of the open
road, the all-male world of adventure, and the possibility
of machine-like autonomy, and the mystic, who seeks reunion
with the lost maternal through mysticism, psychedelic
drugs, and the embrace of nature (xiv). They conclude by
surveying attempts by female artists to negotiate with
these dominant narratives. The book is organized in these
three sections: Rebel Misogynies, Into the Mystic, and Lift
up your Skirt and Speak, and each section proceeds through
an exhaustive survey of artists both well-known (The
Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Pink Floyd) and
obscure (John's Children, Radio Birdman, Can).
[3] As the first book devoted entirely to how gender is treated
in rock, _The Sex Revolts_ deserves our attention and even
our praise. Yet it also calls out for some serious
criticism, since it is in some important respects a deeply
flawed piece of work. It is my hope that in beginning to
excavate these flaws, I will be embarking on the kind of
critical engagement with the book that will assure not its
undoing but rather the productive unfolding of some of its
unrealized potentialities in the coming years.
[4] Essentially the book suffers from three glaring weaknesses.
First, although the dust jacket features a Warhol portrait
of Mick Jagger with pink lipstick and green eye shadow,
promising a decadent, cynical, knowing attitude towards
gender performance, Reynolds and Press present a version of
rock which is completely heterosexualized. Their examples
are chosen to support their theory, not to complicate it.
Queer musicians are not featured (a scan of the index
reveals no entries for David Bowie, Lou Reed, Tom Robinson,
Melissa Etheridge, or Elton John, to pick some prominent
names at random), and those male artists who do appear who
have made sexual ambiguity part of their persona, such as
Jagger, Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, and Kurt Cobain, are treated
only with regard to the putatively heterosexual content of
their lyrics. Likewise, female artists' use of sexual
ambiguity is read as negotiation with the maculinist
dominant narratives of rock, without any possible queer
connotations. Such a blindness to the complex
performativity of gender and sexuality within rock 'n' roll
is astonishing, and constitutes a real obstacle to
understanding.
[5] The second serious flaw in the book is the authors' almost
exclusive emphasis on lyrics. Reynolds and Press seldom
discuss the non-lyrical dimensions of the music, and when
they do they resort to vague and highly impressionistic
language. Thus, for example, the music of Trobbing Gristle
is said to have "mirrored a world of unremitting ugliness,
dehumanization, and brutalism. They degraded and
mutilated sound, reaching nether-limits that even now have
yet to be under-passed" (91). These are perhaps valid
things to say about Throbbing Gristle, but they don't go
very far toward explaining what the music actually sounds
like or how the sounds can be understood as mirroring such
social conditions as "dehumanization." It is unlikely that
a book on film, painting, fiction, or any art form other
than popular music could be published by a major academic
press if it contained no formal, technical, or semiotic
analysis of the medium and texts in question. This is not
to say that only musicologists should write about popular
music. Given the culturally conservative character of
contemporary musicology, this would be a poor idea. But
those of us in cultural studies who write about music have
an obligation to acquire some familiarity with its
mechanics, just as film scholars learn the conventions of
camerawork and editing.
[6] The lack of rigor in popular music scholarship is due to
the failure of popular music to be accepted in the academy
as anything other than a (more or less transparent) social
symptom. Courses on topics such as "Rap and
African-American Politics" or "Madonna and Postmodern
Feminism" are widespread, while those on the formal aspects
of popular music or on popular artists as composers and
performers are scarce to nonexistent. The basic tools
needed for serious analysis of music are monopolized by a
musicology which has little interest in popular music or or
in the socio-political concerns of cultural studies. This
situation has begun to change in the past decade. But the
changes have come almost entirely from within musicology,
where a new generation of radical musicologists (such as
Brett, McClary, and Walser) has been slowly emerging. A
corresponding shift within cultural studies has not yet
materialized.
[7] With musicology still largely hostile to, and cultural
studies still largely incapable of rigorous engagement
with, popular musical forms, a kind of semi-scholarship has
tended to fill the void. If one runs through the list of
university press books on popular music, one finds mostly
books written by non-academics or by academics whose
primary work is as journalists. The tendency has, I
suspect, been exacerbated by university press editors, who,
increasingly confronted with a bottom line, are likely to
see their popular music titles as a best bet for the
coveted crossover market. I do not intend here to marshall
a defense of the academic gates against the journalistic
barabarians. My point is simply that the particular
circumstances of contemporary academe have given the field
of popular music studies a somewhat anomalous set of
contours -- contours whose limitations are evident in the
book under review.
[8] To be blunt, _The Sex Revolts_ is not a scholarly book.
And while in some respects this is refreshing, it also
leads to the third and greatest of the flaws I am
enumerating. In their handling of cultural theory -- of
the range of theoretical materials from which contemporary
cultural study draws its assumptions and practices --
Reynolds and Press are often clumsy and irresponsible.
Names familiar to PMC readers are dropped every few pages:
Kristeva, Irigaray, Deleuze and Guattari, Virilio,
Theweleit, Sartre, Burroughs, Marinetti, Bataille, Sade,
Nietszche, Bachelard, Caillois, Catherine Clement, Marjorie
Garber, etc. But there is no evidence that these different
and in some cases quite contradictory thinkers have been
seriously or systematically engaged. Their names are
simply tossed off as the authors string together well-known
theoretical catch phrases and brief, striking quotations.
The text is no more than %garnished% with contemporary
theory, and this window dressing can't obscure the fact
that Reynolds and Press are basically working with a
Jungian myth-symbol criticism that emerged back in the
1960's. Admittedly, twenty years ago this approach
produced Greil Marcus's masterful _Mystery Train_, but it
also gave us such foolishness as David Dalton's study of
James Dean (wherein Dean is Osiris) or, more recently,
Danny Sugerman's tedious book on Guns 'n' Roses (Axl Rose
is a shaman) -- not to mention the works of Camille Paglia.
[9] Paglia, in fact, is one of the more frequently cited
theorists in _The Sex Revolts_, along with Robert Bly and
Joseph Campbell. And the habitual recurrence to these
three, whose work is more or less compatible with the
pseudo-Jungian approach of Reynolds and Press, leads to
their unlikely -- not to say hilarious -- combination with
other cultural theorists whose work is conspicuously
incompatible with such an approach. Bly, for example, is
yoked together with the brilliant theorist and historian of
the Nazi imaginary, Klaus Theweleit; Paglia is paired
variously with Sartre, Kristeva, and Ferenczi (85-86).
[10] As I said, it is not a scholarly book. And yet it is one
that I think will be genuinely valuable to scholars in a
field which offers so few points of productive departure.
_The Sex Revolts_ has the great advantage over other works
in the field that it at least poses some of the important
questions, and gestures, however haphazardly, toward some
of the theoretical tools that could be used to answer these
questions. Even a conceptually bizarre combination like
Bly/Theweleit might lead to a worthwhile mutual
interrogation once it is unpacked from Reynolds and Press's
rather artless framework and taken up by someone more adept
at contemporary cultural and political theory. For all its
faults, _The Sex Revolts_ succeeds in suggesting some of
the productive directions that an as-yet barely emergent,
more rigorous and thoroughgoing cultural study of popular
music might take.
WORKS CITED:
Brett, Philip. Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds. _Queering
the Pitch: The New Lesbian and Gay Musicology_. New York:
Routledge, 1994.
Dalton, David. _James Dean: The Mutant King_. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1974.
Marcus, Greil. _Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll
Music_. New York: Plume, 1975.
McClary, Susan. _Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality_.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.
Sugerman, Danny. _Appetite for Destruction: The Days of Guns N'
Roses_. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.
Walser, Robert. _Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and
Madness in Heavy Metal Music_. Havover, NH: Wesleyan UP,
1993.
Référence: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.196/review-5.196