I was walking down the corridor to the common room in North
Hall at Antioch College when I first heard the opening guitar strain of "Gimme
Shelter" and I thought, “Oh my god, what is this music?” Years later, Mark and I
were driving down the highway in northern California when “The Sultans of
Swing” came on the radio and we said to each other, “Who is this, is this
Dylan?” and then we heard Mark Knoefler’s guitar riff and we said, “This is not
Dylan.”
At the Sunshine Theater in Albuquerque we danced in our
seats as Buddy Guy danced down the aisle with his guitar. And there was the sad
day when we came out of San Pedro Parks Wilderness and heard on the truck radio—over
and over—the soulful licks of Stevie Ray Vaughn. We turned to each other and
said: “Oh, no, he’s dead.”
A couple of weeks ago in the New York
Times Magazine Saul Austertliz wrote
about the current phenomenon in music criticism called “poptimism,” the term
used to counterpoint “rockism”: “disco, not punk; pop, not rock;
synthesizers, not guitars; the music video, not the live show. It is to
privilege the deliriously artificial over the artificially genuine.” Austerliz,
a music critic himself, explains that other critics have bought into poptimism
to not only be in touch with “the taste of average music fans” but to atone for
their past mistakes of buying into white male rockers who basically stole their
licks from black blues and soul music.
But I have to say, bless you, Saul Austerlitz. I’m a child
of the sixties who is guilty as charged: I love punk; rock; guitars; live
shows. But I also I love Marvin Gaye, Martha Reeves and Little Richard as much
as I love Bob Dylan, Janice Joplin, and the Rolling Stones (not such a fan of
the Boss, who he places in this cohort). There weren’t just “white” guitars,
remember: we had B.B., Buddy, and Jimi.
Austerliz describes a music critic retracting his initial
disappointment with Beyoncé’s new album saying “If you don’t like
the new Beyoncé album, re-evaluate what you want out of music.” I think Beyoncé
could be an Aretha or Patti LaBelle in another time and space but I’m not going
to reevaluate the lousy records she makes now.
Indie rock, jazz, regional American music—not part of a “poptimism”
that Austerliz suspects is actually an attempt to “resurrect a unified cultural
mainstream” that those of us who are, need I say, old, once shared. I still
listen to jazz (Charles Lloyd and Bill Frisell live in Santa Fe–wow!), Texas
blues, and world beat along with my compadres, my “shared musical mainstream”
who remain open to anything else we deem good (how about Amy Winehouse and
Alabama Shakes?).
Finally, though, I have to disagree with Austerliz’s
contention that “poptimism” only applies to the world of music, not that of literature
and movies. A recent article in the New
Yorker reminds us that techies are too busy making money to read books or
magazines other than TechCrunch. And in a New
York Times “Vision of the Future” graphic one of the interviewees lists the
Professions of the Past:“Higher education” and “Diamond mining.” Jeez, we get
to liberate both body and mind in the pursuit of our highest calling:
capitalism.
