Play That Rock Guitar

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.