On November 9, 1967, Jann Wenner’s first editorial appeared in the inaugural edition of Rolling Stone magazine. It read:
“We have begun a new publication…sort of a magazine and sort of a newspaper…reflecting what we see are the changes in rock and roll and the changes related to rock and roll. Because the trade papers have become so inaccurate and irrelevant and because the fan magazines are an anachronism, fashioned in the mold of myth and nonsense…Rolling Stone is not just about music but also the things and attitudes that the music embraces.”[1]
By imbuing it with an authority of publications of record similar to that of newspapers, Wenner laid down the charge for all “serious” rock music magazines that endeavored to present rock music as serious instead of frivolous, a part of the real experience of a culture instead of mere entertainment – as intelligent art as opposed to vacuous "pop." Throughout history, popular and folk music has been defined in opposition to classical “art” music. Prior to the 1960s, pop music could not be considered high culture like the great classical canon – it was commercial, trashy and intended for the lowest common denominator. But rock, like jazz and folk before it ultimately gained merit for its inherent artistry, bringing it to bear scholastic examination.
Scholars and rock journalists’ unifying contention in the early era of rock was that the music mattered in a way that “surpassed pure entertainment, breeding an equally strong need to understand and explain why this was so…in the critics’ view rock was as much art as jazz, but like film, far more democratic.” Cultural theorist Tim Wall cites the academic scholarship of Black American blues music of the 1940s as hugely influential on mainstream American and European popular music of the 1950s and 1960s which eventually was applied to rock music. Rock sociologist and critic Simon Frith devotes the first chapter of his landmark text on rock music and subculture Sound Effects to “rock roots” from both a sociological and musicological perspective as a launching point for academic analysis. Frith describes rock music as an art form that is “primitive” insofar that rock musicians impart emotion through pre-linguistic devices such as sounds and rhythms. He contends that “rock music is the result of an ever changing combination of independently developed musical elements, each of which carries its own cultural message.” Rock and roll came into its own in the 1960s during a re-appropriation of Black music such as soul and pop through interlocutors like Chuck Berry who then went on to influence the Beatles, “opening up the space for the development of rock music” by further appropriating Black American blues, soul and of course rhythm and blues (R’n’B.) Prior to the 1967 Wenner moment, rock music was largely ignored by the establishment, especially in Britain. The BBC had not ventured to play rock music which was instead broadcast by pirate stations and others such as Radio Luxembourg. John Peel, a DJ for pirate station Radio London was considered by the rock music subculture as one of their consecrators and eventually was “poached” by the BBC to head up its new pop music radio station, BBC Radio 1. This motley collection of “fans” became a “real,” structured hierarchy – there were consistencies in the dress, style, taste, politics and activities of these people that consumed and produced rock music. Outside observers could easily identify rock fans; it was the beginnings of an expressive rock subculture.
Ever since the 1930s, studies on subculture had been the domain of academia. Rock music, rock fashion and rock performance was and still is a mass leisure activity or pursuit, giving rise to a self-conscious group of consumers that identify as part of a rock subculture. The Birmingham School of Contemporary Cultural Studies was one of the first academic units to purposefully examine the rock subculture in Britain which lent further credence to rock music as not only an art form but the linchpin, expression and overall rallying point for a subculture. Frith and Horne in Art into Pop explain rock and pop music’s explosion into academia can be explained by the “extraordinary art school connection” with British musicians and later American musicians adding “image, style and self-consciousness – an attitude to what commercial music should and could be…This attitude has been influential even when a particular genre (like punk) didn’t actually sell records.” Subcultures express a response to a set of conditions that are tied together into structured, relatively coherent wholes and rock music is a binding force for a rock subculture can also be viewed in this fashion. However, the mere appreciable existence of rock music subculture did not make it an artform worthy of academic criticism, debate and study. Rock music criticism – the act of thinking and writing critically about rock as art - did not fully begin until the post-1967 Wenner moment.
In Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s, writing on rock music was limited to trade publications and “fan pages” that were analogous to “film fan” magazines of the 1930s. These papers focused primarily on the “stars” and not a literary or discursive analysis of films unlike the French art cinema journal Cahiers du Cinema or similar publication; some trade publications in the US such as Billboard tracked chart positions and industry news but there was little in the way that could be described as criticism or journalism. The music press at this time could be viewed as merely an instrument of the music industry reflecting the “increasing importance of records and record sales” and provided “no perspective, historical or otherwise on the music they covered; they had no developed critical positions…they presented the industry’s own public view of itself.” In the 1960s onwards, rock journalism emerged into its own field, critically evaluating rock music so as to develop an “account of the music as art” as distinct from other previous forms of music reporting such as the aforementioned trade papers and “teeny bopper” fan-oriented magazines. American rock magazine Crawdaddy! was launched in February 1966. Editor Paul Williams proclaimed it “free from teenage-magazine perspectives” and proudly proclaiming that the magazine’s specialty would be “intelligent writing about pop music” while charging Billboard with “non-critical criticism,” opening up the high-low cultural dichotomy arguably for the first time. These magazines attempted, as Simon Frith wrote in 1981, to “take the new musicians and their audiences as seriously as they took themselves.” Rock fans could now determine what cultural products were noteworthy for their artistry and which ones were lesser or inferior through specialized cultural interpreters – rock critics and rock journalists.
The emergence of rock radio stations, magazines such as the aforementioned, article collections, specialist periodicals and record guides all set up a “critical apparatus” that positioned academically credentialed journalists as both “participants and observers of the rock revolution” thus conferring the authority on their works from mere participants or observers of rock music. Those interested in the subculture could not only use these magazines as reflections of their readership, but also act as an entry point into these readerships. The subculture’s artistic expression was under scrutiny from writers of a scholarly background, using similar appraisal techniques usually reserved for critiques of literature, visual art or classical and jazz music. Through such analysis, we can view rock as a true “art.”
This criticism is produced in a professional manner from a position of influence and cultural authority. Rock critics become “arbiters of taste” from the aforementioned “cultivated disposition” imbued upon them from academia, the emergence of a “genius” styles of writing and a sustained body of works of that quality in the rock music field. Their “self-defined task is not only to suggest what to buy, but how to make sense of [rock journalism as a movement, style, subculture, etc.]” This role as navigator through the world of the rock subculture is not cast arbitrarily. The notion of what constitutes authenticity in the rock subculture and how it is expressed through rock journalism, rock music and rock style is another question in the discourse which will be discussed at length in another essay.
Rock critics and journalists in the 1967 moment onwards and arguably until the 1999 “flattening” of the industry by rapid-fire online content distribution and generation “fought” the battle for rock music; the writing that elucidated and analyzed it was armed with an immersion in academia and a revolt into style. Bringing art into pop (or merely viewing pop as art) laid the foundations for rock criticism and journalism to flourish into the mainstream culture and accepted as a popular “art.” Though much has been made of the “high/low” dichotomy of culture in the past, the new media ecology and conceptualization of consumer/producer/critic as a singular, “remixed” entity existing on the internet or digital media breaks down these distinctions into a multi-valued orientation in which artistic or subcultural merit can be found in almost any production (according to the viewpoint of the subculture or individual.) Though some academics would froth at the mouth if one asserts a loss in the fidelity of “high culture,” the simple fact is that rock as a subculture values this music and style as art and as such, is given praise or criticism by those knowledgeable in the art of rock and of course, the art of analysis and criticism. If one can articulate the points of difference or commendable attributes of rock music then they too can shape the canon as a “cultural interlocutor” through their transmission of authenticity and “professional” or historical awareness as an art.
This essay is an early draft in a series of critical examinations of music criticism and journalism. The project is being co-written by Leticia Supple, blogger and founder of MetalAsFuck.net. Read her essays here.
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[1] Lindberg, U., Gudmundsson, G., Michelsen, M. and Weisethaunet, H. Rock Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, bruisers and cool-headed cruisers, Peter Lang Publishing: New York, NY, 2005. p. 146.