SO DISCO WAS ended. Even as the Village People—a gay goof that grew tiring quickly—became, for a short time, the biggest-selling band in America, the pop industry and media were already in retreat from disco. By 1980, disco was clearly a dirty word. Record sales plummeted almost overnight, and numerous artists, producers, and executives—even entire record labels and radio stations—fell into an irreclaimable oblivion. Disco had been overthrown, in part by its own excesses, and in part by a rising ugly racist and anti-gay sensibility.
But in many ways, disco transmuted its style and survived ingeniously—or at the very least, it has had a considerable legacy. In fact, in the 1980s, its rhythmic principles were adopted by two divergent audiences: the new wave crowd, who—from the Tom Tom Club to Billy Idol to Depeche Mode—enjoyed some of their biggest commercial successes by adapting disco’s dance structures to their own conceits; also, hip-hop and rap music based much of their linguistic and textural innovation on disco’s foursquare rhythmic pulse. In addition, the success of many of the 1980s’ biggest stars—including Michael Jackson, Prince, and Madonna—would have been unthinkable without the breakthroughs that disco made in both style and audience appeal. It’s also true, of course, that disco didn’t necessarily make the pop world more tolerant.
In general, though, disco managed to restore to rock the principle of dancing as one of music’s primary purposes and pleasures—and if anything, that truth is more dominant in the 1990s, in hip-hop, rave, and techno, than it was in the 1970s, at disco’s height. Disco also reasserted another vital truth: that dancing could be an act of affirmation—that it could unite people, could redeem (or at least help vent) their pains and longings, and could even empower those who had been too long denied or forgotten. In the end, the question isn’t why disco enjoyed such phenomenal success. The real question is, why didn’t more of 1970s rock & roll stand for those same worthy values?
SKIRMISH TWO: ROCK & ROLL’S POLITICS
Does dedication to rock & roll entail any political commitments?
That was a question I raised in the pages of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in September 1984, in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s attempt to appropriate Bruce Springsteen’s hard-bitten Americanism as a round-about endorsement of the president’s addled social policies (see this book’s earlier chapter). At the time I posed the question largely as a way of suggesting that to esteem the music of Springsteen and yet also support the reelection of President Reagan was (to my mind then and my mind now) to embrace a likely contradiction in ideals—that, in effect, the two interests simply wouldn’t mix. (Springsteen, I believe, made the same point when, shortly after Reagan’s action, he told a Philadelphia audience: “It’s a long walk from a government that’s supposed to represent all the people to where we are today.”) Several readers agreed with my suggestion, though many others—all of whom, interestingly, professed strong fondness for both the singer and the president—did not. In fact, some bristled at the idea that a love for rock & roll was tantamount to any political view whatsoever.
In part, I bring this matter up because some of those letters forced me to do some thinking about my stand. But I also reinvoke it because, at the time I wrote this article (two weeks before the Ronald Reagan-Walter Mondale presidential election) we were about to select a president, and to be honest, I’ve never cast a vote for that office without somehow reflecting on what rock & roll has taught me about my country.
I don’t say this lightly or jokingly. Just as there are people who believe that to follow certain religious convictions necessitates voting or acting in a specific political manner, I believe that to value rock’s contribution to popular culture requires (or eventually produces) given sociopolitical creeds, including a commitment to racial equality and an opposition to illiberalism in general. But if, as some partisans insist, rock no longer speaks for the sociopolitical disposition of American youth—or worse, if the political disposition it speaks for is as ungenerous as post 1930s’ Republicanism (meaning from 1940 to the year 2000, and probably beyond)—then maybe the rock movement has finally turned feckless and empty.
Is this true? Are we finally witnessing a humiliation of rock’s traditional intractability? Has the musical tradition of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Bob Dylan, Sly Stone, and Marvin Gaye finally grown to seem socially docile—even to the extent of enjoying conservative endorsement or co-option? Didn’t we, during the punk revolt of the late 1970s, come through some great “new music” revolution—an insurrection designed to overthrow the staid, cautious, apolitical murk that had gripped the pop scene in the aftermath of the frenetic 1960s?
Well, yes and no. True, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and Graham Parker carved a hard line across the face of rock complacency, except their distinctly British brand of sociopolitical passion seemed too threatening to the American rock sensibility of the late 1970s and early 1980s—that is, until U.S. record companies figured a way to sell the music for its increasingly refined surfaces, while disregarding its political foundations. Whatever true punk revolution there was, by the mid-1980s it would merely look cute, poppy, and clearly marketable—stuff that even young Republicans can (and do) embrace, and by embracing defuse, without acknowledging the music’s real contents, meanings, or consequences.
While much of the best mid-1980s music (which in the case of such British bands as Eurythmics, Culture Club, and others mixed black rhythmic forms within a sleek pop outline) still advanced a liberal, pointedly anti-racist point of view in the context of British society, in America it was originally interpreted by a force like MTV as fun-minded style, without social significance (of course, this was back in that cable network’s pre-”Rock the Vote” period; “Rock the Vote” has turned out to be a smart and effective force, not to mention a nice redemption of the station’s early political stupefaction). To be sure, many 1980s bands—from Husker Du and the Minutemen to Rank and File and Lone Justice—fashioned a new and virile brand of politically informed rock, but until 1984, radio and MTV pretty much shunned (and thus discouraged) such adventurous sounds and outlooks. In fact, with rare exceptions—most notably Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A., and the odd funk or country single—precious little overtly social-minded American rock music won public favor in the early 1980s.
Of course, some folks would argue that to delight in rock and soul music was never exactly the same as staking out a political stand—that, by example, reveling in the early ground-breaking achievements of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, and Gene Vincent was to make an essentially nonpolitical choice based on generational diversion, not cultural insurrection. Even so, the choice had far-reaching political consequences: Rock & roll, remember, was vehemently and openly attacked in many U.S. cities as “nigger music.” Presley, and others like him—whether they intended to or not—brought a previously much feared and despised audience and sensibility into America’s wide-ranging predilections, and because of his actions, that “outsider” style (and its meanings) became publicly, massively integrated to an unprecedented extreme. This development, I believe, also helped play a role in the more significant advance of the civil rights cause.
By the mid-1960s, rock & roll was clearly politicized—but then so was everything else. The racial disquiet of the 1950s had given way to an impassioned and eventful civil rights struggle, while an emerging youth culture (defined in large part by the explosive sensibility of the Beatles) was quickly being turned to fodder for the self-realizing horror of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Initially, it was such left-derived folk activists as Peter, Paul, & Mary; Joan Baez; and Bob Dylan who recognized not merely the bearing these issues might have on their predominately young (though not yet rock-oriented) audience, but also understood the moral and emotional influence that music might have on social problems. When Dylan crossed over to a pop context (a move initially interpreted by the folk crowd as a sellout), he simply updated Presley’s implicit threat of brandishing rock & roll as a
means of radicalizing—or at least disrupting—American mainstream entertainment.
More remarkable was the extent to which all this political music affected the business of music. While a company like MGM (under the direction of Republican hopeful Mike Curb) purged its roster of incendiary thinkers (like the Velvet Underground), other corporate structures (including CBS, Warner Bros., Atco/Atlantic, Decca/MCA and even the famously conservative RCA—the latter the home of Elvis Presley and the Jefferson Airplane) largely supported the activism of their artists as both good business and good ideals. (For example, consider this note from the inner-fold of Chicago’s first album: “With this album, we dedicate ourselves, our futures and our energies to the people of the revolution. . . . And the revolution in all its forms.” Was this simple-minded sedition or simply sound commercialism?)
Then, in the late 1970s, after the furor of Vietnam and Watergate had started to die down and when the battle over civil rights seemed to reach a certain (though only momentary) stability, and after acts from such record companies as Elektra/Asylum and Capricorn had helped support the presidential campaigns of Jerry Brown and Jimmy Carter—both of whom professed a strong liking for rock—two upheavals occurred that dramatically altered the temper of American rock. The first was the punk revolt, a movement that began in the United States as an aesthetic insurrection yet was adopted and expanded in Britain (by such acts as the Sex Pistols and Clash) as fierce, radical-minded music, leveled in protest against the United Kingdom’s emerging, reactionary, Margaret Thatcher-led mood. Consequently, the U.S. radio and record industries eschewed punk, looking on its grim tactics as tasteless and off-putting.
The other disturbance was more decisive. The bottom fell out of the overextended record business, cutting grandiose record sales in half and making simple survival seem more necessary than comfortable political ideals. In short, financial recovery became the first priority of the marketplace, which caused many music moguls (not to mention many musicians) to throw their support to Ronald Reagan, with his promise of restoring financial bounty to the corporate sector. It wasn’t Reagan (of course) who saved the music industry’s ass. Rather, it was that cleaned-up descendant of punk alluded to earlier—a largely dance-informed version of new wave—that did the trick. England’s most radical cultural export of the mid-1980s became one of America’s favorite urban trends. Who said, “This ain’t no party/This ain’t no disco”?
Where does this leave us? Has rock & roll come full circle, so that it is once more viewed as an art and entertainment form largely without political meaning? Or rather, in 1984, did American rock’s political bias actually start shifting to the right—to jingoism, hawkishness, and regressive racial prejudices? Did the rock “vote”—the vote of those who see rock & roll as somehow central to their view of pop culture—go, in 1984, to Ronald Reagan, a man who as California’s governor, once bandied the notion of engaging in a “blood bath” with America’s young dissidents?
I would like to think not—I’d like to think that rock still speaks to our best mixed impulses of insurgence and compassion—but that may not be realistic. Rather, it may simply be that rock is too big for much aesthetic or ideological unanimity, that it is now as variegated as America’s many regions and as disparate as the differences between the United States and the United Kingdom. It is also important that leftist fans like myself recognize that rightist rockers may well possess a redeeming genius, just as Frank Sinatra, Merle Haggard, Ray Charles, or even Neil Young made the misfortune of their politics seem secondary to the depth of their art. Maybe in the years ahead we will stop thinking of rock as a folk-art form that liberates its audience, and instead we’ll start regarding it as something that reinforces sunshine nationalism and grasping opulence. After all, given rock & roll as a spawn of American myth and wide-eyed ambition, unkind possibilities were never far beneath the music’s surface.
But there is another, better possibility, which has nothing to do with right or left, party or rhetoric: Namely, that rock & roll is no longer an answer so much as a big question mark pointed at each of us, asking us what we make of it, what bearing it has on our passions and dreams, and on our view of the world around us. After all, music has the ability to address our hearts personally—to reach me at the same moment it reaches you, no matter our political bonds or differences, despite the caprices of our government and of its self-serving leaders. If that stays true—if rock & roll continues to reach our hearts, and in doing so bids us to find purpose in its raw exhilaration—it will remain an inducement to freedom, and that is the best one could ever ask of any American-born dream or calling.
SKIRMISH THREE: OF SEX, VIOLENCE, PRINCE, MADONNA, SATAN, MURDER, METAL, AND THE NEW PARENTS
Does rock & roll threaten the morals of its most susceptible fans? Can it foment debauchery, cultural dissipation, sexism, even violence? These questions, in some form or another, have been the subject of repeated and passionately unresolved debates, stretching back as far as Elvis Presley’s first unabashedly sexy nationwide TV appearance—an event many critics and moralists viewed as a shocking signal of the degeneracy of postwar America.
Over the years this charge and its refutation have become a fixed and venerable part of the rock tradition for virtually every American and British parent and child (or censor and libertine) who have felt the volatile fluctuations of pop culture, from the initial jolt of Presley to the purposeful nihilism of the Sex Pistols to the coy androgyny of Boy George. But the continual controversy has also become a rite of passage that has a way, years later, of making unseeming conservatives and old fogies out of yesterday’s progressives. In the 1960s, many of us witnessed the moral pedagogy of parents and older siblings who had acted out the surface gestures of rebellion with Elvis but were angered by the social liberalism of the Beatles and the San Francisco bands and repelled by the sexual bravura of the Rolling Stones. By the same token, in the late 1970s, many of those former pop insurgents (the tiring “Big Chill” generation) resisted the punk mutiny, chafing at the knowledge of a younger crowd mocking their own once-daring but now enervated (or, more accurately, now abandoned) ideals.
I am both happy and sad to say that in 1985 things really aren’t that much different [nor are they different in 1997, as I revise this piece]. I am happy because I believe it’s every subsequent generation’s inalienable right (if not obligation) to disturb or offend the status quo, and sad because it invariably seems that so many of yesteryear’s iconoclasts, while they remain pious about their own periods of rebellion, end up disparaging the worth of any later upheavals or progressions. Sometimes it seems as if the children of ’56, ’67, or ’77 feel they have a patent on legitimate pop revolt, that their discovery of the thrill of change or disruption was the last cultural discovery worth sanctioning. The truly confounding part of this is that, with the rapid turnover these days in pop styles and values, it doesn’t take long for old-fogyism to creep in. For example, consider all the late-1970s punks who turn up their noses at anything that gives off even a whiff of techno-pop.
But the real subject here, of course, is the moral content of much of today’s pop, which certainly seems to be rankling many folks. Among them is freelance journalist Kandy Stroud, who in a 1985 Newsweek “My Turn” column, called for the legislative censorship of “pornographic rock.” Stroud (who professes to “being something of a rock freak,” by which she means she enjoys performing aerobics to it) was incensed when she discovered her fifteen-year-old daughter listening to Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” with its glaring reference to a woman “masturbating with a magazine.” After that, Stroud’s newly awakened ears found filth all over the place—in Madonna cooing “Feels so good inside” in “Like a Virgin”; in Frankie Goes to Hollywood singing of gay sex in “Relax”; in Sheena Easton extolling arousal in (Prince’s) “Sugar Walls.” Claiming that all this music degrades and corrupts its listeners, and noting that most parents don’t have the time or wherewithal to monitor what their children listen
and dance to, Stroud proposed that the time has come for the public suppression of such songs—either by self-imposed restraints from the radio and record industry or by the enactment of local legislation.
Stroud finished her article with this thought: “Why can’t musicians . . . ensure that America’s own youth will be fed a diet of rock music that is not only good to dance to but healthy for their hearts and minds and souls as well?” Welcome to the new parents: rock fans who demand that the music adopt and stand for the prudish values that their generations were once free to reject.
Well, I guess Stroud’s question is fair: Why can’t rock stars produce music that is “healthy for hearts and minds and souls . . . ?” To my way of thinking, of course, rock musicians already are producing music that nurtures our souls and hearts, but here is the better answer to Stroud’s question: Because they don’t have to, nor are they morally obliged to. American and British artists are free to assume any perspective—even to exalt or to deride another person’s beliefs. Remember “freedom of expression”? It extends even to rock & roll upstarts.
Night Beat Page 33