By Mark Judge on 8.19.05 @ 12:04AM
A conservative's love for rock and roll -- because it's conservative.
I just attended a wedding for a friend of mine who will turn 40
next year. We had gone to an all-boys high school together, and
although most of our crew is now bogged down with kids and careers,
one thing was clear from the nuptials: we still love rock and roll.
This was evident from both the conversations, which often focused
on how our favorite bands from the '80s -- Van Halen, Soft Cell,
the English Beat, the Replacements -- still sound great, and to the
way we all stormed the dance floor at the end of the night when the
band played the Rolling Stones.
What might seem odd -- at least to the rock elite and
intelligentsia -- is that this was a group of conservative
Catholics. The guy getting married worked for Judge Starr (whom I
had the honor of meeting) and is currently being filibustered by
liberals as a potential judge. As I was driving home and listening
to a tape that contained both Beethoven's Ninth, John Coltrane and
AC/DC's song "Back in Black," I once again thought of a modern
paradox: rock and roll, America's "rebel music," is in fact a
conservative art form.
Music is about sound, and rock and roll is a conservative sound.
It is often a simple and primitive sound. What rock fans -- and
conservatives -- often miss about pop music is that a song's
primitivism or simplicity does not make it heathen. Indeed, in the
very simplicity of the music of much rock music there is order as
tight as the divine love that, as Dante wrote, puts the stars in
circular motion. The rhythm of a river rolling over stones is a
large part of what makes it beautiful, as is the repetition of the
waves rising and dropping on a beach. A pop song has an order --
verse, verse, chorus, verse, break, or some variation thereof --
and juxtaposes this order with lyrics that either bolster its order
with declarations of love or provide tension by expressing sorrow
and loss. In the best examples of this -- The Four Tops' "Baby I
Need Your Loving," The Beatles "I Need You," Bob Dylan's "To Make
You Feel My Love," melody and sound reach into the heart of beauty,
which brings it in proximity with the divine. The rock and roll art
form is a thrilling representation of the Christian paradox of
human failing and original sin in the midst of God's perfect
creation and love. The beat, the chord changes, the guitars all
declare order, beauty and perfection, while the lyrics and the
singer lament that perfection, due to the human condition --
original sin -- which can never truly be perfect.
A defense of this kind of primitivism in art can be found in an
essay written by Etienne Gilson, a great Catholic theologian of the
early 20th century. In his 1955 book Painting and Reality,
Gilson defends modern art, which many critics were dismissing as
primitive. "Reduced to its simplest expression," he wrote, "the
function of modern art has been to restore painting to its
primitive and true function, which is to continue through man the
great creative activity of nature. In so doing, modern painting has
destroyed nothing and condemned nothing that belongs in any one of
the legitimate activity of man; it has simply regained the clear
awareness of its own nature and recovered its own place among the
creative activities of man."
This is essentially what rock and roll did in the 1950s, and at
its best does today. Despite all this, rock and roll still enjoys
the reputation as rebel music -- a reputation earned five decades
ago. For rock historian James Miller, the outlawing of rock began
on March 25, 1955, when the film Blackboard
Jungle was released. The opening song of the film was
"(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" by the 34-year-old Texan Bill
Haley and his band, The Comets. Director Richard Brooks had meant
for Blackboard Jungle to be a warning film about teen
delinquency and cultural decline, and in order to press the point
he cranked up "Rock Around the Clock" loud on the theater PA
system. Teens committed acts of vandalism in theaters in
Minneapolis and Hartford, Connecticut, leading one psychiatrist to
claim rock and roll violence was a "communicable disease" spread by
a "cannibalistic and tribalistic sort of music."
As Miller points our, Blackboard Jungle was one of the
first and most powerful works in the popular culture to wed the
music to violence. The film depicts teenagers as vulgar, sexually
aggressive and explosive, and wed these images to a rock and roll
beat; together the two "defined the cultural essence of the music"
-- it would be all about disorder, aggression, and sex: a "fantasy
of human nature, running wild to a savage beat."
The fantasy, in fact, was something quite different from the
music. "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" was nothing but a
souped-up swing tune. As Miller points out, singer Bill Haley was a
veteran of country radio with thinning hair, a heavyset body and a
dead eye that made him self-conscious. When Blackboard
Jungle caused youth riots in Dublin and London, Haley defended
himself, telling London's Daily Mirror, "We don't make
boys bad!" As Miller notes, "It was too late. Nihilism had become a
pop fad -- a lot of Haley's new fans took pride in being bad: that,
to them, was what the new music was all about. Affecting an air of
foppish brutality, they made rock and roll their own." At the time,
a 15-year-old named John Lennon saw Blackboard Jungle in
Liverpool and was disappointed when there was not a riot.
For the past 50 years, this view of rock as social rebellion has
been unshakable. No one seems to see the irony that the music that
is supposed to break down social barriers, liberate us sexually and
usher in peace on earth is based on musical idioms that are more
rigid than even the safest classical music. "(We're Gonna) Rock
Around the Clock" is about as simple and predictable as a song can
be, from its straightforward lyrics to its 4/4 beat.
Driving home from the wedding, AC/DC was followed by Dylan's "To
Make You Feel My Love," one of my favorite songs of all time. I've
always found it interesting that the love song, by far the most
popular subject in popular music, is both the most reviled by
rock's intelligentsia and yet the most enduring and powerful genre
of popular song -- who listens to protest songs from the 1960s, or
even 1980s, anymore? It is so, I believe, because it is often this
type of song that most capture the essence of Christian love. The
popular love song is most often about a love so powerful it can
conquer time, distance, and death -- a love, like the love of
Christ, that has dominion over the natural world. That's why we
were dancing so feverishly at the wedding.
topics:
Law
