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The Nation's Pulse
Is Highbrow Rock an Oxymoron?
Mixing pretentiousness with popular music.
Radiohead, repeatedly dubbed “best act in the world today” by Q magazine, are touring the United States. The quintet played the Verizon Center in the nation’s capital last week, leaving Washington Post critic Chris Richards to observe, “No other rock band in history has asked us to shush and pay attention quite like Radiohead.”
Does he write this as though that were a good thing?
“Fans kept their eyes locked on [singer Thom] Yorke’s every shimmy,” he explains. “But they did so very quietly, maintaining a reverent hush that felt alien at a rock concert of this size. When one fan let a whoop of admiration escape from his lungs during the piano ballad ‘Codex,’ you could hear it across the stadium. It was immediately followed by another dude yelling, ‘Shut up!’”
When Little Richard announced rock ‘n’ roll’s arrival by shouting “awopbabaloobopbalopbamboom,” he didn’t expect the audience to sit quietly. Early rock ‘n’ roll attracted a crowd because it invited mass participation. It provoked helpless teenagers to leave their seats, sing, dance, scream, and do everything else forbidden in schools. Quiet contemplation is for museums.
Perversely, that’s where Little Richard’s music can be found today, in a gallery in Cleveland called the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Like a Radiohead concert, museums demand quiet, respect, attention. There’s a clear line between art and audience. Herky-jerky movements or sudden screaming can get you removed. It’s all very fascist.
Rock music becoming more like that bad idea in Cleveland is a reason why rock music isn’t very rocking anymore. MTV does reality television. Rolling Stone is a celebrity magazine. Your local rock radio station has switched formats.
There is precedent for an audience exodus once mass art reimagines itself as high art. In Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Lawrence Levine documents the transformation of Shakespearean theatre, among other phenomena, from mass entertainment to high culture. It turns out 19th century Americans preferred “Richard III” to pretty much everything else.
The theater balcony, like the grandstand at a sporting event or the floor of a non-Radiohead rock concert, witnessed raucous behavior. “Ticket holders, a New Orleans judge ruled in 1853, had the legal right to hiss and stamp in the theater,” Levine informs. “Audiences of the period seemed fully prepared to heed this advice and exercise their rights.” They cheered favorite actors and booed their rivals. Riots sometimes put the exclamation point on bad performances. At a staging of Othello in Albany, a boatsman confronted the actor portraying Iago: “You damned-lying scoundrel, I would like to get hold of you after the show and wring your infernal neck.”
Highbrow/Lowbrow theorizes that an art form’s status has more to do with the conduct in the seats than the product on the stage. “With important exceptions — particularly in the areas of sports and religion — audiences in America had become less interactive, less of a public and more of a group of mute receptors. Art was becoming a one-way process: the artist communicating and the audience receiving.” What an artist did to gain respectability came at the price of popularity.
Certainly pretension predates Radiohead. One can go back to 1971’s benefit concerts for Bangladesh for an early hint of this. The artists gathered to save the refugees. The fans came to hear Bob Dylan, two Beatles, and Eric Clapton play live.
Rather than get that, the rowdies in row fifteen got, at least initially, a lecture. George Harrison, introducing his friend Ravi Shankar, explained that Indi music was “a little bit more serious than our music,” so concert-goers must “settle down” to get into it.
“This is a type of music which needs a little concentrated listening,” Shankar reiterated. “And I would request you to have a little patience.” The fiftysomething sitar player explained, “Through our music we would like you to feel the agony and also the pain and a lot of sad happenings in Bangladesh and also the refugees who have come to India.” He then, in proto-Michael Bloomberg fashion, implored Madison Square Garden’s hordes of seventies teenagers — who certainly didn’t buy tickets to experience agony, pain, and sadness — “to refrain or stop from smoking as the program is on.”
Wasn’t sitar music an invitation to start smoking something?
One senses an audible relief once George Harrison kicks into “Wah Wah.” Perhaps the Hindu religious music was an English showman’s trick to further frustrate the energy he wished to unleash with his electric guitar.
Radiohead, as anyone familiar with “Creep,” “Let Down,” or “Fake Plastic Trees” can attest, unleashes pent up energy, too. But the group’s descent into robot music of blips and bleeps practically insists upon an audience of robots, i.e., slaves. That’s not the Little Richard liberation that initially made rock ‘n’ roll so popular.
About the Author
Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America. He blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.
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Lullabys Legends and Lies| 6.11.12 @ 8:23AM
I like concerts where you can just sit there and enjoy the music, instead of having to stand in front of the seat that you just paid $30-$80 for, for the entire concert, so you kind of feel like you're getting your money's worth having rented the damn thing. By the time I get to the show in the evening, I've been up all day anyway, and I really don't want to have to put in too much more work by that point, I just want to be entertained. One of the best shows I've ever seen was YES, and they opened up their concert with the 18 minute long song Close to the Edge (and that's not even one of their really long songs), and Close to the Edge isn't really a dancing song, or a fist pumping song for that matter, and it was awesome!! So to each his own!! If you want to dance, go dance!! If you want to watch talented musicians play complicated music, you have the right to just sit there and enjoy that too, without putting any effort into it!! I've never seen a fight break out out a progressive rock band's concert yet, can you say the same thing?
DTOM| 6.11.12 @ 8:47AM
But please, whatever you do, even if you know every word to every song, DO NOT SING ALONG! The idea of the $80 seat was to hear the performer sing , not some half flat, half fast atonal drone-that might be you-sing over the attraction!
I went to see Elton John a number of years ago and the idiot behind us could not stop himself. Oh for want of a Taser!
Good grief! Manners and rock and roll! What a conundrum...
C. Vernon Crisler | 6.11.12 @ 10:15AM
Yes, it would be hard to beat YES when it comes to highbrow music. They often were very undisciplined and extravagant in their music, but they were also just as often brilliant. ELP and Kansas were usually next on the list. We usually (unfairly) dismissed everything else as "three-chord rock."
Nina in MA| 6.11.12 @ 3:29PM
Sorry, I beg to disagree..as far as Yes is concerned. I saw them in concert and couldn't wait to leave. All they played was new age stuff and I saw people falling asleep in their seats. Now, while I don't want to have to stand during a concert after having paid my price for a seat, I don't want to be put to sleep at a concert either. I think a concert should be full of fun and energy. That's what concerts are....
One of the best concerts I've ever seen was Aerosmith and they certainly don't make you want to just sit in your seat...or not sing! LOL...
Le Cracquere| 6.11.12 @ 8:25AM
As a Yes and King Crimson fan from way back, I shall never apologize for highbrowness in one's rock tastes. Radiohead's not my favorite, but there's nothing wrong with their approach.
Most contemporary post-punk bands--the kind dedicated to "three chords and the truth"--have forgotten more about self-importance than bands like Radiohead ever knew. To my mind, in fact, there's something unassuming about the latter's approach! There's almost a kind of humility in insisting on playing well, and in a way that rewards attentiveness: you're at the music's service and the audience's. You're not too good to hew to a standard you didn't invent, and you're not going to take the easy way out through bluster.
I mean no disrespect to Little Richard--much love, in fact--but there are far worse directions for popular music to take than this.
Fast and Curious| 6.11.12 @ 8:40AM
"We want our listeners to feel the agony...." nuff said right there. Idiots.
THKrupp| 6.11.12 @ 9:14AM
It could just be that the fans of these particular bands have all just gotten older. I was recently at a black keys concert and it was not a sit quietly and listen type of concert at all.
Bumr50| 6.11.12 @ 9:40AM
I like Radiohead, and this guy should probably shy from writing essays about his own, personal interpretation of art. It's about the music, and to say that it consists of "blips and bleeps" is simply biased and ignorant.
TinaB| 6.11.12 @ 9:49AM
Speaking of reverence as participation at rock concerts, I just indulged in some serious time travel with the help of YouTube, and experienced (or re-experienced) this phenomenon.
Starting with Clapton and Steve Winwood, in their first meeting (on stage, that is) in 25 years. Wow. I was searching for "Presence of the Lord." The old Blind Faith version. What I got was even better. Two elder statesmen of the Blues. A very respectful audience. A wonderful jam. Wish I'd have been there.
Then on to some old Traffic concerts, Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. I realized I had been there, at the Santa Monica Civic, and remembered the liturgical feeling during most of that event. I felt it again.
There's a great dichotomy between hard rocking head banging songs, melodies and concerts, and the almost holy experience one gets with Yes, Moody Blues, any combination of the Blind Faith-Cream-Traffic members, as well as many other Super Sessions of yore. I am so glad, now, to have seen so many, then.
I saw Dylan both then and now, and in these troubled days I almost can't wait for that heavenly jam, when those great musicians whose names were written in the Book of Life, perform together for God and the angels and saints in the world to come. Will they need traditional instruments, I don't know. Will it be ga universe shaking jam? I think so!
Shadow| 6.11.12 @ 11:27AM
Won't that be heavenly, Tina? I look forward to that with the singing of the angels too, of course!
spike59| 6.12.12 @ 6:46AM
oh, puh-leeze!!!!!! STOP before you drift into the 'well, Jesus must have needed a tambourine player, so that's why "Stinky Pinky McStupid" chugged a fifth of Chivas after 10 lines of coke, and took out a schoolbus with his Porsche in a fiery wreck on the Pacific Coast Highway' territory
TinaB| 6.12.12 @ 12:03PM
Have you ever indulged in a mind altering drug, like alcohol, tobacco, pot, acid, anything? We are all sinners, saved by His grace, and the concert to come will include many of these, myself included. I love to play tambourine, no alcohol needed any more.
Must be nice to have no vices, I wouldn't know.
spike59| 6.13.12 @ 6:43AM
yes, i have...but never been sufficiently BONE STUPID to risk other people's lives in the process...and had i caused my own demise in the process, i would hope there would be someone with enough integrity to shake their head and pronounce me an idiot...'saved by grace' indeed,,,but that does not mean that one can live 'for the moment only', indulge any and all types of 'appetites', turn one's back on God, and then somehow, after dying, be rehabilitated by dint of an ability to make a pleasing sound from an instrument
TinaB| 6.11.12 @ 9:51AM
ga shoulda been a.
spike59| 6.12.12 @ 6:46AM
no, shoulda been 'gag'
Hardcard| 6.11.12 @ 10:05AM
I'll take Spike Jones over their "RadioHeads" DoWap DoWap a bing bang boom walla walla bing bang.
Petronius| 6.11.12 @ 11:38AM
huh? The last time this, "our music is serious" syndrome set in was the Mahavishnu Orchestra. And the stuff is on Pandora anytime. But the end product really sucks when musicians get religion unless they are so great they Are the religion. That's what Rock and Roll is. As to the fans carrying on and screaming; I paid to hear the band, not them. Rectumites can be seen and heard most anywhere for nothing.
spike59| 6.12.12 @ 6:34AM
i guess concerts have changed since the last one i attended (toby keith/ted nugent)...who can hear the audience anyway? if i want to hear the music and nothing else, not even a whisper, i play the cd's and wear headphones-if i'm at a show, i want walls of noise, energy, and people going bugnutz
Mick Lee| 6.11.12 @ 12:03PM
I am fully understanding each generation is entitled to its own music; but geeeeeeeeez people. I am sure most young people are sick of hearing us old farts telling them they missed something since they were born after them 1960's and 1970's. (Late. Much too late.) But I sorry. You really did miss out on a lot of joy and excellent rock and roll.
That being said, the punk movement of the late 1970's (which mysteriously many rock music critics regard as some kind of Holy Grail) did have a point--but only a point. Many old rockers from the 60's and early 70's did become old and stale--spending ridiculous amounts of money and time in the recording studio to make absolutely mediocre music. What's more, a number of the classic rockers wrecked whatever credibility they had by turning in disco music. Yup, punk had a point. The tragedy was that, while punk could dish it out, it didn't deliver the goods. Punk music was and continues to be bad. More attitude than real fun. In fact, I blame punk for the over-reaction in the music of the 1980's: the monotonous drum machine fed over-produced, synth trophies that dominated radio and MTV.
I don't think "highbrow" is a word I'd use to describe prog rock. Pretentious maybe. Definitely tedious in parts. But let me tell ya. I'd rather sit and listen to the Allman Brothers in a crowded room than shake my bootie to Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis any day.
JP| 6.11.12 @ 3:36PM
"...Many old rockers from the 60's and early 70's did become old and stale--spending ridiculous amounts of money and time in the recording studio to make absolutely mediocre music."
Your comment reminds of the Eagles and the Long Run Album (thankfully their last). According to rumors they spent over a year mixing and "perfecting thier art". When I listened to it for the 1st time I thought, "You've got to be kidding."
The problem with Rock from the middle to late 70s was that a bunch of bong smoking, herion addicted entertainers began getting bored with their work and paid too much attention to the critics. Punk was a reaction "Arena Rock" (or Glam Rock, or Corporate Rock). Musically Punk wasn't very good. But could you blame them?
TinaB| 6.12.12 @ 12:04PM
Yeah. Me too.
Who Knows?| 6.11.12 @ 1:03PM
Hi brow? Low brow?
Hmmm?
Didn't Neanderthals have a low brow?
Just asking.
Obadiah Plainman| 6.11.12 @ 1:07PM
Rock n roll is dead. Long live rock n roll.
Louis Jenkins| 6.11.12 @ 3:06PM
Yes and Madonna showed a ta-ta nipple in Istanbul. What will Lady GaGa do? I can connect more with Ted Nugent.
Occam's Tool| 6.11.12 @ 7:16PM
In the mid 90s, I attended a Stones Concert in Birmingham, AL. The Counting Crows were their opening act, and sucked.
Now, I don't agree with the Politics of Sir Mick or his guitarist. But the Boys played for 4 f'in hours straight, and they were awesome, and VERY polite to the audience. It was a great show, and I remember it almost 20 years later.
Great Rock is never "highbrow." Please.
AhiaBoy| 6.11.12 @ 11:03PM
Rock 'n' roll should be raucous, not staid. If it can't be played by 4 guys on a stage, it's wrong. I'm a geezer, grew up in the 60s-70s, conservative as hell, but I still love the Velvet Underground, Hendrix, White Stripes and Hives. That's how it should be done.
Bumr50| 6.12.12 @ 5:50AM
Radiohead CAN play all of their music with 4 guys on a stage. And very well.
spike59| 6.12.12 @ 6:27AM
"No other rock band in history has asked us to shush and pay attention quite like Radiohead."
================================
apparently, Flynn never heard of Pink Floyd
spike59| 6.12.12 @ 6:31AM
apologies to Flynn, as he was merely quoting chris richards in the Beltway's reliable bird cage liner
radiohead? they're okay...
Mick Lee| 6.12.12 @ 9:07AM
JP: How did you know I was thinking of THE LONG RUN album as the prime example of mediocre music from 60's and 70's dinosaurs? My reaction at the time was much like yours. No wonder people were taping friends’ records for themselves. If you absolutely have to have the album for whatever reason, why pay full price for a so-so album when you can spend a buck or two for a cassette tape. (You could always record over it later by making your own b*tchin' mix tape)
Drugs were certainly the evil muse behind those sonic turds. As far as paying too much attention to the critics, I list two syndromes behind much bad album reviews: 1.) The English Major Syndrome: The critic takes out the lyric sheet, scans for moving poetry, and reviews the album without regard to the actual music. 2.) The Stock Market Syndrome: If a critic feels the artist’s last album sold one more copy than it should have, he downgrades the artist's new album (and often his entire catalogue) as a sort of "stock correction".
Rockers of the period should have known better.
Of course, another factor could have been that the post-Beatles gasoline in the rockmobile simply ran out by the second half of the 1970's. Maybe. Just a hunch.
TinaB| 6.12.12 @ 12:07PM
Post-Beatles gasoline in the Rockmobile? Great stuff.
Buck Ofama| 6.13.12 @ 2:04AM
I once was a "professional" musician, then I grew up and became responsible for my own self-inflicted misery born of excessive navel gazing and Narcissism.
I can attest that the "profession" is vastly dominated by self-absorbed, vain and insecure idiots. Such wise fools typically have endured overblown and exaggerated suffering of their own device. They chose the "profession", yet they resent the outsiders which, incredibly, don't give a shit about the "professional" suffering "arteest" clowns.
Many of these sophomoric assholes adopt the notion that the world owes them something, hence, then produce silly songs preaching all manner of hopey-changey bullshit, such as "Easy To Be Hard" (3 Dog Night: "Howwwwwww can people be so cruel? sniff, snivel, sob), "Waitin' On the World to Change" (by the sniveling cocksuckder Johnboy Mayer), and similar liberal pablum.
Pay them no attention.