This piece was published almost twenty years ago, in the
Winter/Spring 1985 issue of The Hillsdale Review (under the title
“True Blues: Rock, Jazz, and Conservatism”). I dug it
out a few months ago after an intermittent discussion with
Jesse Canterbury about rock and jazz in which
we discussed among other things the different criteria by which
each ought to be judged.
The world of music—not just of pop music, but of jazz
and classical as well—has changed significantly since then,
and when I re-read the article with an eye toward publishing it
again, I considered revising it extensively. But although certain
parts of it now seem dated, my views have not substantially
changed and I have decided to leave the piece almost as it was
published. I am not entirely confident that I am entirely correct
in my observations about the history of blues, jazz, and country
music, but I think they’re close enough to the facts to
support my main argument. The only substantive change is the
removal of some remarks about “the exhausted modernist
mode” of twentieth-century classical music; the phrase now
seems to me to describe a period which, happily, has
passed.
Conservatism, too, has changed. The whole question of
conservatives and rock music is less significant than it was in
1985, and it is no longer “hard to find a conservative who
likes or understands rock-and-roll.” Well, not as hard
anyway. There are now quite a few conservatives who were children
when I wrote this essay and don’t seem to have any
reservations at all about the style itself, although they may
complain about what it preaches. But I still occasionally hear
the same sort of ill-founded denigration of rock which is my
topic here.
—April 28, 2004
Conservatism and Popular Music
“Conservatives worship dead radicals.”
I often heard that piece of left-wing triumphalism in the
1960s, and I suppose those who said it had in mind radicals like
Tom Paine. Obviously they knew nothing of the conservatism of
Russell Kirk, who knows and dislikes a radical when he sees one
in any age. Still, it is true that the conservative sometimes
comes to cherish an innovation which he might have deplored had
he been present at its birth.
Consider the question of popular music, for instance. It is
hard to find a conservative who likes or understands
rock-and-roll. For the most part the conservative reacts to rock
with anger and disgust—a reasonable reaction, as most rock
is highly toxic. Yet it seems legitimate for him to like jazz; he
may play it, as Keith Bower does, or write about it for
National Review, as Ralph de Toledano does, and most of
his fellow conservatives find no fault with him. I hear that at
one of the new conservative Catholic liberal arts colleges music
for parties is supplied by a swing band.
I say that this is not a consistent or reasonable position,
because jazz and rock have enough in common that whatever is
objectionable in rock as such is also found in jazz. I
have no quarrel with anyone who has a taste for jazz and none for
rock. I allow as reasonable, while not necessarily conceding, the
proposition that jazz is the superior art form. But to hold, as
some conservatives seem to, that rock by its nature is evil while
jazz is not is mistaken on at least one of two counts.
First, when rock is condemned as a genre there has often been
a failure to make proper distinctions. The range of music which
can be lumped into the category is too varied for the
generalization to hold true. Those who make this mistake are as a
rule simply uninformed, having heard only the garbage on the
radio. When I was a teenager I thought jazz was what they played
on the Lawrence Welk show.
Second, if it is argued that rock is aesthetically so
perverted as to be inherently wicked, then one must disallow a
great deal of jazz as well. Now, there are good reasons why much
rock, especially since the mid-1960s, merits on moral grounds a
condemnation which jazz does not. We will look at these shortly.
But the point I want to make is that the two styles grow from the
same roots, that they are as much alike as they are different,
and that the truly objectionable elements of rock are not
inherent in it—unless they are also inherent in jazz.
Both rock and jazz are developments of that difficult to
define but easy to recognize music called “blues,”
which appeared among Southern blacks late in the 19th
century. For this reason they have many technical elements in
common, notably the blues scale and the driving rhythms
characteristic of all African-American music. It can be argued
that rock is the child of jazz. This is not perfectly accurate,
because there were other elements involved: the hard amplified
blues of urban blacks and the country-western music of urban
whites. But one stream feeding the development of what emerged as
rock-and-roll in the early 1950s was the continuation in small
towns and rural areas of the cruder “hot” styles
which had passed out of favor in the jazz world as jazz became
more and more a sophisticated and complex instrumental style.
There were bands touring with county fairs in the South in those
years who played what they would have called jazz but which would
sound more like rock to us; it certainly did not feature the
virtuoso improvisation which we now think of as being the essence
of jazz. One could describe much early rock-and-roll as simply
crude jazz. And there is a great deal of music which seems to fit
no category: is Ray Charles a jazz, rock, or blues singer?
To state the matter in a simplified but reasonably accurate
way, jazz was the encounter of blues rhythms and
melodies—that is, the characteristic American black musical
sensibility—with the relatively sophisticated popular music
of the early 1900s: marches for brass bands, piano solos,
sentimental love songs. And rock was the encounter of blues and
jazz with the relatively unsophisticated music of white people
recently moved from rural areas into cities after World War II,
the semi-folk music (as it was at the time) which we call country
or country-western.
There was one basic objection made immediately to the music
resulting from each of these encounters: to put it as coolly as
possible, the music was conducive to a physical excitement
suggestive of sexuality. The objection in both cases was
reasonable. Surely no one will maintain that peculiarly
compelling rhythms are not one of the main characteristics of the
music made by Africans in most places where they have encountered
European music, or that these rhythms are not often used in a way
which implies a very strong connection with sexuality. Even in
religious music they are used to whip up an ecstatic frenzy. And
blues lyrics have always treated sex in a very explicit way; many
of them are about sex, and the word “jazz” was
originally a verb meaning “to copulate.” The words
“rock and roll” were a standard euphemism for
copulation in the blues.
When jazz first began to attract the notice of the white
world, public standards regarding the degree to which sex might
be explicitly mentioned were, to put it mildly, very different
from what they are now. Thus it was necessary that jazz lyrics be
cleaned up considerably in order for the music to be accepted by
middle-class audiences. The same thing was true of rock in the
beginning, because society was still trying to hold the line
against the sexual revolution. (The apparently nonsensical lyrics
of Little Richard’s “Tutti-Frutti,” a song
which became a hit for the bland Pat Boone, were all that
remained, after censorship, of a rather vulgar song.)
Note that I say that society was, in the fifties,
“trying to hold the line” against that collapse of
traditional morality which is popularly called the sexual
revolution. We tend to think of that revolution as a phenomenon
of the sixties, but the sixties were its consummation, not its
beginning. It began not long after the turn of the century. I
suppose most readers of this magazine would agree in seeing it as
an aspect of the general deterioration of respect for Western
religious traditions. I want to make here only the observation
that to blame the decline on the corrupting influence of popular
entertainment is partially justified but insufficient. Popular
entertainment is as much a mirror as a window; had we not been
willing to be corrupted, we would not have tolerated the
advertisements for immorality which music, films, and novels have
presented to us since fairly early the in the 1900s.
Nevertheless, one can hardly claim that the entertainment is
harmless. And the popular music of the twenties, thirties, and
forties was as blameworthy as anything else: of necessity it
resorted to euphemism and leers when speaking of sex, but its
themes of sex and “romance,” which was often only a
sentimentalization of sex, were corrosive of the idea of sexual
restraint.
White radicals always understood this and felt black music to
be a useful tool of assault, both morally and aesthetically,
against the European tradition, praising in it exactly the same
things which traditionalists like Chesterton and Weaver
condemned. But the practitioners of jazz for the most part did
not see themselves in the way that their radical admirers did.
They were simply playing the kind of music they liked. If their
private lives were often disreputable that was a matter to be
hidden, not advertised as being a superior way of life. And now
we come to one of the reasons why so much of rock really does
merit a condemnation which jazz does not.
The early rock-and-rollers were as innocent as most jazz
musicians, in the sense that they had no designs upon society and
intended no message other than a sort of cheerful hedonism to be
conveyed by their music. But in the 1960s, as we all know,
something drastic happened to rock-and-roll. The rebels of the
baby-boom generation, who had grown up listening to rock, made it
their voice of alienation. This was not altogether a bad thing,
as the alienation was not altogether a bad thing. Flannery
O’Connor said of the beatniks that at least they knew what
to run away from. (And let us note in passing that a consciously
radical movement also appeared in jazz, but its anarchic music
had little popular appeal.)
The wave of innovation which swept over pop music in the
sixties introduced into the music topics of more import than
teen-age love, constituting the first step toward transforming
rock into an adult music. Nevertheless, I don’t suppose my
readers need to be persuaded that the bohemianism of the sixties
had its very dark side, which showed itself most blatantly as an
obsession with drugs and sex. In the twenty or so years which
have passed since the first appearance of rock glorifying these
amusements, the music produced in this vein has become steadily
more offensive. I would not hesitate to say that eighty or ninety
percent of the rock being played today is evil in effect and much
of it in intention, so I have no argument with the conservative
who has been listening to the radio or watching rock videos and
condemns most of what he has heard and seen. Some of the music is
like television and other popular entertainment, probably not
greatly harmful except as a steady diet. But much of it glorifies
a greedy and brutal sexual lust which seems devoid even of honest
pleasure. In particular there is a sort of sub-genre known as
heavy metal which often claims to be, and leaves one no reason to
doubt that it is, Satanic in origin.
And yet I still defend rock. Any adult rock fan can tell you
that there is hardly ever anything worth hearing on the radio
(except in big cities where there are specialty FM stations).
There is rock music whose energy is not evil in origin, which has
as much intelligence as it does vitality (well, almost as much)
and which is musically very rewarding if you accept the
style as such. That “if” is crucial. I have insisted
upon the similarities of rock and jazz; now I will note some
important differences.
Jazz fans typically fault rock for its technical simplicity.
They miss the point. Simplicity is part of the style, and anyone
who can’t enjoy an unaccompanied English ballad with
twenty-five musically identical verses, a three-chord Carter
Family lament, or a Muddy Waters blues is not going to enjoy rock
(or is going to enjoy it for the wrong reasons, mainly that it is
powerful). A decent jazz musician has a command of his instrument
rarely attained by even highly accomplished rock players. But
rock is not a purely musical form. Like the blues and country
music to which much of it remains very close in spirit, rock
requires words. It is entirely based on the idea of the song, of
words set to music, whereas in jazz (at least since the fifties)
a song is a theme and a set of chord changes upon which to build
variations. Furthermore, a good rock song is based on relatively
simple musical structures which do not stand alone very well.
Long instrumental passages, whether improvised or arranged, are
simply not part of the style at its best. Most rock musicians who
are good at this sort of thing drift into jazz. If they keep
playing rock they often produce bad music, technically still
inferior to jazz but ruined as rock by its pretensions.
Rock is not a folk music. In fact a great deal of it is
manufactured by the same “entertainment industry”
which sells us movies and television shows. But it has folk roots
and can best be understood by a comparison to folk music. The
typical rock musician is more or less self-taught and starts off
by copying what he hears on records. The simplicity of the style
makes it possible for him to produce creditable results without
the extremely long apprenticeship required for classical music,
which anyway has as an explicit goal that the instrumentalist
(except for a very few very gifted soloists) should be a passive
instrument for composers and conductors. If he inclines to
composition, he will enter a musical culture that prizes
innovation, eccentricity, and complexity far more than ordinary
musical appeal, and will find many obstacles in the way of his
music being heard at all. But the rock musician in his
naiveté is free to return to the simple eternal elements of
music. For this reason, if for no other, the conservative ought
not to despise him.
Understand that I do not exalt the primitive. I make no false
opposition of technique to emotion, nor do I claim that some
writer of catchy pop songs is our Mozart. I wish there were a
Beethoven or a Shakespeare around who could turn the raw material
of life in our time into art worthy of those two names. But there
isn’t, and nowadays many of our trained artists are so
contemptuous of their audiences and so bent upon novelty at any
price that they have abandoned large areas of human concern as
matter for their art. Some of the unsophisticated artists who
rush in to fill this vacuum are gifted and inventive, and a rock
musician who is not a mere hack may strike nearer to the heart of
his people than a poet who despises meaning or a composer who
despises melody.
A typical conservative reaction to rock is that expressed by
Chilton Williamson in a recent National Review column,
where he called it a “clangorous orgy of robotic
copulations.” Mr. Williamson, however, unlike many who
share his opinion, also condemns jazz (mainly for having spawned
rock). He then goes on to recommend, among others, Wagner as more
suitable. I was a little surprised at this, as Wagner seems
thoroughly decadent to me, nor could one ask for a better
instance of conservative admiration of a dead radical.
I say that if one wishes to avoid the gratuitous excitement of
questionable emotions in music one must go back at least to
Mozart and possibly much further. I own that a part of me always
inclines to the opinion of a character in a short story by John
Anthony West who scolds his girlfriend with the words “How
many times must I tell you that there hasn’t been any music
written since Scarlatti?” I resist that inclination
and stand with the editors of this magazine, who in their
introduction to our Fifth Anniversary Issue argued that
“our humanism should look with openness to the challenge of
the modern, secular world.” That means neither uncritical
acceptance or rejection, but attentive discrimination. I hold
that this discrimination has not been practiced by most
conservatives in the case of popular music. In this age, so
dehumanizing in so many ways, the human spirit finds odd and
often flawed ways of making known its resistance. The best rock
music is one of those ways: not a music for the ages, it
nevertheless has its very fine moments, and he who rejects it out
of hand is so much the loser.
Light On Dark Water 