Page 179 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

It’s a rotten, crooked business, but it can’t kill the music
Stephen Hartnett
■ Anthony DeCurtis (ed.), Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1992), 317 pp., index, ISBN 0-822-31265-4 $15.95 Pbk, ISBN
0-82231261-1 $39.95 Hbk
‘Rock & Roll is both fully woven into the fabric of the American corporate
structure and endlessly the subject of efforts to censor its rebellious, anarchic
impulses.’ This claim, made by Anthony DeCurtis in his editor’s preface to Present
Tense, highlights two of the most obvious and extreme poles of possibility within
‘rock & roll and culture’. The devastating paradox within these two movements,
however, oscillating between commercial neutralization on the one hand and
rock’s ‘anarchy’ on the other, is that so much of what DeCurtis calls the ‘effort to
censor’ rock & roll actually occurs at the hands of rock’s corporate structure.
Indeed, the major labels, magazines, and radio gurus—under the pressure of what
is perceived as market-driven ‘realities’—act as little more than fashion factories
that incorporate, streamline, homogenize, and then make billions of dollars off of
rock’s rebels of the season. The remarkable speed with which ‘grunge’ flew from
Seattle’s grassroots scene to worldwide MTV super-stardom to the latest line of
mall-fashion pre-ripped flannels is testament to this process, as the specter of
commodity fetishism appears ever more inescapable for even the most well-
intentioned musicians. The flipside to this claim, however, is that lurking beneath
the voracious monster-world of incorporation, there are grassroots music scenes
flourishing across the nation, with fantastic music being made in every imaginable
genre. It is therefore absolutely crucial when talking about ‘rock & roll and culture’
to specify whether one means the grassroots world of clubs, independent studios,
rehearsal spaces, and so on, or whether one means the mass-produced corporate
labyrinth of stadiums, MTV, and malls.
Readers of Present Tense will quickly discover that this collection of fifteen
essays concerns itself almost exclusively with the latter, yet even here there is a
curious absence: specifically, none of the contributions to Present Tense addresses
in any detail the question of the political-economy of mass-media music. There
are numerous articles in this collection that explore intelligently the semiotics of
rock videos, or that attempt to provide heuristic road maps to the development of
a specific genre or artist (hence the connect-the-dot history of rap music, or the
mandatory and tedious analysis of Springsteen), yet none of the essays actually
explores the question of how the political economy of rock & roll functions. On
the other hand, Present Tense is full of insightful pieces concerning various aspects
of the historical development of rock & roll as both an art form and a series of
cultural practices, as well as containing two brilliant works of creative writing.
Indeed, Paul Evans’s stunning fictional vision of rock & roll in ‘Los Angeles,
1999’, and Jeff Calder’s autobiographical ‘Observations on life in a rock & roll
band’ alone make Present Tense an important collection. In the following pages I
review some of the more interesting pieces in the collection, and provide a personal