Page 181 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 175

the advent of MTV it is almost impossible to think of the guitar without
simultaneously addressing the question of how it has become a dominant cultural
marker of patriarchy gone hog-wild. Palmer is a highly respected aficionado
whose knowledge of the blues in particular is widely recognized, and his tribute
to this deserving list of important players is no doubt heartfelt and sincere, yet by
not addressing the two problems mentioned above his essay cannot help but add
further force to the unfortunate myth-making process that has turned the guitar
into a strutting, testosterone-laden farce.
It is interesting to note then, that the hollow commercialized swagger that so
dominates MTV was initially, in rock’s earlier days—when Elvis’s gyrations
still terrorized parents and censors across the land—part of a raucous upheaval
(fueled by an unholy aesthetic alliance between Blacks and poor whites) that the
fledgling culture industry and dream police sought either to co-opt or squash.
This brings me to Trent Hill’s The Enemy Within: Censorship in Rock Music in
the 1950s’, a fascinating examination of two Congressional hearings on the
troublesome question of the cultural implications of early rock & roll. Hill
explains that the first hearings, in 1958, were ostensibly called to address the
inner-workings of the rapidly expanding political-economy of commercial
music, particularly the battle between ASCAP and BMI over publishing and
distribution rights. The second set of hearings, in 1960, was called to address the
question of ‘payola’, and featured the now famous testimonies of Alan Freed and
Dick Clark, perhaps the two most important media figures in promoting early
commercial rock & roll to a mass audience. Hill’s astute conclusion is that these
hearings ‘Worked, as it were, to bring the music industry from the age of liberal/
competitive capitalism into the age of monopoly capitalism.’ Within the
historical framework of this claim, Hill explains how early rock & rollers—‘the
cultural others of the McCarthy era’—were engaged in political, commercial,
and aesthetic warfare not only with the conservative dingbats in Congress and
the burgeoning lawyers and bankers intent on merchandising their music, but
also with such infamous culture industry goons as Frank Sinatra and Pat Boone.
Hill’s essay therefore exhibits a refreshing combination of political, economic,
and aesthetic savvy that left me hoping that this essay will be expanded into the
book length study that the subject deserves.
Much of the force of Hill’s essay follows from his rigorous historical
perspective, which strives to place aesthetic and cultural activities within a
discernible politicohistorical milieu. No such attempt to historicize is made in
Greil Marcus’ ‘A corpse in your mouth: adventures of a metaphor, or modern
cannibalism’, a wickedly playful montage of quotes and images from a wacky cast
of culture critics, artists, and performers including Theodor Adorno, the Sex
Pistols, Jamie Reid, Guy deBord, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Elvis Costello, and
so on. Marcus’ central metaphor of ‘a corpse in your mouth’ revolves around the
notion of carrying commodity fetishism and pop stardom to the maniacal level of
paying big bucks to munch dead superstars reprocessed in the grisly form of
Presleyburgers, or Lennonburgers, etc. The lurking irony of Marcus’ lament, of