The first rock critic?

[koganbot]

freakytigger continues the discussion regarding origins of rockwrite, links* Issue 4 of The New Vulgate containing David Lightbourne's "Little Sandy Review And The Origins Of Rock Criticism." This is what I wrote on freakytigger's comment thread (bear in mind that I've never seen an issue of the Little Sandy Review):

What absolutely jumps out at me is that, if Lightbourne's summary is correct, in regard to current folk c. 1960 the Little Sandy Review takes what you'd expect as the conventional position, championing the old stuff and the new stuff that tries to sound like it but hating on the popular bastardizations by the Kingston Trio and Belafonte and ilk. Of course, there's no reason in principle that Nelson et al. couldn't have been right about this, and I'm sure in a lot of instances they were ('cept the first two Kingston Trio albums cook, and the little I've heard of Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Dave Van Ronk is dull in comparison)(not that I know from Lightbourne's piece what the LSR guys thought of Elliott and Van Ronk). And Lightbourne goes along with the opinion, obviously. But someone who wouldn't have gone along is Bob Dylan. He wrote this about Belafonte in Chronicles:

He was dramatic and intense on the screen, had a boyish smile and a hard-core hostility... Everything about him was gigantic. The folk purists had a problem with him, but Harry - who could have kicked the shit out of all of them - couldn't be bothered, said that all folksingers were interpreters, said it in a public way as if someone had summoned him to set the record straight.

Nelson and Glover went on to champion Dylan when Dylan went pop - i.e., electric - in '65, a move by Dylan that divided Sing Out!. I don't know if this caused Nelson et al. to rethink their earlier opinions of Belafonte and the Kingston Trio. I've heard very little of Belafonte, so for all I know they were right and Dylan was wrong, but their embrace of electric Dylan meant that they couldn't take it as a given that mixing "folk" and modern pop diluted and unmanned the music. Not to say that they'd necessarily believed this earlier - might have just disliked the particular pop that the Trio and Belafonte went for (I'd have to read those old issues to know). But this confirms that for me rock criticism starts with Dylan, even though he didn't write any.

The reason I pick Dylan rather than the Beatles or Stones as the start of rock criticism is that Dylan would talk in the lyrics about the mix and match going on in music ("Where Ma Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped a bed roll"), and they didn't.

(I might argue that chronologically Ring Lardner and Otis Ferguson are the first rock critics, but they're not part of the stream that feeds into Dylan (unless I'm wrong and they are), and Dylan streamed into me before I discovered Sarris and the Ferguson stream. Of course, Mark Twain is relevant here, as I think dubdobdee has said.)

*AK in Cle had already tried to link it for me, but for some reason his link didn't get me to the Lightbourne piece.

Comments

[koganbot]

"his first album" = Dylan's first album