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Ann Powers (All you need is the Beatles? Maybe not.): The Beatles also taught me that pop could be a serious thing. Following the group's evolution across the tracks of the Red and Blue collections, I got an inkling of what artistic evolution sounded like. Little did I know that the story of the Beatles' transformation from a fun bunch of lads imitating Little Richard and Ronnie Spector to a serious quartet influenced by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Andy Warhol would become the foundation for a whole system of defining popular music's worth, which would become known as "rockism," and which favored the more "artistic" kind of rock on the second collection. Or that, decades later, a new gang of artists and thinkers, sometimes called "poptimists," would battle that legacy -- arguing for mop-top red over granny-glasses blue.
There are just so many zillions of things I want to dispute here, I don't know where to begin. But the one that bugs me the most is the progressive narrative about rock criticism that claims that the old generation of criticism was "rockist" - still a BULLSHIT word, and please please please read this column and this column by me, thank you* - and that only years later did some newbie "poptimists" come along to combat that legacy.
I'm sorry, but Richard Goldstein and Nik Cohn (who panned Sgt. Pepper's and The White Album respectively in the Sunday New York Times Arts and Leisure section; Goldstein was wrong and Cohn was right) are not a new gang of writers and thinkers, and they weren't just blips, either. Read Charlie Gillett's Sound Of The City (I think it's 1970, though the ppbk I've got is '72). Read Greil Marcus on the Beatles in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History Of Rock & Roll (first edition was 1976), and those are not just blips either, they're part of something like... well, not critical consensus but a particular strain in criticism, a strong one, the name of which... well, it didn't have a universal name, but there was one name that kept popping up, and obviously the strain wasn't particularly aimed at the Beatles' narrative but rather at the "progressive" narrative as a whole; but I was reading voices from that strain in Fusion starting in '69 and in Creem which also dates back to then but I didn't start reading it until early '74. The strain wasn't the only one in those magazines and probably wasn't the only one in any particular critic's head either, just as there isn't only a single strain in my head, but I'd say the strain is in rock criticism from the get-go, Goldstein's got it in '66 when he's praising the Shangri-Las for their lack of cool and for sounding desperately and hopelessly involved.
( Look, there is no poptimism, unless by poptimism you mean every interesting rock critic ever )
There are just so many zillions of things I want to dispute here, I don't know where to begin. But the one that bugs me the most is the progressive narrative about rock criticism that claims that the old generation of criticism was "rockist" - still a BULLSHIT word, and please please please read this column and this column by me, thank you* - and that only years later did some newbie "poptimists" come along to combat that legacy.
I'm sorry, but Richard Goldstein and Nik Cohn (who panned Sgt. Pepper's and The White Album respectively in the Sunday New York Times Arts and Leisure section; Goldstein was wrong and Cohn was right) are not a new gang of writers and thinkers, and they weren't just blips, either. Read Charlie Gillett's Sound Of The City (I think it's 1970, though the ppbk I've got is '72). Read Greil Marcus on the Beatles in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History Of Rock & Roll (first edition was 1976), and those are not just blips either, they're part of something like... well, not critical consensus but a particular strain in criticism, a strong one, the name of which... well, it didn't have a universal name, but there was one name that kept popping up, and obviously the strain wasn't particularly aimed at the Beatles' narrative but rather at the "progressive" narrative as a whole; but I was reading voices from that strain in Fusion starting in '69 and in Creem which also dates back to then but I didn't start reading it until early '74. The strain wasn't the only one in those magazines and probably wasn't the only one in any particular critic's head either, just as there isn't only a single strain in my head, but I'd say the strain is in rock criticism from the get-go, Goldstein's got it in '66 when he's praising the Shangri-Las for their lack of cool and for sounding desperately and hopelessly involved.
( Look, there is no poptimism, unless by poptimism you mean every interesting rock critic ever )
