When you say "at the expense of understanding the world" maybe you're talking about, at least in part, not understanding what the world does to people, to musicians, to artists, and the people who love or like or dismiss those artists. Because Bloomfield is dead, died the year before Lester Bangs died. And what the world does to critics is a big part of what criticism ought to be about, it seems to me, and that's why you have the famed antipathy between say Sarris and Kael or the anti-rockist-rockist debate. Kael wanted to put everything into her work, make the world see what she saw; Sarris wanted to show viewers of movies what artists put into the work without the viewers always noticing what was there. What makes "rock" interesting and still relevant is the way rock artists chart the way the world works on them and the way they can change their minds, which is what happened at Newport with Dylan, who was at once a folkie, a rock artist, a pop star and an ironist. The performance of "Maggie's Farm" is about Dylan standing in dead calm with chaos around him in the form of Bloomfield's guitar solo, which even at the time had to be recognized by a few blues fans in the audience as totally derivative of someone like Elmore James, who was also a pop musician--an adaptable guy--and a rocker and an ironist. Is it anti-rockist to honor Elmore James as a pop musician? Why would an anti-rockist want to get rid of a guy like that, anyway? And at Newport, the elements of pop were there in the guise of folk music in the straw hat of country music, which had already begun its Drive to Americana in the way it co-opted folk by giving folkies like Judy Henske and Joan Baez plenty of "authentic" material that of course was written by tunesmiths in suburban enclaves.
So what I'm trying to get at is that the mechanism for dismantling anti-rockism was already in place in 1965. In fact, Dylan did get booed, but he also got something else, a collective murmur of recognition, during his infamous electric performance, part of which was spoiled because Jerome Arnold, the Butterfield Band's bassist, had never heard Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" on the radio, and it was already a hit, undeniable, part of the landscape, by the time Newport started in July. Jerome was a rockist--he didn't trust the radio.
But would I say Jerome Arnold was therefore compromised? Do all musicians necessarily keep up with all new developments? Do you think Buddy Miller takes time off to attend to Meghan Trainor or Taylor Swift or Beyonce? And in general, there is some merit in the rockist distrust of pop. There are several thousand quasi-country, quasi-pop, quasi-folk artists operating in Nashville and other Americana outposts at the moment, busy scrambling all the categories, and yes, that sounds like a simplistic apology for a nonexistent genre. But basically, most of these folks, the ones under 30, trust pop music implicitly whether or not they want to admit it, and so their versions of folk and country often come across as fatally compromised even when you sense that they are "authentic" or even moving, or even somewhat true to the idiom they take off from. In this sense, they've walked a million miles away from how Mike Bloomfield looked at the relationship between pop and rock. --Edd Hurt, Aug. 11, 2016