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koganbotFrom: "Frank N. Kogan" <edcasual@earthlink.net>
Subject: Snakes and snails and Poni-Tails
Date: Wednesday, June 07, 2000 8:10 PM
Hi Mark and crew,
I'm sure I didn't understand all of Mark's [previous] letter on first reading, and my work ethic tells me not to enjoy myself by working it out but instead only to write about it in ways that are Meltzer-relevant - i.e., that produce sentences that I might get paid for. (I've been told that Fusion and Creem in their late days were revolutionary in their ability to collapse the dichotomy between getting paid and not getting paid, but this is a revolution I'm trying to be disassimilated from.)
I realize from Mark's response that the following paragraph of mine contains an ambiguity.
"I also think that comparing to Poni-Tails/Tommy James is now a long-established rock-critic cliché/standby. Don't see how it's fundamentally different (or any more right or wrong) than saying that the Beatles are as significant as Simon & Garfunkel, or as Joan Baez, or as the Leonard Bernstein Young People's Concert where Bernstein uses the Beatles' 'Norwegian Wood' to exemplify an alternative mode. And why not say that Meltzer is as significant as Joan Baez? Why not say that Meltzer is as significant as Marcus-Christgau-Marsh, as Gina Arnold, as any old local alternative-weekly fuddy-dud who attacks Ricky Martin and Eminem for their inauthenticity? Again, what is the aesthetics of rock here that's supposed to be adopted?"
When I wrote "Don't see how it's fundamentally different" I didn't mean to imply that these were all standbys/clichés, though I can see how someone could read it as if it did. In fact, other than the Poni-Tails/Tommy James thing, nothing on my list (Beatles are as significant as S&G, Joan Baez, Leonard Bernstein; Meltzer is as significant Christgau-Marcus-Marsh, Arnold, alt-press fuddy-dud) is a rock-critic standby. The list was specifically intended to represent the middlebrow threat, the challenge of gentility - the stuff that Meltzer would like to ignore or banish, that he'd like to read out of his aesthetics of rock.
(Except that reskimming the Aesthetics I'm not so sure that that Meltzer would want to read these things out of the party. I think the current Meltzer would.)
"One seeking to analyze rock must realize that the context for experiencing it must be left intact. He must take the lesson of environment and happening, art forms which in their expanded use of spatio-temporality contain the contexts for experiencing themselves. All sorts of things are part of this context, as money, competition, survival, acceptance by adolescents, reaction by standard adults, peculiar reaction by the community of prior art." Aesthetics of Rock p. 12.
Let's see, the first sentence I strongly disagree with, and I wonder what Meltzer was thinking when he wrote it, since it's an absurd restriction that in practice Meltzer ignores wherever possible. I can't think of a critic who wanted less to keep the context intact. He was more intent on creating, mangling, altering, reinventing, and being the context. I doubt that Meltzer meant the instructions to apply to himself, anyway - maybe he meant that Time-Life reporters and music historians and people that he didn't like should keep the context intact, but it was okay for people inside rock like himself (in his own mind, at least) to mess around and participate in the form. Because people like Meltzer carry the form within themselves, or something.
Also, it's not clear whether he's talking about the context of rock or the context of environmental art and happening art when he talks of money, competition, survival, acceptance by adolescents, and so forth, most of which seem to apply much more to rock than to art. He's probably talking about both. In my memory I conflated this passage with another one (which I can't find and which perhaps never existed anywhere but in my imagination) where Meltzer (or I) includes in the context such things as fan magazines, girls holding signs ("We Love You Paul"), radio countdowns, attempts to market to teens, etc. (all of which Meltzer talks about in Aesthetics anyway). And the lesson I take from all of this is that rock music contains within itself not just the context but (therefore, as part of the context) the viewers/listeners themselves. Duh. And (not so duh) that the listener who writes about music, e.g. me, has the same right as any fan or musician to use music in any way that he or she wants to. (Not that having the right to do something means that you should do it: what you should do depends on what you think is worth doing, obviously, and varies from day to day, piece to piece, email to email.)
But anyway, returning to the main topic, Meltzer wrote (Aesthetics, p. 15) "Leonard Bernstein's comment that there is value in some rock, particularly that spark in the Beatles which in their 'Love Me Do' is reminiscent of Hindu music, is an attempt to reduce rock to something other than itself in order to ascertain its validity."
I'm not sure how Meltzer would have felt, but it seems arbitrary to me to include "reaction by standard adults" within rock but to exclude "attempt by a prominent adult to reduce rock to something other than itself in order to ascertain its validity." So this is why I used that Bernstein/"Norwegian Wood" reference above (I remembered it as Bernstein playing "Norwegian Wood" on the piano to illustrate a mode that went from Re to Re rather than from Do to Do) [so either Meltzer saw the same and misremembered or there were two different Bernstein episodes]. (I also remember Bernstein illustrating the concept and use of "motif" by giving examples of everywhere the first four notes of "How Dry I Am" appeared in classical music, climaxing (so to speak) with the last movement of Shostakovich's 5th Symphony, from which "How Dry I Am" seems to overflow.)
If rock includes its context, how can we count the Poni-Tails - I've never heard the Poni-Tails, as far as I know - but not count those attempts, which were all over Rolling Stone and the New York Times Arts & Leisure Section when I was growing up, to portray rock as quality-driven and conventionally socially significant?
By the way, I just checked, and Joan Baez appears in Aesthetics more times than the Poni-Tails, though mainly for one song: "Folk singer Joan Baez has had released a single track recorded years earlier, 'There But For Fortune,' which is endowed with the quality of a Duchampian ready-made in its new rock 'n' roll context. It bears a sharp resemblance to Marianne Faithfull's 'As Tears Go By,' which itself had been, seemingly, an insipid reference to Baez, thus without being changed it is altered by its new added rock pretensions." This leads into a discussion of rock being able to take over folk ("[After the Kinks' 'Well-Respected Man'] no content would ever be overly social enough to be, on the basis of that alone, ineligible for immediate rock takeover.") And Meltzer doesn't seem threatened by this, yet, back then. The Poni-Tails are rock, Joan Baez is folk that has been appropriated by rock, and rock is triumphant. Yet I doubt that either Meltzer or Marcus would ever be willing to say "the Beatles are as significant as Joan Baez." Because that would imply more than rock gobbling up Joan, but rock becoming like Joan.
By the way, the person who said, "the Beatles were as significant as Tommy James and the Shondells, or as the Poni-Tails" is neither Marcus nor Meltzer; it's Mark Sinker, and I prefer Mark's version to Marcus's ("writing about Tommy James and the Shondells as if they were as epistemologically significant as the Beatles"; " 'I Think We're Alone Now' is as significant as 'I Am the Walrus' "), since Marcus's still leaves the Beatles on top. But I don't go along with either version; no matter Meltzer's intentions, I don't think he's shown anything more than that Beatles tend to signify not as Beatles by their own little lonesome but as Beatles in relation to whatever (Poni-Tails and Tommy James and Joan Baez and Leonard Bernstein and attempts to justify rock by classical-music criteria and high-school English-teacher criteria, etc.). And we can, if we want, within an individual response, indeed decide (if we want) that the Poni-Tails matter more or are better. I remember Ken Emerson, a congenial nonhipster whom I was reading in Fusion at the same time I was reading Meltzer, frequently making the case for unimportant music. (I'll look up the exact quotes if I can find them. I do remember his saying something to the effect that rock would have been no different without the Zombies, just poorer. [Actual quote: "without the Zombies, rock would be no different; just poorer."] And I remember his praising Exile on Main Street for sounding like a bunch of b-sides.)
But anyway, "Beatles are as significant as Poni-Tails" is a standby not because the Poni-Tails are girl-group and because girl-group is in the canon but because Poni-Tails are safely non-social-sig non-quality-driven-by-middlebrow-standards and had once been safely beneath the notice of the previous generation of liberal middle intelligentsia. And current (last 13 years) versions of the standby would be my comparing the Dolls to Donna Summer to Poison to the Cover Girls (and my trying to explain why, emotionally, I responded to Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes as if the Sex-O-Lettes and not the NY Dolls were the real Dolls) (despite my obviously loving the NY Dolls more than any other group). Or my comparing and contrasting Courtney Love to Mariah Carey as if they were both potentially equal in value. There's also stuff like Phil Dellio's explaining why Milli Vanilli was better than Bob Dylan, but Phil was clearly doing it as a goof, whereas my screeds were no goof. (And Phil seems to accept the sincerity of my screeds but not Chuck's, though I can't see any difference in sincerity.) And for that matter, in Radio On and the like my opinions are not even subversive, they're just my opinions. Anyway, I'm not saying that I represent the majority of rock critics (since I obviously don't), just that what I do is a frequent rock-critic shtick - and one that I believe in, obviously, or I wouldn't do it.
Almost anyone I can think of who might be considered rock-critic establishment would at least be willing to consider the possibility that an Aqua could be better than a Moby or a Radiohead or a Lauryn Hill. Of course, that doesn't mean that such a person will think that Aqua is better; but it does mean that Aqua can make it into intellectual discourse as worth taking seriously. I'd guess that it's more out in the boonies, among second-rate critics at the non-NY dailies and the mid- and small-size alternative weeklies, where such a thought is unthinkable. And probably not always there, even.
From: "Frank N. Kogan" <edcasual@earthlink.net>
Subject: Its Context 1: Face the Music
Date: Thursday, June 08, 2000 11:56 PM
Its Context 1: Face the Music
"One seeking to analyze rock must realize that the context for experiencing it must be left intact. He must take the lesson of environment and happening, art forms which in their expanded use of spatio-temporality contain the contexts for experiencing themselves. All sorts of things are part of this context, as money, competition, survival, acceptance by adolescents, reaction by standard adults, peculiar reaction by the community of prior art." Aesthetics of Rock p. 12.
I wonder if Meltzer had even remembered Sentence 1 by the time he'd reached Sentence 3. Just how does one keep "acceptance by adolescents" and "reaction by standard adults" intact? And would one want to?
When I was 18 and 19 (1972-73) it was pretty obvious to me that all art and music was environmental/contextual, but it wasn't obvious then and still isn't now what conclusions to draw from this insight. The source of the insight, by the way, was the fact that feminist and academic discussion of the Rolling Stones, for instance, was utterly moronic and seemed to take place in complete ignorance of the environments where the Stones' music lived its life. But then, you could say that the Rolling Stones' music lived within the feminist life and the academic life, too, it just happened to be living a stupid life there. And I guess one insight that was obvious to me (and to many academics) was that it was worthwhile to try to understand the music's original context, that the original context tended not only to be richer but to sometimes reveal a different work. And another insight was somewhat contrary to this, which was that records should be played, understood, analyzed, in interesting environments, and that records could lead many lives and a song could therefore, in effect, be many different songs. And also that my subject matter could be the world around the record not just the record itself. And back in high school I'd already (without theorizing it except with the statement "this will help them understand") used and quoted song lyrics (Airplane, Stones, Dylan) and expressed myself and fooled around with lyrics first in letters to friends, then in writing class, then in humanities classes (and rearranged faces and gave new names, just like Dylan in "Desolation Row"). I was relatively less comfortable doing this in college, for various reasons, some bad but a few good: for instance, I didn't (and don't) always dislike a standard analyze-the-text analyze-the-world and try-to-get-the-story-right approach.
My tendency now is to try to do everything at once, using music and analyzing it on the same page at the same time, but I'd say that there has been a drift away from the "doing" and more towards the "writing about," maybe because I'm less inspired in my life and in my heart to do verbal stuff with music these days anyway. (This is relative to what I'd done before, not relative to other rock critics, most of whom still leave most of the doing out of their writing.)
Meltzer'd once said "I'd write like Bo Diddley rather than about him," but this is another false dichotomy, and I think that Meltzer believed that writing like Bo Diddley was a better way to write about him. But Meltzer still seems to think of "about" as some sort of contaminant, and his unwillingness to do "about" has become an unwillingness to think, period.
I want to actually put into words why it is that writing like Bo Diddley can be a better way to write about him. ("Can be." Not "always is.")
"I killed a man with my bare hands" is more powerful than "he killed a man with his bare hands." It's also, therefore, more likely to provoke or entice a reader into some sort of thought, just to deal with it. Of course, this depends on the reader and the circumstances; if "I killed a man with my bare hands" is too powerful for a reader he might just react defensively, might close up. In general, though, "write like" can - sometimes - do better than "write about" at delivering the subject matter, at confronting the reader with it. What I have in mind isn't so much, "convey the spirit of rock 'n' roll in my prose" - though that would be nice - but to throw at the reader all the contradictions, mess, danger, love, insight, stupidity, joking, flirting, fighting, gossiping that come within and around the world of music. And if as a prose writer I can't make the reader dance to me, nonetheless - using words - I can maybe make things more explicit, maybe make the reader face the music, so to speak, face its contradictions, for example (I'm big on contradictions), in a way that he maybe won't when listening or dancing to the music. Acting out with words on the page is somehow more inescapable than acting out in music or song and dance; is probably more inescapable than acting out with words yelled out the window, too. Yell them out the window and maybe I'm not totally committed to them, and anyway they're misheard and misremembered and they're gone. And of course you can put more words on the page than in a song. And words on page (or on disk and website, and there's not such a big difference no matter what anyone says) can go places socially that the music can't. I guess I mean psychosocially. That is, a college prof can listen to punk records and be a punk and can play in punk bands but maybe he's never really faced punk as a college prof until he's read my words, or Meltzer's or ________'s - words that because they're words on the page are now peers, antagonists, colleagues to words on his page. So punk as punk can take a social journey in his brain, really set up home in the "Intellectual Discourse" sector.
Of course, I've never killed a man with my bare hands (or my bare feet, or my elbow, or my earlobe), and I'd rather write like Frank Kogan than like Bo Diddley, and I'd rather write like Frank Kogan than like Kool Moe Dee or Teena Marie or Sophie B. Hawkins or Mariah Carey, all of whom (excluding Bo) I think I have managed to deliver on page, not just done a description of them, and I found a way to do it, which I'll write about in some other email sometime, maybe.
From: "Frank N. Kogan" <edcasual@earthlink.net>
Subject: Its Context 2
Date: Friday, June 09, 2000 2:03 PM
"...it was pretty obvious to me that all art and music was environmental/contextual, but it wasn't obvious then and still isn't now what conclusions to draw from this insight."
E.g., it isn't at all obvious how this insight would affect, say, my writing style. It's not like I don't take my environment into account when I write (esp. given that so much of my writing is argument, i.e. a response to people in my environment), or that I'd need to be told to. The formula, "all art is contextual, therefore my art should be contextual" is not particularly compelling. How would I make it more contextual? By writing it on the walls instead of on paper, and then announcing pretentiously "I have created environmental writing"? It seems to me that such writing would be less environmental than if it had been published in the Voice, where it would have the opportunity to go into many environments and to become part of the environment for someone else's writing. I'm the sort of person who had no trouble, even back in high school, in thinking of editors and DJs as artists. And I think of myself as someone who's not just trying to write well and say smart and entertaining things, but also as someone who's trying to start or maintain interesting conversations. But I don't think of these things as arising from the insight. More like they're the sorts of things from which I abstract the insight.
From: "Mark Sinker" <mark_sinker@craftscouncil.org.uk>
Subject: the totality for puds
Date: Monday, June 12, 2000 8:07 AM
Frank: in the following , I don't know if it makes things clearer to assume I'm generally affirming your points, or dissenting. As a key to my own class make-up, be aware that the phrase "You're being very boring", spoken by my grandmother to a small child acting up, actually meant "You're being exceedingly irritating"...
In respect of the context quote (AoRp12), I think here I'd riff up off of "expanded use of spatio-temporality", with special emphasis on expanded. Since what RM is mainly objecting to is rock's being shut back down to cliffs-notes examination in the mode of previously existing art-forms, we are being asked to put front of mind the ways in which it's specifically different, as an artform. "The lesson of environment and happening" adverts to the most up-to-date movement in the American avant-garde: RM is partly arguing, I'd say, that rock isn't even given the courtesy of being considered along the lines of its immediate art contemporaries. But he's also insisting that rock goes further down the line which makes environments and happenings so radical: which is (unlike Hamlet by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-on-Avon, or Sondheim on Broadway, or Jackson Pollock or Bonnie and Clyde or ... ) that it makes a virtue of insisting that the fourth wall has a door in it, which isn't locked against movement in either direction.
PARADIGMATIC EXAMPLE (of the relevant spatio-temporal context), featuring Nam June Paik (who is after all cited in RM's 1987 Da Capo foreword as part of the occasion of AoR's gathering and expansion into an actual real book): in c.1960, Paik, till now a high-end fan of Cage's, mounted the stage to perform a work in which - among other things - he jumped down from the stage and snipped off Cage's tie...
I take RM to be claiming that this species of reversal is relevant, yet pitifully small potatoes also, when compared to eg the fan-artist reversal effected by Beatlemania. ie in the Paik case, the art is 'happening' on and off stage between Cage and Paik, in their evolving responses to one another, from the moment Cage first impinged on Paik's imagination. This is the expanded context: now think of this in rock terms, with the Shea Stadium as the site of the work, the massed squealy girls (plus Meltzer) as Paik, and the drowning of actual Beatles music as cutting off Cage's tie.
In which case RM's notion of "original context" is absolutely not a limiting, 'back-to-the-context-of-the text' kind of a move (ie to recapture what the poet had in his head just when he was a-scribblin'): because I'd say he's insisting on a huge enlargement of the scope of the 'moment of origination', which - to analyse and cut apart in a potentially misleading way - encompasses three distinct creative sites, as follows. a. what the rockers had in their heads just as they were a-jammin' b. the paik-style response moment of the audience en masse (and as a mass), their enacted grasp of the 'work' in its multiform reality (as heard live, on record, on radio, on tv etc) c. the paik-style uber-response of the critic to both the above
[by "paik-style", I simply mean any enacted response that's a stage-mounting act, a creation of an environment, sensibly tho never totally self-contained, involving decision and a distinct move away from what wd otherwise have happened - i.e. snipping Cage's tie (rather than A.N.Other Audience Member's); or turning up at Shea Stadium with a hand-scrawled "We Luv You John Pam!!!!" banner; or writing about Rock (instead of Modalities of Perception, or Functions of Enjambement in Manley Hopkins)]
[and if we just bear in mind the complex temporal dispersion attendant on 'song-writing' in the age of the studio, and the obvious yet curiously under-explored rock fact that rockers are - by definition - audience members who've recently mounted the stage, we realise that SITE A alone already contains the various songs and artists that each player has been in process of response to, at the various stages of riff-formation, lyric formation, accompaniment formation, and post-play editing together and production decisions blah blah]
Well, clearly this tripartite site is adequately covered by the words 'environment' and 'context', if that's how we choose to read them - but it's just as likely that it's selectively hidden by them. In particular, what you term the 'academic' response tends above all to obscure SITE C. Many academics write as if they themselves are somehow above the fray: ie as if their personal contexts at time of writing - specifically the internal politics and pressures of academia - are nothing whatever to do with the Aesthetics of Rock. (I'd like to believe this is what he means by eg "At the same time rock has transcended any difficulties encountered in the sociology of knowledge" p96, start of the infamous "unit of empricial significance" paragraph, since the key difficulty encountered in the sociology of knowledge is the sociological non-objectivity necessarily imprisoning the sociologist.)
So what wd make your writing more contextual? This isn't really a matter of instrumentalism, I don't think, since reading abt iggy in creem is surely part of what has to be "kept intact": as you know, I very strongly resist this must-get-closer-to-the-source version of good-vs-bad. Seems to me the injunction is this: given that yr site is the Voice (say), how d'you fashion the fact of yr awareness of your choices pre-writing, and your readership post-publication, into some paik-style 'act' (ie of writing but also of cogent stage-mounting) which can conjure a gold old Buber-shudder, or flash of instant connection and potential art-reversal, or whatever. How will the act of reading your words produce in itself - w/o benefit of 'having been there with you' - all possible aspects of the sensibility arising from what it is that caused you to choose to write...
So I don't think "keeping intact" can ever have meant laboriously rehashing descriptively - and the "acceptance/reaction" you jib at are anyway under transformation within time (adolescents are becoming adults; adults read up on adolescence). I think RM means that your use of what you've taken from the whole megilla shd respect - even if it also resists - the use that eg the adolescence of 1965 put their whole megilla to, in respect of the acceptance and/or non-acceptance of the adult. So now in 2000, who or what plays the role in yr 'happening' of the 1965-style adult, the 1977-style wised-up (and grown-up) adolescent, the 1999-style recuperated-established 'academic' critic...? (Dolorous note: in 1968 the New Yorker's rock critic was Ellen Willis; now it's Nick Hornby... )
So much of the blah-ness of writing derives from all the turnings of the machine that are taken for granted as "the nature of things", that habitually go unquestioned...
re: "his unwillingness to do 'about' has become an unwillingness to think, period"
Meltzer long ago became trapped within a very specific strategy: most of us do. Because his strategy was - I think - extremely powerful in itself, and yet was never given a cover story in Time magazine, he's managed to obscure from himself the fact of its diminishing returns now. (The giveaway: when he unearths his own history as a critic, i.e. in the 1987 Da Capo New Foreword, or in Vinyl Reckoning, it's always to out his former self as not yet Meltzer-ish enough - he never considers how his former strengths might have turned into weaknesses, or vice versa... )
In particular - unlike you Frank - he seems today continually to be arguing that his being a writer is a betrayal of full-on Meltzerism, and that it therefore has to be floated in a sea of Meltzer-gonzo. Which is where his anxious evasion of SITE C maps onto the academic ditto (something you pointed out before).
Ben Thompson has now returned my copy of AoR, along with loan of an uncorrected review copy of the DeRogatis book: the latter being sad in several ways, especially if JdR is (as you say) a "sweet guy" rather than an asshole. First, it's set up as Gonzo (good) vs Academic (bad); secondly, JdR is anything but Gonzo himself (more like MOR fair-crack-of-the-whip hack, who believes eg Marcus-Xgau to have misread-projected-rorschached all over Bangs, but can't work up a counter-reading which is better than a balanced corrective, in which getting wasted and abusing people and dying young is life-affirming; and to think a little is to die a little. It's a book which is (I think) very generously conceived, but also disastrously misconceived, unwittingly locating Bangs as a serially confused and self-duped bozo with permanent B.O.
[I had no idea, incidentally, that the record still on the turntable when the body was discovered was the Human League's 'Dare' - just think what Bangs himself wd have made of that?!]
re: "I killed a man with my bare hands"
Some versions: which is you, which is Meltzer, which is me?
"You thought I was just some pansy writer. Then I killed a man with my bare hands"
"You thought I was just some pansy writer. So I killed a man with my bare hands"
"You thought I was just some pansy writer, because I killed a man with my bare hands"
"I thought I was just some pansy writer. But I killed a man with my bare hands"
Bo Diddley went to school with avant-garde loft-squonk violinist Leroy Jenkins; Bo Diddley was elected local sheriff in the late 70s. So writing "like Bo Diddley" him wd require writing "like" someone of whom both these facts were the case... re: Poni-Tails/Aqua/Leonard Bernstein etc Well, yes, I take your point and even concede it, at least within a "whole of rock'n'roll" that's comfortably expanded downwards somewhat since 1965 (or 1977) or whenever. Yes, Frank Kogan is far from the only rock writer who'd be happy arguing for S Club 7 over Sleater-Kinney: and yes, this is indeed a standby (and if applied within certain unspoken limits) a cliché. It's the unspoken limits I'd furiously object to: today the unspeakables run 'upwards' and 'sideways', not downwards (Marcus, after all, talks of Plato and the Poni-Tails). To me, Henry Flynt is in rock'n'roll because Eno's The Maxwell Demon once performed La Monte Young's 'X to Henry Flynt'; Berio is in rock'n'roll because he wrote some piece in which the Swingle Singers quote the Beatles; Leroy Jenkins is in rock'n'roll because he went to school with Bo Diddley. To me, this is Punk Rock 101 anyway: a cat (me) can look at a king (anyone ever, 'highness' notwithstanding). This is the full-on AoR Aesthetic which constantly fails to be adopted: that what makes rock rock is that it contains everything (including Nietzsche, the 1910 Fruit Gum Company, you and me, and even Nick Hornby, Roger Ebert, George W. Bush, and the 'reviewers' who work for amazon.com).
The current Meltzer needs to read those things out of the party which cause him to be confused with eg Marcus, without 1. disavowing AoR, or 2. valorising routine 'media success'. Hence the turn to gonzo pill- and cherry-popping, which the "academics" (in DeRogatis's reading) have shown little interest in pursuing. To the world (some of it - though surely not the current Meltzer), Punk Rock 101 was "stop being pretentious: drink beer, live in pubs, enjoy pub rock, and know your place": Dead Lester is currently being used to buttress this; a corpse propped against a prison door in lieu of a lock. Other corpses - Darby Crash, GG Allin - have been propped here also, though their redeployment today (en masse) would more than likely open doors more than it shut them...
The 'overall' Meltzer (then and now) wants to open up a vector to the Totality, without ever being (mis)taken for that Totality. He wouldn't be so angry now if he didn't still believe it was possible, somehow maybe, I think.
[Mark, do you (1) mind that I've posted this, and (2) mind that it's not under lock and key? (Obv. I think I know the answer, but I'm asking anyway.)]
Subject: Snakes and snails and Poni-Tails
Date: Wednesday, June 07, 2000 8:10 PM
Hi Mark and crew,
I'm sure I didn't understand all of Mark's [previous] letter on first reading, and my work ethic tells me not to enjoy myself by working it out but instead only to write about it in ways that are Meltzer-relevant - i.e., that produce sentences that I might get paid for. (I've been told that Fusion and Creem in their late days were revolutionary in their ability to collapse the dichotomy between getting paid and not getting paid, but this is a revolution I'm trying to be disassimilated from.)
I realize from Mark's response that the following paragraph of mine contains an ambiguity.
"I also think that comparing to Poni-Tails/Tommy James is now a long-established rock-critic cliché/standby. Don't see how it's fundamentally different (or any more right or wrong) than saying that the Beatles are as significant as Simon & Garfunkel, or as Joan Baez, or as the Leonard Bernstein Young People's Concert where Bernstein uses the Beatles' 'Norwegian Wood' to exemplify an alternative mode. And why not say that Meltzer is as significant as Joan Baez? Why not say that Meltzer is as significant as Marcus-Christgau-Marsh, as Gina Arnold, as any old local alternative-weekly fuddy-dud who attacks Ricky Martin and Eminem for their inauthenticity? Again, what is the aesthetics of rock here that's supposed to be adopted?"
When I wrote "Don't see how it's fundamentally different" I didn't mean to imply that these were all standbys/clichés, though I can see how someone could read it as if it did. In fact, other than the Poni-Tails/Tommy James thing, nothing on my list (Beatles are as significant as S&G, Joan Baez, Leonard Bernstein; Meltzer is as significant Christgau-Marcus-Marsh, Arnold, alt-press fuddy-dud) is a rock-critic standby. The list was specifically intended to represent the middlebrow threat, the challenge of gentility - the stuff that Meltzer would like to ignore or banish, that he'd like to read out of his aesthetics of rock.
(Except that reskimming the Aesthetics I'm not so sure that that Meltzer would want to read these things out of the party. I think the current Meltzer would.)
"One seeking to analyze rock must realize that the context for experiencing it must be left intact. He must take the lesson of environment and happening, art forms which in their expanded use of spatio-temporality contain the contexts for experiencing themselves. All sorts of things are part of this context, as money, competition, survival, acceptance by adolescents, reaction by standard adults, peculiar reaction by the community of prior art." Aesthetics of Rock p. 12.
Let's see, the first sentence I strongly disagree with, and I wonder what Meltzer was thinking when he wrote it, since it's an absurd restriction that in practice Meltzer ignores wherever possible. I can't think of a critic who wanted less to keep the context intact. He was more intent on creating, mangling, altering, reinventing, and being the context. I doubt that Meltzer meant the instructions to apply to himself, anyway - maybe he meant that Time-Life reporters and music historians and people that he didn't like should keep the context intact, but it was okay for people inside rock like himself (in his own mind, at least) to mess around and participate in the form. Because people like Meltzer carry the form within themselves, or something.
Also, it's not clear whether he's talking about the context of rock or the context of environmental art and happening art when he talks of money, competition, survival, acceptance by adolescents, and so forth, most of which seem to apply much more to rock than to art. He's probably talking about both. In my memory I conflated this passage with another one (which I can't find and which perhaps never existed anywhere but in my imagination) where Meltzer (or I) includes in the context such things as fan magazines, girls holding signs ("We Love You Paul"), radio countdowns, attempts to market to teens, etc. (all of which Meltzer talks about in Aesthetics anyway). And the lesson I take from all of this is that rock music contains within itself not just the context but (therefore, as part of the context) the viewers/listeners themselves. Duh. And (not so duh) that the listener who writes about music, e.g. me, has the same right as any fan or musician to use music in any way that he or she wants to. (Not that having the right to do something means that you should do it: what you should do depends on what you think is worth doing, obviously, and varies from day to day, piece to piece, email to email.)
But anyway, returning to the main topic, Meltzer wrote (Aesthetics, p. 15) "Leonard Bernstein's comment that there is value in some rock, particularly that spark in the Beatles which in their 'Love Me Do' is reminiscent of Hindu music, is an attempt to reduce rock to something other than itself in order to ascertain its validity."
I'm not sure how Meltzer would have felt, but it seems arbitrary to me to include "reaction by standard adults" within rock but to exclude "attempt by a prominent adult to reduce rock to something other than itself in order to ascertain its validity." So this is why I used that Bernstein/"Norwegian Wood" reference above (I remembered it as Bernstein playing "Norwegian Wood" on the piano to illustrate a mode that went from Re to Re rather than from Do to Do) [so either Meltzer saw the same and misremembered or there were two different Bernstein episodes]. (I also remember Bernstein illustrating the concept and use of "motif" by giving examples of everywhere the first four notes of "How Dry I Am" appeared in classical music, climaxing (so to speak) with the last movement of Shostakovich's 5th Symphony, from which "How Dry I Am" seems to overflow.)
If rock includes its context, how can we count the Poni-Tails - I've never heard the Poni-Tails, as far as I know - but not count those attempts, which were all over Rolling Stone and the New York Times Arts & Leisure Section when I was growing up, to portray rock as quality-driven and conventionally socially significant?
By the way, I just checked, and Joan Baez appears in Aesthetics more times than the Poni-Tails, though mainly for one song: "Folk singer Joan Baez has had released a single track recorded years earlier, 'There But For Fortune,' which is endowed with the quality of a Duchampian ready-made in its new rock 'n' roll context. It bears a sharp resemblance to Marianne Faithfull's 'As Tears Go By,' which itself had been, seemingly, an insipid reference to Baez, thus without being changed it is altered by its new added rock pretensions." This leads into a discussion of rock being able to take over folk ("[After the Kinks' 'Well-Respected Man'] no content would ever be overly social enough to be, on the basis of that alone, ineligible for immediate rock takeover.") And Meltzer doesn't seem threatened by this, yet, back then. The Poni-Tails are rock, Joan Baez is folk that has been appropriated by rock, and rock is triumphant. Yet I doubt that either Meltzer or Marcus would ever be willing to say "the Beatles are as significant as Joan Baez." Because that would imply more than rock gobbling up Joan, but rock becoming like Joan.
By the way, the person who said, "the Beatles were as significant as Tommy James and the Shondells, or as the Poni-Tails" is neither Marcus nor Meltzer; it's Mark Sinker, and I prefer Mark's version to Marcus's ("writing about Tommy James and the Shondells as if they were as epistemologically significant as the Beatles"; " 'I Think We're Alone Now' is as significant as 'I Am the Walrus' "), since Marcus's still leaves the Beatles on top. But I don't go along with either version; no matter Meltzer's intentions, I don't think he's shown anything more than that Beatles tend to signify not as Beatles by their own little lonesome but as Beatles in relation to whatever (Poni-Tails and Tommy James and Joan Baez and Leonard Bernstein and attempts to justify rock by classical-music criteria and high-school English-teacher criteria, etc.). And we can, if we want, within an individual response, indeed decide (if we want) that the Poni-Tails matter more or are better. I remember Ken Emerson, a congenial nonhipster whom I was reading in Fusion at the same time I was reading Meltzer, frequently making the case for unimportant music. (I'll look up the exact quotes if I can find them. I do remember his saying something to the effect that rock would have been no different without the Zombies, just poorer. [Actual quote: "without the Zombies, rock would be no different; just poorer."] And I remember his praising Exile on Main Street for sounding like a bunch of b-sides.)
But anyway, "Beatles are as significant as Poni-Tails" is a standby not because the Poni-Tails are girl-group and because girl-group is in the canon but because Poni-Tails are safely non-social-sig non-quality-driven-by-middlebrow-standards and had once been safely beneath the notice of the previous generation of liberal middle intelligentsia. And current (last 13 years) versions of the standby would be my comparing the Dolls to Donna Summer to Poison to the Cover Girls (and my trying to explain why, emotionally, I responded to Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes as if the Sex-O-Lettes and not the NY Dolls were the real Dolls) (despite my obviously loving the NY Dolls more than any other group). Or my comparing and contrasting Courtney Love to Mariah Carey as if they were both potentially equal in value. There's also stuff like Phil Dellio's explaining why Milli Vanilli was better than Bob Dylan, but Phil was clearly doing it as a goof, whereas my screeds were no goof. (And Phil seems to accept the sincerity of my screeds but not Chuck's, though I can't see any difference in sincerity.) And for that matter, in Radio On and the like my opinions are not even subversive, they're just my opinions. Anyway, I'm not saying that I represent the majority of rock critics (since I obviously don't), just that what I do is a frequent rock-critic shtick - and one that I believe in, obviously, or I wouldn't do it.
Almost anyone I can think of who might be considered rock-critic establishment would at least be willing to consider the possibility that an Aqua could be better than a Moby or a Radiohead or a Lauryn Hill. Of course, that doesn't mean that such a person will think that Aqua is better; but it does mean that Aqua can make it into intellectual discourse as worth taking seriously. I'd guess that it's more out in the boonies, among second-rate critics at the non-NY dailies and the mid- and small-size alternative weeklies, where such a thought is unthinkable. And probably not always there, even.
From: "Frank N. Kogan" <edcasual@earthlink.net>
Subject: Its Context 1: Face the Music
Date: Thursday, June 08, 2000 11:56 PM
Its Context 1: Face the Music
"One seeking to analyze rock must realize that the context for experiencing it must be left intact. He must take the lesson of environment and happening, art forms which in their expanded use of spatio-temporality contain the contexts for experiencing themselves. All sorts of things are part of this context, as money, competition, survival, acceptance by adolescents, reaction by standard adults, peculiar reaction by the community of prior art." Aesthetics of Rock p. 12.
I wonder if Meltzer had even remembered Sentence 1 by the time he'd reached Sentence 3. Just how does one keep "acceptance by adolescents" and "reaction by standard adults" intact? And would one want to?
When I was 18 and 19 (1972-73) it was pretty obvious to me that all art and music was environmental/contextual, but it wasn't obvious then and still isn't now what conclusions to draw from this insight. The source of the insight, by the way, was the fact that feminist and academic discussion of the Rolling Stones, for instance, was utterly moronic and seemed to take place in complete ignorance of the environments where the Stones' music lived its life. But then, you could say that the Rolling Stones' music lived within the feminist life and the academic life, too, it just happened to be living a stupid life there. And I guess one insight that was obvious to me (and to many academics) was that it was worthwhile to try to understand the music's original context, that the original context tended not only to be richer but to sometimes reveal a different work. And another insight was somewhat contrary to this, which was that records should be played, understood, analyzed, in interesting environments, and that records could lead many lives and a song could therefore, in effect, be many different songs. And also that my subject matter could be the world around the record not just the record itself. And back in high school I'd already (without theorizing it except with the statement "this will help them understand") used and quoted song lyrics (Airplane, Stones, Dylan) and expressed myself and fooled around with lyrics first in letters to friends, then in writing class, then in humanities classes (and rearranged faces and gave new names, just like Dylan in "Desolation Row"). I was relatively less comfortable doing this in college, for various reasons, some bad but a few good: for instance, I didn't (and don't) always dislike a standard analyze-the-text analyze-the-world and try-to-get-the-story-right approach.
My tendency now is to try to do everything at once, using music and analyzing it on the same page at the same time, but I'd say that there has been a drift away from the "doing" and more towards the "writing about," maybe because I'm less inspired in my life and in my heart to do verbal stuff with music these days anyway. (This is relative to what I'd done before, not relative to other rock critics, most of whom still leave most of the doing out of their writing.)
Meltzer'd once said "I'd write like Bo Diddley rather than about him," but this is another false dichotomy, and I think that Meltzer believed that writing like Bo Diddley was a better way to write about him. But Meltzer still seems to think of "about" as some sort of contaminant, and his unwillingness to do "about" has become an unwillingness to think, period.
I want to actually put into words why it is that writing like Bo Diddley can be a better way to write about him. ("Can be." Not "always is.")
"I killed a man with my bare hands" is more powerful than "he killed a man with his bare hands." It's also, therefore, more likely to provoke or entice a reader into some sort of thought, just to deal with it. Of course, this depends on the reader and the circumstances; if "I killed a man with my bare hands" is too powerful for a reader he might just react defensively, might close up. In general, though, "write like" can - sometimes - do better than "write about" at delivering the subject matter, at confronting the reader with it. What I have in mind isn't so much, "convey the spirit of rock 'n' roll in my prose" - though that would be nice - but to throw at the reader all the contradictions, mess, danger, love, insight, stupidity, joking, flirting, fighting, gossiping that come within and around the world of music. And if as a prose writer I can't make the reader dance to me, nonetheless - using words - I can maybe make things more explicit, maybe make the reader face the music, so to speak, face its contradictions, for example (I'm big on contradictions), in a way that he maybe won't when listening or dancing to the music. Acting out with words on the page is somehow more inescapable than acting out in music or song and dance; is probably more inescapable than acting out with words yelled out the window, too. Yell them out the window and maybe I'm not totally committed to them, and anyway they're misheard and misremembered and they're gone. And of course you can put more words on the page than in a song. And words on page (or on disk and website, and there's not such a big difference no matter what anyone says) can go places socially that the music can't. I guess I mean psychosocially. That is, a college prof can listen to punk records and be a punk and can play in punk bands but maybe he's never really faced punk as a college prof until he's read my words, or Meltzer's or ________'s - words that because they're words on the page are now peers, antagonists, colleagues to words on his page. So punk as punk can take a social journey in his brain, really set up home in the "Intellectual Discourse" sector.
Of course, I've never killed a man with my bare hands (or my bare feet, or my elbow, or my earlobe), and I'd rather write like Frank Kogan than like Bo Diddley, and I'd rather write like Frank Kogan than like Kool Moe Dee or Teena Marie or Sophie B. Hawkins or Mariah Carey, all of whom (excluding Bo) I think I have managed to deliver on page, not just done a description of them, and I found a way to do it, which I'll write about in some other email sometime, maybe.
From: "Frank N. Kogan" <edcasual@earthlink.net>
Subject: Its Context 2
Date: Friday, June 09, 2000 2:03 PM
"...it was pretty obvious to me that all art and music was environmental/contextual, but it wasn't obvious then and still isn't now what conclusions to draw from this insight."
E.g., it isn't at all obvious how this insight would affect, say, my writing style. It's not like I don't take my environment into account when I write (esp. given that so much of my writing is argument, i.e. a response to people in my environment), or that I'd need to be told to. The formula, "all art is contextual, therefore my art should be contextual" is not particularly compelling. How would I make it more contextual? By writing it on the walls instead of on paper, and then announcing pretentiously "I have created environmental writing"? It seems to me that such writing would be less environmental than if it had been published in the Voice, where it would have the opportunity to go into many environments and to become part of the environment for someone else's writing. I'm the sort of person who had no trouble, even back in high school, in thinking of editors and DJs as artists. And I think of myself as someone who's not just trying to write well and say smart and entertaining things, but also as someone who's trying to start or maintain interesting conversations. But I don't think of these things as arising from the insight. More like they're the sorts of things from which I abstract the insight.
From: "Mark Sinker" <mark_sinker@craftscouncil.org.uk>
Subject: the totality for puds
Date: Monday, June 12, 2000 8:07 AM
Frank: in the following , I don't know if it makes things clearer to assume I'm generally affirming your points, or dissenting. As a key to my own class make-up, be aware that the phrase "You're being very boring", spoken by my grandmother to a small child acting up, actually meant "You're being exceedingly irritating"...
In respect of the context quote (AoRp12), I think here I'd riff up off of "expanded use of spatio-temporality", with special emphasis on expanded. Since what RM is mainly objecting to is rock's being shut back down to cliffs-notes examination in the mode of previously existing art-forms, we are being asked to put front of mind the ways in which it's specifically different, as an artform. "The lesson of environment and happening" adverts to the most up-to-date movement in the American avant-garde: RM is partly arguing, I'd say, that rock isn't even given the courtesy of being considered along the lines of its immediate art contemporaries. But he's also insisting that rock goes further down the line which makes environments and happenings so radical: which is (unlike Hamlet by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-on-Avon, or Sondheim on Broadway, or Jackson Pollock or Bonnie and Clyde or ... ) that it makes a virtue of insisting that the fourth wall has a door in it, which isn't locked against movement in either direction.
PARADIGMATIC EXAMPLE (of the relevant spatio-temporal context), featuring Nam June Paik (who is after all cited in RM's 1987 Da Capo foreword as part of the occasion of AoR's gathering and expansion into an actual real book): in c.1960, Paik, till now a high-end fan of Cage's, mounted the stage to perform a work in which - among other things - he jumped down from the stage and snipped off Cage's tie...
I take RM to be claiming that this species of reversal is relevant, yet pitifully small potatoes also, when compared to eg the fan-artist reversal effected by Beatlemania. ie in the Paik case, the art is 'happening' on and off stage between Cage and Paik, in their evolving responses to one another, from the moment Cage first impinged on Paik's imagination. This is the expanded context: now think of this in rock terms, with the Shea Stadium as the site of the work, the massed squealy girls (plus Meltzer) as Paik, and the drowning of actual Beatles music as cutting off Cage's tie.
In which case RM's notion of "original context" is absolutely not a limiting, 'back-to-the-context-of-the text' kind of a move (ie to recapture what the poet had in his head just when he was a-scribblin'): because I'd say he's insisting on a huge enlargement of the scope of the 'moment of origination', which - to analyse and cut apart in a potentially misleading way - encompasses three distinct creative sites, as follows. a. what the rockers had in their heads just as they were a-jammin' b. the paik-style response moment of the audience en masse (and as a mass), their enacted grasp of the 'work' in its multiform reality (as heard live, on record, on radio, on tv etc) c. the paik-style uber-response of the critic to both the above
[by "paik-style", I simply mean any enacted response that's a stage-mounting act, a creation of an environment, sensibly tho never totally self-contained, involving decision and a distinct move away from what wd otherwise have happened - i.e. snipping Cage's tie (rather than A.N.Other Audience Member's); or turning up at Shea Stadium with a hand-scrawled "We Luv You John Pam!!!!" banner; or writing about Rock (instead of Modalities of Perception, or Functions of Enjambement in Manley Hopkins)]
[and if we just bear in mind the complex temporal dispersion attendant on 'song-writing' in the age of the studio, and the obvious yet curiously under-explored rock fact that rockers are - by definition - audience members who've recently mounted the stage, we realise that SITE A alone already contains the various songs and artists that each player has been in process of response to, at the various stages of riff-formation, lyric formation, accompaniment formation, and post-play editing together and production decisions blah blah]
Well, clearly this tripartite site is adequately covered by the words 'environment' and 'context', if that's how we choose to read them - but it's just as likely that it's selectively hidden by them. In particular, what you term the 'academic' response tends above all to obscure SITE C. Many academics write as if they themselves are somehow above the fray: ie as if their personal contexts at time of writing - specifically the internal politics and pressures of academia - are nothing whatever to do with the Aesthetics of Rock. (I'd like to believe this is what he means by eg "At the same time rock has transcended any difficulties encountered in the sociology of knowledge" p96, start of the infamous "unit of empricial significance" paragraph, since the key difficulty encountered in the sociology of knowledge is the sociological non-objectivity necessarily imprisoning the sociologist.)
So what wd make your writing more contextual? This isn't really a matter of instrumentalism, I don't think, since reading abt iggy in creem is surely part of what has to be "kept intact": as you know, I very strongly resist this must-get-closer-to-the-source version of good-vs-bad. Seems to me the injunction is this: given that yr site is the Voice (say), how d'you fashion the fact of yr awareness of your choices pre-writing, and your readership post-publication, into some paik-style 'act' (ie of writing but also of cogent stage-mounting) which can conjure a gold old Buber-shudder, or flash of instant connection and potential art-reversal, or whatever. How will the act of reading your words produce in itself - w/o benefit of 'having been there with you' - all possible aspects of the sensibility arising from what it is that caused you to choose to write...
So I don't think "keeping intact" can ever have meant laboriously rehashing descriptively - and the "acceptance/reaction" you jib at are anyway under transformation within time (adolescents are becoming adults; adults read up on adolescence). I think RM means that your use of what you've taken from the whole megilla shd respect - even if it also resists - the use that eg the adolescence of 1965 put their whole megilla to, in respect of the acceptance and/or non-acceptance of the adult. So now in 2000, who or what plays the role in yr 'happening' of the 1965-style adult, the 1977-style wised-up (and grown-up) adolescent, the 1999-style recuperated-established 'academic' critic...? (Dolorous note: in 1968 the New Yorker's rock critic was Ellen Willis; now it's Nick Hornby... )
So much of the blah-ness of writing derives from all the turnings of the machine that are taken for granted as "the nature of things", that habitually go unquestioned...
re: "his unwillingness to do 'about' has become an unwillingness to think, period"
Meltzer long ago became trapped within a very specific strategy: most of us do. Because his strategy was - I think - extremely powerful in itself, and yet was never given a cover story in Time magazine, he's managed to obscure from himself the fact of its diminishing returns now. (The giveaway: when he unearths his own history as a critic, i.e. in the 1987 Da Capo New Foreword, or in Vinyl Reckoning, it's always to out his former self as not yet Meltzer-ish enough - he never considers how his former strengths might have turned into weaknesses, or vice versa... )
In particular - unlike you Frank - he seems today continually to be arguing that his being a writer is a betrayal of full-on Meltzerism, and that it therefore has to be floated in a sea of Meltzer-gonzo. Which is where his anxious evasion of SITE C maps onto the academic ditto (something you pointed out before).
Ben Thompson has now returned my copy of AoR, along with loan of an uncorrected review copy of the DeRogatis book: the latter being sad in several ways, especially if JdR is (as you say) a "sweet guy" rather than an asshole. First, it's set up as Gonzo (good) vs Academic (bad); secondly, JdR is anything but Gonzo himself (more like MOR fair-crack-of-the-whip hack, who believes eg Marcus-Xgau to have misread-projected-rorschached all over Bangs, but can't work up a counter-reading which is better than a balanced corrective, in which getting wasted and abusing people and dying young is life-affirming; and to think a little is to die a little. It's a book which is (I think) very generously conceived, but also disastrously misconceived, unwittingly locating Bangs as a serially confused and self-duped bozo with permanent B.O.
[I had no idea, incidentally, that the record still on the turntable when the body was discovered was the Human League's 'Dare' - just think what Bangs himself wd have made of that?!]
re: "I killed a man with my bare hands"
Some versions: which is you, which is Meltzer, which is me?
"You thought I was just some pansy writer. Then I killed a man with my bare hands"
"You thought I was just some pansy writer. So I killed a man with my bare hands"
"You thought I was just some pansy writer, because I killed a man with my bare hands"
"I thought I was just some pansy writer. But I killed a man with my bare hands"
Bo Diddley went to school with avant-garde loft-squonk violinist Leroy Jenkins; Bo Diddley was elected local sheriff in the late 70s. So writing "like Bo Diddley" him wd require writing "like" someone of whom both these facts were the case... re: Poni-Tails/Aqua/Leonard Bernstein etc Well, yes, I take your point and even concede it, at least within a "whole of rock'n'roll" that's comfortably expanded downwards somewhat since 1965 (or 1977) or whenever. Yes, Frank Kogan is far from the only rock writer who'd be happy arguing for S Club 7 over Sleater-Kinney: and yes, this is indeed a standby (and if applied within certain unspoken limits) a cliché. It's the unspoken limits I'd furiously object to: today the unspeakables run 'upwards' and 'sideways', not downwards (Marcus, after all, talks of Plato and the Poni-Tails). To me, Henry Flynt is in rock'n'roll because Eno's The Maxwell Demon once performed La Monte Young's 'X to Henry Flynt'; Berio is in rock'n'roll because he wrote some piece in which the Swingle Singers quote the Beatles; Leroy Jenkins is in rock'n'roll because he went to school with Bo Diddley. To me, this is Punk Rock 101 anyway: a cat (me) can look at a king (anyone ever, 'highness' notwithstanding). This is the full-on AoR Aesthetic which constantly fails to be adopted: that what makes rock rock is that it contains everything (including Nietzsche, the 1910 Fruit Gum Company, you and me, and even Nick Hornby, Roger Ebert, George W. Bush, and the 'reviewers' who work for amazon.com).
The current Meltzer needs to read those things out of the party which cause him to be confused with eg Marcus, without 1. disavowing AoR, or 2. valorising routine 'media success'. Hence the turn to gonzo pill- and cherry-popping, which the "academics" (in DeRogatis's reading) have shown little interest in pursuing. To the world (some of it - though surely not the current Meltzer), Punk Rock 101 was "stop being pretentious: drink beer, live in pubs, enjoy pub rock, and know your place": Dead Lester is currently being used to buttress this; a corpse propped against a prison door in lieu of a lock. Other corpses - Darby Crash, GG Allin - have been propped here also, though their redeployment today (en masse) would more than likely open doors more than it shut them...
The 'overall' Meltzer (then and now) wants to open up a vector to the Totality, without ever being (mis)taken for that Totality. He wouldn't be so angry now if he didn't still believe it was possible, somehow maybe, I think.
[Mark, do you (1) mind that I've posted this, and (2) mind that it's not under lock and key? (Obv. I think I know the answer, but I'm asking anyway.)]
