Frank Kogan

I posted this over on poptimists, where meserach was asking if any blogs focused on pop lyrics:

Girls Aloud would be interesting to explore because, even though I sometimes like them quite a lot (made my P&J ballot last year with a song that most Brit critics didn't seem to like), I'm sure I don't get them. There seems to be a Brit tendency to simply declare control over style, as if to assert you're using fashion rather than following it. Not that most Brits do this, just the ones who make a point of manipulating style. Whereas their American counterparts - Warhol, Madonna - are much more contentious in their manipulations, which I think is a tacit admission that they're not in control, that one has to fight for style. So naturally I tend to identify harder with the Americans. Back forty years or so I recognized that the Stones were the best rock group, and I identified with Jagger's mind, and with Ray Davies', and his distance from the gorgeousness of his own music, but my heart was with Dylan and the Airplane and the Velvet Underground.

(Not that there aren't counterexamples. John Lennon always seemed to be fighting for his very right to breathe.)

Here's the best Beatles album, The Beatles' Second Album (though it really was their third, merely the second on Capitol records), released only in the U.S., though five of these were on the British With The Beatles and the rest were on British singles except for a track or two on other albums. This configuration really kicks, even though it probably was something of a random sample of leftovers that hadn't yet gotten on a U.S. album and a couple tracks that were in the can without yet getting their British release.

side one:
ROLL OVER, BEETHOVEN
THANK YOU GIRL
YOU REALLY GOT A HOLD ON ME
DEVIL IN HER HEART
MONEY
YOU CAN'T DO THAT

side two:
LONG TALL SALLY
I CALL YOUR NAME
PLEASE MR. POSTMAN
I'LL GET YOU
SHE LOVES YOU

By the way, don't make too much of the symbolism of my picking an early Beatles album. I think the early Beatles were better than the mid and late Beatles, but that doesn't mean they should have kept going with what they were doing at the start. That would have been phony, and the phoniness would have been evident in the music. The music had a potential to move in many directions, and the Beatles had to move in some of them or they would have been letting themselves and the times down. 1964 wasn't a golden age, it was a furious transition, musicians grabbing something and trying to know what to make of it.

I call this album the Black Album, not just because it's the most r&b, but because Lennon's aching mind is all over it, and McCartney's jauntiness is perfect to keep the ache propulsive. Paul was a good bass player, probably the best musician in the group.

"You Really Got A Hold On Me" is twice as agonized as Smokey Robinson's original, and from there side one is a whoosh of pain, John throwing "Money" in our teeth as if he wanted to crush them. And then "You Can't Do That" has a similar riff, as if the throwing and the crushing don't stop, but the song adds so much color, making the ache a bright ache, an exuberant ache, that the shutdown that Lennon's words are insisting on is inextricable from the sound of music that's opening up.

And then Side Two is a sock hop but one that remembers the pain that had marched through Side One. "She Loves You" is the most deliriously great song the Beatles did, yeah yeah yeah and those harmonies. And on this album, the delirious joy remembers what the joy was attempting to surmount: "She said you hurt her so, she almost lost her mind" gets funneled into all the exuberant "she loves you"s and "yeah yeah yeah"s, but it doesn't get lost.

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 )

"All righty. This song is called 'Love Me For Me.' It's on my album Autobiography, in stores. I wrote it actually after I broke up with my ex-boyfriend - he broke up with me. And it's about never changing yourself for a guy." So once again she uses a song intro to misrepresent the song (just as she almost misrepresented the breakup). Good performance.

( Beatle resemblances )