THE HEART OF ROCK’N’ROLL IS STILL BEATIN’: So a reader sent me this essay: “Body and soul: The musical miseducation of the youth,” by Martha Bayles. It’s a critique of Allan Bloom’s takedown of rock music (click here and here for previous, much longer Eve rants on this topic); Bayles chastises Bloom, but also sympathizes with him, and agrees with substantial portions of his criticism.

I found the essay to be a mixed bag. Bayles makes lots of excellent points, many specifically directed at Bloom’s attempt at a Platonic approach to contemporary music. She notes that Bloom attempts to smuggle in romanticist music even as he denounces romanticist philosophy, for example. She picks up on the way he tends to lump all “the old European music” together, blessing it all, while similarly lumping all the new American music together in order to damn it. She identifies three “distortions” (I wonder if she intended that as a rock reference?) that lead Bloom to false and overhasty conclusions: a belief, Marxist in origin, that anything popular with contemporary “masscult” audiences must be bad; a denunciation of rock rhythms and an ignorance of the complexity of those rhythms; and an inability to see, or even to consider, that in the 20th century the Western musical “center of gravity” shifted from Germany to black America.

But then Bayles goes and lumps lots of disparate things together just like Bloom did! When she’s defending music she herself loves, she is attuned to nuance; she points out that Bloom’s take on Louis Armstrong’s hit recording of “Mack the Knife” ignores not only Armstrong’s singing style but also the many hit instrumental versions of the song. She writes, accurately, “In the same chapter, Bloom waxes indignant at the German condescension that views America as ‘a nonculture,’ a collection of castoffs from real culture.’ Such indignation is ironic coming from someone who has just reduced Louis Armstrong to a hollow conduit through which the elixir of German philosophy flowed into an empty American vessel.”

But Bayles’s own stance is too narrow, because it’s based on a defense of jazz over and against other 20th-century musical forms. Bayles mentions the blues, but they more or less drop out of her narrative; jazz clearly has pride of place. She locates the greatness of jazz and suitably jazzlike rock in its “rhythmic counterpoint, or swing.” I find this too confining. An assessment of great music should allow for a wider variety of moods and expressions–lament, meander, laughter, rage, gallows humor, resignation, and much more. Not all of those moods and expressions require, or work well with, counterpoint/swing. Toward the end of the essay she writes, “Most jazz, including the highly developed strains that appeared after 1930, is less emotional than” the 18th- and 19th-century European music beloved by Bloom. She adds that “Afro-American music” exhibits the classicist virtues of “wit, elegance, playfulness, lucidity, detachment.”

In the margins at this point I have written, “When did the blues disappear from this essay?”

Even if you just stick to jazz, can this description really cover the sultry, knowing humor of songs like “My Daddy Rocks Me” (“I looked at the clock and the clock struck ten/I said ‘Glory, amen…’/He kept rockin’/With one steady roll…”)? Where does “Strange Fruit” fit in here–where’s its detachment and playfulness?

Bayles charges contemporary rock with being preoccupied with murder and suicide, as rock was not until the late 1960s. Before then, she claims, rock “was not a musical and cultural revolution.” She doesn’t tell us much about why contemporary critics of “Elvis the Pelvis”–who certainly did believe he represented a musical and cultural revolution–were wrong, so it’s hard to evaluate her stance here. But I note that murder and suicide aren’t exactly unusual themes in popular music, from “Sheath and Knife” to “Stagolee.” Her account of punk as “performance art, not music” is most accurate as regards the Sex Pistols; it doesn’t have much to say about the horde of groups and styles covered under the “punk” umbrella. (Part of the problem with the essay is that it treats genre boundaries as much more real than they are. Even if I grant that different genres have different specialties–say, rock is better at anger, blues is better at despair, synth-pop is better at ironic distance–few actual groups or genres stick within one genre.) The artistic or cultural value of an alienated howl is limited, for sure. But I do think it’s possible for actual music, actual art, to be mostly composed of alienated howl. It helps if the musician has accurately identified at least some of the sources of his alienation; I think the Pistols did that, which is part of what makes them so compelling. A final, parenthetical weirdness of her take on punk: She blames it partly on the Velvet Underground, and then later praises jazz because “in the Eastern bloc, jazz became quite literally the Voice of America.” So… what was the Velvet Revolution again?

That said, I wholeheartedly concur with this statement, toward the end of the essay: “At bottom, my gripe with Bloom is that he pays no real attention to the musical battles being fought in the souls of youth. He finds his students lacking ‘strong prejudices’ against which to test serious learning. Yet he dismisses their passion for music as a moral and cultural dead end,” rather than viewing that passion as precisely the kind of love through which he could draw students to “serious learning.”

Two possibly-significant postscripts: Bayles writes that she agrees with Bloom “that music should not be used to whip human beings into a mindless frenzy.” She doesn’t discuss whether she thinks there are forms of ecstasy that are not mindless–supra- rather than sub-rational.

And I wonder whether Bloom wasn’t subjecting music to stringent criteria he would not apply to Shakespeare, Giacometti, or other artists whose works often inspire longings, passions, or alienations that Bloom would find unsavory. Bloom also didn’t tell us if he liked any 20th-century art. What was in between Othello and Ayn Rand, for him?