DO YOU LIKE AMERICAN MUSIC?: Unqualified Offerings defends rock’n’roll against Allan Bloom’s charges that rock “provides premature ecstasy… [and] artificially induces the exaltation naturally attached to the completion of the greatest endeavors–victory in a just war, consummated love, artistic creation, religious devotion and discovery of the truth.”

Bloom actually has a series of charges to press against rock. His first and most accurate point is that contemporary Americans have forgotten or ignored the power of music. Music seeps into virtually every moment of our lives. You can’t go anywhere without Muzak (there’s even a term, “elevator music,” suggesting how all-pervasive the stuff is) or radios or background music. There’s music to make us shop, top 40 hits at the local eatery or the grocery store, and Walkmen if you want to live your whole life to a soundtrack. Bloom, with the ancients, argues that far from being a harmless diversion, music is one of the more powerful forces in shaping our characters. I can’t recall the arguments he presents in support of that claim (I think he mainly argues by anecdote), but here are some possible reasons he’s right: Music is perhaps the art form least accessible to rationality, so it’s easier to be influenced by music without even noticing or being able to analyze what’s going on; our defenses are down when we hear beautiful music; music strikes the senses immediately, providing an instinctual attraction or revulsion, and only makes its way to our reason much later if at all; music is occult, not transparent or quickly intelligible, and thus some passions can be stirred by music that would be taboo if they were spoken outright (although this claim is less relevant in an anything-goes society); music, through rhythm, changes the heartbeat and thus even physically has a more visceral and less rational impact. Anyway, whatever the reasons, I find very persuasive Bloom’s basic claim that we are paying much too little attention to the music that colors almost all of our public moments.

Bloom’s specific claims against “rock’n’roll” as a genre are much more scattershot and ideological. He makes some good points; for example, he points out that many rock songs have a rhythmic structure that mimics sexual arousal and release. Such songs often give the listener a private, masturbation-like experience, in which arousal is unconnected to another person (or, as Bloom would be the first to recognize, an ideal or other outside object of love). He doesn’t point this out, but many of these rock songs also rely on (and therefore reinforce) a visceral connection between sex and aggression. I think it’s patently obvious that this connection exists in reality, in the human soul; but reinforcing the sex/aggression link leads to various screwed-up mentalities in which aggression is eroticized and fetishized, while sex is made more animalistic. Contemporary America fetishizes and exalts grievance, unearned alienation, manipulative (whether intentionally or not) sex, and instant gratification; unsurprisingly, so does lots of rock. (Which came first? Neither. Musicians reflect the surrounding culture, either to sell records or simply because cultural stances and poses are what they actually believe and want to express; the music, by making sexualized aggression cool, reinforces the culture.)

But there are two major problems with Bloom’s criticism: He conflates pop-culture, top-40 music with “rock”; and, like most authors of conservative jeremiads, he refuses to give contemporary culture any credit. The top 40, for good (Lauryn Hill, say) or ill (my favorite bad example is that song that goes, “Every freakin’ night and every freakin’ day, I wanna freak ya baby, in every freakin’ way”–which was popular around the time I first read Bloom), is full of music only tangentially connected to rock’n’roll. If Bloom wants to pick fights with the top 40 he has a complicated brawl on his hands. (Oh, and on a related note, I don’t think any of Bloom’s criticisms apply at all well to pre-’60s rock. “Tutti Frutti” just doesn’t do what “Sympathy for the Devil” does.)

UO has already talked about rock’s connection to rhythm and blues; because of that connection, it’s no surprise that rock is a terrific form for expressing yearning and resignation. Bloom also forgets that virtually every artistic genre contains the potential for self-critique; rock is as dialectical as anything else. Precisely because rock appeals to very visceral urges, desires, lusts, and longings, rock has produced ferocious, compassionate, or conflicted criticisms of our responses to those visceral facts. (The lyrics to “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” for example, are not what Bloom might expect or assume.)

UO gives a brief playlist of songs that express this rejection of the easy answers Bloom thought rock promoted. I think UO may be focusing too much on lyrics, at least in his descriptions of the songs (and I bet I’ll fall into the same trap; it’s much easier to talk about lyrics rather than music). Here’re some songs that I think disprove Bloom’s thesis about rock. These are all songs that I think can be fairly easily categorized as “rock”; I didn’t include stuff like Huggy Bear’s “Children Absent From Heaven Says,” anything by the Raincoats, any Cat Power, any rap, etc., because they’re too far from the kind of rock Bloom is trying to criticize.

1 & 2) Rolling Stones, “I Don’t Know Why I Love You,” and Bruce Springsteen, “Atlantic City.” These are paired because in both lyrics and music they’re painful, terrific expressions of longing and confusion–not the sort of emotions Bloom associates with rock! I think IDKWIL is a cover, but it’s hard to imagine that the original could have been better than the Stones’ version. It’s the classic “why do I love her when she hurts me so?” plaint, but possibly the best song of that kind that I know. There’s a tough, resigned rock swing to it, and a kind of beautiful-loser’s swagger that reminds me of Raymond Chandler. “Atlantic City” also reminds me of film noir, though really only in its central question, which it shares with “Sweet Smell of Success”: How much of your soul will the world make you sell? Unlike SSOS’s Sidney Falco, the narrator of “Atlantic City” is just trying to scrape by; but the same false (and they know it’s false!) hope that you can pawn your soul and then redeem it later animates both characters. The role of the woman in “Atlantic City” is also heartbreaking. Lyrics here.

3) Nirvana, “Polly.” So my theory (and look, another movie connection!) is that pretty much all of Nirvana’s songs are the rock equivalent of “The Ice Storm”: a look at the despair and chaos that whipsaws people who try to live as moral beings in an amoral society. People without moral compasses, but who still desperately want to be good. “Polly” is the best example of this; as with all Nirvana songs, the lyrics aren’t super-illuminating, but as far as I can tell it’s the story of a woman who is used by a man who, even as he’s using her, tries to respond to her; a man torn between love and selfishness. Somewhere or other (emails on this point are appreciated), I think I read that Kurt Cobain did in fact intend “Polly” to be about what I think it’s about, and that he stopped playing a fast and furious version of the song (which I’ve heard as “New Wave Polly”), replacing it with the slow, dragging version on the album, because he hated it when guys would start moshing to this song about something close to rape. Anyway–like “The Ice Storm,” Nirvana doesn’t offer any positive vision, but its negative vision is, in my opinion, honest, raw, and moral.

4) You can find all kinds of fun (and rockin’) implicit criticism of cock-rock in P.J. Harvey’s “Sheela-Na-Gig” and the X-Ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” Among many, many, many others. (Bikini Kill’s “Strawberry Julius” and “I Hate Danger” also come to mind.)

5) Blondie, “Dreaming.” Wistful–the hopeful wistfulness of a teenage girl imagining what it’ll be like when she’s grown up, when she’s for real. Reminds me of the young Penny Century (Beatriz Garcia) from Love and Rockets. I guess “One Way or Another” might be the older Penny Century?? The “Dreaming” girl should ask the guy in Elvis’s “Blue Moon” out… then they can both become disillusioned together.

6) Patti Smith, “Birdland.” Sweet, sad song.

7-10) A totally random assortment: The Clash, “Rudie Can’t Fail” (get up! get on up!); the X-Ray Spex, “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo” (much more fun than reading freakin’ Naomi Klein or whatever); Patti Smith, “Horses” (because not even Allan Bloom could figure out what’s going on there… except that it’s good); Elvis Costello, “Little Palaces” (how my friend Mike convinced me to get into EC).

11) The Smiths, “Rusholme Ruffians.” A stand-in for all the other great stuff from the Smiths–the guitar plays against the bassline, the brightness of the music plays against the sly darkness of the lyrics, and it all adds up to an awesome, ambiguous, totally enjoyable song.

I should add that even songs I know Bloom would reject can be really well-done–the Stones’ “Under My Thumb” and “Rocks Off” are definitely on my all-time top 10 list. They’re fun; UMT is musically nuanced; yeah, they sexualize aggression (I mean, this is Mick Jagger we’re talking about here), but given that Bloom is willing to see the point of authors (like Nietzsche) whom he finds ultimately destructive, you’d think he’d be able to see why listening to the Mickster now and again would not necessarily portend cultural collapse. The problems Bloom rightly notes in some/most rock are, in my view, only really pressing problems because they are so prevalent; and so the solution, as usual, is not to reject pop culture but to make better culture.

Also, I agree with rock-haters that we should question why we find some things “fun.” If you really doubt this, take a gander at what other cultures have considered a laugh riot–the way the Spartans baited helots, say, or the virulently racist gag gifts sold in this country. If you’d be leery of someone who, in 1964, thought a big-lipped black woman eating a watermelon was a hilarious shape for a cookie jar, then you should accept that it’s worthwhile to challenge your own sense of humor or pleasure. But some stuff really is just fun. Some aggressive, raunchy rock is just pedal-to-the-metal intense fun. Any social critique that can’t see the point of the Cramps, or “You Spin Me Right Round,” is clearly wack.