Script
Script We’re messing around, the three of us, getting ready to go home and rubbishing each other’s five best side one track ones of all time (mine: “Janie Jones,” the Clash, from The Clash; “Thunder Road,” Bruce Springsteen, from Born to Run; “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nirvana, from Nevermind; “Let’s Get It On,” Marvin Gaye, from Let’s Get It On; “Return of the Grevious Angel,” Gram Parsons, from Grevious Angel). Barry: “Couldn’t you make it more obvious than that? What about the Beatles? What about the Rolling Stones? What about the fucking . . . the fucking . . . Beethoven? —Nick Hornby, High Fidelity T his book is composed of a series of essayistic encounters, the first and foremost being between Chuck Berry and Ludwig van Beethoven, the duck-walking, Gibson-guitar-wielding rocker from St. Louis and the definitive Western icon of musical genius. Although the not so “vanishing mediator” of this discursive encounter is Theodor Adorno, the title of the book is intended to recollect not only Berry’s great rock anthem, “Roll Over Beethoven” (1956), but the rebellious spirit of early rock ’n’ roll and American popular culture itself. In other words, if Adorno stands for European high culture and all things classical, including and especially music (Beethoven being, for Adorno, the consummate figure of artistic expression), Chuck Berry—the de facto king of rock ’n’ roll—signifies American popular culture in all its iconoclastic energy. Before I turn to a more formal, chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the book, I might mention that part of my attraction to popular culture stems, like my interest in fantasy, from a wish to engage politically fraught topics. One corollary of this wish has been a strong desire to attend to the intricacies of the aesthetic register, the kinks and quirks of individual texts, to maintain a high or, if you will, hi-lo fidelity to what Adorno in a letter to Walter Benjamin calls the “objectivity of phantasmagoria.” xvii Part 1, “Popular Music: Hi-Lo Fidelity,” examines the role of popular music in American culture from early rock ’n’ roll to recent debates , in the wake of MP3 and P2P technologies, about the death of the music industry. Chapter 1, “Rock ’n’ Theory: Cultural Studies, Autobiography , and the Death of Rock,” starts by turning back the clock to the rock-around-the-clock 1950s. This ’50s tack is mirrored in the musical form of the chapter, which is structured like a 45 record. On the “A” side, called “Memory Train” (after Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train”), I present a brief sketch of the birth of rock ’n’ roll in the context of some of the more memorable popular-musical moments in my life. The point of these personal reflections is to italicize the specific, even autobiographical , sources of rock criticism. On the “B” (theory) side, I read Lawrence Grossberg’s work on popular music, a singular instance of cultural studies, as a symptom of the unexamined racial, sexual, national , and international assumptions that frequently subtend claims about the “death of rock.” My focus here is the, for some, oxymoronic combination “rock ’n’ theory”—in particular, what happens when rock becomes an object of theoretical speculation. Finally, in the conclusion to the chapter, a self-reflexive coda that owes a debt to Chuck Berry, I muse on the relation between contemporary youth culture and popular music as well as the generational fantasies that underwrite so many rise-and-fall histories of rock music. Chapter 2, “Roll Over Adorno: Beethoven, Chuck Berry, and Popular Music in the Age of MP3,” reflects—in the idiom of the essay, Adorno’s favored form—on the classic cultural-industrial problematic in the context of popular music. In this, the title chapter, I concentrate on the medium of music rather than, say, film or TV not simply because music is arguably the most ubiquitous art form today, from radio to MP3, but because it offers a unique lens with which to focus the various questions that motivate this book: the status of popular culture and audiovisual media at the beginning of the twenty-first century; the tension in postmodernism between aesthetics and politics, art and entertainment ; and the role of critical theory and popular-cultural studies in the present conjuncture. The premise is that if Berry is something like the wild dialectical other of Adorno, this binary opposition is not a simple one nor, as I demonstrate in my reading of the two, does it...
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