The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over from Romanticism to Rock and Roll (review)

The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over from Romanticism to Rock and Roll. By Perry Meisel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. [ix, 156 p. ISBN 0-19-511817-0. $24.95.]

It has become commonplace to describe as "romantic" too unreflective a subscription to the ideologies undergirding the investment of rock and roll with cultural and political meaning. Perry Meisel's The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over from Romanticism to Rock and Roll confronts head-on the question of what romanticism and rock and roll actually have to do with one other. The result is an important book, well argued and highly inventive. Most undergraduates and general readers will find some pretty hard going here; Meisel's prose is imposingly dense and not altogether free of critical jargon. But The Cowboy and the Dandy should be considered essential reading for scholars of rock and roll and of popular culture in general, and it forms an original contribution to late- romantic literary studies as well.

Through a broad, synthetic historical vision reminiscent of Susan McClary's Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), Meisel argues persuasively that rock and roll and its stylistic precursors share with late romanticism a common set of concerns and tendencies. With the cowboy and the dandy embodying, respectively, the American geographic expansion westward and the European aesthetic expansion inward, Meisel shows that romanticism and rock and roll are both, at heart, about crossing boundaries. The literary and musical readings that make up the bulk of the book tease out dynamic crossings and recrossings of a dizzying array of oppositional frameworks: country and city, self and world, black and white, East and West, voice and instrument, tradition and progress, and more. Meisel is hardly the first to explode as hopelessly naive the standard formula describing the stylistic origins of rock and roll: r&b + country = r&r. (This equation has been qualified, complicated, and outright maligned for almost as long as it has existed.) But Meisel's book feels like nothing so much as a vindication of the basic modus operandi behind this formulation, an affirmation that rock must be thought of in terms of the constitutive dichotomies it dances across.

The pairing of rock and romanticism is not, in itself, new territory. Most significantly, Robert Pattison's The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) discerns in nineteenth-century pantheism a justification for the celebration of "vulgarity," on which rock's aesthetic and social power is founded. But Meisel's book and Pattison's ultimately have little to do with one another, distinct not only in the basic terms of the rock-romanticism analogies they seek to draw, but in the principal subject matter of their investigations into rock. Meisel's argument turns on a rich collection of close musical and textual readings; Pattison's, which is almost free of musical observations of any kind, takes on "the idea of rock" (Pattison, x) in the broadest terms.

Buddy Holly's recording session with New York saxophonist "King" Curtis Ousley --one of Meisel's many inspired choices of historical nexus--launches his first chapter's exploration of black urbanity, which is rooted, as Meisel sees it, in the self- conscious making and unmaking of boundaries. The second chapter centers on the mythology of the West, pitting the American romanticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson (who takes on the unlikely role of "cowboy" in this equation) against that of the English Walter Pater (who plays the "dandy") in an argument that deftly analogizes the interior and exterior frontiers that form romanticism's unified field of exploration. These two chapters establish the rhythm sustained in the remainder of the book, which unfolds in a loosely interlocking series of studies dedicated alternately to musical and literary subjects. The third chapter takes on the electric blues of Muddy Waters and...