Clamor of the Godz: Radical Incompetence in 1960s Rock

Just about everyone is a musician. Most scholars of music find this view fairly uncontroversial. We often define music as “humanly organized sound” or something similar, and allow a wide range of human behaviors into its purview.¹ If one sings in the shower, one makes music. If someone taps his or her fingers rhythmically while waiting for a bus, he or she makes music. As the well-known example of percussionist Evelyn Glennie indicates, profoundly deaf people can comprehend and perform complex music, and recent scholarship demonstrates the significant musical capabilities of those whose disabilities, such as blindness or Asperger’s syndrome, lead others to stigmatize them as abnormal.² Other than “amusical” people, such as those described by Oliver Sacks, whose neurological makeup renders them unable to perceive or make music, every person appears to be a musician.³

Not everyone, however, accepts this broad definition of musicianship. Ethnomusicologists have reported, certainly, on societies that seem to regard everyone as more or less equally musical. Thomas Turino points out that “some societies do not even have the concept of innate musical talent; the Aymara of Peru and the Venda of South Africa generally think of musical and dance ability as being available to anyone who has the interest and who puts in time and effort.”⁴ Industrial and postindustrial societies that admire and market the work of professional musicians, however, typically have rigorous aesthetic and technical standards by which they judge what is and is not acceptably “musical,” and most members of a given society do not excel by these standards. The finger-tapper and shower-singer manifest a deep-seated human impulse to organize sound, but society at large, and especially the person in the adjoining cubicle or apartment, rarely holds their individual expressions in high regard. Several scholars have examined the means by which cultural institutions separate musicianly wheat from untalented chaff. John Blacking argues that the ethnocentric assumption of Western music’s supposed exceptional complexity “brings about a degree of social exclusion: being a passive audience is the price that some must pay for membership in a superior society whose superiority is sustained by the exceptional ability of a chosen few.”⁵ Henry Kingsbury, in his ethnographic study of the pseudonymous “Eastern Metropolitan Conservatory of Music,” demonstrates that the notion of “talent” in U.S. concert music circles “interprets musical expression in terms of the recruitment of an elite” and conversely channels ostensibly “unmusical” people into another social role, that of the self-deprecating “musically untalented person.”⁶

Institutions in the realm of popular music similarly police the boundary between talent and incompetence. TV’s American Idol, for example, features public mockery of unsuccessful auditionees. Matthew Wheelock Stahl describes American Idol’s “narratives of humiliation” as “instructive tableaux of punishment and vengeance that serve simultaneously as further legitimation and authentication of those in whom the desired talents inhere, and as graphic warnings to all those considering an attempt to breach a field for which their talents are not appropriate.”⁷ More anecdotally, anyone who teaches introductory music courses to undergraduates, at least in the United States, has met the apprehensive student who explains bashfully on the first day of the semester that he or she, while a lover of music, is unfortunately “tone-deaf” or “not musical” and thus worries about fitting into the class. Such students see music as a source of shame and insecurity rather than a natural ability that they can enjoy and celebrate.

Music scholars do not always limit themselves to reporting on these narrow notions of musicianship. Sometimes they assume the role of activists who seek respect for overlooked or denigrated musicians. Ethnomusicologists often stick up for the importance of everyday music-making in the face of oppressive canons of good taste, which they sometimes link to Western cultural imperialism. Bruno Nettl argues that

although [ethnomusicologists] take into account a society’s own hierarchy of its various kinds of music, and its musicians, we want to study not only what is excellent but also what is ordinary and even barely acceptable. We do not privilege...