Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism

2. Pop

43 CHAPTER 2 Pop Over the course of Goldstein’s polemic, his tone grew more urgent—one might even say incensed. “We learn to tell Dostoevski from Spillane, but we know nothing about the flicks,” he wrote. “We learn to tell Rembrandt from Keane, but we know nothing about advertising.” Here, in the fourth edition of his new Village Voice column Pop Eye, Goldstein’s argument crescendoed toward the neglect of music. After outlining the sonic and stylistic differences between genres within the new popular music, the author charged: We learn to deal with classical music and legitimate theatre but we know nothing about the sights and sounds which bombard us perpetually in the name of pop. And pop is not mere entertainment; it is anything but passive and conventional. Television, radio, advertising, and cinema have radically changed the perceptions of every man on any street. The question now is how to deal with pop—how do we screen the fallout from Madison Avenue? How do we evaluate our responses to the electronic waves racing through our living room? How do we tell what is noise and what is good, even artistic, rock ’n’ roll?1 Goldstein’s column mounted a sharp rebuttal to the critical stance on popular culture that prevailed in intellectual circles for much of the post– World War II period. Using the Voice as a platform from which to intervene in the mass culture debates, Pop Eye pioneered “pop criticism”: writing that aimed to engage seriously yet accessibly with mass culture on its own terms. In this gesture, his writing resonated with, responded to, and extended arguments of his contemporaries such as Susan Sontag, Marshall McLuhan, and Herbert Marcuse, as well as the companion movements in Pop Art, new media, participatory democracy, neo-Freudianism, and postmodernism 44 CHAPTER TWO which enthralled and included them. In devoting itself primarily to rock music, Pop Eye ensured not only that the new music received serious treatment , but also that music was the lynchpin of a new critical ethos. Yet the difficulties of this endeavor revealed themselves almost immediately , delimited by the contradictions of the age, of rock music, and of Goldstein himself. As he railed against the educational establishment’s neglect of his generational culture, it was that same education on which he built his own critical lexicon and praxis. His arguments fell in line with critical and popular movements that championed appreciation of popular/populist culture, while at the same time they reproduced old hierarchies and erected new ones in this uncharted terrain. Moreover, to the degree that popular culture was rapidly changing in form, content, and industry, criticism itself became not only a commentary on trends, but a tool that increasingly could, and would, be utilized to manage them. As the critical perspective of Goldstein’s Pop Eye column developed during its first months, it redirected the discourse about popular culture in journalistic, intellectual, and political terms. Pop Eye became more than a celebration of the popular: it was a space that tackled and laid open larger questions about the substance and use value of popular culture and the critic ’s role within it. The initial installments were also experiments, displays of the difficulties involved in maintaining a robust criticism without altering the thing criticized for the worse. In time, these difficulties manifested a striking change in Goldstein’s attitude toward popular culture, whereupon enthusiasm for its revolutionary power quickly transformed into shrewd, even cynical expositions on its machinations. Developments within the music business factored heavily into the environment on which Goldstein was commenting, though I will for the moment table an in-depth discussion of those points. It is not my intent to artificially separate economic components from cultural ones, but rather to give the intricacies of this situation their proper weight. Together, this chapter and the next will illuminate how rock critics began to negotiate the paradoxes that were becoming visible within the music industry, the music itself, and their own profession during second half of the 1960s. Mass Culture and Critique The questions Goldstein’s writing confronted locate him within centuriesold deliberations about the social worth of popular entertainment. The pastimes of “the people” occupied the minds of commentators in the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome as much as they did those of intellectuals Pop 45 of early twentieth-century America and at many points in between, though with different contexts...