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

3. Hype

74 CHAPTER 3 Hype In college, they showed us an anthropology film about a tribe in Africa somewhere , in the middle of a ferocious famine, and the men had to go out hunting giraffes, with water slung over their shoulders, and singing, walking for arid days, trying to smell giraffe dung in the clouds, until finally, over a distant ridge, they saw just the neck of an enormous giraffe with spots like brown eyes. As it smelled them its feet churned and its neck waved panicky in the wind—glorious in color—but the men whooped, shook their singing bolos overhead, and ran after the animal; it leaping, careening, and the men tossing their weapons at the animal’s legs—legs spread apart for distance—until, hit once, again, it fell straight on its head like the log of the century . . . fell on its face, waiting, and as the men slashed with their knives, the animal’s eyes closed slowly, heavily, lids quivering . . . Rock ’n’ roll is the giraffe. Public relations men, disc jockeys, emcees, executives, socko boffo copy boys, fabulous blondes, prophets, frauds, fakes, connect-the-dots copies, and under-assistant West Coast promo men hunt with their snares and bolos, cut, castrate, slice up the meat, and hang shaggy heads in trophy.1 The above is an excerpt from Richard Goldstein’s “Giraffe Hunters,” a piece he wrote toward the end of 1966. Its graphic imagery portended what would be the overwhelming theme of his writing as his tenure at the Voice came to a close: the industry’s violent, dramatic capture of the spirit of rock. Coming just months after his column’s enthusiastic beginning, “Giraffe Hunters” heaves with both resignation and fear. With little to hope for, Goldstein watched in disgust as hungering ravagers devoured the music he loved. The hunters sought more than just music; Goldstein himself had become prey. As the quality of mainstream rock deteriorated, Goldstein began a tac- Hype 75 tical retreat to the underground, a zone he imagined would nurture his continuing faith in the possibility of cultural radicalism. Yet as underground music exploded in popularity, it too ran the risk of exploitation, and this reality struck the young writer with a deep and highly personalized blow.2 He quickly recognized that the process of unearthing music was far from simple—it was thorny, and potentially even wrong. Goldstein’s transitioning attitudes regarding the power and perils of media exposure contained new truths about mass culture and critical practice that clashed angrily with his one-time fantasies of mediated revolution. Moreover, though Goldstein did not damn criticism in his rant, journalism in general and rock criticism in particular played an explicit role in the very situation he was lamenting. As the industrial production of music changed over the course of 1966 and beyond, the press around it developed into an established business that intertwined with the industry it covered. At the same time, mainstream journalism, unevenly hipping itself to new cultural trends, spread awareness of the new music beyond the reach of the alternative press that generally housed rock criticism, and began to mimic the types of coverage found in the below-radar publications. The emerging collusion between the music industry and the mass media would earn a name: hype. Coming into common parlance during the middle 1960s, hype in the most straightforward definition is public relations, usually of the type that borders on stunt. But for Goldstein, hype had both literal and metaphorical implications that would deeply impact his practice. Hype was the antithesis of authenticity—the poison pill that threatened to contaminate his beloved underground culture and choke the spaces where good rock music could flourish. Hype defiled mass media, turning what was once the powerhouse behind popular culture into just another mechanism for selling it. Hype was an indiscriminate and stealthy traveler, coming variously in the form of a psychedelically tinged advertisement or over the lips of a long-haired music executive, on the cover of a major market magazine, or even from the pen of a fellow rock critic. And hype threatened, and perhaps even made impossible, the profession that Goldstein held dear and the kind of intellectual work that had come to define him. The previous chapter concerned how Goldstein’s pop criticism intentionally de-territorialized the categories of high and low; this chapter explores what it did unawares to reshape the relationship between culture’s mainstream and its margins. In the mire of intensifying music...