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

4. Identity

98 CHAPTER 4 Identity The Voice critics who wrote into 1969 and beyond continued to question the efficacy of a rock-fueled revolution—a debate deeply intertwined with concerns over whether rock culture was losing its momentum, cogency, and meaning. Christgau professed his ambivalence in his column Rock & Roll &, writing “Rock and roll . . . is going to revolutionize the world,” before qualifying it with a glib “Well, not exactly.”1 Lucian Truscott IV, a regular writer for Riffs, explained that recent experiences had been “leading me in one direction: away from rock,” but allowed that perhaps “rock has left me,” in part because it “has become a subculture.” He continued, lamenting that “within the realm of rock remains a memory of the excitement of days and music long past, even though the excitement is today no longer there” (emphasis in original).2 Another occasional Riffs contributor, Sandy Pearlman , hypothesized that “rock ’n’ roll’s no political instrument” and that any sway it might wield in that realm will last “only momentarily . . . It can’t be sustained.”3 The changing contours of rock music culture baffled critics, causing them to question the nature of rock music as well as their role as its gatekeepers . Saying that the music lacked “excitement” did more than indict the output of musicians. It also implicated the audience, which included critics as the consummate consumers. Was it wrongheaded, the critics wondered, to believe that music might politicize listeners—and, if so, should criticism be excused from any requirement to, say, champion the movement, stand against the Vietnam War, or instigate revolutionary sentiment? Rock music may have been “energy,” but that energy increasingly directed itself toward a “revolution in style,” as Christgau adroitly observed.4 Should criticism take a stand against this trend, or go with it? Identity 99 Rock music of the late 1960s and early 1970s was vital popular culture and thriving capitalist enterprise, but to many observers both inside and outside of music labels, its reign as the predominant music of young people was coming to an end. More acts, from a variety of musical genres and subgenres, attracted the attention of the majors of the music business; these labels, in turn, paid keen attention to audience demographics and poached profitable acts from weaker independents, fragmenting the audience even further.5 These strategies reflected movement toward market segmentation, a practice that had become more sophisticated and widespread throughout the consumer landscape during the previous two decades. As Lizabeth Cohen writes in her authoritative history of American consumerism, it was during the late 1950s that market researchers began to emphasize segmentation in earnest, presuming consumer diversity rather than conformity and exploring distinct ways to market products to multiple populations.6 As the technique became entrenched over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, it gave rise to ethnic marketing, which took off during the 1970s and played a fundamental role in the “demassification of American cultural identity” and Americans’ morphing relationships to their immigrant heritage.7 Segmentation in the consumer market found something of an unlikely corollary in the political realm through the rise of identity politics. The landmark civil rights and voting legislation of 1964 and 1965 evidenced a pinnacle in the integrationist strides the Civil Rights movement inspired in American political and social life, but the movement would also recalibrate the form and tenor of grassroots politics. By the early 1960s, the New Left, the early stages of the feminist movement, protests against the Vietnam War, and the transgressions of the counterculture joined the Civil Rights movement to demand rights, reconfigure the relationship between public and private, significantly revise and in some cases reject core American values, and push ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and other categories of identity to the forefront of political participation. While these progressive movements overlapped significantly and shared a mission to redesign the status quo, they also pinpointed divisions that would magnify as the 1960s moved toward and into the 1970s. The shift toward identity politics and other modes of granular political change reflect yet another aspect of postmodernity, which I have already discussed in earlier chapters in terms of its economic and cultural shifts. David Harvey’s classic characterization, for instance, calls postmodernity a moment in which “The experience of time and space has changed, the confidence in the association between scientific and moral judgments has collapsed, aesthetics has triumphed over ethics as a prime focus of social and intellectual concern, images dominate narratives, ephemerality and [3.17.186.218...