Rock and the Facts of Life (1970)

( 30 Rock and the Facts of Life (1970) Charles Hamm But let's remember the essence ofpopular music. A song comes on. What do you hear first? Words? Nah, you hear a beat, then a melody. Take 'My Sharona." Ifyou really liked the song, then you took the time to dig out the words, and they're pubescent, dumbo words, but they fit the song. -Billy Joel (Kohut and Kohut 1994, 49) Lyrics will hurt a song is they're too adult, too artistic, too correct. You should shy away .from anything too deep or too happy. -Brill Building songwriter Gerry Goffin (Szatmary 2009, 67) As Charles Hamm, historian of American music, observes in his 1995 introduction to this essay written in 1970, until recently the canon in academic music study largely excluded pop ular ("vernacular") music. In 1970 Hamm suggested that scholars should look outside their largely classical music canon, and take into account a// the various forms of music created and consumed in America. His suggestion met with some remarkably intemperate responses, reminiscent of the worst of '50s rock bashing. Hamm struck out on his own, nevertheless, and produced some of the most influential writing on American popular music. According to Hamm, mainstream commercial pop in the first half of the twentieth century spoke largely about one subject: romantic love between a man and a woman. The ten most popular songs in the week of May 8, 1954 were nearly uniform in this regard, to the exclusion of any other topic.The music was equally homogenous in style.Thus, popular music in the early '50s gave a narrow and distorted view: this music did not question life in America, nor, appar ently did those who listened to it. Fast forward to May 9, 1970: after a turbulent decade (Civil Rights, the Vietnam war; Kent State, and so forth), the Top Ten now reflects a very wide range of topics (religion, sex, toler ance, criticism of war), and shows a broad range of musical styles. Especially noteworthy is the political and social content of the songs listed by Hamm, which question American life in a way not seen in 1954. Like the blues before it, rock offered a much more realistic portrayal of life than the pop music it succeeded. Rock said that people are lonely. that there is a physical side to love, that war is wrong, and many other things .. 223 224 Charles Hamm Rock and the Facts of Life 225 recent decades, but at the same time to enrich [INTRODUCTION] and revitalize the field by constant broadening of the types of music, stylistic and chronological, that our scholars and When I arrived at Princeton University to begin work on a Ph.D. in musicology in teachers are concerned with, [and] to embrace whatever new methodology and aes 1957, with a life-long interest and involvement in various genres of American music, thetic is necessary to deal most sensibly with this larger and more varied body of 3 I discovered that: material. All books, monographs, editions, periodicals, and other materials considered neces~ary Reaction from certain musicological quarters was immediate and predictable. The for successfully completing the degree had been collected in a large study-seminar then-director of graduate studies in musicology at Columbia University, a noted room .... The word "canon" was never used then, but the ideology, though never writer on Early Music, responded in the following issue of the same publication: articulated could not have been clearer. The corpus of music and literature on music The gist of [Hamm's] argument is that one necessary for the pursuit of musicology was finite; it was all .here in this room; and . of the best musicological journals in the world, familiarly and affectionately known once our apprenticeship was completed and we moved out into the hard world of as JAMS, together with those who are suf ficiently misguided to receive and read it academia, our success would be measured by whether or not our own work would one regularly, should be censured for failing to give publicity to jazz, pop, rock, folk, tape, and trick music-if indeed the Muses have any day be brought into this room. The [general] stacks were situated just outside the door of our sanctuary, and occa- thing at all to do with these monosyllabic forms of activity. My reply is that neither the Journal nor its supporters sionally, when none of my professors or fellow students was about, I would sneak a look deserve censure of any kind or degree; and it is no more incumbent upon them to feature the commercial at a score by John Cage or Charles Ives, or at a book. about so~thern folk hymnody~ or ephemerides that blight the artistic ecology of our sad planet a bound collection of nineteenth-century sheet music. I felt like a teenager browsing than it is desirous that they should advertise cola drinks, greasy kid stuff, or the pill. through a collection of pornography.1 We are told that "many younger people of today ... understand only too well the 2 What Wiley Hitchcock would later label "vernacular music" was no part of this artistic, historical, and sociological value of this music." Younger than whom? Perhaps canon, and my proposal to write a dissertation on nineteenth-century shape-note, this sentence should read: "many immature quasi-illiterates understand perfectly the music was rejected out of hand. Dufay was acceptable, ~owever, .and my career as atavistic, hysterical, and social appeal of this noise." For noise most of it is, if you will a scholar of Renaissance music was launched. But my interest m other types of consider the deafening volume at which most of it must be reproduced, and the music continued, and in 1970, as a member of a panel considering "Music and incident of permanently damaged eardrums among its practitioners. As for hysteria, evidence is superabundant, ranging Higher Education in the 1970s" during a joint conference of the American from a kind of mass hypnosis through drug addiction to murder. 4 Musicological Society and the College Music Society in Toronto, I suggested the following: This same gentleman had written elsewhere, in response to a suggestion by Arthur Parris that Bach's cantatas were the "commercial" music of their The last five years have witnessed a period of intense and significant activity in day: American music almost without parallel in our history, a period of vitality and accom Bach wrote his cantatas as part of his duties as a director of music, a:nd for the glory of plishment in composition, performance, involvement of large .and varied. g.roups of Almighty God. Commercial music is written or improvised (the mode of transmission people with this music, and above all of interaction be~een :nusic-and m~s.icians-a~d is of little importance) by decomposers as part of their duties as corrupters of public the exciting and troubling events that have made t~is period such a cntic~l one in taste, and for the glory of the Almighty Dollar .... IfMr. Parris can honestly com pare American history. I am speaking not only of "art" music, of course, but the e~tire range the finest of Binchois, or of any other great composer before or since, with the of musical activity, from John Cage to Jimi Hendrix, Terry Riley to Simon and primitive vomiting noises wallowing in over-amplified imbecility that typifies most Garfunkel, Cecil Taylor to Roger Reynolds, Gordon Mumma to The Band to Merle "commercial" non-music of today, he would be well advised to cure his addiction to Haggard to "Hair." . value judgements.5 And I confess that I find it disturbing that none of this activity has been reflected in the publications and other official activities ?f the American :"1~s~cological Society, It was in this climate that I made my first attempts to write about what I saw as and very little of it in the teaching and other involvements of individual members of America's "intense and significant" music of the 1960s and its interaction with "the the Society. exciting and troubling events" of the day. There was no literature in my own discipline [I] suggest that the most sensible and profitable course for musicology in the c?m- to guide me. I knew some of the writing on "mass culture" by Adorno and other soci ing decade would seem to be one that would hold fast to the ~ethods and accomphs~ ologists, but I couldn't imagine that this dour, elitist, negative approach, exhibiting an ments that have made our discipline one of the fastest-growing and most respected in 3Charles Hamm, "A needed change of attitude," College Music Symposium 11 (1971), pp. 94-5. 4Denis Stevens, "Lower music and higher education," College Music Symposium 12 (1972). lCharles Hamm, "Expanding our musical heritage," Harvard Library Bulletin 211 (Sprin~ 1991), P· 13. 5Denis Stevens, The New York Times, 18 December 1971. 2H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, 1969). Rock and the Facts of Life 227 226 Charles Hamm almost total lack of familiarity with the music in question, could be fruitful. othe:1° ~at~ers as well. Citing Kenneth Burke's description of poetry as "equipment Journalistic writing by David Ewen and his peers seemed equally unpromising, as did for living, he ends by saying: the growing body of sociological "youth and leisure" literature, since it seemed to me I.four symbolic representations give a false or misleading impression of what life is that popular music cut a much wider swathe in American culture.

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