A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading

them over, and get its mitts on record distribution in the bargain. Nor is it all about the Benjamins. If by popular music you mean domestic palliatives from “Home Sweet to Celine Dion, OK, that’s another realm. But most of what’s now played in concert halls and honored at the Kennedy Center has its roots in antisocial impulses—in a carpe diem hedonism that is a way of life for violent men with money to burn who know damn well they’re destined for prison or the morgue. Most music books assume or briefly acknowledge these inconvenient facts when they don’t ignore them altogether. But they’re central to two recent histories and two recent memoirs, all highly recommended. Memphis-based Preston Lauterbach’s The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Roots of Rock ’n’ Roll For anyone who cares about the history of pop—and also, in a better world, anyone relishes the criminal origins of a mostly southern black club scene from the early ’30s to who cares about the history of the avant-garde—Between Montmartre and the Mudd the late ’60s. Journalist-bizzer Dan Charnas’s history of the hip-hop industry, The Big has a big story to tell. Popular music is generally identified with the rise of Payback, steers clear of much small-timeClub thuggery and leaves brutal LA label boss Suge Knight to Ronin Ro’s Have Gun, Willsong Travel, publishing butROBERT plenty and of piano crime manufacture stories rise up inas theprofits mid-nineteenth century. But starting snowball. Ice-T’s Ice devotes twenty-fivein the 1880s, steely artists pages toand the other lucrative fringe-dwelling heisting operation weirdos have been active as pop the rapper-actor ran before he madeperformers, music his composers, job. And ’60s impresarios, hitmaker Tommy and entrepreneurs. James’s Gendron aims to turn all Me, the Mob, and the Music isthese an artist interrelationships memoir distinguished into aby single its substantial coherent portrait narrative. of American pop’s most legendaryCHRISTGAU gangster, Morris Levy. His organizing conceit locates the relevant connections first in modernist Paris Owner of Roulette and countless other labels as well as the jazz club Birdland and the (section title: “Pop Into Art”) and then, at greater length, in postmodernist Strawberries record retailing chain, Levy is said to be the model for Hesh Rabkin of The New York (“Art Into Pop”). He posits five stages: bohemian cabaret, ’20s jazz as Sopranos and deserves fuller treatment than James’s fast-moving 225-pager. After he died of cancer while appealingmisapprehended an extortion conviction in Paris in by 1990, Milhaud a few ofand Levy’s Cocteau, machinations then bebop, the canonization were detailed in the likesof the of DorothyBeatles, Wadeand New and JustineYork punk/new Picardie’s Ahmet wave Ertegunand postpunk/no wave. That bebop BOOKbiography, Music Man,is no and more John “postmodernist” A. Jackson’s Alan Freed than biography,abstract expressionism Big Beat Heat. Butisn’t the only flaw in the James’s stories are theschema—swing most closely observed was far to more date. aestheticizedIRS men examine than Levy’s Gendron books acknowledges,for so the hippie long that he gives ballroomsthem their ownof San office Francisco at Roulette, get short where shrift, low-level etc. enforcers But Gendron and future doesn’t pretend to Genovese boss Tommytouch allEboli the stroll bases, in andand out. deserves Levy roughs thanks up for James’s tackling first a topicmanager no and one else has ever threatens James himself. When James gets his draft notice, Levy phones a friend who’s on gotten near. His research has been prodigious; I learned hundreds of things. But I REPORTSthe board of both Chemical Bank and the Selective Service, and James is classified 4-F. was left in the dark about many others, and in what is always a dismaying pattern, Finally, in 1972, with the hits dried up anyway, James confronts Levy in a pill-fueled rage found that the more I knew about any subject, the less I thought Gendron did. and walks out with his knees intact. James hatedPiquantly, Morris Levy. Gendron Yet he levels also loved an arsenal him, and of he’s Big not Concepts the only at one. what With the James, average snob maybe thiswould is understandable. judge a minor Although cultural he byway. and his Pierre Shondells Bourdieu’s were no notionPaul Revere of “cultural and the capital,” A Music Critic Raidersin quality-wise, which status he traderswas a smart, valorize ambitious, works hardworking of art and styles kid compelled of connoisseurship to learn the to on His First Love, musicaugment business attheir nineteen, own socialand so and Levy economic inevitably becamepower, aunderlies father figure—a Gendron’s father entire figure analysis. Which Was Reading whoAndreas robbed him Huyssen’s of millions essential in royalties distinction while overseeing between a thefive-year “high runmodernism” where James of the ’30s made his own pile touring, served as a youth advisor to Hubert Humphrey, and married and ’40s, which was “unrelentingly hostile to mass culture,” and “historical avant- a Mob-linked Roulette secretary whose dad forwarded the kids pharmaceutical samples gardes” (especially dada) that were friendly to it, is adduced most explicitly in an endnote but fruitfully fleshed out in the text. Gendron’s own useful terminological contribution is the “secondary practice,” which encompasses all the public lifestyles, presentational paraphernalia, venue stylings, and promotional ploys that inflect the BOOK REPORTS ROBERT CHRISTGAU BOOK REPORTS A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading duke university press Durham and London 2019 © 2019, Edition, previously unpublished pieces, Robert Christgau All rights reserved. All other materials are previously published. Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper ∞ Designed by Matthew Tauch Typeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. isbn xxxxxx (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn xxxxxx (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn xxxxxx (ebook) “The Pop- Boho Connection, Narrativized: Bernard Gendron’s Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club” previously published as “The Pop- Boho Connection: History as Discourse, or Is It the Other Way Around?” © Summer 2002, Bookforum Review of David Wondrich’s Stomp and Swerve, October 9 issue © 2006, Seattle Weekly “The Impenetrable Heroism of Sam Cooke: Peter Guralnick’s Dream Boogie,” previously published as “In Search of Sam Cooke” © 2005, The Nation “A Darker Shade of Noir: The Indefatigable Walter Mosley,” © 2006, The Nation “Biography of a Corporation” published in Where Did Our Love Go? © Nelson George All se lections that have appeared in The New York Times are reprinted here by permission. All se lections that have appeared in The Village Voice are reprinted by permission. In memory of Marshall Berman 1940–2013 who read more books than anyone I’ve ever known except maybe Simon Frith (and Jonathan Lethem) Contents xiii Acknowledgments 1 introduction I Collectibles 11 The Informer: John Leonard’s When the Kissing Had to Stop 14 Advertisements for Every body Else: Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence 17 Demo cratic Vistas: Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar II From Blackface Minstrelsy to Track- and- Hook 23 In Search of Jim Crow: Why Postmodern Minstrelsy Studies Matter 40 The Old thiopiansE at Home: Ken Emerson’s Doo- Dah! 43 Before the Blues: David Wondrich’s Stomp and Swerve 46 Rhythms of the Universe: Ned Sublette’s Cuba and Its Music 49 Black Melting Pot: David B. Coplan’s In Township To night! 56 Bwana- Acolyte in the Favor Bank: Banning Eyre’s In Griot Time 59 In the Crucible of the Party: Charles and Angeliki Keil’s Bright Balkan Morning 64 Defining the Folk: Benjamin Filene’s Romancing the Folk 67 Folking Around: David Hajdu’s Positively 4th Street 70 Punk Lives: Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me 72 Biography of a Corporation: Nelson George’s Where Did Our Love Go? 75 Hip- Hop Faces the World: Steven Hager’s Hip Hop; David Toop’s The Rap Attack; and Nelson George, Sally Banes, Susan Flinker, and Patty Romanowski’s Fresh 80 Making Out Like Gangsters: Preston Lauterbach’s The Chitlin’ Cir cuit, Dan Charnas’s The Big Payback, Ice- T’s Ice, and Tommy James’s Me, the Mob, and Music 86 Money Isn’t Every thing: Fred Goodman’s The Mansion on the Hill 89 Mapping the Earworm’s Genome: John Seabrook’s The Song Machine III Critical Practice 97 Beyond the Symphonic Quest: Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings 100 All in the Tune Family: Peter van der Merwe’s Origins of the Popu lar Style 102 Bel Cantos: Henry Pleasants’s The Great American Popu lar Singers 109 The Country and the City: Charlie Gillett’s The Sound of the City 115 Reflections of an Aging Rock Critic: Jon Landau’s It’s Too Late to Stop Now 117 Pioneer Days: Kevin Avery’s Every thing Is an Afterthought and Nona Willis Arono witz’s (ed.) Out of the Vinyl Deeps 123 Impolite Discourse: Jim DeRogatis’s Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer’s A Whore Just Like the Rest, and Nick Tosches’s The Nick Tosches Reader 129 Journalism and/or Criticism and/or Musicology and/or Sociology (and/or Writing): Simon Frith 137 Serious Music: Robert Walser’s Running With the Dev il 139 Fifteen Minutes of . : William York’s Who’s Who in Rock Music 140 The anzineF Worldview, Alphabetized: Ira A. Robbins’s (ed.) The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Rec ords 143 Awesome: Simon Reynolds’s Blissed Out 147 Ingenuousness Lost: James Miller’s Flowers in the Dustbin 151 Rock Criticism Lives!: Jessica Hopper’s The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic 156 Emo Meets Trayvon Martin: Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us IV Lives in Music Inside and Out 163 Great Book of Fire: Nick Tosches’s Hellfire and Robert Palmer’s Jerry Lee Lewis Rocks! 169 That Bad Man, Tough Old Huddie Ledbetter: Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell’s The Life and Legend of Leadbelly 171 The mpenetrableI Heroism of Sam Cooke: Peter Guralnick’s Dream Boogie 178 Bobby and Dave: Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One and Dave Van Ronk’s The Mayor of MacDougal Street 180 Tell All: Ed Sanders’s Fug You and Samuel R.

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