NRO Weekend, October 14-15, 2000 Issue
Rocking the Critics
Taking American rock journalism to task.

By Mark Gauvreau Judge, author of If It Ain't Got That Swing: the Rebirth of Grown-Up Culture

have seen the future of rock-&-roll journalism, and its name is Julie Burchill.

Actually, that's not true. I only wish it was. Julie Burchill is a music reviewer for the English newspaper the Guardian, and if you want to get a good idea of how lazy, timid, tautological, and downright crummy American rock journalism is, I direct your attention to a piece Burchill recently wrote about Madonna.

Some books, songs, and films really do make you believe that the chief ape in 'Planet of' was right when he maintained that human beings were lower than chimps. [The new Madonna song] 'Music' is one of them. Give 1,000 chimps access to recording equipment for 100 years and they would not, could not, produce anything as boring as this castrated, truncated funk.

So far so good. Acrid, yes, and a true shock to Americans, whose newspapers have arts editors so anxious to kiss Madonna's feet that they bump into Kurt Loder coming around the big toe. Burchill added that "the main problem is not that Madonna has no talent, but that she has hung around for the best part of 20 years throwing this in our faces." Madonna, she wrote, was nothing, and deserved to be nothing until, "a lazy media, always hungry for sex, ambition, and an easy, sleazy handle on feminism, set upon her as a symbol of practically everything."

Nice touches, to be sure, but still not beyond the realm of possibility in the states. That is, until Burchill does something that simply stuns. She brings up the emergency delivery Madonna had to make over the summer, and then attacks her-of-the-phony-brit-accent on, gasp, moral grounds. The passage is bracing. Remember, this appeared in the Guardian — and was reprinted in the Irish Times:

Like the man who invented jogging and then dropped dead of a heart attack while doing it, and the woman who wrote all those diet books like Let's Get Healthy and then died of bowel cancer, the sad events of August 12th, when Madonna was taken to hospital a month early after a massive hemorrhage, must have made her brutally aware that Man was made for Nature, and not the other way around. I don't know what a detached placenta is — the life-threatening condition for both mother and fetus which led to the caesarian section a month early — but I bet it isn't helped by putting one's ankles behind one's head on a regular basis while eight months pregnant. Couldn't she have just put her feet up for a few months and relaxed?

This is so breathtaking one doesn't know how to respond. It's like Thomas Aquinas mixed with Dr. Laura. Burchill is astringent, witty, and tough. But she is also, yes, moral — a crucial aspect of criticism that is no longer part of rock-&-roll writing.

Rock writers have grown so politicized in their bland advocacy of every outrage against established taste and so entombed in the fog of the therapeutic culture that they really don't care what's good and what's not anymore. Or rather, their morality is a skewed morality, in defense of anything "cutting-edge" and "controversial" — as long as it's not homophobic! — while contemptuous of anything that doesn't adhere to this agenda.

They make it a crime to like 'NSync and an absolute imperative to venerate Madonna. They have become what they feared the most — conformists. Their existential revolutions and grad school dissertations on the Velvet Underground are the standard.  Gone are the days when they would even question the culture and business that produces gangster rap. In 1969, Rolling Stone knew that Altamont was evil, and said so. When it happened again at Woodstock '99, all writers thought to talk about was how hot it was that day and how this was the reason for the rapes and fires that erupted at the end of the show.

This supine willingness to lay back and let whatever happen because, hey man, it's rock-&-roll, is not only morally reprehensible. It's dull.

Stylistically, American rock writing is pseudo-insightful and self-important. Leafing through recent issues of Spin and Rolling Stone, one finds the same mushy pablum.

Anthony DeCurtis on Paul Simon: "This album may not lead you to the music of other continents. But it provides a map of the shifting geography of our emotional lives — the yearning vulnerability of our hearts, the intractable terror in our bones." 

And here's Ann Powers in Spin, reviewing the new Bjork: "As always, her singing  is paradoxically intuitive and highly stylized, carefully shaped from the gut. Like a great Method performance, this music is all about process — letting us in on an unfolding enigma of being human." This stuff belongs in Oprah's magazine.

In her Guardian piece, Burchill at least had the guts to admit to this kind of vapor, quoting herself from a favorable review she wrote about Madonna years ago. She wrote that Madonna "looks like a whore and thinks like a pimp, which as everyone knows is the very best type of Modern Girl." Now as a grown woman she shamefully admits, "Reader, I wrote that swill."

I used to write a lot of that swill myself when I was younger. When I grew out of it I thought I'd have to give up writing about rock-&-roll for good. Indeed, the writing seemed on the wall a few months ago, when I realized that in the eyes of most editors my adult convictions didn't square with my musical passions.  I realized this when I was trying to write something about the group Everything but the Girl, and their album "Temperamental," which deserved a Grammy last year but was not nominated. (Technically EBTG is dance music, but I use the term "rock" to encompass pop music in general.)

I wanted to somehow convey the rich, plangent spirituality of the album, and how it powerfully expresses the sadness and soulfulness of growing older. The album ends on a high note, in which singer Tracy Thorne, drinking in the brightness of an electric urban night, is filled with rapture at coming to terms with age:

The future of the future will still contain tonight
The passage of day, the passage of night.

Rock lyrics are hardly holy writ, but this line resonated. It not only evoked the thrill of city nightlife — the band is from London and conjures the city in many of its songs — it said that our pasts will not be lost, that each moment of our lives is important in the eyes of God, and that we might be able to feel our warm, youthful exuberance in the next life, when we stand outside of time and are able to look back.

It said to me in an unambiguously religious way that every magic moment of life counts. It says that we won't be trapped in time forever. It didn't hurt that the song's magnificent melody gave me the best kind of swoon, the kind that one gets when in love, or underneath a night sky swimming in stars — or, yes, in church. For some of us it happens before the Cross. Yes, pop music can approximate, on a small scale, what I imagine to be the joy of heaven.

Of course, in the world of rock writing, I couldn't say that "Temperamental" made me think of God and the nature of being outside of time. Unreturned phone calls and a couple quick rejections made that evident. One friend of mine who left journalism to become a doctor just laughed. "You can't quote the Pope in a rock review," he said. To get published, he reminded me, I would have to write like a rock writer.

Rock critics see the rock tradition as one unbroken line from Elvis to the Sex Pistol to Gansta Rap. But Elvis wasn't the revolutionary people claimed him to be (his music was about singing the blues and dancing, not revolt), and pop music has always had it's share of decency and talent — unlike Madonna, who's becoming increasingly difficult to grow old with.

As Burchill noted in her Guardian piece, it's actually kind of sad that Madonna is still trying to be the pop queen when she's now the mother of two kids. Burchill gets it right, and her summation sings:

In light of Madonna's 'motherhood,' would it be too much to ask that she retreat for a season or two from the three-ringed circus of studs and starlets, pierrettes and poltroons, drolls and dolls, who compete to distract us from our supposedly dull lives with their tragic attention-seeking? Let it be so, and let Madonna heed the words of one of those great English wits she is so fond of: 'Madam, please go — you have delighted us long enough!'