Sandy Denny: Rock writing revisited

Here is a photo of someone enjoying life. The booze may have contributed to her fatal fall. The fags certainly changed – I would say coarsened – her voice. But there’s no doubt she’s having a ball, which is a roundabout way of introducing the proposition that music’s function is ‘to reveal what we live for’ – as makers, as listeners, and as writers about music.

Last summer I posted an entry here about ‘Rock writing’. My argument back then was that there has to be a ‘third way’ for popular music criticism between the extremes of gonzo journalism and academic musicology. I like to think it touched a nerve; it certainly drew a response. One of my respondents was the excellent Ron Moy of Liverpool John Moores University. In the careless way which is more journalistic than academic (mea culpa!) I had been less than generous about his book on Kate Bush, basing my comments on some rather overcooked advance publicity from the publisher. Since Ron got in touch, I’ve read his book – which is what I should have done in the first place – and recommend it wholeheartedly. I like the way he builds a survey of Bush’s entire output outwards from a close reading of Hounds of Love, his central text. He tells me that he took flak from some readers for the ‘subjectivism’ of his approach. Granted, it’s not every academic who will interrupt his flow to tell you how he split up with his long-term partner in August 1985, how he was ‘on the brink of tears’, ‘hypertense’ etc [1]. But his point is that in this condition he was ‘extremely sensitive to all forms of emotional and artistic stimuli’, thus primed for the release of what he sees as Bush’s masterpiece in September of that year. The approach is right. This is music to be lived by.

Ron Moy’s ‘Introduction’ is especially pertinent to my theme, because in it he outlines the development of a ‘bunker mentality’ in UK higher education. Despite the growth of popular music studies, he says, the last twenty years have seen a continuing ‘lack of dialogue between the spheres of academia and journalism’, particularly regrettable as ‘some of the most successful examples of popular music are those that manage to straddle the commercial and the critical worlds’. It’s a missed opportunity. In support of his views he quotes David Buckley, biographer of Bowie and The Stranglers:

‘In the early 1990s, it seemed as if a new way within popular music studies was not only possible, but inevitable. Simon Frith, Jon Savage and Steve Redhead were producing work that elided the safe boundaries between rock journalism and academic discourse […] However, today it seems that the two are as entrenched in their positions and as separatist in their views as ever.’ [2]

As it happens, recent weeks have also brought obituaries of Wilfrid Mellers in the national press (why am I so superstitious as to see synchronicity where others see mere coincidence?) I never met the great prof, though in a former life (for an aborted book project) I was supposed to interview him about his memories of his composition teacher Egon Wellesz. Too late now. The first academic muso to write sympathetically about popular music, Mellers surely deserves his column inches. As a pupil of FR Leavis and an early contributor to Scrutiny, he took from his master a discriminating – not to say moralizing – intelligence, believing that ‘a limitless plurality of values is indistinguishable from no values at all’ [3]. What was striking was that these values extended beyond the ‘great tradition’ of Bach and Beethoven to encompass Bob Dylan and The Beatles as well as jazz and ethnic musics. As one of Mellers’ pupils, Richard Middleton, wrote in the Guardian, his core belief was a ‘revisionist form of Leavisism: that musical value and human truth could in principle be found in any sort of music’ [4]. Reading this sent me back to the Editorial that Middleton contributed to a special number of Popular Music in 1994 marking Mellers’ eightieth birthday. There he wrote of another ‘Leavisite’ quality taken over into Mellers, the emphasis on close reading of texts:

‘We find that this has permeated subsequent popular music research much more hesitantly – and with variable results. It’s fair to say, too, that Mellers’ own method hasn’t been particularly influential, in fact it has been the object of criticism for its “subjectivism”.’ [5]

Ah, too ‘subjective’, was it? That word again. Mellers saw music’s function as ‘to reveal what we live for’ [6]. Hounds of Love helped sustain Ron Moy through a period of ‘excessive drinking, insomnia and sexual promiscuity’ following a painful break-up [7]. There has to be room in music criticism for the subject and, in our interactions, whether in the concert hall, the basement club, the ivory tower or just inside a pair of headphones, that subject may as well be the listener as the composer or performer. We have to get away from what Nicholas Cook has called ‘the underlying, root metaphor of Western musical culture: that music is some kind of object’ [8].

The Mellers obituaries reopened, albeit briefly, the door to a ‘third way’. Here is Richard Morrison, responding to the Times obit:

‘People thought, and still think, that musicians and writers about music should “stick to what they know”. But that mentality has led to the appallingly ghettoised musical life that we have today, in which almost no one has the curiosity or confidence to enjoy both Robbie Williams and Richard Wagner, or Coldplay and Chopin. Mellers tried to bridge every gap, especially the gap between music and “real life”.’ [9]

I have a plan, long in gestation, quixotic in ambition, to found a new popular music magazine. It will carry articles combining documented facts with biographical insights, broad cultural context with precise (but not forbiddingly technical) discussion of words and music and their interrelations. In its field of view it will accommodate makers of music and consumers and every mediating jobsworth and technology that comes between them. But though it dares to inhabit the no-man’s land between Brixton Academy and the Oxbridge academy, it won’t be all serious [10]:

Provisionally, this magazine, I call it Brush on Drum, adapting a favourite line from one of my favourite artists, Laura Nyro: ‘A rush on rum / of brush and drum’ (New York Tendaberry, 1969). Is anyone with me?

References
1. Ron Moy, Kate Bush and ‘Hounds of Love’ (2007), p39
2. Moy, pp8-9
3. Obituary of Wilfrid Mellers, Times, 20 May 2008, p53
4. Guardian, Letters, 24 May 2008, p35
5. Popular Music 13/2 (May 1994), p.vi. Not a journal I have much time for, as regular readers will know, but this issue contains more sense than most.
6. Quoted in Times obituary of Mellers
7. Moy, p39
8. Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction (1998), p70
9. ‘Opinion’, Times2, 21 May 2008, p7
10. Cartoon from Minneapolis Star and Tribune, 1987, quoted in Susan McClary and Robert Walser, ‘Start Making Sense! Musicology Wrestles With Rock’, in Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, eds, On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word (1990), p277. This whole article is relevant to my topic as well, but too detailed to go into here. In a footnote – never the best place to pick fights – the authors take Wilfrid Mellers to task for applying ‘criteria of musical complexity and the mystified image of the artist-as-genius from standard musicology to popular artists’ (p290).