Wednesday, June 04, 2003
critics on critics dept
You should have been there
(Filed: 02/06/2003)
Laura Thompson reviews The Sound and the Fury: Forty Years of Classic Rock Journalism ed by Barney Hoskyns
There is something oddly touching about this book. So much youthful passion burns within its prose: it reeks of the heady sweat of pop concerts, of joints smoked while listening to guitar solos in delicious, tortured solitude, of beer spilled beneath frenetic feet.
It is a labour of love produced by the writer and editor Barney Hoskyns, who has collected 30 articles spanning 40 years in rock music. They cover subjects such as The Beatles' conquest of America, the birth of punk and the death of Kurt Cobain, as well as interviews with Madonna, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan and others. The authors include Will Self, Greil Marcus, Charles Shaar Murray and the punk goddess Caroline Coon.
Diverse though this collection may seem, almost every article shares the same compulsion. With one or two exceptions, such as Nick Hornby's knowing little essay on Abba, they are all written by fans. However much the writers may strain after cynicism or maturity or irony, they don't fool me: inside they are dancing with the same inexpressible joy felt by Shaar Murray when he watched Eric Clapton live at The Rainbow in 1973: "God damn, you should have been there."
Fans take themselves seriously - Shaar Murray does not expect you to laugh at him when he writes that Clapton "really was sump'n else". Above all, fans like to collect. The Sound and the Fury is a book for those who want to possess, in some tangible form, a sense of their elusive past. It reminded me of the ineffably moving stack of Rugby World magazines that my brother used to keep in his bedroom. In that sense, the writing in the book is not really the point: which is perhaps just as well, since its subterranean passions tend to be more powerful than the prose that they produce.
For rock journalism - like its subjects - does not necessarily age with dignity. An essay by the Rolling Stone writer Michael Lydon about the 1967 Monterey festival contains this, for example, about Jimi Hendrix: "The act became… an orgy of noise so wound up that I felt that the dynamo that powered it would fail and fission into its primordial atomic state." Impossible to doubt Lydon's aching sincerity, his desperate urge to convey barely describable emotions. Equally impossible not to feel that the intervening years have rendered the writing banal (except, of course, to fans).
Nor is rock journalism necessarily better when it is retrospective, analytical. The Sound and the Fury contains an essay about Altamont written by David Dalton in 1999 - 30 years after the event. Altamont was the black antithesis to Monterey: the festival at which a young man was knifed to death by Hell's Angels while the Rolling Stones played Sympathy for the Devil. Dalton attended Altamont, and he does evoke some of the horror of the night: "The chaos and terror are so pervasive that few people actually notice the murder; it's just another bone-crushing skirmish among a hundred others." His "mature'' overview, however, reads as if it were still written under the influence of illegal substances. "As we all drifted away from Altamont that night, everyone who was there knew it was the end of that kind of event for ever... We had used up all the unreasonable cosmic-radical anticipations for another hundred years…"
The passions aroused by rock music are deep, exquisite and lasting. Yet at the same time, they are ephemeral, protean, defiant of analysis. No pop artist of the past 40 years is more intelligent and self-aware than Bob Dylan, but the nature of his genius is still too fragile to sustain the weight of words that has been heaped upon it. Hence the problem of writing and reading about rock music; except in the intensely present tense, or perhaps in a realm beyond journalism, where this book does not go.
For all its armour-plated literacy, Will Self's 1995 Observer interview with Morrissey brought back helpless thoughts of the precious private communion that I once had with The Smiths, who were the sound of my youth as surely as Jimi Hendrix was the sound of Michael Lydon's. Twenty years on, the feelings aroused by that sound are exactly the same. It is just that everything else has changed. Perhaps, in the end, it is that sad, beautiful, inevitable dislocation which makes rock music so hard to write about.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003. Terms & Conditions
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
dissecting the critic's prose
There is something oddly touching about this book. So much youthful passion burns within its prose ...
It is a labour of love
Diverse though this collection may seem, almost every article shares the same compulsion.
they are all written by fans.
However much the writers may strain after cynicism or maturity or irony, they don't fool me:
inside they are dancing with the same inexpressible joy
Fans take themselves seriously
Above all, fans like to collect.
for those who want to possess, in some tangible form, a sense of their elusive past.
For rock journalism - like its subjects - does not necessarily age with dignity
the intervening years have rendered the writing banal (except, of course, to fans).
Nor is rock journalism necessarily better when it is retrospective, analytical
The passions aroused by rock music are deep, exquisite and lasting.
Yet at the same time, they are ephemeral, protean, defiant of analysis.
Hence the problem of writing and reading about rock music; except in the intensely present tense, or perhaps in a realm beyond journalism, where this book does not go.
the sound of my youth
Twenty years on, the feelings aroused by that sound are exactly the same.
It is just that everything else has changed.
Perhaps, in the end, it is that sad, beautiful, inevitable dislocation which makes rock music so hard to write about.
¶ 6/04/2003 06:20:00 AM
You should have been there
(Filed: 02/06/2003)
Laura Thompson reviews The Sound and the Fury: Forty Years of Classic Rock Journalism ed by Barney Hoskyns
There is something oddly touching about this book. So much youthful passion burns within its prose: it reeks of the heady sweat of pop concerts, of joints smoked while listening to guitar solos in delicious, tortured solitude, of beer spilled beneath frenetic feet.
It is a labour of love produced by the writer and editor Barney Hoskyns, who has collected 30 articles spanning 40 years in rock music. They cover subjects such as The Beatles' conquest of America, the birth of punk and the death of Kurt Cobain, as well as interviews with Madonna, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan and others. The authors include Will Self, Greil Marcus, Charles Shaar Murray and the punk goddess Caroline Coon.
Diverse though this collection may seem, almost every article shares the same compulsion. With one or two exceptions, such as Nick Hornby's knowing little essay on Abba, they are all written by fans. However much the writers may strain after cynicism or maturity or irony, they don't fool me: inside they are dancing with the same inexpressible joy felt by Shaar Murray when he watched Eric Clapton live at The Rainbow in 1973: "God damn, you should have been there."
Fans take themselves seriously - Shaar Murray does not expect you to laugh at him when he writes that Clapton "really was sump'n else". Above all, fans like to collect. The Sound and the Fury is a book for those who want to possess, in some tangible form, a sense of their elusive past. It reminded me of the ineffably moving stack of Rugby World magazines that my brother used to keep in his bedroom. In that sense, the writing in the book is not really the point: which is perhaps just as well, since its subterranean passions tend to be more powerful than the prose that they produce.
For rock journalism - like its subjects - does not necessarily age with dignity. An essay by the Rolling Stone writer Michael Lydon about the 1967 Monterey festival contains this, for example, about Jimi Hendrix: "The act became… an orgy of noise so wound up that I felt that the dynamo that powered it would fail and fission into its primordial atomic state." Impossible to doubt Lydon's aching sincerity, his desperate urge to convey barely describable emotions. Equally impossible not to feel that the intervening years have rendered the writing banal (except, of course, to fans).
Nor is rock journalism necessarily better when it is retrospective, analytical. The Sound and the Fury contains an essay about Altamont written by David Dalton in 1999 - 30 years after the event. Altamont was the black antithesis to Monterey: the festival at which a young man was knifed to death by Hell's Angels while the Rolling Stones played Sympathy for the Devil. Dalton attended Altamont, and he does evoke some of the horror of the night: "The chaos and terror are so pervasive that few people actually notice the murder; it's just another bone-crushing skirmish among a hundred others." His "mature'' overview, however, reads as if it were still written under the influence of illegal substances. "As we all drifted away from Altamont that night, everyone who was there knew it was the end of that kind of event for ever... We had used up all the unreasonable cosmic-radical anticipations for another hundred years…"
The passions aroused by rock music are deep, exquisite and lasting. Yet at the same time, they are ephemeral, protean, defiant of analysis. No pop artist of the past 40 years is more intelligent and self-aware than Bob Dylan, but the nature of his genius is still too fragile to sustain the weight of words that has been heaped upon it. Hence the problem of writing and reading about rock music; except in the intensely present tense, or perhaps in a realm beyond journalism, where this book does not go.
For all its armour-plated literacy, Will Self's 1995 Observer interview with Morrissey brought back helpless thoughts of the precious private communion that I once had with The Smiths, who were the sound of my youth as surely as Jimi Hendrix was the sound of Michael Lydon's. Twenty years on, the feelings aroused by that sound are exactly the same. It is just that everything else has changed. Perhaps, in the end, it is that sad, beautiful, inevitable dislocation which makes rock music so hard to write about.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003. Terms & Conditions
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
dissecting the critic's prose
There is something oddly touching about this book. So much youthful passion burns within its prose ...
It is a labour of love
Diverse though this collection may seem, almost every article shares the same compulsion.
they are all written by fans.
However much the writers may strain after cynicism or maturity or irony, they don't fool me:
inside they are dancing with the same inexpressible joy
Fans take themselves seriously
Above all, fans like to collect.
for those who want to possess, in some tangible form, a sense of their elusive past.
For rock journalism - like its subjects - does not necessarily age with dignity
the intervening years have rendered the writing banal (except, of course, to fans).
Nor is rock journalism necessarily better when it is retrospective, analytical
The passions aroused by rock music are deep, exquisite and lasting.
Yet at the same time, they are ephemeral, protean, defiant of analysis.
Hence the problem of writing and reading about rock music; except in the intensely present tense, or perhaps in a realm beyond journalism, where this book does not go.
the sound of my youth
Twenty years on, the feelings aroused by that sound are exactly the same.
It is just that everything else has changed.
Perhaps, in the end, it is that sad, beautiful, inevitable dislocation which makes rock music so hard to write about.
¶ 6/04/2003 06:20:00 AM
