"The Masters": Jann Wenner and the articulateness of straight cis white men in music

 

Jann Wenner Defends His Legacy, and His Generation’s

For Jann Wenner: Rock'n Roll Women

After his diss: A dozen rockers (no last names needed) named Rosetta, Aretha, Ronnie, Tina, Bonnie, Linda, Chrissie and more

Jann Wenner’s Blinkered Rock ‘n’ Roll Revolution

He built an empire on the foundations laid by Black musicians—but fails entirely to recognize that. The Nation, Joan Walsh

The above are excerpts of a letter that the great Ellen Willis, one of the key music critics of the 1970s, wrote to Rolling Stone magazine explaining why she was refusing to write for them. Eventually she did end up publishing several pieces in the magazine, including 1975’s “The Trial of Arline Hunt,” a prescient account of a woman who was blamed for her own rape.

Maybe as a result of this kind of push-back by Willis, Rolling Stone partially course-corrected its chauvinism thanks to the work of Marianne Partridge, an important editor of the 70s and, interestingly, founder of the magazine's fact-checking department. Read about that newroom in the article below chronicling that (temporary) change in RS culture.

“It Was Us Against Those Guys”: The Women Who Transformed Rolling Stone in the Mid-70s

Nelson George, author of The Death of Rhythm and Blues, responds

The record corrected:

As Bobby Dylan, Jann's good friend, would say: The times they are a-changing

Jann Wenner’s Rock Hall Reign Lasted Years. It Ended in 20 Minutes.

The day after the Rolling Stone co-founder made remarks widely criticized as racist and sexist in a Times interview, the Hall of Fame called an emergency vote and ousted him.

Welcome To Spring 2023: Theory, Music Video, Pop Music, TV

  

Post-Rock, Subcultures Gender & Sexuality: The End of Discourses of Authenticity

At this point you should be moving forward towards completing the Garofalo textbook, here are the reading assignments for the final weeks:

On 'co-optation':
Thomas Frank's "Commodify Your Dissent" here.

On Jamaican Music:
from Dick Hebdige, Cut'n'Mix here.



On Gender:
Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, "Rock and Sexuality"
Simon Frith, "Afterthoughts"
"Richard Dyer, "In Defense of Disco"
Find these articles here as a single PDF file.

Lindsay Zoladz, "Joni Mitchell: Fear of a Female Genius"


On 'sub-cultures':
Here are the Dick Hebdige chapters from Subculture: The Meaning of Style.
Refer back to the Punk: Attitude film screening.

On sampling, music videos, remix culture and the 'postmodern turn':
Andrew Goodwin, "Sample and Hold"
E Ann Kaplan, "A Postmodern Play of the Signifier?"

Also, to clarify (or further obscure) 'postmodernism' please help yourself --in case you have not encountered it in your other studies-- to Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society"

For Those About To Rock: Return of the Aura

Frank Zappa & Captain Beefheart

"I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"

-Jack Kerouac

-Keightley, "Reconsidering Rock"

Here are a couple of articles to integrate Keightley's Reconsidering Rock article. The first Frith article is required; the second article is a highly recommended read. Enjoy the Lester Bangs reviews from Creem. Reebee Garofalo's article on Soul ("Popular Music and the Civil Rights Movement") is required.

Simon Frith - "Rock and Popular Culture"
Simon Frith - "The Magic The Can Set You Free": The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community
Paul Clarke - "'A Magic Science': Rock Music as a Recording Art"
Lester Bangs - Various Record Reviews from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
Reebee Garofalo - Popular Music and the Civil Rights Movement

Also, here is Andrew Chester's "For A Rock Aesthetic", Richard Merton's response, "Comments" and Chester's response to the response, "Second Thoughts on a Rock Aesthetic: The Band". It's all from the Jan/Feb1970 #59 issue of New Left Review.

Please read in 'Rocking Out' up to and including Chapter 8.

Playlists and clips on Moodle.

AC/DC, Let There Be Rock (1977) 

Reverend Bon tells you all about it. As you can see the 'aura' is back around Angus' head.

The In-Between Years (or The Empire Strikes Back)

In the playlist below some of the genres that were popular during the so-called 'in-between years': Girl Groups, different kinds of Phil Spector produced records, the uptown RnB of Motown Records, Surf and Hot Rod combos and the different iterations of the folk revival.

As you listen consider the following records by two of the most popular of the Girl Groups:

The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"
The Crystals, "Then He Kissed Me"
The Crystals, "Da Doo Ron Ron"

These records were written by the same pair of songwriters, Cynthia Weill and Barry Mann and produced by Phil Spector as he was building his wall of sound.

Then compare these to Lesley Gore's "It's My Party" which is still a Weill/Mann song but was NOT produced by Phil Spector.

Finally consider these records with Spector's wall of sound in full-effect:

Ike & Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"
The Righteous Brothers, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling"

Be ready to identify the characteristics of Spector's production style.

General In-Between The Years playlist here. Specific playlists linked below.

• Phil Spector Productions
• The Wrecking Crew! : Tracks Recorded by the Wrecking Crew
• Brill Building Songwriters: Goffin/King
• Brill Building Songwriters: Mann/Weill
• Brill Building Songwriters: Greewich/Barry
• Girl Groups Playlist
• Motown: Mainly Holland-Dozier-Holland

Readings:
Keightley, "Reconsidering Rock"

nb. We will discuss the issues and concepts raised in it after the exam. I do however urge you to read it as it offers a lot of points that would help your review and understanding of material tied to the 'in-between years'.

In Garofalo you should read up to and including Chapter 6.

Phil Spector

R'n'R or Transubstantiated RnB?

Whitey's Lindy Hoppers: Something Wild

 

This is the Lindy Hop, the Jitterbug, the Suzie-Q. The clip is an excerpt from H.C. Potter's Helzapoppin' (1941). The Lindy Hoppers doing "The Big Apple" in 1939 are here. Enjoy.
In this clip the dancing starts at the 2:15 mark.



from Jonathan Demme's Something Wild; The Feelies play David Bowies's "Fame" and Jeff Daniels dances with his eye on the 'Other' for cues.

Groovy Movie (1944): Instructional Video for the Lindy Hop

The Sound Begins: Popular Music Readings II

Rufus Thomas, DJ Extraordinaire

in Garofalo:

-Chapter 2: Blues and Country Music: Mass Media and the Construction of Race
-Chapter 3: “Good Rockin’ Tonight”: The Rise of Rhythm and Blues

Charlie Gillet from The Sound of the City, "The Sound Begins"
Nelson George from The Death of Rhythm and Blues, "Dark Voices in the Night"

Teddy and Walt in The New Yorker

 

The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and the Critique of Pop Culture
by Alex Ross

Even the New Yorker catches up:

"One way or another, the Frankfurt School mode of criticism—its skeptical ardor, its relentless scouring of mundane surfaces—has spread far. When online recappers expend thousands of words debating the depiction of rape on “Game of Thrones,” or when writers publish histories of sneakers or of the office cubicle, they show intense awareness of mass culture’s ability to shape society. And in some cases the analysis takes a recognizably dialectical turn, as in Hua Hsu’s 2011 essay, for Grantland, on Kanye West and Jay-Z’s album “Watch the Throne.” A dispassionate hip-hop fan, Hua Hsu ponders the spectacle of two leading rappers making an “album against austerity,” in which they mark their ascension to a world of “MoMA and Rothko, Larry Gagosian, and luxury hotels across three continents,” and at the same time forfeit a hip-hop tradition of fantasy and protest. Citing the Kanye track “Power”—“Grab a camera, shoot a viral / Take the power in your own hands”—Hsu writes, “This version of power is entrancing—it explains an entire generation. But it also confuses ubiquity for importance, the familiarity of a celebrity’s face for true authority.” There is no telling how Adorno and Benjamin might have negotiated such contemporary labyrinths. Perhaps, on a peaceful day, they would have accepted the compromise devised by Fredric Jameson, who has written that the “cultural evolution of late capitalism” can be understood “dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.”

These implacable voices should stay active in our minds. Their dialectic of doubt prods us to pursue connections between what troubles us and what distracts us, to see the riven world behind the seamless screen. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”: Benjamin’s great formula, as forceful as a Klieg light, should be fixed as steadily on pop culture, the ritual apparatus of American capitalism, as it has been on the art works of the European bourgeoisie. Adorno asked for only so much. Above all, these figures present a model for thinking differently, and not in the glib sense touted by Steve Jobs. As the homogenization of culture proceeds apace, as the technology of surveillance hovers at the borders of our brains, such spaces are becoming rarer and more confined. I am haunted by a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.”"

Art & Folk & The Popular

 

 

The virtuoso instrumentalist and composer as superstar: Franz Liszt.

Good interview on WNYC's Soundcheck with Tim Blanning author of The Triumph of Music, a 'social history' of musicians in the west and how they went from being considered merely servants to being 'stars'. This is an excellent example of metacontextual musical knowledge. Required listening.

Download entire interview mp3 here.

Popular Music: Music Becomes A Thing

 

Readings Week 1&2:

in Garofalo, Rockin' Out:
-Introduction + Chapter 1: Tin Pan Alley

in Cambridge Companion:
-Introduction + Chronology
-Theberge, "'Plugged In': Technology & Popular Music"
-Frith, "The Popular Music Industry"
-Frith, "Pop Music"

from The Cultural Resistance Reader:

-Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'"

from Durham & Kellner (eds), Media & Cultural Studies: Keyworks
-Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

from Frith & Goodwin (eds), On Record
-Adorno, "On Popular Music"
nb. You can find this essay together with "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" co-written with Max Horkheimer --an essay which if you have not read should definitely do so-- here.

from Even Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa
-Eisenberg, Chapter 2: Music Becomes a Thing

Grimes, "Genesis" Live Session for KEXP

Welcome To Spring 2021

 

Post-Rock, Subcultures Gender & Sexuality: The End of Discourses of Authenticity

At this point you should be moving forward towards completing the Garofalo textbook, here are the reading assignments for the final weeks:

On 'co-optation':
Thomas Frank's "Commodify Your Dissent" here.

On Jamaican Music:
from Dick Hebdige, Cut'n'Mix here.



On Gender:
Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, "Rock and Sexuality"
Simon Frith, "Afterthoughts"
"Richard Dyer, "In Defense of Disco"
Find these articles here as a single PDF file.

Lindsay Zoladz, "Joni Mitchell: Fear of a Female Genius"


On 'sub-cultures':
Here are the Dick Hebdige chapters from Subculture: The Meaning of Style.
Refer back to the Punk: Attitude film screening.

The Ramones, "Rockaway Beach" Live in Rome, 1980




On sampling, music videos, remix culture and the 'postmodern turn':
Andrew Goodwin, "Sample and Hold"
E Ann Kaplan, "A Postmodern Play of the Signifier?"

Also, to clarify (or further obscure) 'postmodernism' please help yourself --in case you have not encountered it in your other studies-- to Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society"