introduction

I guess I could say what many people of my age—or people who are younger or even older—might be able to say: I grew up with popular music encompassing my life. It played as a soundtrack for my youth. It enhanced (sometimes created) my memories. It articulated losses, angers, and horrible (as in unattainable) hopes, and it emboldened me in many, many dark hours. It also, as much as anything else in my life, defined my convictions and my experience of what it meant (and still means) to be an American, and it gave me a moral (and of course immoral) guidance that nothing else in my life ever matched, short of dreams of sheer generous love or of sheer ruthless rapacity or destruction.

I can remember my mother playing piano, singing to me her much-loved songs of Patsy Cline and Hank Williams, or singing an old-timey Carter Family dirge, accompanying herself on harmonica. As I remember it, she wasn’t half-bad, though of course I’m forming that judgment through a haze of long-ago memories and idealized longings.

It was my older brothers, though, who brought music into my house—and into my life—in the ways that would begin to matter most. I was the youngest of four boys; my oldest brother, Frank, was eleven years older than I, Gary was ten years older, and Gaylen, six years older. As a result, by the time I was four or five in the mid-1950s, my brothers were already (more or less) teenagers—which means that they were caught in the early thrall and explosion of rock & roll. As far back as I remember hearing anything, I remember hearing (either on one of the house’s many radios, or on my brothers’ portable phonographs) early songs by Bill Haley & His Comets, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Fats Domino, the Platters, Buddy Knox, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, Sam Cooke, and Ricky Nelson, among others. But the biggest voice that hit my brothers’ lives—the biggest voice that hit the nation—was, of course, Elvis Presley’s. In the mid-1950s, every time Presley performed on nationwide TV (on the Milton Berle, Steve Allen, or Ed Sullivan shows) was an occasion for a family gathering—among the few times my family ever collected for any purpose other than to fight. Those times we sat watching Presley on our old Zenith were, in fact, among our few occasions of real shared joy. For some reason, the appearance I remember most was Elvis’s 1956 performance on the Dorsey Brothers’ “Stage Show” (which was also the singer’s national debut, and was followed by six consecutive appearances). I remember sitting tucked next to my father in his big oversize brown leather chair. My father was not a man who was fond of youthful impudence or revolt (in fact, he was downright brutal in his efforts to shut down my brothers’ rebellions). At the same time, my father was a man who had spent the better part of his own youth working in show business, in films and onstage and in vaudeville and the circus, and something about rock & roll’s early outlandishness appealed to his show-biz biases (though his own musical tastes leaned strongly to opera and Broadway musicals). After watching Presley on that first Dorsey show, my father said: “That young man’s got real talent. He’s going to be around for a long time. He’s the real thing.” I know how cliché those remarks sound. Just to be sure my memory wasn’t making it all up for me, I asked my oldest brother, Frank (who has the best memory of anybody I’ve ever known), if he remembered what was said after we’d watched Presley on that occasion. He repeated my father’s declaration, pretty much word for word. I guess my father had a little more in common with Colonel Tom Parker than I’d like to admit, but then, like Parker, my father had also once been a hustler and bunco man.

So rock & roll as popular entertainment was welcomed into our home. Rock & roll as a model for revolt was another matter. When my brothers began to wear ducktails and leather motorcycle jackets, when they began to turn up their collars and talk flip and insolently, likely as not they got the shit beat out of them. I guess my father recognized that rock & roll, when brought into one’s heart and real home, could breed a dislike or refusal of authority—and like so many adults and parents before and since, he could not stand that possibility without feeling shaken to the rageful and frightened core of his being.

I NEVER GOT TO HAVE my own period of rock & roll conflict with my father. He died in mid-1962, when I was eleven, when “The Twist” and “Duke of Earl” were my picks to click. Hardly songs or trends worth whipping a child until he bled.

A little over a year later, President John Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas, Texas. It was a startling event, and it froze the nation in shock, grief, and a lingering depression. Winter nights were long that season—long, and maybe darker than usual. I was just twelve, but I remember that sense of loss that was not merely my own—a loss that seemed to fill the room of the present and the space of the future. By this time, my brothers were hardly ever home. Gary and Gaylen were either out at night on criminal, drunken, carnal activity, or in jail. My mother had the habit of going to bed early, so I stayed up late watching old horror movies, talk shows, anything I could find. I remember—in January 1964—watching Jack Paar’s late night show, when he began talking about a new sensation that was sweeping England: a strange pop group called the Beatles. He showed a clip of the group that night—the first time they had been seen in America. It’s a ghostly memory to me now. I don’t remember what I saw in the clip’s moments, but I remember I was transfixed. Weeks later, the Beatles made their first official live U.S. television appearance, on February 9, 1964, on the “Ed Sullivan Show.” The date happened also to be my thirteenth birthday, and I don’t think I could ever have received a better, more meaningful, more transforming gift. I won’t say much here about what that appearance did to us—as a people, a nation, an emerging generation—because I’ll say something about it in the pages ahead, but I’ll say this: As romantic as it may sound, I knew I was seeing something very big on that night, and I felt something in my life change. In fact, I was witnessing an opening up of endless possibilities. I have a video tape of those Sullivan appearances. I watch it often and show it to others—some who have never seen those appearances before, because those shows have never been rebroadcast or reissued in their entirety (there isn’t much more than a glimpse of them in The Beatles Anthology video series). To this day, they remain remarkable. You watch those moments and you see history opening up, from the simple (but not so simple) act of men playing their instruments and singing, and sharing a discovery with their audience of a new, youthful eminence. The long, dark Kennedy-death nights were over. There would be darker nights, for sure, to come, and rock & roll would be a part of that as well. But on that night, a nightmare was momentarily broken, and a new world born. Its implications have never ended, even if they no longer mean exactly what they meant in that first season.

It was obviously a great time, though it would soon become (just as obviously) a complex and scary time. It was a time when almost every new song was shared, discussed, and sorted through for everything it might hold or deliver—every secret thrill or code, every new joyous twist of sonic texture. “The House of the Rising Sun.” “Stop! In the Name of Love.” “Help Me Rhonda.” “Mr. Tambourine Man.” “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” “Positively 4th Street.” “Help!” “California Dreamin’.” “Good Lovin’.” “When a Man Loves a Woman.” “Summer in the City.” “Sunshine Superman.” “I Want You.” “96 Tears.” “Paint It, Black.” “Over Under Sideways Down.” “Respect.” “Ode to Billy Joe.” “Good Vibrations.” “The Letter.” It was also a time of many leaders or would-be leaders—some liberating, some deadly. Mario Savio. Lyndon Johnson. Robert Kennedy. Julian Bond. Richard Nixon. George Lincoln Rockwell. George Wallace. Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcolm X. Hubert Humphrey. Eldridge Cleaver. Shirley Chisolm. Jerry Rubin. Tom Hayden. Gloria Steinem. Abbie Hoffman. There were also the other leaders—some who led without desire or design, but who led as surely (and sometimes as liberatingly or as foolishly) as the political figures. The Beatles. Bob Dylan. Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, and Keith Richards. Timothy Leary. Jimi Hendrix. Jane Fonda. The Jefferson Airplane. Aretha Franklin. James Brown. Marvin Gaye. Sly Stone. Jim Morrison. Charles Manson.

As you can tell from those lists, the 1960s’ ideals, events, and moods grew darker—and they did so earlier than many people would like to acknowledge. In the middle of 1967—the same season that bred what became known as the Summer of Love in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, and the same period when the Beatles summarized and apotheosized psychedelia with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—I came across an album I really loved (still perhaps my favorite of all time): The Velvet Underground and Nico. It was a record full of songs about bad losses, cold hearts, hard narcotics, and rough, degrading sex. I took to it like a dog to water (or whatever dogs take to). It was the first subject—in a long list—of arguments that I would enter into with friends about rock & roll. In fact, it was my first rock & roll choice that actually cost me some fraternity. When I was a senior in high school, I was part of a Folk Song after-school group. We’d get together, under a teacher’s auspices, and sing our favorite folk songs—everything from “Kum Ba Yah,” “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” and “We Shall Overcome” to “Blowin’ in the Wind” and (gulp) “Puff the Magic Dragon.” At one meeting, each of us was invited to sing his or her favorite folk song. I sang Lou Reed’s “Heroin.” I was never welcome back in the group.

A YEAR LATER I was out of high school, into college, not doing well. I was going through one of my periodic funks, following one of my periodic failed love affairs (the woman of this occasion became a born-again Christian and married the man who impregnated her; later, she became one of the most wildly game sexual people I’ve ever known or enjoyed, but that is another story). In this period—the late winter of 1969 and the early winter of 1970—I was taking a lot of drugs, learning how to drink, and staying up all night until the sun rose, then I’d hit the bed (actually, the floor, which was my bed at the time), and finally find sleep. (Interestingly, at least to me, I returned to this pattern—the staying-up-until-sunrise-then-running-to-hide part—for the entire month in which I wrote and revised this current volume.)

By this same period, something called the “rock press” had developed: magazines like Cheetah, Crawdaddy!, and Rolling Stone, where one could read passionate and informed opinions and arguments about current music and, better yet, could also learn about earlier musicians who had helped make the late 1960s’ and early 1970s’ innovations possible—everyone from Robert Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington to the Carter Family, Lotte Lenya, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Ornette Coleman (some of whom were still alive, making vital music) and countless more. As a result, the journalism (that is, the essays, rants, profiles, interviews and historical perspectives) of such writers as Ralph Gleason, Paul Williams, Greil Marcus, Jon Landau, Dave Marsh, Langdon Winner, Jonathan Cott, Lester Bangs, Paul Nelson, Nick Tosches, Robert Christgau, and Ellen Willis came to seem as exciting and meaningful to me as much of the music they were writing about—though too damn few of them for my liking were willing to stand up for the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed (Willis, Nelson, and Christgau being notable and important exceptions).

It was not until 1974 that I began writing about popular music. What made this possible was Bob Dylan’s “comeback” tour (his first such American trek in eight years) with the Band. This was also a time, I should note, when I spent my days working as a counselor at a Portland, Oregon, drug abuse clinic and my nights smoking as much marijuana as I could find—a contradictory (probably hypocritical) turn of affairs, but hardly an uninteresting one. Then I saw Dylan in early 1974 (again, on the occasion of my birthday, ten years after the Beatles’ debut on Ed Sullivan), and an old girlfriend suggested I write about the event for a local underground newspaper. After doing so, I never looked back. The piece, of course, was awful (at least to my eyes today), but that hardly mattered. I’d managed to put together my two greatest dreams and pleasures: writing (as a result of a love of reading) and music criticism (as a result of listening to music). When I finished that article, I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to write about popular music—it was pretty much all I cared about as a vocation. Within a season I had quit my drug counseling job (also had cut way back on my drug intake—a connection?), and started writing for a number of local publications. I also began writing jazz reviews for Down Beat (jazz, by this time, had come to mean as much to me as rock & roll—a passion that isn’t evident enough in this present volume), and along with the help of some good friends, I was soon editing a Portland-based magazine, Musical Notes. A few dreams were now active in my life.

Then those dreams turned to nightmare, to the worst horror I could imagine. I am sorry if you have already heard this story—perhaps you have—but there is no way I can finish this introduction without being honest about this particular passage in my life.

In 1976, when I was twenty-five, I began writing for Rolling Stone. When the magazine came along in 1967, it announced itself as a voice that might prove as fervent and intelligent as the brave new music that it dared to champion. From the time I began reading the magazine, I held a dream of someday writing for its pages. To me, that would be a way of participating in the development of the music I had come to love so much.

In the autumn of 1976, I learned that Rolling Stone had accepted an article of mine for publication. I was elated. Then, about a week later I learned something horrible, something that killed my elation: My older brother, Gary Gilmore, was going to be put to death by a firing squad in Utah. It didn’t look like there was much that could stop it—and I didn’t know if I could live with it.

A few months before, in April 1976, Gary—ten years my senior—had been paroled from the U.S. Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, to Provo, Utah, following a fifteen-year period of often brutal incarceration, largely at Oregon State Prison. Unfortunately, Gary’s new life as a free man shortly grew troubled and violent, and on a hot and desperate July night, my brother crossed a line that no one should ever come to cross: in a moment born from a life of anger and ruin, Gary murdered an innocent man—a young Mormon named Max Jensen—during a service station robbery. The next night, he murdered another innocent man—another young Mormon, Ben Bushnell, who was working as a Provo motel manager—during a second robbery. Within hours, Gary was arrested, and within days he had confessed to his crimes. The trial that followed was pretty much an open-and-shut affair: Gary was convicted of first degree murder in the shooting of Ben Bushnell, and he was sentenced to death. Given the choice of being hung or shot, Gary elected to be shot.

All this had happened before I began writing for Rolling Stone, and a few months later, when I did begin working for the magazine, I never mentioned anything about my brother or his crimes to any of my editors or fellow journalists. Only a handful of my friends knew about my strained relationship with my troubled brother. The truth is, I had put myself at a distance from the realities of Gary’s life for many years; I told myself that I feared him, that I resented his violent and self-ruinous choices, that he and I did not really share the same bloodline. After Gary’s killings and his subsequent death sentence, I felt grief and rage over his acts, and I also felt deep and painful humiliation: I could not believe that my brother had left his family with so much horror and shame to live with, and I could not forgive him for what he had done to the families of Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell. But in a way, the whole episode seemed more like a culmination of horror rather than its new beginning. That’s because part of me believed that Gary would never be executed—after all, there had not been any executions in America in a decade—and that he instead would simply rot away the rest of his life in the bitter nothingness of a Utah prison. At the same time, I think another, deeper part of me always understood that Gary had been born (or at least raised) to die the death he would die.

Any hope for serenity in my life had been destroyed. Shortly after I heard about Gary’s wish to be executed, I told my editor at Rolling Stone, Ben Fong-Torres, about my relationship with Gary. By this time, Gary Gilmore was a daily name in nationwide headlines, and I felt that the magazine had a right to know that I was his brother. Fong-Torres, who had lost a brother of his own through violence, was extremely sympathetic and supportive during the period that followed, and eventually he gave me the opportunity to write about my experience of Gary’s execution for the magazine. To be honest, not everybody at Rolling Stone back in early 1977 thought it was such a great idea to run that article (“A Death in the Family,” March 10, 1977), and I could understand their misgivings: After all, what would be the point of publishing what might appear to be one man’s apology for his murderous and suicidal brother? Still, following the turmoil of Gary’s death, I needed to find a way to express the devastation that I had just gone through, or else I might never be able to climb out of that devastation. With the help of Fong-Torres and fellow editors Barbara Downey and Sarah Lazin, a fairly decent and honest piece of first-person journalism was created, and in the process a significant portion of my sanity and hope were salvaged. More important, perhaps the people who read it got a glimpse into the reality of living at the center of an unstoppable national nightmare.

In the season that followed Gary’s death, I went to work for Rolling Stone full-time in Los Angeles. It wasn’t an easy period for me—I felt displaced, and (once again) was drinking too much and taking too many pills—but the magazine gave me plenty of slack; maybe more than I deserved. As time went along, I began to find some of my strength and purpose again as a music writer, and Rolling Stone gave me the opportunity to meet and write about some of the people whose music and words had mattered most in my life. It was also a season in which I spent many nights lost in the dark and brilliant splendor of punk. I liked the way the music confronted its listeners with the reality of our merciless age. Punk, as much as anything, saved my soul in those years, and gave me cause for hope—which is perhaps a funny thing to say about a movement (or experiment) that’s first premise was: there are no simple hopes that are not false or at least suspect.

I WROTE FOR Rolling Stone from 1976 until the present—sometimes as a staff writer, sometimes as a contributor. In the years after 1979, I also wrote for Musician and the Los Angeles Times briefly, and in the early 1980s I was (for a year or so) the music editor at the L.A. Weekly. In the autumn of 1982, I became the pop music critic of the (now defunct) Los Angeles Herald Examiner, where I worked until 1987. For the first two or three years, the Herald was a sublime place to write; it was a paper that allowed writers to find and exercise their own voice, sometimes at great length (I’m afraid I became a bit long-winded during that period, but brevity has rarely been my strong suit). Then, sometime in 1985, a new managing editor came in to the paper—a self-described “neo-conservative.” I’ve never shared much affinity with conservatives of any variety (I’m pretty much an American leftist and have not been shy nor apologetic about that leaning). In August 1985, I reviewed a live performance by Sting for the Herald. Sting wasn’t a performer or songwriter I liked much—that was plain from my review—but I admired two things about his music at that time: his willingness to attempt adventurous, swing-inflected pop with a band that included saxophonist Branford Marsalis, and his acuity about the realities of mid-1980s, Margaret Thatcher-defined British politics. I was particularly taken by his performance of a song called “We Work the Black Seams,” and I wrote the following about it:

“We Work the Black Seams” . . . was perhaps Sting’s only serious statement that wasn’t saved solely by the prowess of his band, as well as the only one that didn’t need saving. In part, that’s because with its lulling arpeggios and mellifluent chorus it is the one song in Sting’s new batch that is most like his Police material. But there’s more to it than that: It is also the one song uttered from outside Sting’s usual above-it-all perspective—a song told from the view of a British coal miner faced with the uncaring determinism of his government. In order to tell his tale . . . Sting climbs down deep inside the place and conditions where the character lives: He is aware that the fate of the miner’s professions—and therefore the future economy of his class—has already been irrevocably shut off, and so he sings his account in a tired and resigned voice, but also with a dark, deadly, righteous sense of pain and anger: “Our blood has stained the coal/We tunneled deep inside the nation’s soul/We matter more than pounds and pence/Your economic theory makes no sense.”

The Herald’s new editor was not pleased to read such sentiments in his paper. He sent a message to me via another editor: “Rock & roll is music about and for teenagers. Write about it from that point of view.” I ignored the warning—in fact, I stepped up my politics—which meant that soon my life at the Herald was hell. I wasn’t alone. I watched the paper’s managerial structure drive some of its best writers out of the company. The managers believed, I was later told, that it was perhaps the writers’ affections for style and point of view that was costing the paper its readers (and hell, maybe they were even right).

I left the Herald Examiner in 1987, but by that time I was badly disillusioned. Plus I was going through another of my end-of-the-world romantic aftermaths. I wasn’t sure I wanted to remain a writer—but what else did I know how to do? A sympathetic friend and editor at Rolling Stone, James Henke, gave me a series of assignments. I remember hating writing each of them. All I wanted to do was sulk and drink and hate some more. Still, I had bills to pay. Looking back, I see how those assignments helped save me and also taught me some invaluable lessons: one, that summoning the will to write—even at the worst points in my life—meant I had an inner strength that was invaluable and that I should trust; two, that I had not yet lost my love for popular music and its meanings and how it mattered to its audiences. Plus, I realized it still mattered to me—that is, it still helped me. Popular music, all said and done, was among the best friends—and one of the few real confidants—I’d ever known in my life. Whereas you could talk to and confide and hope and trust in a lover, that lover might still leave or betray you. A great song, by contrast, would talk to you—and its truths would never betray you. At 3 A.M., outside of the greatest and most sinful sex, there was nothing that could mean as much as a pop song that told you secrets about your own fucked-up and yearning heart.

A FEW YEARS AGO, after the publication of Shot in the Heart (a story about my family’s generational history of violence), I received several letters from readers asking me to compile some of my earlier writings for publication. I didn’t much like the idea. I thought my pop writing was too disjointed and had covered too much musical stylistic terrain to work in any cohesive volume. Also, I’d just finished a book about looking back at my past. I wasn’t anxious to start another—especially since reading my old writings always made my skin crawl. Instead, I preferred to write my own original history about rock & roll’s epic patterns of disruption, but that idea didn’t excite most of the people I talked to. After all, it was a season when pundits like Allan Bloom and William Bennett could write depthless and malicious indictments of popular culture and achieve fame and success for doing so. A history (and defense) of rock’s agitation did not prove an appealing idea to most editors.

Then, following an article I wrote for Rolling Stone in 1996 about the death of Timothy Leary, I again received requests for a collection of writings. I felt a little more receptive to the idea by that time, because I knew I had a handful of articles I’d like to see enjoy a second (if only brief) life. At first, though, the process of selecting those articles was not fun. I’m a big believer that one should never read too much of one’s own writing; you begin to see all the repetitions, all the flaws. A week into the project, I felt like bailing out. Also, I’d written so much about some subjects—such as Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, punk, and Bruce Springsteen—that I wasn’t sure which piece (or pieces) to pick as the most representative.

Then one morning, about 2 A.M. (my favorite hour—that is, next to 3 A.M.), I came to understand something that should have been apparent all along: Without realizing it, I had been writing my own version of a rock & roll history for over a generation. I began to see how I could collect some of my preferred (at least to my tastes) writings, yet also refashion them to construct an outline, a shadow, of rock & roll history—and that is what I have tried to do here. This is not, of course, a proper history of rock & roll; there is far too much that is not addressed in this book as widely as it should be (including blues, punk, jazz, and hip-hop—all of which have been great adventures that have made rock & roll count for even more). Instead, I’ve tried to construct a volume out of a mix of personal touchstones (Bob Dylan, John Lydon, Lou Reed, and others), interview encounters (such as the Clash, Sinéad O’Connor, Miles Davis, and Keith Jarrett), and a sampling of critical indulgences (Feargal Sharkey and Marianne Faithfull’s “Trouble in Mind,” among the latter). Some of these pieces are printed here pretty close to their original published form, but most have been revised, reassembled, rewritten, or newly thought out. The Bob Dylan chapter, for example, includes elements from over twenty-three years of articles I’ve written about Dylan, plus many new passages.

I’ve tried to put it all together in an orderly way that might make for a story arc of sorts, from Elvis Presley’s invention and weird fame to Kurt Cobain, and the horrible costs of his inventions and weird fame. A Starting Place: A July Afternoon, is about Elvis, where it all begins—or at least where it began in my own life. Setting Out for the Territories is about the people who took Elvis’s possibilities and expanded them—the obvious folks: the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones; in this section, the story moves from the 1950s to the 1960s. Remaking the Territories is more or less about what happened in the 1970s (with the exception of disco, which is addressed in the following section). These are stories about people who began to expand and remake rock—sometimes with wonderful and sometimes horrible results. Dreams and Wars is largely about what happened in the 1980s, as rock (again) took on the powers that be—or actually, the other way around: the powers that be took on rock & roll, in big, bold, ugly ways. This section forms the story (in my mind) of some of what rock means in America and what it has said about the nation, its promises, betrayals, and politics; what Americans think of rock & roll in return; how dance music and heavy metal and rap work and matter for their audiences; and how moralists have tried to shut the whole thing down. There’s also a Michael Jackson chapter in this section, because it’s the best place for it and after a while, Jackson too became part of the problem. Lone Voices is a section about people (some well known, some obscure) who made lone and brave choices and music in the 1980s and 1990s. Endings is exactly what its title proclaims: stories about how some people lived and died, in both their music and their lives. And A Last Late-Night Call is about another ending.

IT IS NOW 1998, as I revise this edition. I am a forty-seven-year-old man. I still spend far too many post-midnights listening to new and old loved music. (And far too often hear from my girlfriend: “Could you please turn that down just a little? And when are you coming to bed?”) I still love popular music—from Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Frank Sinatra to Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Tupac Shakur, and (still and always) Bob Dylan—above all other twentieth-century popular culture forms.

And yet there is something about today’s music that bothers me terribly—or to be more accurate, about today’s music business. I am troubled by the way the music industry (and not just major corporate labels, but also numerous independent outfits) sign or record artists for what these labels see as a certain sound, quirk, style, nuance, niche, or whatever—and are loathe to allow those artists to expand or develop much beyond that one thing. That is partly why we see so many one-hit wonders—or one moment wonders—whether it’s Green Day, Cowboy Junkies, the Offspring, Faith No More, and countless others. These artists are milked, drained, toured, and discarded before they even have a shot at a second round. It’s a new kind of pop hegemony—a blockbuster hegemony, not at all unlike the blockbuster mentality that has made so much modern film tiresome, predictable and limited. As much as I’m not a real fan of U2, R.E.M., or Pearl Jam, I admire the way they resist being stratified, directed, or contained.

Still, I don’t want to sound like a grumbler or somebody who has lost faith. Pop music hegemony is nothing new. The industry loves it, seeks it—that is, until somebody shatters the security of that dominance: somebody like Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, Nirvana, N.W.A. Then, the industry goes off in search of artists who can parlay all the new dissidence and invention into yet another newer, hipper, profitable version of dominance. It’s maddening, but it’s also fine—sometimes, in fact, it’s great fun. That’s the way things work. Somebody makes a moment or career out of sundering the known order and sound, and then the industry and culture try to make that act of sundering into a model for mass commodity. I’m not sure it’s entirely bad—if only because it guarantees that, come tomorrow, somebody else, somebody new and wonderful and daring and deadly, will have something to disrupt and displace, to the pleasure and outrage of many.

Besides, for all the inevitable corporate appropriation that goes on in popular music, rock & roll and hip-hop still face much more serious problems and enemies: All those folks like William Bennett, C. DeLores Tucker, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and (I hate to admit it since I voted for the fuckers twice) Bill Clinton and Al Gore, who still blame rock & roll for social problems, and who still refuse to acknowledge their own hand in lining the “bridge to the twenty-first century” with some deadly potholes. I am glad that popular music continues to seem like a risk and threat to those people, and I am glad it still seems like an opportunity and voice for liberation (and offense) for others. I am also immensely thankful that I was allowed to come of age in an historical moment—that is, to “grow up”—when rock & roll made some bold and upsetting advances, and I am thrilled with the realization that I will “grow old” with music that will continue to do the same.

That’s why, today and tomorrow, I’ll look to artists like Sleater-Kinney, Trent Reznor, Royal Trux, Marilyn Manson, Tricky, Master P, Bikini Kill, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, P. J. Harvey, Mary Lou Lord, Elliott Smith, and Lucinda Williams for the kind of courage, insight, and beautiful violation that have made rock & roll such a great adventure and such a great disturbance in our culture, our arts, and our values. Without these artists, and others like them, the future won’t count for as much as the past—and all tomorrow’s nighttimes of sin might not be as illuminating.

MIKAL GILMORE
MARCH 17, 1997
LOS ANGELES
 (REVISED AUGUST 12, 1998)