More Alive and Less Lonely

by Jonathan Lethem

  So, in editing Da Capo Best Music Writing, it’s been impossible for me not to wonder how the results might fare as a message in a bottle—or, to change the metaphor slightly, as a time capsule of 2001—or, to change the metaphor wildly, as a kind of hologram of popular music culture, a microcosmic Sim City to represent in shrunken proportion every facet of the larger World of Pop. Could a Martian reconstruct our era solely from the evidence contained in this Best Music Writing volume, as I had reconstructed the Founding Fathers’ worldview from the sole existence of Stranded? The answer’s no, absolutely. Popular music’s history, like its present, is vastly more complex in 2001 than in 1978. Not least because, as Nick Hornby ably described in his introduction to last year’s book, that history is now intricately woven into its present, from samples to reissues. Besides, even Stranded only intimated the world to my teenage-Martian brain, it didn’t actually contain it. I needed record stores and hundreds of further books, as well as thousands of magazines and liner notes and conversations, to enact the full reconstruction. In truth, that project is still in progress, a life’s work, though now it’s been muddled by the attempt to comprehend everything that’s happened since 1978.

  Oh, and I’ve tried to live in the present, too. Pop purists and Buddhists concur, it’s best to live in the present. I’m doing my best: must parse new record reviews, must get ass out of the reissue section in the record store: Be Here Now. I’ve so far skirted the whole looming question of fuddy-duddyism, destined to be wrestled with eternally in this field of study where the maximum impact between subject and object is ordinarily made somewhere in adolescence, say around age thirteen or fourteen. So, full disclosure: I’m thirty-eight. Though that’s poor excuse for a paradigm shift, Da Capo ought to be congratulated on their progress: without actually consulting with a mathematician, I’ve calculated that the arc from Peter Guralnick (editor of the 2000 volume) through Hornby (last year), and now to me dictates that the editor of the 2004 Da Capo Best Music Writing will need to be thirteen years old, while the editor of the 2006 volume hasn’t been born yet.

  The point? I’m the first editor in this series who can fairly claim to be faking it in both directions. Sure, I’ve got a twelve year-old niece who understands the radio better than I do—who doesn’t? But I’ll also admit that the first Rolling Stones song I heard on the radio as a new single, instead of an “oldie,” was “Emotional Rescue” (I thought it was wonderful), a confession sure to chagrin anyone who’s endured my discourses on the virtues of Sticky Fingers or Exile on Main Street, never mind Aftermath. My generation, such as it is, is the one jolted into solidarity in mourning Joey Ramone, and we were born into a world the giants, those both writing and written about in Stranded, had already made. What did our glorified punk-ineptitudes and leather-jacket poses mean if not this: To seize this music for ourselves, to seize a life for ourselves, was to embrace faking it, brazenly.

  Not to say the giants have abandoned the field. A quarter-century later, four of Stranded’s contributors are collected in the first two volumes of this series (including the undead Lester Bangs). Also Richard Meltzer, who, by the appearance of his Rock Aesthetics in Paul Williams’s early mimeographed issues of Crawdaddy, has a share of the claim to have invented the rock-crit form. What are the chances for the egg-sucking mammals of this planet when the dinosaurs are still so crafty, alert, and strong? It’s as unfair as…well…as the tyranny of Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft over the Village Voice’s Pazz and Jop Poll this past year. Muttering can be heard through the land: When will these guys take their jewels and binoculars and go home and take a nap?

  No time soon, I hope. Let any revolution be incomplete while I’m in charge—that thirteen-year-old can clean house in 2004. Much of my favorite music writing last year was by the Usual Suspects, as was much of my favorite music. It happened, for instance, that 2001 was The Year Bluegrass Broke. Go figure. Besides, if picking a big fat pile of writing I loved was pure pleasure, the responsibility to create a snapshot of 2001 was mostly as distracting as it sounds. This is my chance to mention all the things this book could have been, and isn’t: Rock Obituaries 2001, The Year’s Best Dylan Writing, or Fifty Thousand Music Fans Array Themselves Like Iron Filings in Postures of Attraction and Repulsion Vis-à-vis The Strokes (though I did find a useful distillation of this element in an excerpt from the Ilovemusic online forum, where much of the impromptu chatter is as good as the best magazine writing). The book also isn’t The Year’s Best Capsule Reviews, Sidebars, Top Ten Lists and Photo Captions. Though that stuff forms the regular work of a large number of talented writers, and is often smashingly clever, I’m helpless in my general preference for essays and profiles when it comes to re-reading, which is the point of binding this compendium with something more durable than staples. I’ve let Carl Wilson’s poignant references to which cool bands are coming to town this week stand as a tribute to the yeoman work done by weekly columnists and listings writers everywhere, whose frontline efforts keep us all fresh and hopeful in our quest for a good show: Good show. Nor is this book What I Was Listening To and How Little It Mattered In September and October, though it easily could have been. 2001 was a year with a crater in it, and it seemed nearly every music writer, nearly every writer (myself included), contributed something to the vast collective howl of despair. But to include more than a few references was to feel the void open again under my feet, and then suddenly the subject wasn’t music at all. The conclusion of many of the writers, anyway, was my conclusion in editing the book: 2001’s music answered the needs of that moment better than music writing ever could. O Death, indeed.

  So, welcome instead to Johnny’s Graying Teenaged Sense of What Isn’t Boring. I promise no objectivity: My tastes in music played a part here, as did my bullshit detector. I spent some money on new CDs to road-test claims for alluring new acts I hadn’t heard. If the piece was a rave, I felt I ought to play official taster. Nice work, really, easier than trying to write about music from scratch or crashing vacuum cleaners for Consumer Reports. I also vetoed pieces, many of them appealingly written, even rhetorically strong, which were nevertheless pegged on listener’s assertions I couldn’t abide: Sorry, but if you want to claim that The Spinners’ records don’t hold up, do it on someone else’s watch. Faking it and getting it wrong aren’t the same thing. All we’ve got on this island—all anyone has in this archipelago of islands, here in this sea littered with urgent and impulsive communiqués, both musical and written—are two ears and the truth as we know it.

  “When I found Steve Young, I had been heartsick a while,” begins David Eason in his piece on the country singer, “and he was singing songs that told stories about a world I knew. It’s a world where you go somewhere and aren’t sure how you feel about it, where you feel the past pushing you away and pulling you back, where you cover sad feelings with crooked smiles and bitter words, where you make tough choices and always pay the price for them.” In trying to explain the pull of Young’s voice, Eason offers his own, and there’s nothing more a writer can do. Music writing is an art of substitution, but perhaps so is any art. What we seek is the voice, and what’s behind it. What we want is to be with ourselves, but not alone. This book, I hope, is a book of encounters, none of them predictable, whether the names are as familiar as the Beatles or Louis Armstrong or Jennifer Lopez, or as new to you as Kelly Hogan or Opeth were to me, or as unfamiliar and unlikely as Korla Pandit (I’ll admit I searched the name on the Internet to be sure I wasn’t being hoaxed by this account of a fake fakir). Take it as an invitation to an impossible, gabbling conversation, a party line, where every voice is unforgettable—vivid with a freight of confession, advocacy, sarcasm, dismay. The characters in these pieces are musicians and fans, sometimes also disc jockeys or producers or family members, but above all the characters in these stories are the writers themselves: chasing leads, pitching angles, making lists, constructing impossible gossamer theories, sprawled wrecked in depression on their couches, envying their
heroes, arguing with their friends, changing stations, listening, listening, always listening. Faking it. We’re all faking it, even Greil Marcus. Thank God, too. It’s literally the best, and most human, thing we can do.

  —Introduction to Da Capo Best Music Writing 2002

  Close Reading (Ricks on Dylan)

  Christopher Ricks and I share a privilege. It’s one you share too, assuming you join in our almost fathomless esteem for the songs and performances of the sui generis poet-singer Bob Dylan. That is, to have had our lifetimes overlap with an artist whom stone fans like Ricks and I suspect future generations will regard, in his visionary fecundity, with the awe reserved for Blake, Whitman, Picasso and the like. This concurrence of our lives with his is a privilege that shouldn’t be taken for granted: forty or fifty years from now, one of the questions younger people will surely ask of elderly witnesses to the twentieth century is, “Did you ever go to a Bob Dylan concert?” If the reply comes: “You have no idea what a hassle Madison Square Garden could be,” it will be met with shaming incredulity.

  That Christopher Ricks? Yes, that one—the great British literary critic, exemplar of the art of “close-reading,” explicator of Milton, Keats, Tennyson and Housman, praised by none other than W. H. Auden as “the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding,” and now the author of the tome-like Dylan’s Vision of Sin—a volume perhaps ipso facto to be regarded as either the most intimidating rock-critical treatise ever published, or the silliest, or both. Or, as one friend blurted when I’d said I was reviewing the book: “Does that mean you have to read all the way to the end?”

  I did, with escalating ease and pleasure. Ricks, surely aware of the oddness of his enterprise—the elevation of a member of the Traveling Wilburys to a place among the greatest poets in the English language—has anticipated not only the possible resistance of his usual readership to his subject at hand, but also the probable unfamiliarity with his aims and methods in the potential new readership he will have attracted. “Most people who are likely to read this book will already know what they feel about Dylan, though they might not always know quite why they feel it”; this is how he opens the book, with typical brio and warmth. Ricks quickly addresses concerns that Dylan might not be properly treated as a poet: “The case for denying Dylan the title of poet could not summarily, if at all, be made good by any open-minded close attention to the words and his ways with them. The case would need to begin with his medium, or rather with the mixed-media nature of song, as of drama.” Translation: if the lines in Shakespeare’s plays, written for and much enlivened by (sufficiently inspired) performance, make a legitimate object of reverence and study, what’s your problem? Might it really only be that you never had to see Shakespeare sing on “We Are the World,” or accept an Oscar by live satellite feed from Australia? If so, get over it.

  Perhaps thinking of potential new readers, Ricks makes the book a seductive primer in his own methods. Take a look, he seems to say, at the pleasure in juxtaposing one poet with another (he abuts Dylan with Lowell, Marvell, Tennyson, Eliot, Herbert, and many others): see how they seem to read one another, while you and I, reader, stand back and watch. Or consider the rewards of parsing what you’ve taken for granted even in songs you praise as masterworks: a lyric’s exact strategy and means, what it has in common with other human utterances, and what sets it apart. Such clockwork dissection never seems to drain Dylan’s work of its vitality (a tribute to Ricks and Dylan both, I suspect), but rather to renew a listener’s amazement. By the end of one such disquisition Ricks may persuade you that rhyme, that corny tool, is the central receptacle for not only Dylan’s wit but for the moral and emotional brilliance of his art.

  Close reading, on close reading, turns out in Ricks’s hands to be a lively sport, full of beguiling allusions, teasing asides and free philosophical musings, and bursting with groanworthy puns. See, or rather hear, Ricks analyze Dylan’s use of pronouns in “Like a Rolling Stone”:

  The pronoun “you” is the song’s pronouncement, this being a song in which, although “they” may for a while be hanging out with “you” (“They’re all drinkin’, thinkin’ that they got it made”) and “he” may be doing so, too (even if “He’s not selling any alibis”), “you” will never, Miss Lonely, enjoy the company of “we” or “us,” and never ever the company of an “I.” Of all Dylan’s creations this is the song that, while it is one of his most individual, exercises the severest self-control when it comes to never mentioning its first person. Never say I. Not I and I: you and you.

  Elsewhere, Ricks riffs on one of Dylan’s latest offerings, the song “Sugar Baby” (2001):

  Two idioms were the parents of this Sugar Baby, parents who—despite not exactly getting on with one another—were determined to make a go of it. They are the idioms to go without (“You went years without me”) and to keep going (“Might as well keep going now”). Their child would be keep going without. Meanwhile, lurking in the brains behind ma and pa is the thought of getting going, which is why the words “get” and “got” get to usher in “went without” and “keep going.”

  Ricks’s lighter-than-air allusion to an earlier song—“the brains behind ma and pa” is a near-quote from “Maggie’s Farm”—reminds us of another lyric about quitting and setting off down the road. There’s madness in his method, but Ricks’s confidence in his reader’s willingness to follow him derives from the willingness to follow displayed by Dylan’s listeners.

  Readers may be disconcerted by Ricks’s sheer goofiness, a tendency not constrained to his writing on this new, pop-culture subject: Ricks’s Beckett’s Dying Words is equally antic, even as it worries at Beckett’s graveness. Punning is less an ornament on Ricks’s critical prose than one of its central methods, one alive with the kind of linguistically embedded meanings he wants to excavate in the first place. Bent on tormenting into view the recalcitrant intention hidden in a writer’s vocabulary, syntax and rhyme, Ricks will stop at nothing to extract the information he craves, even tickling. Happily, he’s got an ear for a tune as well as a trope. The songs he discusses, taken as the contents of a mix tape, would consist neither of Dylan’s greatest hits (though many are here), nor of a bunch of stuff rewarding to parse but musically dull. Rather, Ricks has picked a lot of “sleepers”—those Dylan songs that emerge as favorites on long listening, not purely for their lyrical sophistication but for their depth in that mysterious conjunction of lyric, music, and performance. Ricks’s book leads you back into Dylan’s music, no small virtue.

  Dylan’s Vision of Sin seems a conscious attempt to forge a post-biographical context for Dylan’s art, to sweep away in one gesture the defensiveness, gossip, and, perhaps worst of all, proprietary distortions too often imposed on an artist’s legacy while it is still in the making. There are those who, like Kinbote in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, ask us to believe their approach to Dylanology, pegged on Woody Guthrie, heroin, or the Kabbalah, is exclusively correct. Ricks, on the other hand, has no stake in persuading his reader that his particular taxonomical trick, which consists of reading Dylan’s songs against the seven deadly sins, four cardinal virtues, and three heavenly graces, is anything more than what William Empson calls “the right handle for picking up the bundle,” i.e., a reasonably adequate stance from which to begin contemplating the artist’s accomplishment. (In fact, he forgoes his chapter on Greed, concluding blithely that Dylan hasn’t written any songs on the subject.) Ricks grants art’s ultimate indifference to criticism—so, despite a tone of vast assurance, his book is agreeably humble.

  In attempting to set, almost single-handedly, the course for the future of “Dylan Studies,” Ricks has a counterpart in Greil Marcus. An American critic who began as a “rock writer,” Marcus brings to consideration of Dylan’s music a freight of vernacular knowledge as weighty as Ricks’s academic discipline. Beginning in the classic Mystery Train, and then, more recently and extensively, in The Old, Weird America, Marcus has placed Dylan deep in his American context, the s
ame swamp of indigenous voicings that gave rise to alchemists like Walt Whitman, John Ford, and Chuck Berry.

  Marcus is both Ricks’s twin and his opposite. He provides the corrective to Ricks’s seeming disinterest in America, or in Dylan’s magpie appropriations from folk and pop traditions, as opposed to his relationship to canonical poetry. Certainly there are moments, reading Ricks, when you want to shout: The sixteen year-old Robert Zimmerman didn’t want to be Lord Tennyson, man, he wanted to be Muddy Waters! But Ricks wouldn’t argue; that’s the strength of his book. The critic has merely wished to test the songs he loves against his own pre-existing context, which happens to be Philip Larkin and Matthew Arnold, not Blind Willie McTell. In doing so he’s found them all the more extraordinary, not wanting in any measure. Any critic’s a blind man, faced with an elephant as formidable as the collected works of Bob Dylan. But some blind men have extraordinarily sensitive hands, and it is possible to imagine an elephant’s pleasure at their touch.