Novel Sounds: Southern Fiction in the Age of Rock and RollThe Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll“Do You Have A Band?”: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City
2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 92; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00029831-8267960
ISSN1527-2117
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
ResumoIn 2016, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 2010, Patti Smith won the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids. These events decisively affirmed a place for rock music in contemporary literature and a larger unity between forms once considered incompatible. While not always on the same wavelength, fiction, poetry, and autobiography have intersected with the sound and essence of rock and roll to express disenfranchisement. The divergence between these expressions among disparate subcultures is demonstrated in three valuable new books.Florence Dore’s Novel Sounds extrapolates beyond the standard narrative of rock history to argue that post–World War II southern fiction shared a subtextual “thematic resonance” with early rock and roll (3). The liberating sounds of African American music represented for the Southern Agrarians and New Critics alike a degeneration of vernacular (read: white folk) culture. Defensively, these southern writers, particularly New Critics with influence in the academy, clung to the ballad as a resource for literature that revered the past, resisted modernization and intrusive technology, and kept racial and class lines intact. The ballad tradition gave reactionary cultural producers a reassuring “racial clarity” that was becoming harder to find on the radio or jukebox (58). As a medium for cross-racial interchange, rock and roll moved at a tempo faster than what gradualist critics of integration desired. In analyzing invisible but profound reverberations found in selections like William Faulkner’s The Town (1957), Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1955), and William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960), Dore reveals spaces between the textual lines where rock and roll cast a spell on white southern writers’ consciousness that belied the music’s novelty status in the 1950s and early 1960s.The innovative readings and interpretations in Novel Sounds, though, elide some troublesome facts. Indeed, many of these authors expressed annoyance at rock and roll but largely understood it as a symptom of the Deep South growing louder and less stratified: the noise-averse Faulkner convinced a restaurant owner in Oxford, Mississippi, to place an Out of Order sign on the jukebox when he visited, while O’Connor used Elvis Presley and the Beatles as punchlines in letters to friends. Evidence that these southern writers reacted to rock and roll more vehemently as a singular threat or tipping point is scant in the archive. In several places, Novel Sounds’ implication that rock and roll radically shifted the course of southern fiction simply by osmosis seems implausible.Chronologically, Randall J. Stephens’s The Devil’s Music picks up approximately where Novel Sounds ends, as the first wave of rock and roll is absorbed into the larger entertainment industry. Evangelical Christians’ engagement with secular rock music, as Stephens’s subtitle suggests, consists of a three-act drama with numerous subplots. First, charismatic sects, particularly southern Pentecostalism, unwittingly supplied rock and roll with much of its energy and many of its most magnetic performers, including Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard. Following the downfall of early rock and roll and the emergence of a more self-conscious rock style in the 1960s with the arrival of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, evangelicals selectively adopted elements of rock’s form and fashions but adapted the content to their own ends. The result was what Stephens calls a “more culturally flexible faith” (21) and a semi-underground style of rock geared toward young born-again Christians. Following the outcry that met John Lennon’s off-the-cuff statement in 1966 that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” (quoted on 103) and the recognition of the counterculture’s massive influence, Christian rock finally broke off from its secular foil, branching out as a lucrative loudspeaker for the Far Right, powered by strategically marshaled outrage toward the mainstream.While The Devil’s Music’s historical coverage does not incorporate contemporaneous fiction depicting the quasi deification of musicians, like Harry Crews’s The Gospel Singer (1968) or Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street (1973), Stephens does productively bring to light an impressive array of archival sources—brochures, pamphlets, news articles, and editorials from the evangelical point of view—that articulate the shifting antirock stances of the self-proclaimed sanctified. The value of this study for literary scholars, then, lies in its illumination of an understudied force in American backlash politics, as conservative Christians in the media first engaged rock music negatively then opportunistically employed Christian rock as their ally in a wider culture war.Like the rebellious rockers heralding the fall of Jim Crow in Novel Sounds and the clean-living Christian hippies who co-opted the Devil’s music, another band of outsiders makes an unholy pact with convention in Daniel Kane’s “Do You Have a Band?”, as punk rock infiltrates the stodgy, insular world of poetry. Kane spells out the book’s intention clearly in the introduction, explaining how punk’s confrontational, stripped-down style redefined what was poetic in the texts of avant-garde writers and lyricists who were part of overlapping social circles in New York City’s Lower East Side from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. Enlivening a subculture glimpsed in autobiographies like Smith’s Just Kids, Richard Hell’s I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp (2013), and Jim Carroll’s Forced Entries (1987), Kane’s study delineates a singular creative environment, where even the most somber downtown poet was at most two degrees of separation away from the endearingly cartoonish punk group the Ramones.During this brief moment of notoriety, poets and punk rockers comingled not only because of proximity, haunting the same dives in a decaying lower Manhattan, but also through an interdisciplinary sensibility and a creativity borne from desperation, best voiced in Smith’s 1979 spoken-word revision of the Byrds’ “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star.” The Poetry Project, located at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery (the same neighborhood as punk’s ground zero, CBGB), provided the space for much of this cross-pollination. It reinvented St. Mark’s Church as a live venue for experimental poets who rejected the Beats’ drive toward transcendence and confessional poets’ relentless self-examination, drawing instead on idiosyncratic, often brutal work generated by their peers and their own self-reliance. This ingenuity extended to do-it-yourself (DIY) production, as poets distributed their work through mimeographed broadsides and chapbooks just as punk made its mark via low-budget independent-label singles.Kane effectively historicizes the rise and fall of punk’s intertwining with poetry in New York, beginning in the mid-1960s when the Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed (a rocker harboring poetic ambitions) and Ed Sanders of the Fugs (an established poet drawn toward rock) individually created elemental musical/lyric hybrids. Driven by the DIY aesthetic and an eclecticism that encompassed past poètes maudistes along with pop poètes manqués like Jim Morrison, the movement peaked with the cult fame of Smith, Hell, and Carroll, who concurrently published verse and recorded seminal albums. Impressed by their downtown peers, poets like Eileen Myles, John Giorno, and even esteemed elder Allen Ginsberg took their poetry from the lectern to the stage, embracing punk’s insouciance. The era hit its end point in the corrosive No Wave movement, in which poetry and music seemingly obliterated all respect for form and tradition. The punk poetry era moved quickly and burned brightly; Kane’s reportage and detailed, historically informed close readings rewardingly commit much of this once-ephemeral body of work to posterity.As Kane’s epilogue explains, the frantic music and declamatory poetry from the Bowery in the punk era partook of an elemental need to rant and revolt, an impulse that, according to Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces (1989), goes back centuries. Ironically, shouting “No Future!” at an audience in song lyrics and verse has a long history. As punk rock and spoken word’s contrarianism settles into the realm of respectability (like early rock and roll and Christian rock before it), Kane has done readers a service by explicating one unique, fascinating manifestation of that urge.
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