[This is the prologue/preface to a book about the music of 1964 I thought about writing. I might still write it.]
Prologue:
A Transvaluation of Boomer Values
When I was growing up, there were three musical eras on the radio: oldies, classic rock and contemporary music (both in its mainstream, hard rock, occasionally R&B, as well as “alternative” iterations). Steven Hayden has done a good job of describing the “classic rock” format in his book Twilight of the Gods (2018), but I’m curious about our category “oldies,” and what it might mean today. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the time during which radio would have been most dominant in my life, in Boston, WROR played “oldies” (essentially music from 1954-1964, or so); WZLX played “classic rock” (one of the first successful forays into the format in the country: music from 1965-1975); WBCN and WFNX played contemporary music.
I would say my parents switched pretty regularly between the “oldies” and “classic rock” formats. I remember listening to classic rock more often, but that oldies stations hold dearer memories for me, because they obviously held dearer memories for my parents. You were more likely to see my parents drunk on a Saturday night singing along to Joe Martell’s selection of 50s hits than you would see them singing along to Dylan or Springsteen on classic rock. It makes sense to me now as a 45 year old adult: My parents were in their adolescent and teenage years when that music was released, in their young and not so young adult years when the music on WZLX was released. Just like my parents, I overly estimate the music from my youth: goes a long way in explaining my generation’s obsession with Yacht Rock.
Now such distinctions seem meaningless. “Oldies” radio just means music made before 2000, and who listens to the radio any longer? SXM, which I now have in my car, seems to have a station for every musical taste (albeit stratified by decade, rather than format, and, although it once held the prominent position at Station #4, the forties music station has been relegated back into the 70s or somewhere). Besides, most people stream music in their cars, where any curatorial decision, either by man or by algorithm, can replicate myriad listening experiences: including the radio of my youth.
So now that the era seems to have passed, and my parents passed even before that, it seems important to figure out what shaped my understanding of popular music. Constructing a history of popular music isn’t something that is only done by historians or musicologists, it’s also determined by commercial forces, music availability, format and lived experience. One of the most powerful voices in music criticism that recognizes this is Hanif Abdurraqib, who recently in an interview remarked: “I think the stakes are raised when music criticism understands the world that music is being released into.” This is true not only of music being produced today, but of past music as well: understanding the world music was released into back then, as well as understanding how that music is heard in the world we inhabit now. What was the world in which that music was released into (albeit understood on a necessarily reduced level)?
What I am talking about is a set of values that constructs “the world” (or possible worlds) for a music listener. That, as much as anything, is constructed by a set of values alongside of historical contingency and individual genius. Values are constructed and what appears “natural” is a process that develops over time through the shaping of things well beyond our control. For example, growing up, I was taught music periodization by the radio and what that periodization meant to constructing a cohesive narrative about popular music. Broadly defined: “oldies” radio meant a lot of different kind of music: you might hear a primitive jump blues number next to an orchestrated pop vocal from Roy Orbison. An early Beatles single, next to an early Doo-Wop single, next to the instrumental version of the theme from “A Summer Place.” It was meant to convey to its boomer audience the shock of moving from something your parents might have thought pleasant, to something you might have had to listen to under covers at night.
But mostly the music seemed to come from everywhere: Belafonte singing songs from coastal cities in countries people hadn’t heard of, girl groups from poor communities where humiliated men often took out the violence of the world on their girlfriends, Joao and Astrud Gilberto, along with Stan Getz, bringing Brazilian music to the masses, James Brown bringing sex to everyone. But the thing I remember most about the music of oldies stations is that many of the artists played there were people of color: Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, the Drifters, Ben E. King, all the Phil Spector groups, the Motown groups and solo artists, all the Stax artists, the aforementioned Brown, the occasional weird jazz outlier like Louis Armstrong, Cannonball Adderley or Hugh Masekela sneaking in. As much as it is a format constrained by time, it was incredibly ecumenical in what it could play.
I can count on one hand all of the artists of color I heard on classic rock: Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Carlos Santana, War, Thin Lizzy…and that’s pretty much it. If one the DJs got adventurous, they might throw in a Bob Marley song. But that paltry offering is all I remember from hearing artists of color on classic rock radio, and, going through the list, all of those artists either played in bands with white musicians or were highly touted by other white musicians (specifically thinking of the racist Eric Clapton covering both Hendrix and Marley). In all my years of listening to classic rock radio growing up, I never once heard Funkadelic. I was more likely to hear “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “That Lady,” “Reflections” or “Psychedelic Shack” (all songs as influenced by “classic rock” as any in the format) on “oldies stations” then I was on “classic rock” stations.
Of all the insidious forms value can take, upholding institutions of power is the most insidious. This one time division of radio formats might seem benign or insignificant, but in terms of creating a social history of listening and consuming music, it highlights a natural seeming truth about music that obscures as much as it produces new ways of knowing through periodization and exclusion. Yet understanding this isn’t as simple as retrofitting a legible form of racism to the whole enterprise. Or, to put it another way, racism doesn’t always make itself legible on the surface. Experiences of the dominant group within an ideological structure can produce the naturalness of exclusion from experience alone.
The “classic rock” era, as defined by the radio formats of my youth, roughly 1967-1987 (someone once remarked that Dire Strait’s Brothers in Arms (1985) was the official end of the “classic rock era”), was about relaying a set of understandable and collective experience to white baby boomers at the expense and exclusion of others. This wasn’t necessarily willful on their parts, but once they found themselves in positions of power (radio programers, label executives, etc.), it became impossible not to reinforce the narrative they had been told about themselves their whole lives.
I experienced this first hand in 1987. That year Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band celebrated its twentieth anniversary. For anyone who has heard the record, the first line gives away why this anniversary was particularly important: “it was twenty years ago today…” The record was released on CD. Countless books were published. Covers were recorded. Perhaps the capstone, for 14 year old me, was Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 greatest records from 1967-1987: “The 100 Best Albums of The Last 20 Years.” I’ve always wanted to write something about this list, but it’s always been too close to my own development as a music listener to give it its due. Now I know that what I want to write about it what the list was telling me about myself as a music listener. What it was teaching me.
The list, given the years it covers as well as its clear appeal to baby boomers (who would have just started to enter their 40s), is predominantly populated with white artists. Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix cracked the top ten. Steve Wonder, Otis Redding, Sly & the Family Stone, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin and Al Green all have albums in the list. Miles Davis Bitches’ Brew also shows up there. All in all, artists of color make up 14% of the total list. There’s one “international” record, The Harder They Fall, placed to represent all of reggae (and, one assumes, all of “world music”). If I remember correctly, I don’t have my original copy and it seems to be all but scrubbed from the internet, there was a preface to the list that explained this skew with the assertion that, since this list started with 1967, it left a lot of great early music behind (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc.) and R&B artists tended to make better singles than albums, with the exceptions noted above. They also made sure to include how many copies each album sold, just to assure the reader that they weren’t biasing big selling albums by bands like Loggins & Messina or the Eagles.
It’s correct to call the list racist, but I’m interested in the why. And I think the why, like a lot of whys in our current state, can be traced back to a narrative the post-war generation both were taught to believe, as well as taught to perpetuate. Most people center the baby boom generation from 1946-1964. My father was born in 46 and my mother was born in 49. In 1967, the “summer of love” and ground zero for the list, my father was 21 and my mother was 18. Again, judging from my own experience, that span of years is the first time a person begins to feel like an adult. Thus begins the narrative of popular music that it doesn’t become “serious” or “mature” until 1967, and that Sgt. Pepper becomes the paradigmatic example. But this narrative comes at a moment when the government started increasing the number of young men being sent to Vietnam, while allowing college students to defer. This would be still maintained through the 1969 draft. In 1967, 4% of the total African-American population enrolled in college, while 10% of the overall white population did so. Meanwhile, African-Americans, as a general population, were being asked to serve in Vietnam in disproportionate numbers. As historian Gerald F. Goodwin writes:
"African-Americans also complained that they were disproportionately drafted, assigned to combat units and killed in Vietnam. Statistics from the first three years of the war support these complaints. African-Americans represented approximately 11 percent of the civilian population. Yet in 1967, they represented 16.3 percent of all draftees and 23 percent of all combat troops in Vietnam. In 1965, African-Americans accounted for nearly 25 percent of all combat deaths in Vietnam. By 1967 this percentage had dropped considerably, to 12.7, but the perception that blacks were more likely to be drafted and killed remained widespread."
This occurs during an extended period of time wherein the incarcerated African-American population grows exponentially. As a Department of Justice report from 1986, a year before the Rolling Stone list, explains:
"A major trend documented In the admission series is long-term growth in the size of the black prison population. From 1926 to 1986 the recorded black percentage among admissions to State and Federal prisons more than doubled from 21 % In 1926 to 44% In 1986. This growth is not explained by general population trends. The number of blacks relative to the general population was about the same In both years, 10% In 1926 and 12%. [….] The recorded number of black prisoners in 1986 was nearly 9 times larger than the number recorded in 1926 (80,814 In 1986 versus 9,292 in 1926) (table 3). The recorded number of white prisoners was 3 times larger (100,874 in 1986 versus 33,626 In 1926), and the number of other races was 5 times larger (2,081 versus 410)."
The narrative around popular music develops as more and more African-Americans are being drafted and incarcerated. Meanwhile, the rate of African-Americans attending college, a refuge against the draft, at the same time remains flat.
If we are going to reassess our understanding of the music that has so dominated my life, at least, it seems to me we need to take these statistics into account. The boomer account popular music’s “serious” development over the years 1967-1987 is determined by the luxuries afforded them by dint of their race, class and education. Moreover, the benefits of this experience then feeds into the narrative of what is “natural” and “worthy.” The “poptimism” of recent popular music criticism is a recent development, and is more likely to favor white artists (Taylor Swift, Robyn, Carley Rae Japson) than it is to favor artists of color. For most of my life popular music has been rock music’s ugly step-child in the face of serious art. And pop music that is most closely tied to genres where African-Americans are integral to their development, have always been originally sold as faddish or, at best, admirably held at a distance: disco, hip-hop, blaxploitation…I grew up thinking at one point or another that each one was bad, or certainly not as good as the stuff on the Rolling Stone list.
However, I argue that this doesn’t just affect minority artists, the obscure or the forgotten. If you Google “Radiohead Beatles comparison” you will most likely find some comparison like this: Radiohead are like the Beatles in that they made some insignificant music and then recorded a series of classic albums that changed rock. Generally, Pablo Honey gets compared to pre-Rubber Soul, with RS being compared to the Bends, Revolver to OK Computer, Kid A to Sgt. Pepper, Amnesiac to Magical Mystery Tour, Hail to the Thief to the Beatles and In Rainbows to Abbey Road. You can kind of see it, except for one flaw that supports my argument: you have to compare the first Radiohead record with the first four Beatles records. Records that completely changed popular music, whereas “Creep” once soundtracked Steven Dorff slowly walking down the street in 1994’s S.F.W. (aside from Prince’s cover of the song, this is how I will always remember it).
It’s amazing to think of the early music of the Beatles, with songs like “If I Fell” and “Things We Said Today,” and so many more, being lumped with a mediocre debut album that now just seems like a grunge cash-in from a band that would go on to better things. The comparison itself demonstrates the still-held import of the Beatles, so this isn’t something that’s new upstaging something passe, but also demonstrates the very problem described above. We can only think of albums like A Hard Day’s Night or Beatles for Sale as necessary commercial compromises that led to the artistic breakthroughs. This is because my parent’s generation went off to college, instead of going off to war, and learned from people much smarter than them that childish things must be put away in favor of grown up concerns. In the shadow of war, nuclear annihilation, assassinations, etc. singing something as simple as “If I Fell” seems absolutely naive and immature. What is joy compared to the alienation and serious classical music of “A Day in the Life?” I can recall this narrative echoed in the Beatles/Dylan comparison of the rock histories of my teenage years: by 1965 Dylan had eclipsed the Beatles in terms of seriousness and sophistication. Or the Beatles/Beach Boys comparisons: as wonderful as Pet Sounds is, it’s no “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Motown and Stax were seen as “factories,” where geniuses had to fight the system if they were going to produce artistic statements. And on and on in Jan Wenner’s “transvaluation of all values.”
But that wasn’t quite true before 1967. And now that I’m getting older, and my parents are no longer around to talk about what happened before that, drunk, dancing to some old novelty R&B song, I have to recreate it for myself. As history moves forward, and pop music history even more so, it seems even more important to try to peer through the opacity of a time before I was born to try and rescue the past from a monochromatic blur. In that sense, I’m starting to become sympathetic to my least favorite Beatles’ songs, the songs where they sing (especially Paul) about the music to which their parents listened. Except, whereas Paul understood his parent’s music as evidence of a simpler time, I want to reawaken the radical nature of music in 1964: from pop, to R&B and soul, to jazz, to avant garde and, even, international music, everything seemed to be possible in the musical landscape of 1964, with a resonance that feels more present than ever.
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