Boy, You've Got to Carry That Weight

MY FRIEND and partner Tom Watson has a great post this morning about baby boomer rock and the young soreheads who rail against its continuing dominance of the music business. Watson takes as his target a particularly self-righteous, ill-informed review of the new Dylan album by a college newspaper critic (the writer willfully professes ignorance and assumes conventional wisdom instead of challenging it--things that would get the writer in trouble with me in the college class I teach on writing criticism).

     The article seems to be more of a response to critical praise lavished on the new Dylan album than a response to the record itself (btw, its a good record, not a great record, not nearly the equal of Love & Theft). But what's interesting to me about the piece is the anger that seethes under the surface. How dare people like the Dylan album and still consider this kind of old fashioned music interesting or good in a world where electronica and hip hop exist! It's the same kind of attitude that people who hate comics books have about comic book movies--it can't possibly be really good or serious, it's just a comic book!

     That boomer rock continues to dominate the marketplace for pop music is an accident of demographics about which I've written before. But the social and artistic shadow cast by boomer rock, and rock in general, since rock and roll is THE quintessential cultural expression of the boomer generation, is another matter entirely.

     With the rise of rock and roll in the 1950 and 1960s pop music reached a cultural apotheosis. Suddenly pop music was something other than material for entertainment, it was in the center of a surging, violent cultural upheaval. The music one liked was a source of tribal identity the way religion and ethnicity once had been. Sure there had been minor subcultures that identified themselves around music before--hipster be-boppers in the 1940s and early 1950s for example. And musical genres had been identified with youth before (big bands in the war years). But the 1960s WERE different. Young folks might not want to hear that, but it's time for them to suck it up and deal. Radical social change was occurring. The demographics of a youth surge was a big driver of that change. And pop music self-consciously served as a tent pole for the edifice of cultural revolution. Terrorist groups named themselves after pop songs. And pop musicians, for the first time in American life, tried, however fitfully, to merge commercial concerns with artistic pretensions. (Natch, the use of pop music for political polemics was as old as the hills, from colonial era sentimental ballads about the woes of Africans yanked from their homes and sold into slavery to Sinatra's famous plea for racial and ethnic tolerance "The House I Live In." But until the 1960s it wasn't expected as a norm.)

     Because the cultural shift was all about demographics the music of the day was very much the emblem of a "generation gap" that really did exist. The depth of that schism is probably unimaginable today for people under 40. Now your parents have Eminem, Snoop Dog, and The White Stripes on their iPods. They're just as likely as their kids to be found at a political rally. Then, listening to Hendrix meant choosing sides. Growing your hair long meant getting kicked out of the house. Turning 18 meant being shipped off to war.

     If the demographics of the baby boom have given boomer rock its commercial staying power, the cultural politics of boomer rock have given the music its cultural staying power.

     This is not to say that post-boomer pop music genres have eschewed politics--punk and hip hop are genres whose artists often deliberately inject themselves into cultural politics. But the demographics and overall political landscape have shifted. There is no generation gap. And more importantly, pop music as a tribal identifier has moved back to the fringes of subculture--maybe a coupla kids in the local high school are deliberately goth or emo, but gone is the Manicheanism of the old divide. One is no longer either hip or square. On my 15-year-old's iPod you can find everything from Puccini to Ludacris. In my car the Dirty Pretty Things album shares the carousel with the new Christina Aguilera record and yes, Dylan's Modern Times. Pop music has retreated from the anomalous position it held in the 60s and become a much more traditional part of the landscape. Not only is the music no longer expected to play a socio-political role, but it is no longer made exclusively by and for the young. It's back to the way pop music was in the days of "How Much is That Doggie in the Window" and "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White."

     Furthermore, pop music is no longer a dynamic, fast-changing, engine of cultural invention. The Beatles' entire career, which witnessed enormous changes in the sound and style of the music, lasted eight years. By contrast, the last great stylistic schism in hip hop can be traced back to the release of The Chronic 14 years ago. (Ok, ok, Outkast has developed a unique sound, but their style has yet to spur a school of imitators). If you want to look for fast-changing engines of cultural invention in pop culture YouTube, MySpace, and Grand Theft Auto are all better artifacts to examine.

     Of course the cultural politics of boomer rock don't necessarily make the art better or worse. In fact the icons of 1960s rock believe that their art is unnecessarily burdened by the weight of cultural significance with which the fans and critics have loaded it. In Chronicles Dylan explicitly discusses the unwanted mantel thrust upon him in the 1960s, and still thrust upon him. In the Cornell Daily Sun review that Tom mentions, the writer refers to Dylan as "Mr. 60's" and cites Blood on the Tracks (Dylan's mid-1970s divorce album) as cultural evidence that the political activism of the 1960s had given way to the self involvement of the me-generation. It's convenient cultural short-hand, and some of the insights have merit. But if one tries to look at Dylan's development as a writer from the inside out, one can see that he turned away from writing predominantly political material in 1964, not 1975. That a young writer is still parroting these misconceptions about the man's work is a measure of the cultural freight that boomer rock is still asked to haul. That Blood on the Tracks' popularity, if not it's composition, DID signal a shift in a generation's preoccupations is evidence that boomer rock has shoulders broad enough to carry that weight, carry that weight a long time.