Fans and critics: Greil Marcus's Mystery Train as rock 'n' roll history

Musical Quarterly

Volumn 81, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 145-169

  Mazullo, Mark ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 63549089157     PISSN: 00274631     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/mq/81.2.145     Document Type: Review

References (39)

1. Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975; rev. 1982, 1990, 1997). Since Mystery Train, Marcus has written prolifically on American music and culture. However, because my concern in this essay is with the way in which rock 'n' roll history was constructed during the early to mid-1970s, this other work, while it retains several of his most characteristic metaphors, ploys, and so on, is not of relevance here
2. Some details of Marcus's education and career can be found in the author's note in Mystery Train. See also Robert Draper, Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 40-42, 109-11. According to Draper, as an undergraduate at Berkeley in 1964, Marcus "fashioned his own major, American studies, then became a political science graduate student [there]" (109). By 1970, he was one of Rolling Stone's "most respected music critics" (41)
3. Marcus, 4
4. th Century Music 19 (Summer 1995): 50-67
5. th Century Music 18 (Fall 1994): 87-107
6. and Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). My work here is meant to represent the kind of historiographical concerns expressed in these and other sources
7. The polar positions on this topic have been voiced perhaps most strongly in the recent polemical debate between the musicologists Gary Tomlinson and Lawrence Kramer. See Kramer, "The Musicology of the Future," repercussions 1 (1992): 5-18
8. and the interchange that ensued: Tomlinson, "Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer"
9. Kramer, "Music Criticism and the Postmodernist Turn: In Contrary Motion with Gary Tomlinson"
10. and "Gary Tomlinson Responds," Current Musicology 53 (1994): 18-24, 25-35, 36-40
11. Greg Shaw, "The Teen Idols," in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History, 112
12. Shaw, "The Instrumental Groups," in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History, 124-25
13. This same argument was used elsewhere in the volume by Marcus to criticize the post-Rubber Soul work of the Beatles, who, it was argued, had sacrificed that crucial link with their fans as they recorded more and gave up the nightly live performances that had characterized their early years. See Marcus, "The Beatles," in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History
14. Mark Crispin Miller, "Where All the Flowers Went," New York Review of Books, 3 Feb. 1977, 31
15. Miller's title refers not only to the folk song made popular by Pete Seeger but also to the aging of rock's followers, their absorption into mainstream society, and their ideological shifts from countercultural demonstrators to more general, and in some cases academic, cultural commentators. Relevant to this discussion is Hans Robert Jauss's view that histories of the "authentic period" of any art form are always formulated under the assumption that the "authentic enterprise" had already reached its peak. See Hans Robert Jauss, "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory," in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, vol. 2 of Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 3-45
16. Along with Mystery Train, Miller discussed the following texts in his review essay: Jim Miller, ed., The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll (New York: Rolling Stone Press, 1976)
17. Tony Palmer, All You Need Is Love: The Story of Popular Music (New York: Penguin, 1976)
18. Dick Clark, Rock, Roll, and Remember (New York: Cromwell, 1976)
19. Roy Carr, The Rolling Stones: An Illustrated Record (New York: Harmony Books, 1976)
20. Ben Fong-Torres, ed., What's That Sound? (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976)
21. and Anthony Fawcett, John Lennon: One Day at a Time (New York: Grove Press, 1976)
22. This type of criticism might be characterized with the term "fan-as-critic," a paraphrase of some of Theodor Adorno's comments on the problems in distinguishing between the jazz fan and the jazz "expert" or critic. See, for instance, his "Perennial Fashion - Jazz," in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 119-32
23. Of course, such a formulation is problematic in today's academic climate, with competing critical methodologies claiming social and political legitimacy for their own system. I acknowledge this problem but stand with those who maintain that distance from one's subject of study is necessary to yield significant historical-critical observations. For a sharp and especially insightful criticism of the trend in cultural studies to remain in fan mode while writing cultural criticism, see Jochen Schulte-Sasse, "Can the Disempowered Read Mass-Produced Narratives in Their Own Voice?" Cultural Critique (fall 1988): 171-99
24. Frank Rich, "Elvis Presley as Moby Dick," Village Voice, 26 May 1975, 41
25. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), xv
26. See Tony Pinkney, D. H. Laurence (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990)
27. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking Press, 1923), 2
28. It seems as if Lawrence had taken his cue from Hawthorne, who was obsessively concerned with the idea of a moral in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables. Hawthorne had written: "Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral - the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief." See Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (New York: Heritage Press, 1935), xvi
29. The tendency to singularize the American experience, a position commonly attributed to the field of American Studies for obvious reasons, is as old as the nation itself. Often hostile to European intervention in matters of cultural criticism (one manifestation, perhaps, of Americans' anxious defensiveness regarding their deference to European culture in general), exceptionalist critics maintain that the American model is unique and therefore misunderstood by critics who espouse foreign paradigms. In the years after World War I, for instance, American intellectuals responded to foreign ideological explanations for the gargantuan world crisis by thematizing the democratic and egalitarian nature of American culture. On this point, see David Noble, "The Reconstruction of Progress: Charles Beard, Richard Hofstadter, and Postwar Historical Thought," in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, ed. Lary May (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 61-75
30. American exceptionalist scholarship also thrived during the Cold War, when liberal thinkers, confronting the anxieties of an increasingly internationalist governmental policy, countered this political maneuvering with a narrative that constructed the people of our nation as distinct from those Europeans who had succumbed to the forces of fascism and Stalinism. See Thomas Hill Schaub, "Introduction: The Liberal Narrative," in American Fiction in the Cold War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991)
31. Even today, exceptionalism is thriving. In a recent essay on American literary studies, Philip Fisher, professor of English at Harvard University, suggests that "ideology," in the strict sense of the word, is an impossibility in American society. Fisher claims that the "speculative society" fostered by advanced American capitalism is a force strong enough - and rooted so deeply in our tradition - to dispel any single model of domination and power, such as those offered by the Frankfurt School critics and, later, Michel Foucault. He finds in the absence of a centralized American state a system of multiple "rhetorics" that function more or less independently and locally in the creation and maintenance of America's unique culture. See Philip Fisher, "American Literary and Cultural Studies Since the Civil War," in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992), 232-50
32. Marcus, 163. Lawrence's essay appears in Studies in Classic American Literature
33. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion Books, 1960), xi
34. Again, Lawrence is drawing on Hawthorne. In the same preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne had written: "When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtle process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral, as with an iron rod - or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly - thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skillfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first." Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, xvii
35. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963)
36. Sacvan Berkovich, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), xii, xiv
37. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991)
38. Simon Frith, "'The Magic That Can Set You Free': The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community," Popular Music 1 (1981): 159
39. For an excellent discussion of the sources of this intellectual position, see Gene Bluestein, The Voice of the Folk: Folklore and American Literary Theory (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972)