THE PRESENTATION OF SELF IN EVERYDAY LIFE:
Democratizing the Intellect
by Frank Kogan
*Unless we can somehow recycle the concept of the great artist so that it supports Chuck Berry as well as it does Marcel Proust, we might as well trash it altogether.* - Robert Christgau
But rock criticism does something even more interesting, changing not just our idea of who gets to be an artist but of who gets to be a thinker. And not just who gets to be a thinker, but which part of our life gets to be considered "thought."
Say that - using rockers like Chuck and Elvis as intellectual models -young Christgau, Meltzer, Bangs, Marcus et al. grow up to understand that rock 'n' roll isn't just what you write about, it's what you do. It's your mode of thought. And if you do words on the page, then your behavior on the page doesn't follow standard academic or journalistic practice, and is baffling for those who expect it to.
To explain this new behavior, and the bafflement it causes, I use "school" as my metaphor for the psyche, and I say that school tries to enforce a split between classroom and hallway. The split tells us that to be intellectual we have to live in the classroom and to obey the classroom rule, which is to talk not to and about other people but just about some third thing, "the subject matter." It says that to talk to and about each other, as we do in the hallway, isn't to think but to merely live our lives.
And so - the split claims - either we can use our intellect or we can live our lives, but we can't do both at once. And living our lives (as the hallway narrowly construes this) becomes "visceral" by default, since our lives have been ejected from the "intellect." And the hallway's vengeance on the classroom is to say, "You may be smart, but I'm *real*, and you're not." But this is an impoverished realness, since it expels anything that the classroom defines as "mental," and forbids our putting something off at a distance and reflecting on it.
Good rock critics, by and large, don't honor the boundary between classroom and hallway. This puts us at odds with most editors-in-chief, department heads, and those horrible people the readers. The rules have no intellectual validity; we're not following them; and the reader who wants reassurance through us that he's smart isn't going to get it from us in the standard way, and the reader who wants reassurance from us that he's real isn't going to get it either.
Simon Frith points out that most magazines now "edit every contributor into a house style expressing house opinions." This is in order to match taste with publication, publication with reader. Even those "intellectual" magazines that wouldn't think of editing someone's opinions will nonetheless choose writers whose styles fit the magazine's brand. "Intellectual" is itself a style, a brand.
There are arguments to be made in favor of imposing a uniform style, maybe the best arguments being analogous to the ones for school uniforms: suppressing personal characteristics also suppresses social and class characteristics and therefore suppresses social conflict and gang warfare, thereby allowing the school to get on with its business. But no one claims that school uniforms are somehow more *intellectual* than regular clothes. Yet academia and journalism do try to claim that the enforced style is more
intellectual or "objective" than any other.
I first came up with the "classroom-hallway" metaphor 12 years ago, in this passage:
"'A fifteen-year-old's relationship to a pop song also puts her in relation to other fifteen-year-olds and to *their* relationship to the pop song and to other fifteen-year-olds etc.' Yes, and believe me, all fifteen-year-olds know this. But the sad thing is that the fifteen-year-old who writes empty truisms like 'a fifteen-year-old's relationship to a pop song also puts her...' etc. and shows it to the teacher gets an A-plus, whereas a fifteen-year-old who writes something that actually puts her in relation to other fifteen-year-olds knows better than to give it to the teacher, knows
that it's not welcome. E.g., from recent *Smash Hits* (Australia):
"'Calling all gorgeous guys on Earth who are 14 or older. We are two 15 year old chicks who are absolutely in love with Guns N' Roses, Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, Poison, and stax more! Interested?'
"'I'm sick of it! Once again I was game enough to wear my Bon Jovi badge to school and what do I get for it? A black eye. I'm sick of people always saying that Jon Bon Jovi has AIDS, they know it's not true but they say it just to shit people up the wall. So to all you terrorists out there, I think you're jealous because you're not as good looking or popular as him!'"
Of course, the fifteen-year-old's relationship to the *teacher* puts her in relation to other fifteen-year-olds too, so I'm not claiming that she's failing to live her life when she's writing down teacher-pleasing generalizations. And I'm not saying the *Smash Hits* letter style is in all circumstances *better* than the vague social generalization, especially given that this piece itself is full of such generalizations. If you lean
towards generalizations you'll go for the "classroom" prose; if you lean towards analogies you'll lean towards the "hallway." My point is that when she's out in the hallway, amidst the flirting and fighting, she's sure as hell thinking. She's working out her relations to others; she's working out who she is. And if a big deal of her caring about music is that it helps her do so, she might wonder - in the event that this caring leads her to becoming a rock critic - why she's not allowed to continue using the music
on the magazine pages as she always had in her life. What's the rule that says you should stop being a person when you become a writer, and what do the rules of journalism have to do with being a writer in the first place, or being a thinker?
Of course, the glam-metal chicks and the black-eyed battler are *in* the magazine, but they're safely off in the penpal section and the letters pages, where they're business-as-usual. Put them doing the same thing on the main pages, though, and they're suddenly wild things, gonzos, transgressors, a threat to... well, what *are* they a threat to, and why? And, if we assume that what's on the main pages has something to do with what the readers want there, the crucial question is why do they want to keep this prose style, this part of themselves, off the main pages? Are they trying to protect this
part, by keeping it off the main screen? Are they trying to protect the main screen from their lives?
I'll give an answer that I never would have imagined giving 20 or 30 years ago: In today's culture, print is a more potent medium than music, at least for presentation of self - more potent, and therefore has to be kept under more control.
Rock critics do the same thing that an Elvis or Jagger or Eminem does: they put themselves at issue, their personalities, their social stances, and in so doing force the readers into an attitude towards *them*.
When rock 'n' roll first hit, it had the effect of calling social status into question. But such a thing can be disconcerting, even for those whose status is low. After a while it's hard to continually lose one's sense of place, even if you don't have much of a place to begin with. Fact is, though, rock criticism barely has a place anymore. That's because it doesn't match up with the world's grid. There's this pseudo-equilibrium right now, in its prose style, semi-casual, somewhat jokey, moderately snide, tastefully feisty, not too over-"analytic," not too "wild," and still fundamentally subservient to the supposed subject matter. This is nothingness, not balance. You don't need to strike a balance between thinking and living, since one doesn't detract from the other. Real rock critics do both in their prose, and it's always too much for someone. Marcus
gets attacked for being too academic, Meltzer gets attacked for being too undisciplined, but it's really the same attack, the hallway-classroom split trying to reassert itself from one side or the other. I've heard Marcus's prose attacked for being too dry. Compared to what, the Great Flood?
Whether the style is wild, academic, or a casual balance, once a magazine or a profession imposes a uniform writing style, it's forcing the writer to suppress his own social characteristics in favor of the magazine's or the profession's. And once some writers get away with defying the dominant style, then another writer's conformity to it becomes a personal characteristic anyway; there's just no escaping the personal; it's so tied to the social. And social relations get called into question, and the self gets called into question, and the reader gets uneasy.
But that's where ideas arise, from this uneasiness. Because that's one of the things that critics do, whether they want to or not: they call social relations into question.
Robert Christgau: "[Chuck Berry] was one of the ones who made us understand that the greatest thing about art is the way it happens between people." And music makes us understand that *ideas* happen between people too, but we need the page and critics to drive this point home.
― jess (dubplatestyle), Friday, 23 May 2003 15:45 (twenty-one years ago) link