Because I was hatched in 1960, not 1950, I've been able to experience rock as a (''mere') product from the gitgo. Grow up surrounded by Beatles and Stones and Motown, and that stuff's bound to sound not so magnificent to you—'Satisfaction' to me is mainly just a catchy song I've heard on the radio a lot. Personally, I'm convinced the early '60s and early 70s, both hucksterdominated periods of supposed stasis, were the high points of rock 'n' roll: this is entertainment made for monetary means, and lots of so-called 'teen exploitation music' weathers the years in better shape than the purported classics. 'Cause rock succeeds when blockheads on the make, ones who don't mind looking like they're on the make, contemptive bastards who'll serve up any redundant rubbish their audience will swallow, inadvertently let their humanness leak out. And the rock that expresses the most usually doesn't have the slightest idea what it's trying to accomplish, or why.

Intellectual sophistication, poetic artifice, 'flair for language,' all that Cole Porter nonsense, is what rock reacted against. So, as far as I'm concerned, what Bruce Springsteen does has very little to do with rock 'n' roll. He plays art-rock. Like Rick Wakeman (or, okay, Pete Townshend—same dif) before him, his muse can't be separated from his ego; he's too palpably concerned with how he'll be documented in the history books. Rock doesn't work that way. If postconscious rock has visionaries, they're guys like James Brown, Marvin Gaye, George Clinton, probably Stevie Wonder, possibly Neil Young—guys who don't spend their whole careers trying to prove it, guys who never seem vainglorious, no matter how much ground they're breaking. And, needless to say, they break lots more Springsteen.

Self-conscious rock, or at least superconscious non-party-turning-out rock, isn't direct enough, and that's why bubblegum and metal and disco formulamongers generally communicate more than 'artists' making 'statements.' What makes albums like Tonight's The Night and Blood On The Tracks and Rumours (and Metal Box and Funhouse and White Light White Heat) so devastating are the sub-psyche substances beneath the self-consciousness—some major emotional crisis at stake in the individuals' private (or public) lives overpowers, takes control of, their most arrogant lyrical/compositional pretensions. But that almost never happens. And except when it does, it's ignorance of trends, of aesthetic expectations, of where the 'edge' is, that keeps people honest: 'Idealism' limits expression more than commercialism does.

Photos by

Originality, as an entity, is incredibly overrated. And though we pretend the difference between genius and idiocy is one of miles, really it's one of inches. When Springsteen puts over a believable song, he does it the same way John Waite does—by accident. In rock criticism, there's this recurring theme where a singer or band or movement comes along and miraculously saves the world, and keeps saving the world over and over again, but the idea contradicts the anyone-can-do-it democracy at the music's core. Rock critics trying to justify their questionable career-choice by shrouding music in mystique, and that's why imperfect-but-'important' conceptworks like Sgt. Pepper's, Never Mind The Bollocks, 'The Message,' Thriller, and 'Sun City' are so overvalued. The implication is that rock should somehow make you a more well-rounded person, but of course that's baloney.

Serious rock performers should probably only be analyzed in a completely ridiculous way (though I suppose it's okay to be serious about the ridiculous guys.) Only fools spew solemnities over what is primarily trivial garbage. (Sometimes I'm a fool.) In rock 'n' roll, it ought to make sense to dismiss music for being too relevant, to say that the very cultural influence a Bruce Springsteen exerts is what precludes him from being a 'great' artist. The mere way he is able to be dealt with so sobersidedly negates whatever rock 'n' roll importance he might otherwise have. How can anybody's eyes pop out over a Bruce (or Berry or Beatles) record? They can't—we've been taught to expect more than we'll ever get. These dodos aren't banal enough to be rock 'n' roll—their 'genius' has been hyped into nothingness. Rock means fantastic moments, 'cause history's not made by great men. And when we con guys like Lou Reed and Elvis Costello and Paul Westerberg into believing their 'genius' tags are true, they destroy themselves.

Mass-crass line-drawings of utopian person-to-person interaction are far short of what we're indoctrinated that R'n'R oughta be, but nowadays they're damn near all we've got—we fool ourselves when we act like anything besides overriding pretensions (and lack of catchy tunes) distinguishes Robbie Robertson's middlebrow mystijism and Marianne Faithfull's cabaret glitz from, say, Def Leppard and Eddie Money and Tiffany. And meanwhile, what few alleged alternatives-to-the-mainstream there are speak to an incrementally smaller and smaller constituency, climb further and further up their own butthole, every day. Insularity has led to an inevitable fatigue and frustration, so by now the 'underground' is just one big predictable in-joke. College radio nowadays serves a revenge motive: to confirm the conceit of insecure out-group kids who need to prove to themselves that they're smarter than the Simple Minds fans in the drama club and Motley Crue fans on the football team. Indie-label bands brandish their cleverness, impress you (if they're any 'good') while they're on, but never threaten to provoke empathy or compassion in any way. The preordained 'cutting edge' is too limited, too ego-bound, too worried about what it 'should' or 'shouldn't' do, to express anything; 'innovation' itself has turned trite. Outrageousness is a major part of what rock's about, but it ain't something you can afford to work hard at. Real garbage doesn't work months thinking up new ways to be garbagey.

Everything these days is some kind of lowest-common-denominator, and we might as well stick with an LCD that doesn't disguise itself as something bigger. So, more and more, the only valid way to critique rock music is through an aesthetic of guilty pleasures. Not all schlock is good schlock, naturally— hackpop should aim high, but in a vulgar/playful way, not a pseudoepistemological/melodramatic way. And like any rock 'n' roll, hackpop oughta be unstifled, urgent, sexy, sloppy, and raw (or else just real pretty—innocuousness is as noisy as noise, in its own way), and it's mandatory that it genuinely convey some kind of emotion, no matter how moronic. (So, you can forget Simple Minds and Motley Crue.) Also, it helps if you can tap your foot to it.

But whichever way you cut it, the bottom line is that we're best off just packing up and starting all over again, back at the point when one of this garf 'meant' anything (and the way to do that ain't by reverting to R&B/C&W-based pre-synth 'traditionalist' sensibilities whose possibilities were exhausted eons ago, either.) We need to stop being such snobs, and start listening to the radio (commercial radio) and accepting unlistenable crap at face-value, intertwining our heartstrings with the heartstrings of the hacks on the records, surrendering to supposed stupidity like your average commuter does. We've gotta stop insisting, as is too easy to do these days, that all meanings be complex; we need to reconnect with mass-crass music's unique potential to make all the puny stuff that goes right and wrong in life more bearable. I mean, that's what it's there for, right? We've gotta get back to the base, or we can kiss this whole rigamorole goodbye.