I hope that it will be completed at some point in 2009 to mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of Marsh's original book. As many critics noted back in 1989, Marsh's book can seem willfully wrongheaded at points, but over the last twenty years it has more frequently struck me as under-appreciated, misunderstood, and thoroughly wonderful, especially in those places where I find my own taste most at odds with the author's. You can find a virtual version of the book by clicking on the title for this particular post, but I would suggest you go out and buy your own physical copy right now, read it, then come back here.{Sound of Jeopardy theme played several thousand times}
Okay, good. Now we can talk.
As you can see, Marsh's book is an argument in list form. If you read it from start to finish it has some interesting things to say about Western popular music in the late twentieth century, particularly about the role of the single as opposed to the album, and about the cultural gumbo that is pop music. The book's center of gravity is the mid-1960s. As someone who was starting grade school at that time, I owe whatever appreciation I have of artists like Paul Revere & the Raiders or the Rivingtons to what Marsh has to say about them in this book.
However, as someone who came of age a little later than Marsh did, I also find his argument has little room for some of the pop artists of the 1970s, 1980s, and later who have meant the most to me.
Moreover, even though Marsh offered (in his preface to the book's tenth anniversary reprinting) a list of 101 singles from 1989 to 1998 that might have "made the list" had he revised it, they seem almost beside the point. His book describes a phenomenon, a world of pop music that developed in the 1950s, as r & b slid into rock & roll (whatever that is), and dissipated into generality during the 1980s. As Marsh shrewdly notes in that tenth anniversary preface, the flowering of punk and hip hop in the 1980s made a "new world" out of the old one and effectively ended the story that he had written about. In a way, it seemed as if the trans-racial pop art of the Beatles/Motown era was a thing of the past, never to be recreated in an age in which many would-be popular artists equated widespread popularity with aesthetic failure. In twenty-first-century America, we call this the "Jonathan Franzen syndrome," but it was certainly in evidence as early as the 1980s when the corporate motto of independent SST Records proudly proclaimed "Corporate Shit Sucks."But a funny thing happened as we moved from Reagan and Bush to Clinton and . . . well, Bush: pop didn't die. It didn't get dumb--at any rate, no dumber than it was in the early 1960s. And even if you deplore the atrocity that is American Idol as much as I do, I still think Western pop today is a fascinating stew, one that can very much challenge its audiences, if only its creators take pop seriously.
This blog will be an attempt to tell that story, the sequel (or "answer song") to the story that Marsh told in his book twenty years ago. In terms of strict chronology, it will stretch back to the early 1970s and forward to last week--or sometime next spring, about a year from now.
Like Marsh's book, it will be an argument in list form, but in homage to S.S. Van Dine's The Greene Murder Case, another orphan book that I love, I will be throwing the list up out of order on purpose. Think of it as a Dickensian era serial novel that emerges from the shotgun collaboration of Mark Danielzewski and Lester Bangs; or as music criticism as written by a post-Swan-implosion Desmond Hume.And you. Add comments. Disagree vehemently. Suggest artists and singles that you think I'm neglecting. If you're eighteen years younger than me, tell me the story I'm missing by putting my center of gravity in . . . oh, but that would be telling. As the singles I hope to write about frequently demonstrate, harmony may begin far more easily in dissonance than it ever does in mere identity.
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