|
The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll: Collected Music Writings 2005-09
(Black Inc.)
By Robert Forster
Music: What Happened?
(125 Books)
By Scott Miller
The old adage “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” may be generally correct. But to paraphrase Roger Ebert, what matters most is not what it’s about but how it’s about it.
 Miller (left) and Forster Consider these two collections, which go together comparably well, mostly because the two authors – not exactly household names, and neither a professional pundit – complement each other in myriad ways. Both are songwriters who fronted bands that were never massively successful, but rather critical favorites: Forster in the Go-Betweens, Miller in both Game Theory and the Loud Family. Each takes an episodic view of popular music in their respective books, rather than making a global critique or taking on some grandiose overview. Tone-wise, both authors are equally earnest about music without becoming fawning or sycophantic, and both can be funny.
In terms of ambition, Miller would seem to have the more formidable challenge: writing about the last 50-plus years of music using a “top 20 songs” format for each year. Picking up on the list-making he’d been obsessed with since his youth, Miller began Music: What Happened? as a blog titled “Ask Scott.” You can read the book straight through, but before doing so forget any presumptions you might have that it will develop some kind of theoretical chronology, examining each decade as a thing unto itself, or looking for trends to define each era. It is, instead, more interested in minutiae, comprised of spontaneous observations by a musician who’s been in the trenches with many of the objects of his commentary, and more so, a musician who’s also a voracious, knowledgable, and opinionated fan.
Opening the book at random to the list for, say, 1985, you see comments on recognizable radio fare such as Tears for Fears, Talking Heads, R.E.M. and Pete Townsend, but also lesser known artists such as the Three O’Clock, Shriekback and Other Bright Colors. (Especially offbeat in this list is Miller’s choice of “On My Own,” from the Les Miserables Original Cast Recording, as one of his top 20.) As Miller does in most chapters, he opens with an intimation of change, if slight, to signify some differentiation in the new year. For 1985, he first captures the zeitgeist before zooming in to briefly consider the essence, or “cultural upheaval,” of a specific hit — in this case, Tears for Fears’ bombastically vague “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”:
 1985 – it was all over. As drum machines and DX7s blared, crooning emoters with mullets and rolled-up suit jacket sleeves paraded victoriously past countless sorry little rock combos at palpable risk of obsolescence. If you find that much cultural upheaval invigorating, there’s a lot to like about “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” – principally, the Olympian dream reality occupied by the chorus melody. It has a way of creating chordal moods extremely economically: there are typically only a couple of notes going at any one time, played on personality-free synthesizers, yet they continue to conjure a solid feeling of idea sharing, despite the fact that I haven’t the slightest clue what the lyrics are about.
As with all his selections, Miller doesn’t linger too long on one topic, devoting five or so sentences to his ruminations, or more to music he finds particularly interesting. That sense of discovery-on-the-fly, rather than having a well-sharpened sword or thesaurus of superlatives handy for certain predetermined targets, lends Music: What Happened? much of its easy charm and readability.
So, who is the book’s intended audience? Chances are, Miller’s readers are already interested in music that’s off the radar, but if some Us Weekly subscribers should come across it, there’s plenty to draw them in and point them in a less centrist direction the next time they log into iTunes. Conversely, hipsters will find themselves reconsidering certain artists they may have ignored or blown off unceremoniously beforehand. For example, he writes of the New Seekers, “This is light entertainment, but its energy and centeredness succeed in demanding of me that an introverted person in need of coaxing to blossom a little be taken seriously alongside those concerning themselves with drugs, doom, war.” He has similarly surprising takes on Barry Manilow, Led Zeppelin, Jane’s Addiction and the Dixie Chicks, to name but a few. What Miller makes abundantly clear is that great songs are great songs, regardless of who may be singing them, though their greatness might be achieved through various aesthetic combinations, trials and errors.
If Miller’s own music can be filed under smart (as well as tuneful), Robert Forster could be called smart to a fault. Never a huge success, even in their native Australia, the Go-Betweens were fronted by Forster with fellow singer-songwriter Grant McLennan. To give a general idea of the band’s sonic imprimatur, McLennan was McCartney to Forster’s Lennon (no, that’s not a riddle, it just sounds like one). In other words, while both Go-Betweens knew their way around a hook, McLennan had a traditionally prettier (i.e., more commercial) voice; Forster was prone to verbiage, his lyrics sometimes abstruse compared with McLennan’s more direct style.
In The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll’s introduction — which is subtitled “How I Became a Rock Critic” — Forster explains the “leap of faith” he got from the editor of Australia’s The Monthly, a magazine of politics and culture:
 I could see the confidence he was showing in me: my entire published writings, my portfolio so to speak, consisted of an article I’d written on hair care for a Manchester fanzine called Debris back in 1987, and a review of a Bob Dylan album in the German rock magazine Spex in 1990. Whatever had prompted [him] to invite me to write for The Monthly, I knew it couldn’t have been what I’d done so far; it must have been based on what he thought I could do – which was intriguing and flattering to me.
He ponders the editor’s offer, continuing:
…I knew of no other practicing rock musician in the world writing regular published music criticism. Linked to this was the ancient divide, not too strong in my mind, between journalists on one side of the fence with their pens and supposed frustrated rock-star dreams, and the bourbon-drinking, cigarette-puffing, ‘they don’t understand us’ world of the musicians on the other. In the end, the decision to say yes was relatively simple.
To Forster’s way of thinking – and evidently that of the editor – the journalist with “supposed frustrated rock-star dreams” is just as much of a cliché as the “bourbon-drinking, cigarette-puffing, ‘they don’t understand us’” musician. Neither describes Forster. Like Miller, he has the benefit of an insider’s perspective on pop culture. Unlike Miller, his focus is narrower in terms of music history.
The book includes 43 pieces, most of which are album reviews. Other pieces include concert and book reviews, some fiction, and two moving essays on McLennan, whose sudden and unexpected death by heart attack in 2006 effectively ended the Go-Betweens.
Forster writes about contemporary artists including Antony and the Johnsons, the Shins, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Cat Power, Vampire Weekend, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Franz Ferdinand, but he also takes on works such as Bryan Ferry’s 2007 Dylanesque album. Within those he discusses a large variety of artists including three ‘lost’ singer-songwriters (Vashti Bunyan, Sibylle Baier, and Connie Converse), producers (Phil Spector, Joe Boyd), and several musicians whose effects have been palpable for decades (Nana Mouskori, Roberta Flack, Leonard Cohen, the Saints, Guy Clark, Creedence Clearwater Revival). Unlike Miller’s micro-appraisals, Forster’s essays are longer, around three to five pages each, and because of that he delves more deeply into his chosen topics, while still remaining syntactically breezy. Compared to his lyric writing, which can be circumlocutory, Forster’s criticism is conversational yet concentrated:
Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle is Bill Callahan’s second album since he dropped the appellation Smog. He resides in Austin, Texas, and his career has taken him from acoustic-guitar home recordings, through electric instruments, band line-ups and recording studios, to the lush instrumentation and widescreen shimmer of his current album. It has been a journey to watch, and the success of Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle comes not only from a strong and pointed set of songs, but from the placement of Callahan’s dark baritone voice in a pool of sound that is sweet and uplifting.
Forster’s style is neither the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson nor the pyrotechnical loquacity of the Lester Bangs school. Its clarity and empathy is more akin to Joan Didion or Susan Sontag. You don’t need to know a thing about Bill Callahan or Smog to appreciate what Forster says, and even better, you can actually feel the emotional underpinning to all of his writing, including his marvelous dry wit, exemplified in the title essay, which is simply a numbered list:
- Never follow an artist who describes his or her work as ‘dark’
- The second-last song on every album is the weakest.
- Great bands tend to look alike.
- Being a rock star is a 24-hour-a-day job.
- The band with the most tattoos has the worst songs.
- No band does anything new on stage after the first 20 minutes.
- The guitarist who changes guitars on stage after every third number is showing you his guitar collection.
- Every great artist hides behind their manager.
- Great bands don’t have members making solo albums.
- The three-piece band is the purest form of rock and roll expression.
There’s no ‘trick’ or laziness involved in Forster’s list; it needs no additional window dressing, demarcation, or convoluted explanations. And he reveals his humility in Rule #9. He and McLennan each recorded a number of excellent solo albums, worthy on their own merits. But to call Forster or his Go-Betweens “great” is not the point here. Forster’s writing is the point. And it speaks for itself.
For more info:
The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll: Collected Music Writings 2005-09 (Black Inc.); Robert Forster; 256 pages.
Music: What Happened? (125 Books); Scott Miller; 258 pages. |
