A First Thoughts Introduction to Carl’s Rock Songbook

Hello, First Thoughtsters!One of the things I’ll be carrying over from my blogging for Postmodern
Conservative, now that it’s been incorporated into First Thoughts, is “Carl’s
Rock Songbook.”

What is the Rock Songbook?

It
is a series of posts, sometimes focusing on a particular rock song, sometimes
on a particular issue or style connected to rock music.It has also involved some analysis of relevant
films.

My
favorite posts are those that analyze a song, artist, or style, that I really
love.Here are a few of those:

5.U2, “New Years Day”

6.Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind”

7.Duke Ellington, “Come Sunday,” and The
Velvet Underground, “Sunday Morning”

13.The Ramones, “Bliztkrieg Bop”

18.David Bowie, “The Prettiest Star”

23.The Beach Boys, “That’s Not Me”

25.Simon and Garfunkel, “Sounds of Silence”

32.The Zombies, “A Rose for Emily”

34.The Kinks, “Waterloo Sunset”

40.The Bangles, “I’m in Line”

47.Surfin’ the You-Tube with the Noise-Pop
Beach Goths

66.The Greatness of Dave Gonzalez

80.Joan Baez, “Silver Dagger”

84.The Allah-Las, “Busman’s Holiday”

87.
Karen Lafferty, “Seek Ye First”

Once
the First Things web archives get put back into working condition, you’ll be
able to access all of these using the search engine feature above (click on the
magnifying glass icon). So if you’re interested,
book-mark this post.

Some
of these songs, you’ll notice, are not really rock songs, although for various
reasons I feel a need to discuss them.I
don’t regard disco, rap, jazz, or folk, as being rock, although I have had
posts on all of these.Most
controversially, I don’t regard old-time rock n’ roll as being rock.I actually often attack rock, at least in
terms of its music, from the standards of both “above” (classical, jazz) and
“below” (rock n’ roll, etc.).However, I
do admit that rock is often better able to capture the modern middle-class and
democratic zeitgeist than any other
art-form.

There
are also songbook posts that deal with rock criticism.There are a number that discuss my debt to LINKMartha
Bayles, probably our greatest pop music critic.One of my more involved series of posts report about and respond to the
book Retromania by the rock critic
Simon Reynolds.He gets us thinking
about the issue of “recyclement,” that is, the contemporary returning to and
slight reconfiguring of older rock styles:

48.Critical Notes on the Indie Rock Noise-Pop
Boom

49.Simon Reynolds, Retromania

50.When the Future’s Over, Turn out the Lights

51.Simon Reyonlds and Kurt Andersen on Our
Cultural Cul-de-Sac

52.Rock’s Recyclement Explained

Other
series deal with themes that run through rock, sometimes linked to a particular
style.Lately, I’ve returned to a series
that deals with the hippie creed of love:

72.The Beatles, “It’s Only Love”

73.The Beatles, “All You Need Is Love”

88.Jefferson Airplane, “Let’s Get Together”

89.The Love-World of Jefferson’s First LP

My first Songbook posts for First Thoughts
will develop this further—look for a post on Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to
Love” soon.

My
main areas of scholarly expertise are Tocqueville, Plato, American Political
Thought, and contemporary Tocquevillian thought.I am a very Catholic-friendly/influenced evangelical
Protestant, a social conservative, and like all of the Postmodern
Conservatives, as Peter described below, a Strauss-influenced thinker.

Now
obviously when younger I had a more intensive-than-average fling with rock
music, culminating in a stint as a college-radio DJ. But why would a middle-aged Gen-X-er like me be
returning to that now (particularly when his own musical diet consists far more
of classical, jazz, standards, and roots-music), and why would a person blessed
with a Great Books education be making such a big deal about rock?

Allan
Bloom in 1987 sniffed about the fact that that “talking about it [rock music]
with infinite seriousness” has become “perfectly respectable.”Wasn’t he right to do so?

Well,
my seriousness about it is of a finite sort, but I nonetheless think my
Songbook is a worthy and important project, a step forward in the critical
understanding of popular music, and particularly in the way social conservatives
understand it.I do intend to make a book
out of it.

The
basic reason pop music matters was long ago expressed in this famous saying of Plato’s:for never are the ways of music
changed without the greatest of political laws being changed.In essence, for Plato, a change in the
music heralds a change in the regime.Now for Plato and ancient political
philosophy generally, the term regime stands
for botha society’s set of
institutions and laws, and its overall way of life.

Our
society, curiously, is one that has experienced a revolution in its cultural
order, but not necessarily in its politics.There was a Cultural Revolution that occurred in the 1960s.That fact has to be faced.Its most obvious impact then and to this day
has been in the area of sexual mores, but everyone knows that this happened in
tandem with a musical
revolution.Pop music in general became
regarded much more seriously than it had been before, and something that had
been called rock n’ roll began to be called Rock.Indeed, so many fascinating musical changes
occurred that anyone with good taste in pop music has some love for the music
of those years, 1964-1969, and the rock stars of those days have entered into a
kind of pantheon.We speak with all
seriousness, because we are really forced to, of a Rock Mythology.The legends about Bob Dylan or Jim Morrison matter
to us as much as those about Achilles did to the ancient Greeks.

However,
while we correctly speak of a Cultural Revolution,
one that began in the 60s and whose full implications and regularization
occurred over the course of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, we also correctly speak of
an ongoing Culture War or Cultural Divide.We note that the U.S. Constitution, a rather key part of the American
regime, remains the law of the land; we note that Christianity remains the
dominant religion of the land, and shows few unambiguous signs of fading away;
we note that efforts to at least try to practice monogamous marriage continue
to characterize the behavior of the of more of our adults than not, despite the
heavy blows the institution has suffered. We finally note the presence,
strikingly absent in much of Europe, of a powerful conservative movement.Obama scandalously won re-election in 2012,
but only barely.

In
sum, we have experienced a Cultural Revolution, but at least in America, this
Revolution has not decisively won the day, or somehow cannot win it.The regime remains divided.To use the sort of symbolic imagery Plato
would, our polis seems to have two
citadels rather than one, and only one of these has been seized by the
revolutionaries. And to some extent most
of our own souls, whatever side of the culture divide we might place ourselves
on, are divided as well.One of my
better recent Songbook posts, on “Seek Ye First,” explained how folk and rock
set in place certain changes that became adopted by Praise Music, a style that now
potentially divides every Protestant church in the land, and not for any obviously theology-related
reasons.

So
in a way, my basic reason for why rock
music culture matters is identical to my suggestion of how to understand it.We
need to study it most of all in an effort to understand our culture, a basic
part of which is the ongoing effort to revolutionize it that began in the
60s.Rock Song is both a cause and a
signpost of changes that have occurred, of changes which did not fully occur but
remain very much on the table; even more interestingly, it is likewise a record
of how certain changes did not turn out the way we expected, and what our
emotional reactions have been to the new world created by the Revolution.

As
a social conservative, I have a general (but not comprehensive) tendency to
oppose the changes brought by Revolution, and am thus particularly interested
in pointing out ways in which the creeds of the 60s, so often embodied in rock
song, have come up short.Part of my
motivation for doing this with the help of rock song is that it allows me to
give the positions I oppose a poetic power they wouldn’t otherwise have, and it
allows me to show how certain general ideas have political and philosophic
implications.

And
religious implications, too.I am quite
serious about the need to approach Rock as a mythological phenomenon; that is,
Rock Song to some extent is a poetic storehouse of our times, containing a set
of symbolic images, phrases, sounds, and heroes that can be employed, as
Socrates employed quotations from Homer, or as St. Paul employed ones from
other Greek poets, to more vividly illustrate the truly fundamental issues.

Here
are some Songbook entries about songs, artists, or styles I do not particularly
like or recommend, but which I regard as keys to understanding our culture:

1.The Zombies, “Time of the Season”

8.Bob Dylan, “Masters of War”

12.The Who, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”

21.David Bowie, “Sunday”

31.The Beatles, “Eleanor Rigby”

41.The Cramps, “Goo-Goo Muck”

58.Revolution’s Rush—Oliver Stone’s The Doors

So
First Thoughtsters, I hope you can see how this fits into the overall mission
of First Things.Know that I am at least
aware of the dangers of neglecting the Fine for the Popular, and of the dangers
of exposing oneself to the temptations of the World even as one seeks to better
understand them.Still, I don’t need to
tell you that arriving at a loving Christian stance towards our culture, and at
strategies for making it more Christ-seeded, cannot occur without a serious and
open-minded consideration of its main tendencies.