A John Lennon song floated over our rental-car radio as my father and I wound our way past silos and dairy farms in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Lennon’s voice made me nostalgic for the late 1960s, which was odd, because it was the late 1980s and I was a teenager who had only known pop charts ruled by the likes of Rick Astley, Tiffany, and Belinda Carlisle. “Why doesn’t my generation have any real artists like Lennon?” I asked bitterly.
My dad shot back that he never understood why The Beatles were considered great artists. “You’re always listening to lyrics,” he said, slipping the knife in. “What made John Lennon so important?”
What a stunningly stupid and provocative question, I thought.
Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.
I posted (and put a lot of work into) a rather lengthy comment earlier in this window about 20 minutes ago but apparently skipped over the Captcha feature in my rush to post it. Error message came up. I went back but poof! my comment was gone.
Is there anyway to retrieve it? I busted my ass writing it.
Posted by richard nusser on Sat 15 Aug 2009 at 05:49 PM
Richard
I can sympathize. There's nothing you can do to get it back.
Since I had a similar incident a few years ago, I now copy the entire contents of a post (contral-A in Windows, command-A in Mac to highlight all contents, then control-C or command-C). If for some reason the post blows up, you can simply retrive it by repasting it in the new window (control-V or command-V).
Posted by Buzz on Mon 17 Aug 2009 at 11:10 AM
Although Jacob Levenson’s thoughtful essay on the dearth of serious criticism of pop music was overdue and generally on the mark, I’m compelled to add some comments of my own. Robert Christgau churned out a tremendous amount of copy in his day but he himself might agree that Levenson overplayed his role in putting pop criticism on the media map, aside from his tremendous output. Serious criticism of pop and rock emanted from the Village Voice’s coverage of New York City’s mid-1960s burgeoning downtown arts scene, a mixed-media circus that foreshadowed video rock, punk, glam, art rock, garage rock, etc.
Long before Christgau’s ascension to rock/crit “dean,” serious rock/pop criticism was kick-started into life via the Voice’s Pop Eye colym, written by Richard Goldstein, and the Voice’s Riffs colym, a weekly round of essays, comment and reviews written by at least a dozen Voice contributors, including myself. San Francisco journalist Ralph Gleason performed a similar service on the West Coast (also mentoring the pre-Rolling Stone Jan Weiner). Andy Warhol’s affiliation with the Velvet Underground gave rock and pop intellectual catchet, catching the interest of post-modern academics such as Dave Hickey and others. Time and Life caught the buzz, putting Albert Goldman on the case. And who can forget Tom Wolfe’s NY Herald-Trib magazine interview (later New York Magazine) with Phil Spector -- a New Journalism landmark.
That’s all history now, but history is something that doesn’t pop on today’s news media’s radar, or stir much interest among even the most prolific of today’s print journalists. There are exceptions, of course, such as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s making ex-Billboard staffer Cary Darling its pop culture editor.
All that aside, Levenson deserves a great of credit for pointing out the news media’s failure to take today’s pop culture scene more seriously. A closer, more incise inspection of the multi-media swirl is needed– from Tarantino films to alt-rock, gangsta rap, hip hop, Japanese manga and beyond.
Posted by richard nusser on Mon 17 Aug 2009 at 04:47 PM