MAGAZINE REVIEWS

Rock is Dead; Keep Fenway alive; Renounce all things!

by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., December 8, 1999) - I've said it before and I'll undoubtedly say it again: rock music has been swallowed whole by corporate consumer culture, which has pretty much succeeded in sucking all the life and originality out of the form.

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
ROLLING STONE

The New York Review of Books (Dec. 16) agrees with my basic premise. In "Rock of Ages," an essay sparked by the publication of James Miller's book of cultural history, "Flowers in the Dustbin," author Geoffrey O'Brien writes, "Each new subgenre [of rock] aspires to duplicate the shock value achieved in a now legendary time by the invention of rock and roll….Instead…they are likely to find themselves part of a blandly acceptable subdivision of the industry that embraces television, advertising, and fashion, an industry content to purvey whatever brands of accessorized rebellion move the most units off the shelves."

Well said.

The year-end issue of Rolling Stone (Dec. 16-23) includes a fascinating interview with Michael Tilson Thomas, a former conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra who now leads the San Francisco Symphony. Thomas is one of a growing number of baby-boomer conductors raised as much on rock music as classical. Among the groups he has conducted are the Grateful Dead.

At ease in both the rock and clasical worlds, Thomas talks eloquently about the recording techniques used by the Rolling Stones and why the Beatles were an Elizabethan music group. So when he talks about the sorry plight of contemporary music, it's not from the knee-jerk perch of one who hates rock. Just the opposite. Thomas is clearly sad that pop has devolved into bland, commercial pap.

He says, "[R]ock has already come to a point where it is basically repeating most of the moves that it made in the first thirty or forty years of its creativity, and is more and more linked to production values and hooks, and one somehow suspects that there's a cynical, controlled obsolescence behind it.

"Never before has an art form been so hyped, sold, merchandised as pop music has. Just to imagine that someone can hum or stumble over a few notes, even a few intelligible words, and there is machinery that can take this over and make it so important and essential, when nearly all of it is dross."

Thomas gives the thumbs-up to Bob Dylan and the thumbs-down to Nirvana, whose 1991 album Spin magazine calls the best of the decade in its September issue. Of the late Kurt Cobain's music, Thomas says, "It's in no way focused enough or good enough. It's just not happening." He calls most '90s rock "indicative" music, "just posing as music."

Finally, in Rolling Stone's "millennium" issue (Dec. 30-Jan. 6), David Bowie, no slouch himself, writes rock's obituary thusly: "Rock and roll is a dying religion. In terms of being a revolutionary force of any kind, I think it just doesn't have that clout anymore, and that's demonstrated by the fact that there's been no individual who's actually been able to expand the medium this last ten or twelve years….The great innovator or 'mover-on-er' of things doesn't seem to have materialized."

THE AMERICAN PROSPECT

Popular music isn't the only cultural form that has been milked of its essence by the forces of capitalism and the bottom line. As we all know, professional sports has long been beholden to black ink.

In the Dec. 20 issue of the American Prospect, former Boston city official Peter Dreier bemoans the campaign on the part of the owners of the Boston Red Sox to tear down the venerable Fenway Park and replace it with a new stadium.

Dreier rebuts all the usual arguments in favor of building a new stadium. It won't make the team more competitive, says Dreier- the team is already consistently competitive. It's not cheaper to build than to renovate, according to Drier. And the trail of publicly-funded new stadiums is littered with boondoggles, corruption, unpaid bills and unfulfilled promises of economic renewal.

Dreier does more than complain. He proposes a solution. He calls on Major League Baseball, Inc., to step up to the plate and help fund a renovated Fenway Park, for the good of all baseball fans, past, present and future.

Batter up?

MOTHER JONES

In "The End of Growth" in the November-December issue of Mother Jones, author Bill McKibben revisits the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. Specifically, McKibben examines Gandhi's ideology of renunciation as a possible countervailing force to our prevailing creed of consumption.

With economic growth and development spiraling out of control, bringing with them a panoply of disastrous social and environmental effects, McKibben suggests a move towards simplicity as a solution.

By embracing an ideology of simplicity - eating lower on the food chain, living in smaller houses, driving smaller and fewer automobiles, voluntarily cutting back on work hours in exchange for more free time to enjoy life itself - we at the top of the scale of global affluence can exert great positive effect on the forces of consumption spinning out of control.

And what better time to begin than now?

LINGUA FRANCA

In the January issue of Lingua Franca, which calls itself "the Review of Academic Life," Jason Sholl reads some recent studies and asks some pointed questions about attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and the promiscuous use of the drug Ritalin.

According a recent study by Ken Jacobson, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the nearby University of Massachusetts at Amherst, there are no detectable differences in behavior between "normal" children and ADHD-labeled children.

Rather, ADHD is a culturally-determined syndrome. In England, for example, diagnoses of ADHD are much fewer than in the U.S., because the British "have a more liberal definition of 'normal' than do Americans." A lot of what gets medicalized as ADHD here in the U.S. would be considered disciplinary cases in the U.K.

Perhaps even more telling is the disparity in the treatment afforded learning-disabled minorities - who are "usually warehoused in Special Ed programs" - and the children of wealthier parents, who "parlay ADHD diagnoses into the obtaining of special amenities for their children" - amenities, Sholl emphasizes, that would benefit any and all mediocre students, learning-disabled or not. "Affirmative action for affluent white people" is what one critic calls special treatment for children with ADHD.

[This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Dec. 11, 1999. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1999. All rights reserved.]