Dean Biron

Towards a Popular Music Criticism of Replenishment

Attitudes of popular music critics are analyzed so as to identify the various “exhaustion” narratives which have arisen in the wake of the post-Beatles dissolution of rock and pop music into a multitude of genres and sub-genres. It is argued that criticism might better serve audiences by focusing less upon narrow, nostalgic treatments of canonical rock music and more upon a narrative of replenishment for which critical nomadism and the labyrinthine nature of the contemporary musical landscape are central themes.

Australian rock: Essays on popular music

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Attica!; Armed Courage

In 1984, I somehow came into possession of a copy of Christgau’s Guide: Rock Albums of the ’70s. For a 17-year-old who loved music but struggled to tell, as the back cover write-up puts it, the “indisputably excellent” from the “interestingly dire,” its collection of capsule reviews by critic Robert Christgau proved invaluable. Over subsequent years it led me to such touchstones from the decade as A Tribute to Jack Johnson by Miles Davis, Sex Machine by James Brown, Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, and Dub Housing by Pere Ubu—all hugely 147

Where Does Your Mind Go?; En Form en Blå; The Peregrine; Sagittarian Domain

illness, alcoholism, and an inconsistent stage presence. For Little Willie John, fame and fortune arrived long before maturity and self-control. His volatile personality and addictive behaviors led to his premature death in prison. Sleep, Ain’t That Loving You Baby, and Ten Years of Hits salute musical genius and recorded legacies. Unlike their black contemporaries Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, and Little Richard, though, these three performers never attained lauded status as rock and roll pioneers. That’s too bad. Among R&B balladeers, Little Willie John had few peers; in respect to crafting and performing blues shuffle tunes, Jimmy Reed was an undisputed master; and in the field of blues shouting and R&B rocking, Big Joe Turner could shake, rattle, and roll with the very best.

Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert: 40th Anniversary Deluxe Box Set/Exile on Main Street: Deluxe Edition

In America in Our Time, historian Godfrey Hodgson compares a Rolling Stones spokesperson’s refusal to publicly condemn the Hells Angels after the Altamont Speedway concert with “President Nixon discussing Lieutenant Calley’s conviction for the massacre at My Lai” (339). What the band’s representative termed a “regrettable” event was a notorious evening of debauchery and violence, recorded in sobering detail in the remarkable documentary Gimme Shelter (Maysles, Maysles and Zwerin, 1970). The film culminates with an obviously unnerved Mick Jagger viewing footage of a Hells Angel stabbing to death a gun-wielding audience member directly in front of the stage. The anti-establishment’s strutting warlock, at the height of his infamy, is suddenly laid bare as little more than a naive entrepreneur, Nixon’s dialectical counterpart in the race toward post-Watergate oblivion. Altamont has come to represent the end of the American counterculture, the 1960s shuddering to a halt three weeks early in a miasma of alcohol, drugs, and indiscriminate violence as overseen by a gang of bikers (paid

Never a Dull Moment: 1971 – The Year That Rock Exploded; Bitches Brew

500 worth of beer, the story goes, to “protect” the band from the crowd). It is also seen by many as the mythical antithesis to the three-day love-in that was the Woodstock festival, held several months earlier on the other side of the country. As with most myths, though, this one obscures as much as it reveals. Taking place just days after psychopathic hippy-cum-musician Charles Manson and his followers slaughtered seven people in two separate homes in Los Angeles, Woodstock too was riddled with bad vibes and hypocrisy. As Hodgson reports, rock critic John Landau saw Altamont as merely “a parody and an anticlimax” to a cultural revolution which had already succumbed to cynicism by the time the “ultimate commercialisation” that was Woodstock came around (339). The Altamont affair took place only a few days after the Stones performed a series of East Coast concerts that provided the material for the live album Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out. Four decades later it feels like a record lost in time, adrift between the culmination of the band’s 1960s’ aesthetic—epitomized by the death of Brian Jones and the release of the transitional Let it Bleed—and the short-lived ascendency of their post-Altamont