Rock and rot

One of my sideline occupations is serving as adjunct lecturer in jazz history, blues history and rock & roll history at the local campus of our biggest state university. It's a gig I picked up fifteen years ago. I was a musician and a cultural historian, and the opportunity arose. Part of my thinking was that, if I didn't take it, the position would go to someone who would use it to proselytize and indoctrinate - fill students' heads with a lot of toxic notions about "social change" and the like.
I've always used Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll 1947 - 1977 by James Miller as my textbook in rock history. I'm actually a little surprised that I've never had to field many questions, from students or colleagues, about why I would choose a book that was written in the early 1990s and basically only covers rock's development up through the late 1970s (because the author believes rock had done all the evolving it was going to do by that time, and has recycled various aspects of itself ever since).
The short answer is that most more textbook-y histories of rock are really stupid. I get to see a lot of them. Sales reps from the publishing companies send comp copies to our liberal arts division, which puts them in my faculty mailroom cubbyhole. I generally find their arcs of emphasis to be skewed, and they often treat the entire subject as the evolution of a consumer product rather than the story of flesh-and-blood human beings who, like all of us, were bundles of achievements and flaws.
And it is quite a story. From a business standpoint, for instance, there are some remarkable tales of entrepreneurial tenacity and vision. Consider the lives of Syd Nathan, Ahmet Ertegun, Berry Gordy, Jr., guys who built record-label empires on a shoestring budget. Consider the nuances that Johnny Otis's viewpoint on race in America add to an overall discussion of that subject. On the one hand, he had the classically leftist view that white America was systemically racist; on the other hand, he railed against the erosion of dignity that got underway in the 1970s, noting that the great R&B divas of the 40s, 50s and 60s - Dinah Washington, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, who stood relatively still in evening gowns when they performed - would not be able to find work in the age of skin-tight costumes, overtly sexual gyrations and over-the-top stage shows, replete with wild lighting and cartoonish props.
But Miller's take is important in ways that transcend the passing of years. He was the editor of the very first edition of the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll in 1976.  Subsequently, he branched out beyond rock journalism and criticism to write about culture more generally for a variety of opinion journals. He did some teaching. By the early 1990s, he felt that his views on rock and its place in Western culture had changed to the point where a fresh take on the subject was warranted.
One semester a few years ago, I had two students - thirtysomething ladies who apparently knew each other outside of class - who sat next to each other each week. The last night of class, they raised their hands and I called on them. They said, "We've read Miller's entire book now, and we've concluded that he doesn't like rock & roll."
There was something satisfying about that moment. While there was the chance that they were concluding by inference that perhaps I didn't like it either, at least I'd broken through any possible assumptions that my class existed to cheerlead for the phenomenon known as rock.
Fifteen years is a long time in a lot of ways. It's long enough that the demographic composition of my classes, and the attendant cultural experiences they have had, are not what I was dealing with at the outset. For one thing, I used to occasionally get people older than me, front-end baby boomers who were going back to school, and could remember American Bandstand and Grateful Dead shows at the Fillmore first-hand.
The deterioration of our culture has continued apace as well. As I look over the syllabus and prepare for this semester, I wonder how I can impart any kind of sense of tumult to, say, the events of the year 1968 - the student-radical takeover of administrative offices at Columbia University, the riots in Chicago outside the Democrat National Convention that August, the assassinations of MLK and JFK - given the kind of year 2015 was, a year in which an absence of any specific accusations, but plenty of student rage, could get the University of Missouri president to resign, in which campuses nationwide are acquiescing to Black Lives Matter demands for segregated "safe spaces."
Post-American society has been at this deterioration thing so long that today, even conservative talk-show hosts are bringing in and taking out segments of their programs with David Bowie music and reminiscing about how important an icon he was during their formative years.
Really? David Bowie? Just what the hell makes him so important? After singing in some R&B bands in the 1960s, he parlayed his penchant for West End theater, particularly the histrionics of Anthony Newley, and his awareness of his own androgynous bearing into a series of personas, each more fantasy-based than the last, churning out generally one album per persona that, musically, was steeped in the trend of the day - glitter rock, disco, techno - and, thematically, little more than garbled escapism.
But as of early afternoon this January Monday, you can't avoid the eulogies to this supposedly significant artist.
Of course, rock history properly treated must look at the evolution of the rock press from the fanzine paradigm of 1956 - 1967 to the "serious" rock magazine, as exemplified by the founding of Rolling Stone in 1967.
RS founder Jann Wenner could, early on, lay claim to some degree of seriousness. He has written about how longtime Bay Area jazz critic Ralph Gleason got him to listen to Wes Montgomery and avail himself of the topical comedy of Lenny Bruce. Wenner's one foray into producing a rock album, Boz Skaggs's first solo album, recorded at Muscle Shoals (and generously graced with the guitar stylings of the truly great Duane Allman) and released on Atlantic in 1969, was undeniably one of the most grown-up contributions to rock in its development.
But his magazine quickly declined. In the name of journalistic objectivity, it decided standards were useless, and treated every new trend as equally deserving of exposure and examination. The tenth anniversary of RS was marked by a truly abysmal television special that obliterated any distinction there had ever been between "serious" observation about rock and the old fanzine model.
The ongoing immersion in general "journalism" didn't help either. Was Hunter S. Thompson, on balance, a step forward for the field of political reportage? (P.J. O'Rourke and Tom Wolfe were the exceptions to this, it needs to be noted. But they were far outnumbered by the likes of William Greider and Alexander Cockburn.)
That push for journalistic legitimacy can now be seen to have failed utterly. The University of Virginia gang-rape-at-the-fraternity-house story was an utter lie, leading to a lawsuit against RS. And now we have RS sending a had-left movie actor, Sean Penn, out to interview the world's most vicious - and wanted - drug lord in a hideout. And giving the interview subject the power to review the manuscript and make any changes he wishes to make. As one whose day job is freelance magazine writing, I can tell you that this is on any editor's top five list of no-nos.
So I begin another semester, more conflicted than ever, not only about how to present the material, but what the material means to me, even if I'm 100 percent successful in presenting it objectively.
As I say, rock history is full of dramatic stories of towering achievement, crashing failure, redemption and ruin. And, yes, some performances and compositions that do Western civilization proud.
But let us remember that it began as much as a marketing tactic - a way to get America's kids to consume Negro dance music and the white forms spun off from that - as a discernible musical genre.
And, from the outset, it not only acknowledged but celebrated primitivism. It's mainly the story of self-taught chord-bangers groping their way to some sense of aesthetic coherence. Its essence is immediate feeling.
And its legacy is found in such phenomena as the obliteration of human sexuality as designed by nature and nature's God, the exaltation of lying in the service of some distorted notion of "justice," and the grim predominance of fist-pumping mobs whose aims range from the toppling of university administrations to the election of Donald Trump.
I have my work cut out for me in the next few months.