What follows is not a review of the new collection of the late Ellen Willis’s rock criticism,Out of the Vinyl Deeps[1], but a sort of answer record remixed from old and new episodes in my own pop life. Hope it reads half as well as, say, Mouse and the Traps’ “Public Execution” sounded after “Like A Rolling Stone.” (Or did that Dylan imitation follow “Positively 4th Street”? Ellen—Mother of all Dylan critics—would’ve known!)
I
If Ellen was still here, I’d’ve dubbed her a copy of Infidelity—the bootleg version of Dylan’sInfidels that was one of my favorite CDs last year. It has fresh, alternate takes of the original album’s tracks. But there’s also a whole side of add-ons including (1) “Julius and Ethel”—a Chuck Berry-ish number with a not-so-hot concept the band burns right through as Dylan and a diva fade in and out of the mix wailing the names of the Rosenbergs “who loved each other right up till the time they checked out” (2) “Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart”—an early version of “Tight Connection to My Heart” where Dylan rides Sly and Robbie’s riddim and prompts Mick Taylor’s riffs (3) “God Protect My Child”—Daddy Dylan’s in love (“He’s got his mother’s eyes…to see him at play makes me smile”) (4) “This Was My Love”—Boy-genius Dylan’s in love (and modest but crafty Mark Knopfler glows too).
What makes Infidelity more than a fun oddity, though, is the full band version of “Blind Willie McTell”—Dylan swings hard on piano and harp, Mick Taylor plays for the Ages and the group takes that wild mercury sound out where the Stones’ “Stop Breaking Down.”
In her days as a rock critic, Ellen had a problem with Taylor. She worried he was all about technique and that his proficiency would drive the Stones away from rock and roll art toward a more musically complex but less powerful and meaningful music. Time has reversed that verdict. And the band version of “Blind Willie McTell” is further proof Taylor could really mean it man.
When I searched out the sparer official take back in 1991, I was thinking meaning first. I’d heard tell there was a song about slavery-days from the Infidels sessions on the (not yet released) authorized Dylan “bootleg” collection—Volume 1-3 (Rare and Unreleased) 1961-1991. I’d always liked Infidels and guessed “Blind Willie McTell” might be fine. But I had another motive too. I was hoping for something “good for the Jews” and African Americans—a model of empathy that could lift cultural conversation about (and between) them out of the gutter.
I was just an amateur–not a known rock critic–and Columbia Records didn’t have many pre-release versions of Volume 1-3 Rare and Unreleased, but somebody there put the song on a cassette, taping it over a James Taylor cassingle. I still remember the yellow mis-label and the first time I heard Dylan’s living history lesson:
See them plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whip
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
Feel the ghosts of slavery ships
Dylan copped to his own distance from the felt life of black Americans in his song’s chorus—“nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.” McTell was a very real “songster” with real style. But his name also stands in for all those African American avatars who’ve given voice to black people’s excruciations (even if they weren’t singing “protest songs”). Dylan mapped profane and sacred coordinates of their moral tradition—”Saying this land is condemned/all the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem.” He limned a down home world of would-be squires and chain gangs. Then he filled his imagined county with Terror–”I can hear that rebel yell.”
“Blind Willie McTell” articulated history by “seizing hold of a memory as it flashed up in a moment of danger” (to quote Walter Benjamin’s famous text). Dylan made himself cousin to the Brother in Public Enemy’s “Can’t Truss It” who flashed back to slave ships when confronted by an authority figure—“Years ago he could’ve been a ship’s captain/Getting me bruised on a cruise” (as Flavor Flav freaked in the background: “Don’t sentence me Judge, I did nothing to nobody”).
“Can’t Truss It” was controversial in 1991. P.E.’s Chuck D. caught hell for saying the story of the Middle Passage—“the one still going on”— was “harder than the hard-core cost of the Holocaust.”[2] Though P.E. had reached out obliquely in the song’s loving sample of Israeli singer Ofra Haza, certain “progressive” Jews were stuck on their own backlash blues. Reborn as neo-Podhoretzs, they were cultivating (what one Village voice claimed he’d inherited from his parents) “a subtle and consuming sense of dread that America could turn out to be not so different than the Old World.” Local ethnic tensions in NYC (such as those sparked by turf wars between Hasidim and West Indians in Brooklyn) were getting mixed up with existential threats to Israel.
I thought “Blind Willie McTell” might help bring the discourse back to home truths.Infidels’s sessions seemed like a rich resource on this score because “McTell” could be paired with the track on the album defending Israel, “Neighborhood Bully.” Dylan had not only heard that “rebel yell” but felt for “bully” Israel when it “destroyed [Iraq’s] bomb factory:” “nobody was glad, the bombs were meant for him, he was supposed to feel bad.”[3]
With “Blind Willie McTell,” “Can’t Truss It” and “Neighborhood Bully” as my soundtrack, I tried writing a piece about conflicts between blacks and Jews in NYC. But as a WASP who’d only lived in the city for 10 years, I began to have doubts I had the experience to do my subject justice. I never finished the piece. I bet Ellen could have done something with my material though. She could see past the moral panic in New York over “the new anti-Semitism” in the Black Nation without downplaying much more dangerous forms of Jew-baiting intolerance that were on the march in the Middle East. Maybe I’d have persevered if she’d been a reader over my shoulder in 1991.
II
Ellen was in the (small) audience back in 2000 when I read a piece on Jay-Z’s rap song, “You Must Love Me,” (which I’ll get to later in these musings) at a publishing party for an early issue of First of the Month. I can still see her unsmiling eyes when I looked up as I got to a passage criticizing Robert Christgau. She didn’t show any emotion (as ever), but the air in the room felt a little close at that moment. During First’s first couple years, I’d come pretty hard in print at writing by two of Ellen’s oldest rockwrite comrades, Richard Goldstein and Greil Marcus. Now here I was swinging on her ex-boyfriend Christgau. Ellen’s look was worrying: was it three strikes and First‘s out? I’m not sure she felt like an ump that night. But her contribution to the party—a reading of a 10 year old essay about the Balkans she’d done for the Voice—distanced her a bit from our newspaper (even though she’d already given us a piece and real money to help pay our printer). I’ve explained elsewhere why/how she eventually overcame her ambivalence about First. (Long story short: she identified deeply with First’s refusal of anti-anti-Islamism.) But I think it helped she knew all along my plaints about her buds’ work (and the Voice) weren’t coming out of the blue. From Ellen’s angle, the argument of the piece I’m introducing here (slowly—Sorry!) had a back-story that began when I slipped a tape of TLC’s first album,Ooooh on the TLC Tip, to her daughter Nona in the early 90s. I’d figured a NYC tween like Nona would surely dig TLC’s spunky, funky expression of black girl-power and maybe her Mom would get the groove too. TLC didn’t change Ellen’s pop life but she did wonder (like me) at the Voice’s failure to pick up on the kicks. Further on in the 90s, in the first First, I wrote up another lively hip hop album—OutKast’s ATLiens—that hadn’t got any play in theVoice. (Not that TLC or OutKast needed my poor help!)
The piece on Jay-Z I read at the First fete ended up in the next issue of our newspaper. I was tempted to include my case for his “You Must Love Me” in the upcoming First of the Year volume since the song had gone missing from Decoded—last year’s coffee-table book fetishizing Jay-Z’s verbal dexterity and capital gains.[4] But I left it out so as not to criticize Robert Christgau (again) for making “smart” the term of art in popcrit back in the day. I’m going to risk hammering on that point here, though, because Christgau tripled down on his favorite word in a tribute to his ex quoted admiringly in Out of the Vinyl Deeps’ introduction:
Ellen was one of the few people I’ve known who I’d say unequivocally was smarter than me. Another candidate would be her second husband, the political theorist Stanley Aronowitz—who at Ellen’s funeral said she was smarter than him. Students and colleagues describe her as shy, but she wasn’t shy—she was thinking, and ignoring you.Because Ellen was always thinking, she was intoxicating and addictive. But once we broke up I broke away. My fervent and explicit belief in marriage as an institution and monogamy as a way of living was developed—with input from the most extraordinary woman, or person, I’ve known—in conscious contradiction to Ellen’s ideology of sexual freedom, which most of her admirers value far more than they do the rock criticism she quit in 1975.
For me, of course, the rock criticism is her most important work. As a writer and a thinker, she set out many of the ideas that define my calling to this day. The persona she established was pretty cool too—skeptical, sexual, and political; affectionate, vulgar, and very smart.
Smart has long since devolved into snark and the ideal of Mind in pop has been traduced by academics. I’m not walking back my charge (see below) against Christgau’s chip-on-my-shoulder popcrit. Still, it would have been more just if I’d recalled the snotty tones that got under his (and Willis’s) skin in the first place. A recent commentary by Leon Wiseltier speaks to the persistence of disdain among intellectuals for pop artists that once made the original generation of rock critics feel like they belonged to The Resistance. Wieseltier looks down from a great height on that low dog Kanye West: “Whether or not Thelonious Monk is like Debussy, he sure as hell is not like Kanye West.”
Kanye, by the way, played a role in my return to the piece I read on Jay-Z’s “You Must Love Me” at that long-gone First publishing party. A few months before Vinyl Deepsreminded me of the Godmother’s eyes, a Kanye rap (“Big Brother”) detailing his fractious relations with his “brother”-from-another-mother Jay-Z sent me back to “You Must Love Me”‘s tale of Jay’s near-fratricidal rift with his actual brother. Here’s what I wrote (and read) about that in 2000.
Back to Life
When rap star Jay-Z was fourteen—angry about a stolen/borrowed piece of jewelry—he ended up shooting his older brother. He rhymes about this in “You Must Love Me” (In My Lifetime, Vol. 1)
We used to fight every night, but I never would suffer
Just smile—my big brother trying to make me tougher
As we grew, fussing and fighting continued
As I plundered through your stuff and snuck your clothes to school
It got intense—real real intense as we got older
Never believed it would lead to me popping one in your shoulder
Where my ring? Knew you had it cos you took too long
As Mickey, Angie and the one who bought it looked on
Huffing and puffing, gun in my hand, told you “step aside”
Hoping you’d say no, you hurt my pride
Made our way down the steps
Maybe you thought it was just a threat
Or maybe your life was just that crazy and you were begging for death
Try to justify this in my young mind
But the adrenaline and my ego-hurt combine
Drove me berserk, saw the devil in your eyes
High off more than weed
Confused I just closed my young eyes and squeezed
What a sound.
Opened my eyes just to see you stumbling to the ground…
Damn…What the fuck I done now
Running around in the circle—think I’m ass-out
Hot gun burning in my waist, run straight to Jazz house
Like a stranger
Damn, I just shot my nigga
And ran up into the night as if it was not my nigga
Left the scene, how could I go out that way?
Still you asked to see me in the hospital the next day
You must love me
The liner notes to Jay-Z’s new CD/cassette have a shot of him perched on the backrest of a park bench in front of housing project; he’s listening to a Discman as a little kid looks up to him. Jay-Z has lately been competing with Puffy, DMX, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Black Rob, Eminem, et al. in tabloid culture’s bad boy modeling school. He was arrested last December, accused of a knife attack on a former friend-turned-bootlegger. But “You Must Love Me” proves he offers his fans more than just another sad—or notoriously clever—example.
This song could help some young mind bust out of the prison house of self (and self-hatred). Might even keep a hip hop head out of the joint or save a life. Jay-Z’s mini-moral education matters because he cares enough to get the flow of feeling right. There’s that wishful pause after “Hoping,” those innocent “young” eyes closing and opening (never to be young again), the hard echoing sound/ground rhyme that wakes Jay up to nightmarish fact of his brother falling, that mucho macho “hot” gun in his waist, the guilty self-estrangement, the graceful turn—“Still you asked to see me in the hospital the next day,” and that final love-revelation. (I remember talking with a friend about this track and he chided me for saying the title wrong; I was calling it “You MUST love me.” Like the fascist Madonna song from Evita, but Jay-Z’s rap underscores the emotion not the imperative: Though of course, we don’t choose who we love.)
Jay-Z tells two other unconditional love stories in his rap. In between his tales, a choir echoes the title tag line while a girl-singer wonders up front—“After all the wrong I done…” This back-up to lead-Sister moans low during Jaz-Z’s raps, and when she obliges at the end of track, she become a voice for every body—“Say that you love me…Say that you love me.”
As a track in an oral tradition, “You Must Love Me” has something in common with—no, this is not a stretch—The Iliad. But it matters because it’s not Homeric. Simone Weil once pointed out in her essay “The Poem of Force” how the warriors in The Iliad—time and again—act without any sense that they themselves might soon be going down hard. Their unconsciousness isn’t far removed from the pitiless kill-at-will posturing of gangsta rappers. Jay-Z’s “You Must Love Me” leaves that kind of mindlessness in the dust. Where they are all equal now.
Jay-Z talked (for a moment) to a Vibe Magazine interviewer last summer about the actual fratricidal beef at the heart of “You Must Love Me,” but his questioner didn’t seem to care that Jay-Z had kept it truly real. The journalist’s lack of interest in his subject is probably a sign of a certain kind of sophistication. Hip hop “intellectuals” tend to buy into a street version of formalism. They treat rap as a game. It’s about “skills” not emotion. But hip hop—like any art form—counts most when it moves you back to life.
“You Must Love Me” is in the tradition of feelingful rap. Part of an emotional history that’s on record, though it’s often submerged. It was LL Cool J who first proved b-boy emotion could go pop in a late 80’s track called “I Need Love.” LL was, and is, a formidable rap actor. He can access what Depardieu calls “la douceur.” Though he doesn’t always aim to get you open. LL’s persona in “I Need Love” was way different from standard hard-rock b-boy poses. And it certainly stood out on Bigger and Deffer—the emotionally armored album on which it appeared. Bigger and Deffer was full of typical b-boy boasting, but in “I Need Love”—written/recorded just after LL met the woman he would marry—the rapper laid off the chesty bellowing. Suddenly you could feel his lips, the intake of breath, the tongue pressure. In the midst of B&D’s samey rants, “I Need Love” was like surprise kiss on the earlobe. One line hints at how fresh it sounded. I remember snapping to attention—along, no doubt, with an army of black girls in New York city—when I first heard LL call out:
Clean and unspoiled yet sweaty and wet
This is one love I’ll never forget
The pop critic with the most clout in New York City, however, wasn’t with it. “I Need Love” went right by Robert Christgau when he reviewed Bigger and Deffer back in the day. Christgau who’s been grading records forever at the Village Voice, gave B&D a C+.
That grade wasn’t far off, but Christgau’s unresponsiveness to “I Need Love” hints at the sin in his approach to pop life—he’s not “an emotion man.” Which means he’s too smart for his own good. As it happens, “smart” has been his favorite gift word—his penultimate term of praise—for 30 years. It’s a word he helped popularize as the insane world of entertainment exploded.
While Christgau thinks of himself as a man of the left, what’s right now is what’s smart. That was the keyword to 90’s culture. It linked leadership trainers and scientific racists with Microsoft’s on-line Slate of “really smart” policy wonks and a whole media class who search for “the kind of band [or movie or book] the smart kids liked in high school.”
Such smart sets share more than a praise-word, they assume cleverness is all good and some should be more equal than others.
Their ruling conceits have generated a self-lacerating kind of cultural resistance. A dumb and dumber populism that implicitly challenges all those permanent A-students who have made a fetish of their own superior tastes. But “I can fuck stupid” populism won’t do. We need to encourage everyday people—LL’s and Jay-Z’s people—to become the sort on whom nada is lost. Together we can feel our way of this desert of dollars and smartness.
III
There was something missing from my millennial critique of the smart word: I hadn’t proposed an alternative term. A few years ago it occurred to me soul might serve to incarnate a better aesthetic.[5] “Soul” surely evoked a sweeter 60s moment in boomer politics of culture. A passage on Otis Redding from Out of the Vinyl Deeps suggests rockwrite’s originary smart woman might have gone for it:
A few years ago, I saw the Monterey Pop Festival movie for the fourth or fifth time.l had always loved Otis Redding’s performance, but this time I heard intimations in his music I’d never picked up before. Sung by a black man to an audience of white freaks—“the love crowd,” he had labeled them (us), with amusement and affection and who knows what cynicism—a ballad like “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” became more, much more, than a simple love song. The line “Please don’t make me stop now” was both a plea and warning. It spoke of human relations in general and race relations in particular. It reminded the love crowd that in their naïve rapacity they had taken what sustenance they needed from the black music and the black outlaw culture without much thought about what they could give back. And it insisted, sadly but firmly, that that one-way transfer of energy-of love, if you will—could not continue forever. This is your chance, Redding seemed to be urging; if you do something about love instead of merely talking about it, then maybe—just maybe—we can all make it through.
Willis’s little bit of soul isn’t perfectly representative of her Vinyl Deeps. Sam and Dave, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder made the cut along with Otis, but 70s Marvin Gaye and Al Green are missing from its implicit hierarchy of taste.[6] While that may irk those of us who’d take them in a hot second over Willis’s beloved Lou Reed, her value as a critic can’t be separated from her resistance to a priori p.c. assumptions that real soul men/woman must necessarily make better music than inauthentics like Lou Reed or Mick Jagger or Janis Joplin. One of the foundational “smart” moves made by Willis and other 60s pop critics was to challenge the 5th column of moralizers who tried to one-up eclectic pop lovers in the 60s by proclaiming the high righteousness of pure tastes.
I was reminded of that brigade recently when I came across an exchange between Arthur Kempton—author of one of the few essential histories of black pop music, Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music—and an interviewer who agreed with him about the pathos of Jagger/Joplin fans. Given license to vent by his questioner who mixed up the dark end of the street with a haughtier side of town—“Mick Jagger looted American culture…Janis Joplin was a second-rate screamer”—Kempton obliged:
Kempton: I would only suggest that you listen to Erma Franklin’s version of “Piece of My Heart” and then listen to what Janis Joplin did and dare you this disagree with me.
Interviewer: I know the song and I agree with you.
Kempton: Mick Jagger. As you may recall their first American hit was “It’s All Over Now” but Jagger’s is a note-for-note copy [of the Valentinos’ version]. The second hit was “Mercy Mercy” by Don Covay. There was always this side of me, even then that said it was wonderful that these English kids love and respect black music but when do you love something enough to leave it alone. And they really didn’t. None of them as far as I am concerned, ever produced anything worth listening to. My tastes are cardinal…
I wish Ellen Willis was around to talk back to Kempton and his shadow. While it would be hard to argue with them about “It’s All Over Now” (and “Piece of My Heart”) and most of the Stones’ straight blues numbers, if memory serves, the Stones’ version of Otis Redding’s “That’s How Strong My Love Is” is different. And what about “Play with Fire”? (If you weren’t around to hear it on the radio—and especially if you were—look out for Greil Marcus’ lovely passage on “Play with Fire” in his chapter on hits of 1965 in Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads.) A Brit Christian lady once wrote up her experience as a young pop fan in the 60s. She went on for pages about virtues of Beatles and then switched suddenly to Stoney facts of life. It seemed she didn’t want to tarry there. Yet this Christian allowed the Stones had taught her something undeniable. They’d introduced her to the reality of evil.
Please don’t understand me too quickly. I’d never claim black music lovers must get Stoned. (Jay-Z sure didn’t need “Play with Fire” or any of the Stones’ flowers of evil to see “the devil” in his brother’s eyes.) A true conservative purist like Kempton is good for all our souls as I realized when I watched Rejoice and Shout—this summer’s botched documentary about gospel music.
Rejoice and Shout is definitely not the work of a purist. The filmmaker is pretty clueless about his subject. (I doubt he’s a real gospel fan.) His doc is a mishmash. Unremarkable performances and a barely-there historical narrative talked up by talking heads alternate with wondrous singing, starting with 10-year-old Jekalyn Carr of the contemporary gospel group the Selvy Family, who opens the movie with “Amazing Grace.” The flic peaks, though the filmmaker doesn’t seem to notice, with a 50s clip of Claude Jeter and the Swan Silvertones. There won’t be a more graceful scene in a movie this year.[7]
That scene, though, had a shaming follow-up for me. Inspired by it I went and found out Claude Jeter had died in a nursing home in Queens in 2009. I hadn’t even noticed his passing though there was a time when his singing on “Saviour Pass Me Not” was everything I desired. Talk about a “one-way transfer of energy—of love” (to lift Ellen’s line about the love generation’s cottoning to black style). I missed my chance to give Claude Jeter some love before he died. Thank God for a true gospel head like Arthur Kempton. He gave Jeter and other heroes of his tradition their due in Boogaloo. Kempton may have disagreed with Ellen about Jagger and Joplin but he answered her Call “to do something.” The first couple hundred pages of that book amount to an act of soul and reparation.
Notes
1 The phrase “Vinyl Deeps” seems to echo the title, “Vinyl Reckoning,” of Richard Meltzer’s coruscating protest against his own exclusion from the rockwrite canon. Meltzer, like Willis, quit the game decades ago. His move, like Ellen’s, should be taken as a sign of mother wit (and a good bullshit detector) not moldy fig-ism.
2 As Marshall Berman noted in a Village Voice review of PE’s Apocalypse 91 that appeared a week after an issue on “the new [i.e. black] anti-Semitism,” Chuck wasn’t denying “the enormity of Jewish suffering:” “What he’s saying is that Black history is a harder story to tell. Harder to understand or confront, harder to separate the good guys from the bad, more deeply ambiguous in its long-term human cost, harder to tag at its core.”
3 My readiness to rock and roll with the ironies of “Neighborhood Bully” shows I wasn’t very caring about “the hardcore costs” of the Palestinian Nakba.
4 That pop arty object comes with annotated readings of Jay-Z’s lyrics that treat his rhymes as Rorschach tests about inner city/outer borough life. Jay-Z’s hard-sell editors/hagiographers conflate difficulty with depth. That’s probably why they avoided “You Must Love Me.” You don’t need a decoder to get this track.
5 See “New Criterion” in First of the Year: 2008.
6 Robert Christgau, who responded with his whole body and spirit to Al Green, is a better consumer guide to 70s pop.
7 Film critic Armond White might be down with that. (Maybe we can agree to disagree about Rejoice and Shout which he liked a lot.) I owe him for crying up Rejoice and Shout. When he reviewed it recently for New York Press, he placed his rave in front of praise for the latest movie by Jean-Luc Godard, who is one of his absolute heroes. I thank him for getting me out to the theater to hear Claude Jeter (and Jekalyn Carr).