MUSIC YOU CANNOT ADMIT YOU EVER LIKED

Seriousness shanghaied the joy of rock and roll and used it to wipe its furrowed rear. The worst offenders are the truly repellent likes of Yes, Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull, those bands with wind-up toy time signatures, castrati vocalists, and reams of wretchedly vacant philosophizing that was so steeped in skull-fuckingly dull cliches that I suspect even Rod McKuen and Edgar Guest would call these guys grunting, formless worms choking down their own fecal trails. Still, I think some of this ambitious stuff works on their own terms--King Crimson, The Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart, and his Magic Band. The lyrics from all three bands were idiosyncratic and free of pud-wilting platitudes. Overall, the music for the three of them was unique and entirely original blends of marginal influences that, when stirred the right way, created something just as authentic. Peter Townsend had been called an intellectual so often by both the rock and the mainstream press that I suspect he came to believe and sought to live up the image of the Thinking Artist. The irony was that he already was doing Art, a unique and original kind of music; his sagging jockstrap of an ego trip with Quadrophenia robbed him of that talent. He never got his groove back. I do think good rock and pop musicians and songwriters can be taken seriously to a degree. Still, there is always the danger of pomposity and self-congratulating bombast, the inflated sense of importance that nearly always saps the music of genuine inspiration and vitality. Yes, even the best of our generation's singer-songwriters have been maudlin, precious, and bordering on hard-edged baloney-mongering. But they have a knack, in general, to recover from their worst work and give us something actually inspired, focused, full of conviction. Still, others have not regrouped from their worst efforts. Sting, post-Police, is an autodidactic tourist in other cultures' music; he is lost in his pretensions, lost to us. Joni Mitchell decided she wanted to be a composer and a poet of a highly diffuse, Eliot ilk and tried to merge meandering imagery with poorly conceived, Mingus-inspired impressionism; she has been minor league ever since. Peter Gabriel, in turn, has been largely quiet on the solo front and involved himself instead in other projects; this keeps our memory of his music a fond one.