Several weeks ago I was puzzling over the fact that an issue that was apparently irrelevant to the quality of music—whether or not performers write their own songs—seemed nonetheless to be continually pushing its way to the fore. I said that behind this issue were inchoate feelings about class relations, so our concentrating on the false issue of whether bands write their own material allowed us to feel class issues without actually discussing them or thinking them through.
People avoid addressing the class issue straight up because it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with why a piece of music sounds good or not. Even if you’re genuinely concerned with the social effect of music and with social inequalities regarding who gets to make music and who gets their music heard, to say “I don’t like the music’s social effects” or “I don’t like the social commitments of the people who make the music” seem like really weak reasons to say that the music is bad (rather than merely bad for you)—whereas chiding a band for not writing its own material at least seems to have something to do with creativity. But to give any thought whatsoever to the fact that, say, one is denigrating The Monkees for not writing their own material, one has to take an apparently ridiculous position: that the musical choices—involving what notes to play and sing and how to play and sing them—of The Monkees and of the people who actually did write and produce their material, don’t count as aesthetic choices in the way that real people’s choices count. In effect you have dismissed a whole class of people, said their creativity doesn’t count.
But I don’t want to disassociate myself too much from the guys who would belittle The Monkees, since these guys’ impulses are actually pretty similar to mine.
For example, when it came out I thought The Monkees’ “I Wanna Be Free” was awful; it was a ballad, for one thing, and most ballads bored me to the point of pain, and the melody and lyrics were sappy, ingratiating shit. The thing is, “ingratiating” is a social as well as an aesthetic judgment—ingratiating to whom? Silly girls, maybe, or whoever responds to this shit (my friend Jay told me at the time that she’d come home from school one day to see her little sister Alison and Alison’s best friend Lizzy on the sofa with their heads resting together and gazing dreamily into space while “I Wanna Be Free” played on the stereo). Anyway, my experience of the music didn’t come segmented into “I’m hearing this aesthetically” and “I’m hearing that as the music’s social commitment.” It was all one sound. So maybe you could say that I didn’t like the way the music’s social commitment sounded.
The softer sounds of The Monkees implied a class difference from the snarl of early Stones.
I’m bringing up The Monkees because they came along at a very interesting time in music history. In one way they were an obvious attempt to cash in on The Beatles by creating an American imitation. The joke was that The Beatles were the Fab Four and The Monkees were the Prefab Four. But among the people who wrote for and produced and bankrolled The Monkees were people who’d done the same for the girl groups several years earlier—Shirelles, Crystals, Ronettes, etc.—from whom The Beatles had drawn a big hunk of their sound in the first place. So you could see The Monkees as these people’s response to what was being reflected back at them from England. But The Beatles, of course, hadn’t just drawn on girl-group source material; they’d altered it, created a new sound. And they weren’t just a new sound; when you took them in combination with the other British Invasion groups they seemed to be a new class of people. The Beatles, Kinks, Animals and Who were from working-class families, the Stones and Yardbirds from the middle class, but almost all of those bands were art-school punks or bohemians (even the ones who weren’t art school per se were of that type and milieu, and there were bohemian music scenes to support them). And their music had a new kind of social defiance in it, a new bohemia under construction, an attempt to break into the Strange.
The did-the-performers-write-their-own-songs thing is a red herring because it was never used as a critique of the Stones, who did mostly covers on their first three albums, and The Animals, who hit with songs written by the same people who wrote for The Monkees. And it was never used to praise someone like Neil Diamond, who wrote his own songs (as well as writing for The Monkees). But the question of what class is creating the songs is most certainly not a red herring. The sound of the Stones and The Animals—hard rock—gave signals about the apparent social commitments of the people who made the music, put them on the hard left socially no matter what they may have felt as individuals. If The Monkees had sounded like the Stones or The Animals no one would have given a thought to whether or not they wrote and played on their own songs. But The Monkees didn’t sound like the Stones and The Animals. Their music went both ways, went hard on a few songs but had ballads for the little girls, too. So they were equivocal, compromised. Of course, that could make them better, more interesting, that they were torn between old and new and between boys and girls, playing tough but also sweet, rocking but with a thin sound so as not to frighten the moms. (Peter Tork told a British interviewer recently that The Monkees’ producers had kept the sound thin for that very reason.) Except for the ballads, I generally liked The Monkees fine, and I was torn in the same way, excited by the Stones and Animals but scared shitless by them, too, by their new world. Yet my feelings gave me a different message, which is that I thought the Stones and Animals clobbered The Monkees. You could say that my personality resembled The Monkees, but that I thought the Animals’ and Stones’ social commitments sounded better.
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