Someone once asked me why I thought Brit kids in the early ’60s started making music based on American blues and R&B. My quick answer was, “Because they felt like snapping a pistol in your face.” Hardly a complete explanation, but it does give a sense of what it felt like to listen to the Rolling Stones back then -- and maybe a sense of what the Stones were listening for when they listened to R&B. The line is from Muddy Waters’ “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” a song the Stones covered early on, rather weakly, but they later did an aggressive song of their own on the subject of not being satisfied.
The Stones took their moniker from a Muddy Waters song called “Rollin’ Stone,” itself based on an older blues called “Catfish Blues,” about tomcatting around, sexual metaphor, all the pretty women fishin’ after him, which apparently doesn’t have much to do with steady, responsible Muddy Waters’ actual life -- though having been a Mississippi sharecropper who’d made the trek north to Chicago, and singing for similar people, he probably felt the phrase “rollin’ stone” had poetic resonance beyond the purely sexual. Presumably so did the Stones, restless, ambitious young men.
But Mick Jagger didn’t really believe that a rolling stone gathers no moss. He knew better. He sang lyrics in which he ripped at people and tried to rip himself away from people, usually women, but he sang even more songs in which a narrator would be claiming freedom but what the song was actually telling us was that the guy still remained tied to the women he was supposedly getting out from under, his feelings all tangled up with money and power and emotional obsessions. The closest you got to free spirits in any Stones number was the misty evasive Ruby Tuesday and the raving raging psycho rapist in “Midnight Rambler,” who was hardly a viable model of freedom -- though, if requested, the Rambler will snap a pistol in your face, or stick a knife right down your throat, or put a fist through your steel-plate door.
“Midnight Rambler” is the only Stones song that actually uses a riff from “Rollin’ Stone.” The Stones generally took more from gospel-based soul and black pop than from blues, though one of their innovations was to put nasty blues licks into everything. “The Last Time” has a snaking riff that would have been at home on a Howlin’ Wolf record, but the song is based on “This Could Be The Last Time,” a gospel call-and-response that reminds you that death can come any time. (“May be in the morning, may be afternoon …”) “Call-and-response” means more than just a preacher singing and a choir or assembly responding. It’s a general practice that sets musical elements in interplay: instruments and vocalists leaving space for each other to respond, a bass playing syncopation against a drum, and so on. In the Staple Singers’ version of “This Could Be The Last Time,” the lead singer will start a line and another will finish it for him. What you get in gospel, though, in all this interaction, is a sense of a shared psychological space, shared understandings of the world, a sharing that can include the listener, whom the background singers are standing in for.
You get call-and-response in the Rolling Stones, too, but the Stones use it differently, giving you conflict instead of sharing. Or, more accurately, they give you a tense combination of conflict and sharing. The Stones invite the fans in and kick them away in the same motion, and it’s a kick that the fans find inviting, as they keep coming back for more. “Get Off Of My Cloud” is a call-and-response gang shout that ends with Jagger going “Don’t hang around ’cause two’s a crowd, on my cloud.” So listeners can join in the shout or decide that they’re the ones being shouted at, or both. In “The Last Time,” Jagger’s telling a lover that he could leave her at any moment (but he hasn’t left her), and the call-and-response at the end is one of the longest fadeouts ever, Jagger repeating and repeating “I don’t know,” it feeling like a threat, and confusion. In dance music, the fact that you’re fading rather than ending means the dance can potentially go on forever; in gospel it’s truth that goes on forever; but in “The Last Time” it’s the push and the pull and the ambivalence and uncertainty and menace that stretch on into infinity.
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Over the last couple of weeks, two pieces came through the wire that have generated a lot of talk. They both raise exactly the kinds of issues that I like to raise -- the first, race, the second, class, the second piece being a comment on the first. Since Rules Of The Game is online-only this week, I’ll link the pieces here rather than describe them in detail.
Sasha Frere-Jones, “A Paler Shade Of White”
Carl Wilson, “The Trouble With Indie Rock”
I think each piece is more or less right in what it’s trying to say, though each has a whole hunk of what I’ll call “technical” problems. (Carl says that Sasha’s piece seemed one or two drafts away from completion. I’d say the same about Carl’s; but then I’d say the same about a lot of mine. Deadlines, you know.) By “technical” problems I mean assertions that smack me in the face as illogical or largely irrelevant, and obvious counterexamples that are totally overlooked. But I think Sasha and Carl could have gotten rid of the technical problems and still have said more or less what they did say, which is, in Sasha’s case, that indie rock draws on black idioms a lot less than rock of the past did; and in Carl’s case, that Sasha is overstating his point, is really only citing a subset of indie, and that you have to take account not just of racial divides but of class divides, and in particular the class of that subset: “blatantly upper-middle class and liberal-arts-college-based.”
Both think some of the music is good but that overall the lack of “miscegenation” and, Carl would add, the narrowness of the subset’s music are bad things.
Since I tend to agree with them I won’t harp on their technical problems, but three of these problems seem crucial: (1) Neither makes anything of the fact that American mainstream popular music (including country and adult contemporary and teenpop) is totally swamped in black and white and Latin idioms that are continually mixing together, and that a good deal of the performers are white: e.g. Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado and Fergie; (2) Neither bothers to mention that there is an indie hip-hop underground that includes a lot of white MCs and DJs; (3) The class divide that’s relevant here isn’t, as Carl thinks, between rich and poor but between bohemia and the mainstream. Most indie kids may be middle class, but most of the middle class isn’t indie and most salaried professionals aren’t part of liberal arts culture.
The significance of these problems is that they demolish the reasons Sasha and Carl give for indie rock’s (or its liberal arts subset’s) move away from black idioms: that blacks in hip-hop are no longer so accepting of whites doing the music, that black music is simply more generally available to whites, so whites using it as a model is a lot more noticeable than it was in Jagger’s day, and that whites are becoming more sensitive to the exploitation and complicated racial politics involved in pilfering black music. All this is probably true, but none of it has stopped a lot of non-indie white kids from listening to and performing hip-hop and R&B and R&B-influenced pop.
I had a lot of trouble getting traction from these two articles, and that’s because the music is missing from them. It’s as if there’s a mental block here that says that when you’re talking about broad issues of race and class you can’t get down to the specifics of what people sang and how they sang it. But without the specifics there’s no story. The reason I described the Stones in such detail was that the story isn’t “The Rolling Stones were white kids who played in a black idiom” but rather that the Rolling Stones listened to particular black music (not just any black music) with particular rhythms and notes and poetry, and produced their own particular music as a result, ended up not with “All God’s children got happy feet” but with “Don’t hang around ’cause two’s a crowd.”
Sasha and Carl are describing the music in order to place it socially or to note its miscegenation or lack of it, but they’re not saying what the music means to those who play it or what it does to those who listen to it. And this is particularly frustrating because one of the bands mentioned is Sasha’s own. I mean, why is he playing this music? What’s his feeling towards it and what’s he trying to achieve? What did he hear in his sources -- the Meters, and such -- that made him think “I want to do something with that”? And crucially, what made his voice fail? Why couldn’t he find vocals to go with his rhythmic sounds? He says his voice wasn’t up to a Jagger- or Prince-quality synthesis, but neither was Jerry Garcia’s or Keith Relf’s or lots of other people’s, but they still produced viable vocals on rhythm-based music. I mean, if New Kids On The Block can do it, why can’t Sasha?
But maybe there’s an answer there: New Kids and Boyz II Men and Bell Biv Devoe and Londonbeat and the Backstreet Boys were the modern model of miscegenation -- boy bands, girl fans; or girl bands and girl fans, TLC, then the Spicies and Britney -- and I’m guessing that Sasha wasn’t saying to himself, “If I could do Bell Biv Devoe but with the look and the feel of a downtown, intellectualized bohemian, I could make a million bucks.” An answer to the question “Why isn’t black music the model for today’s bohemia?” could be “because it’s the model for the modern mainstream.”
But I do think Sasha’s put his finger on something. In what I’ve been hearing of indie (only a tiny fragment) the problem isn’t the rhythm so much as the vocals, blank or pale or recessive, being simultaneously homely and idiosyncratically weird. There’s no reason this choice can’t have artistic payoffs, by allowing people with nonstandard or “bad” voices to make music, and not only that, to expand the palette, using the hesitations and stops and miscues of actual speech, with various wavers in and out of pure tones; but the results are usually mediocre. Even a talented performer like Nicole Atkins, who’s got the chops, seems at a loss as to which voice to use -- Peggy Lee here, Ronnie Spector there. She’s a passionate singer, but there’s always an inadvertent distance.
I think a lot of indie vocalists aren’t hearing a potential voice for themselves except in vocals that seem to be some sort of retreat. Several months ago I reviewed a single by spoken-word guy Barr that actually swings fairly nicely, “The Song Is The Single,” which starts “You make the record at night, ’cause everyone knows that rock ’n’ roll is the language of night/But this got made in the day; it was bright.” So what’s happening here is that the language of night -- black night or white night -- is no longer available. What you come up with is awkward in the light, but seems more true. Of course, this truth, this awkwardness, has long since become a shtick, a common blah. This means that the voice has to keep searching for itself anew. Night doesn’t work, day doesn’t work. Maybe twilight.
Keep the conversation going at koganbot(at)gmail.com