About half of my writing for the original Postmodern Conservative blog (2010-2016, hosted first at First Things, and for the last two years at National Review Online) was for a series titled Carl’s Rock Songbook. A premise of the series was that rock, a form spanning several styles that began around 1966, should be analyzed as fundamentally distinct from rock ‘n’ roll. To a large extent, I focused on songs that stood as landmarks of the form, and these often had lyrics that reflected about what the connected Culture Revolution ought to be, or, about its problems and contradictions. Many of the songs came from the late-60s period, such as “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Time of the Season,” “Somebody to Love,” “Sounds of Silence,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Changes,” and “Imagine.” My Songbook never did get to a fulsome examination of songs from the punk and post-punk movements, although a few were covered, there was one number on New Wave (No. 37, XTC, “Life Begins at the Hop”), and I began to include a few millennial-gen rock songs, as I was becoming aware that genuinely interesting things were happening there.
A list and link-bank of the first ninety-nine numbers was provided in No. 100, and a good explanation of the basic point of the Songbook can be found in the one I did after David Bowie’s death, or in a separate introductory essay I once did for First Things. While some numbers laid out an overall postmodern conservative theory about rock itself, and of related genres, a more common pattern would be my use of a song or rock trend as a gateway to cultural and/or philosophic reflection. There were a number of thematic series along these lines, including one on individualism/loneliness (nos. 23-34), another about the Counter-Culture’s idea of Love (nos. 72-73, & 88-94), and another on the idea of cultural repetition as exhibited in rock (nos. 48-53). Plato, Tocqueville, Wilson Carey McWilliams, and Chantal Delsol were some of the political philosophers whose ideas regularly got considered alongside rock songs.
[Note: there are problems with about a fifth of the links provided within the no. 100 list, requiring to one to play around with title searches, and there are a few numbers that are simply gone, as well as about ten that suffered robot-cuts of chunks of text. I will try later this year to get the relevant archive-keepers to heal those old numbers.]
Part of the idea for a rock “Songbook” derived from the well-known idea of the “American Songbook” of the jazz-inflected pop “standards.” Basically, these were popular songs that jazz musicians and especially jazz-connected singers made part of their repertoire—some went back to the sheet-music business of Tin-Pan Alley, many were written for Broadway shows or Hollywood films, and all were either originally composed with jazz-friendly arrangements, or later found to be particularly suited to such. The mere names of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Mercer, Dinah Washington, Judy Garland, and Harry Connick, Jr. should remind you of the tunes that make up the “standards” Songbook. Quite a few entertainers were ready to deliver these upon audience-request—many were “in the book” or were memorable enough to stumble-through.
Of course, there are similar lists of genre-defining and constantly-covered songs for blues, rock ‘n’ roll, country, and folk-music. This pattern continued right up into the rock-era—if a rock ‘n’ roll band played at your high-school dance circa 1966, you could with confidence request songs like “The Twist,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Gloria,” or “Johnny B. Goode.” If they couldn’t play the specific Berry or Beatles tune you wanted, they likely could another one. The blues or rock ‘n’ roll fan wasn’t necessarily looking for a band with original songs, and they might not want to hear a band that did only originals, or even 60% originals.
A songbook for Rock, however, is a trickier proposition. Rock began, in part, as a demand for original songwriting, spurred on by Dylan’s achievement, and to a lesser degree, by that of the Beatles. The idea of a rock artist whose repertoire is mostly covers simply doesn’t compute, but outside a few exceptions like Ellington, that was standard operating procedure in the pre-rock days, and remains so with many non-rock genres. We also notice fewer covers of rock songs, I think because quite a few of them emphasized idiosyncratic aspects of the performer and recording. Those aspects became central to what made a particular rock song click. I came of age in the 80s, and I can tell you that we sure weren’t approaching our local bands with requests for U2’s “New Year’s Day” or R.E.M.’s “Pretty Persuasion.” Who would try? Maybe we’d ask a punk band to do a Ramones song, but that’s about it.
So for a rock “songbook,” I was only half-tethered to the older songbook model. Some other rubric besides a song’s being passed-down and widely-covered was needed. Thus, I sought songs that stood as exemplars for the rock scene, that influenced others or stood as representative in some way, and I generally only selected a song if there was either something about the trend or idea it represented, or more typically, something in the lyrics, that was worth extended discussion. Thus, I would select a few songs I disliked, such as “Eleanor Rigby,” although usually, I selected ones that had some claim in my judgment to overall rock excellence, and not merely the virtue of having interesting lyrics.
Stand-out rock excellence almost always involves lyrical excellence. That’s why about two-thirds of the Songbook posts were exercises in decoding lyrics, and interpretation.
Not a few selections were made in defiance of popularity—i.e., my Songbook regarded a song like Love’s “Alone Again Or” or Woods’s “Are We Moving to the Left?” as an important cultural signpost, regardless of how few know it. In rock’s classic eras, certain underground songs proved to be landmarks as time unfolded, and in what we might call rock’s latter-day eras, say from the mid-90s onward, the cultural scene has become so fragmented that certain important songs remain widely unknown regardless of their impact on other rock artists. Most Boomers and X-ers are unaware of the achievements of the better millennial-gen bands, lost as these are amid the dross, the market fragmentation, and the lesser centrality of rock to the overall culture. The odd situation of those latter-day songs reminds me a bit of what we say about latter-day Roman poetry (aka “Silver Age” poetry), such as Statius’s Thebaid, with it being regarded by many critics as derivative, tired, and lesser, but with a critic like myself trying to make the case that our latter-day rock songs can still serve as key clues to the meaning of our times, and may exhibit real excellence in doing so. (Also, there are quite a few instances of millennial-gen rock artists improving upon the sonic texture of some oft-recycled style, or of discovering some un-mined niche of stylistic possibility.)
Natalie Mering from Weyes Blood, Tim Heidecker, and Co.
I hope in another post to meditate on what’s happened culturally in years intervening between the first “volume” of my Rock Songbook, and this new, more tentatively-begun second one, and how those events will inevitably change the tenor of my rock-commentary. I can guess that my second volume will be more focused upon contemporary songs and signs than upon the overall Story of Rock, that is, more upon certain half-hidden instances of rock reflection on our times, than upon songs from the classic era. In any case, it’s good to be back.
I'm really glad I discovered this after noticing your recent post on Pink Floyd. I have a lot of catching up to do! I'll be reading as much as I can of the Songbook archives on First Things over the next week or two.
My own perspectives are mostly informed by Roger Scruton (Modern Culture) and Michael Walsh (The Fiery Angel) which I synthesized last year in a Medium article on the topic of grunge entitled Rock's Postmodern Death Rattle.
I also do a lot of stream of consciousness musing on rock history on my Twitter profile. I look forward to picking up some ideas from your work and maybe even trading some.