It is not amongst the most loved of The Beatles’ songs, “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” Ian MacDonald, in Revolution in the Head, his celebrated disquisition on The Beatles’ discography, describes this McCartney composition as a “ghastly miscalculation” and as “sniggering nonsense” and claims it was a song that Lennon despised. The tale of a murderous medical student, it has a jarringly jaunty tune — a Trojan tune that smuggled the horrific into my head. The song I discovered when investigating my parents’ record collection, a discovery as unfortunate as that of some cursed amulet that brings woe to its owner, but of which the owner can never be rid. But Abbey Road is, despite “Maxwell.” The Beatles album that means the most to me, perhaps, in part, because I knew it when I was young, and it has the additional import, therefore, of a lost thing found, or of a thing delivered from afar. Whatever makes a rock from the Moon matter more than a rock from your garden — that ingredient is present, I find, in the things first known. But the album, of course, requires no biographical happenstance on the part of the listener to have meaning. Good things are to be found therein. Including the moment, during the second side’s long medley, when the briskness of “Polythene Pam” gives way to the lengthier phrasing of “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window.” and the moment of changed pace feels like the moment a glider is freed from the plane that pulls it, the brutish motoring left behind in a rapturous banishing of racket and rush. Yet for all that is good on the album, it is what is bad that remains, for me, most potent. There was a long period of my life when even the sight of the third track’s title on the back of the sleeve was a cause of disquiet. And though I know that I will have to listen to the track again for the writing of this essay, I am now at the end of the second paragraph and have yet to get the listening done.

It was not the only piece of music, this, that snared me with its melody and disturbed me with its words. There was also Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, which, I think, was the first record I ever owned. The five- or six-year-old me sent away a certain number of labels from bottles of Ribena, and received, in return, a copy of Peter and the Wolf on flexi-disc. I found it magically pretty, this piece of music. It seemed to me extraordinary that something so pretty could exist, and be in my possession. Here was gorgeousness caught, as baffling a capture as a snatched sunbeam or a phantom filmed. And yet I found listening to it an ordeal. Because the narration was about a cat, a bird, and a duck being hunted by a wolf, and, in the case of the duck, eaten. Which I did not like. The chasing of the cat made me afraid, I remember, for my own cat, who seemed to me very meaningful, and, as I listened to the narration, very vulnerable. The narration, as it happens, has a cushioned conclusion, pulls back, at the last, from an adult frankness about death — Peter persuades the hunters not to kill the wolf but to take it to the zoo, and as the wolf is led away we hear the duck it has eaten quacking from inside its stomach. This is mortality fashioned with a child in mind, mortality tailored to the tender. Nevertheless, the tale bothered me, and quite soon the mortality proved more worrying than the melody was alluring, and I put the record safely to one side. But with “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” the record could not be put safely to one side. Because I couldn’t stop singing it.

They are hardly strangers to each other, music and compulsion. The phenomenon of the earworm, of the tune that refuses to leave you be, has been much remarked. Oliver Sacks, in Musicophilia, his book on neurological oddities relating to music, describes people prey for long periods to the irresistible mental repetition of a tune, and quotes a correspondent who suggests that the cause lies in our hunter-gatherer past, when learning the sounds of wildlife through repetition would have been of assistance to survival. With me, the repetition was not mental but vocal. I was given to unbidden singing, sometimes to the annoyance and amusement of those around me, and can remember the day, in my early 20s, when I managed to leave such singing behind, my work colleagues giggling as I repeatedly started to sing and then, on each occasion, immediately stopped and apologized, and, over a couple of hours, brought the automatism finally to a halt. It’s no accident that music, which can so unevictably inhabit us, is often depicted as magic. In the fairy tale, “Roland,” the title character rids himself of a witch by playing her a magic tune on his fiddle. The witch cannot stop dancing and eventually dances herself to death. In “The Wonderful Musician,” a lonely fiddler seeks to attract a companion with his playing, and a woodcutter, hearing this playing, leaves his work in spite of himself and stands and listens to the fiddler as if enchanted. Sometimes what music means is that our will is neither here nor there, and my will, when I was 10, was exactly that. I was in the grip of a ghastly enchantment, and did not have what was necessary to get myself free of that grip.

So yes, what I thought, when I was 10, was this: that as a consequence of my singing “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” — my monstrously involuntary singing of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” — my parents would die. But not immediately. In three years’ time. When I would be 13 and they would be 42. There seemed to me a fatal conjunction in those numbers. Because both were inauspicious. Thirteen traditionally so. And 42 because that was the age at which Denis, the man who lived opposite, had died. Denis had two children who were much the same age as my sister and me. And yet, somehow, this hadn’t stopped him dying. Denis’s death, I now suspect, had much to do with my troubles. If he could die, I had realized, then my parents could too. I would have known this already, of course. But his death gave the knowledge heft. That those who were the land you lived in could be lost to you, that the ones where all the warmth was could be removed — Denis’s death had flicked a switch and made this knowledge live. And my anxiety about it, I am speculating, infected my singing of the song. There was a reason, I think, why it was this particular song that was a problem, and not another. It was because my singing of this song seemed a transgression. It was about a murderer bringing a hammer down upon people’s heads. It was not a song, I felt, that I should have been singing. Yet sing it I did. I was a 10-year-old much given to toeing the line, and yet there I was, guilty, unarrestably, of transgression. And bad things are born of transgression. Just as Adam and Eve, in their consumption of the forbidden fruit, had brought mortality upon the race, so was I, in my singing of a forbidden song, bringing mortality upon my mother and father. I was doing wrong and the horrible would follow. And yet I couldn’t stop. I could not.

Here we are now, six paragraphs in, and still I haven’t steeled myself to listen again to the song. I have, over the years, listened to it on several occasions, and without any significant psychological collapse. But I am finding the notion onerous now. Not because I fear a resumption of the compulsion. Or because I fear that to hear it will spell my parents’ end. I am long rid of such thinking, and will walk under the unluckiest of ladders with wild abandon. Nevertheless, I was in the habit of hating it, and the habit has made a partial return, though I know that there is nothing there to hate. That a prejudice has been debunked can be of strangely little impediment to the persistence of that prejudice. I used to recoil, for example, at the thought of watching a western, and decided to watch half a dozen to confront my prejudice and make larger the likeable world. And I did, indeed, find that I liked them, and felt the prejudice depart. And then, as time passed and I went a while without watching another, I felt the prejudice grow back, in peculiar heedlessness of experience. “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” is not, I know, a thing of nasty magic, yet an odor of nasty magic remains. Yes, there that odor is. Some art we have to be feeling strong to consume, and some art we have to be feeling weak. But that there exists a piece of music that has a strange power over me — I do not entirely dislike this idea. I am apt to be grateful for the strange, for that to which my thinking might gainfully go. And that it’s possible to create a piece of art that plays havoc with a human — this idea can do gingering things to a writer, as can all evidence that art is not a thing inert. That it might be possible to summon something of similar import, a sentence or a story that does not pass traceless through the soul — this makes one hasten to the waiting page far wider of pupil.

It is right, I think, to talk now of the Yorkshire Ripper. For the Yorkshire Ripper, I suspect, may be pertinent. I was, as a child, particularly given to nocturnal fears, and there was a period when I would spend large parts of each night leaning out of bed in stricken vigilance, monitoring the stairs for the Yorkshire Ripper’s ascent. The face of this murderous inadequate I knew from the front page of my parents’ paper, which meant that he was, by this time, safely in custody. And in his long and sanguinary career he had shown no interest whatsoever in butchering small boys. But my fear of him was a thing to which the facts had no access. And it wasn’t only for myself that I feared. My parents’ room stood between mine and the top of the stairs, and I would weigh in my mind whether this was a cause of comfort or concern, whether my parents provided a bulwark against the awful or would in fact be the first things the awful fell upon. I wasn’t clear what powers my parents had. It was possible murderers had more. I once, when young, raised the question of my parents dying with my mother, and she laughed, and declared that that was a long, long time away and wasn’t something I had to worry about. But when I was 10, I was worried. At the thought of being alone in the world, and with less strength than the world required. When I think, now, of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” I think also of the Yorkshire Ripper. They overlap in my mind. Let me look up the dates. I have looked up the dates. They match. I was bedevilled by the one at the same time as I was bedevilled by the other. But my fears about both petered out. By the time I was 13 and my parents were 42 and the fatal conjunction of the numbers was in place, my compulsive singing of the song had ceased, along with my fear, and the year reached its end without the augured apocalypse coming to pass.

Now, I suppose, I must behave like an adult, and listen again to the song. That plaguing perkiness. That bright-eyed blight. I am not without hopes that this will induce in me some enormous meltdown so as to give the final paragraph some pizzazz. If the listening were to coincide with terrible news about my parents, what weight the final paragraph would have. The writing of that last sentence caused me some unease. I felt the errancy in it imperilling my parents. I felt the infraction in it doing something damning. It does not confine itself entirely to one’s childhood, does it, the childish mind. But here we go then. Here we go.

I am back and I am, of course, unharrowed. Nothing terrible was triggered. None of the odious potency remained. “When the fear yields,” wrote Saul Bellow, in Henderson the Rain King, “a beauty is disclosed in its place.” It would be pushing it, perhaps, to categorize “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” as a thing of beauty. But I did not dislike it. There was McCartney’s light voice taking a pleasant melody over the oompah underpinnings, and the lyric that fell so foul on my infant self fell utterly fallow on my adult. There was nothing there to induce upheaval. The only element of the track that caught on me was to be found during the final verse, a very quiet organ line that I have never noticed before, a thing muted enough to be mysterious, lying there beneath the more obvious elements of the orchestration, and the hiddenness of which passed, to my ears, for profundity. I want to listen to that again.

Instead, however, I have just listened to a version of the song by Jessica Mitford, a larky version in which she pays but scant obeisance to the tune, her elderly voice plonking down on the notes with jolly imprecision, her ineptitude so blithe that one starts to think it admirable. The original, though far less slapdash, is larky too. There is a point, during the verse in which Maxwell dispatches his teacher, when McCartney has to conquer an inclination to laugh. And the bassline, in its amiability, would suit a humorous tuba. A tuba wasn’t used. But it’s a song — and I realize how grave a statement this is — that teeters on the brink of using a tuba. He has said, McCartney, that for him the song embodies the fact that bad things can happen out of the blue. That isn’t a reading of the song I would ever have arrived at. Because it isn’t about terrible things happening to one person. It’s about one person doing terrible things. Nevertheless, when I was 10, the song did, for me, embody the worst blow a person could know, and I think perhaps I experienced the light treatment of dark matters not as an attempt to draw the sting of such matters ­­– or whatever it is one is doing when one deals depthlessly with death — but as a violation I would be punished for being privy to.

I am not so strange, I suspect, in having once thought a tune taboo, in having thought myself the font of the horrible, my trespasses the murderers of my parents. Magical thinking, I have just read, in a culpably tardy session with a search engine, is particularly common amongst children, especially with regard to death. They are apt to blame themselves for a death, to think that what’s at the root of it is their wretchedness. In the film, MirrorMask, written by Neil Gaiman, which has just shown, with kindly timing, on TV, the young protagonist, while throwing an adolescent tantrum, wishes her mother dead, and then, when her mother falls ill soon after, thinks her wish the culprit. That the meaningful are mortal — a large part of human oddness is born of this fact. Wherever the meaningful are mortal, oddness will follow. As prevention or as explanation or as solace. Though guilt about the dead, of course, isn’t always groundless. They die, the loved, and then there is guilt. Because we will not always have lived up to the fact that they mattered. But the situation, when I was 10, was this — I was a child faced with an adult fact, and childishness followed. Perhaps, buried somewhere within my thinking, was the notion that if my parents’ dying was down to me, then I could, by being good, make them immortal. To think death the consequence of sin is to think death defeatable. Because we can stop being sinful. But I, for a long while, couldn’t stop. My tongue would make the decision to sing, and there I would be, up to my neck in the terrible. I think about singing it now, the opening line of the song. But I only think about it. No, that won’t do. I shall sing it. I have sung it. But quietly. I didn’t exactly belt the thing out.

1.

J: What r u doing tomorrow night want to go to a concert with me at Madison sq garden?

Me: No plans as of yet. Quite possibly? What concert?

J: One Direction. Don’t laugh! But I can’t think of a person who I would have a better time at a 15 year old Brit boy band concert with. Think of it as anthropological study!!

Me: OH MY GOD YES.

Me: NOT BEING IRONIC.

A few weeks before Christmas, a friend invited me to the One Direction concert at Madison Square Garden. There were two distinct groups in attendance that evening: fans, ages 7-17, with a little wiggle room on either side, glowing and jumping and shrieking their hearts out, even when there was no one was onstage; and chaperones, ages 35-55ish, fondly exasperated and slapping down $9.50 — the price of a Bud Lite — on concessions counters across the arena with an extreme sense of purpose. For me, it was all a little surreal, I guess. I am 28 years old.

But wait — it’s probably best to pause straight away and unabashedly reject any lingering embarrassment over attending the concert: I sang along, I danced a bit, and I cheered enthusiastically, though I found myself physically incapable of matching the testing-the-limits-of-the-human-hearing-range screams of the assembled crowd. The boys put on a good show. For the uninitiated, One Direction (1D!!!) are a classic Simon Cowell product, a quintet of teenagers packaged together from individual auditions for The X Factor in 2010, and in the past two years, through the force of collective charisma, catchy pop singles, frankly spectacular hair, and a skillful marketing juggernaut, they’ve become the most successful group in the world. When I asked that same friend whether I needed to explain the band here, she wrote in a Facebook message, “haha no. they are the five most beautiful brits on earth.”

It’s both short-sighted and a little curmudgeonly to sit at a One Direction concert and marvel at the “kids these days,” though I’ll admit that when I was ages 7-17, I’m pretty sure that I never felt like any of my peers were literally about to fall to pieces over the Backstreet Boys, or Hanson — though maybe I just had the wrong friends. The night at MSG felt more like the Ed Sullivan Show with laser lights and balloons full of confetti — girls cast in black and white, trembling and jittery and ear-splittingly loud as they swooned over The Beatles, The Stones, and all those bands that never made it past 1964. One Direction plays up their Britishness — their new album cover involves a top hat, a bow tie, and one boy hoisting another up onto a red telephone box — which partly feels like a nod to (or, perhaps, a pale imitation of) the transatlantic sensations of half a century ago. Mick Jagger recently drew those comparisons himself: after watching a One Direction concert on television, he said, “It reminded me very much of our early concerts, when we were pushed around among the audience and we would kind of float. [T]hey were like, floating above the audience, and they looked like, really distinctly uncomfortable…It was a very funny moment, because it was very similar to the things we’ve been through.”

So it was fitting, then, that just a week prior, I’d gotten drawn into watching Crossfire Hurricane, the new HBO-produced documentary about The Rolling Stones. It was entertaining all along, but for me, one segment was extraordinary: half an hour in, after a rapid-fire montage of clips of the early Stones and commercial images of the mid-1960s, we come to a young Mick Jagger in an ascot, sitting smugly beside a vaguely German man who’s theorizing about the singer’s rapturous fan base. “When these girls pounce upon Mick and seem to want to tear him to pieces, it’s not essentially an act of aggression,” the expert suggests, “but rather an act of devouring him. They want to incorporate his essence. It’s a sort of fetishism which has more in common with people collecting the relics of saints, as they did in the ancient past. There’s really no break with the ancient tradition — it’s just a question of form.” The camera cuts over to Jagger, and the look on his face is inscrutable for a moment, before he hunches down to light a cigarette, and the expert goes on, “I’ve seen this with the most marvelous, dramatic intensity, with two or three thousand young girls in Manchester, and these girls, they wept, they were possessed by the spirit — and I may add that all their little panties were soaking wet at the end. I mean, the complete physical and mental absorption.”

The camera’s back on Jagger as he smirks at the last bit, agreeing with the assessment, but then he spins the analysis away from fan girls. “I think what’s more interesting is that in this country, the audience is indeed all girls and they do behave in this way, but in the rest of the world, this isn’t true. In lots of places, they’re nearly all boys. With the boys, it erupts, you know, much more aggressively. And they use it to have a great fight with the police. And they just beat the police up. As a show of sort of strength. Or a show of dissatisfaction. Or something.” Underneath it all, the first strains of “Paint It Black” start pulsing through, until they cut away, to shots of young boys pounding the stage, half gleeful, half infuriated.

If there is one thing that’s pretty damn hard to find at a One Direction concert, it’s boys. And even harder to find there, amongst any gender, is a show of dissatisfaction.

2.
If Britain has conquered the early-21st-century boy band, we’ve got the indisputable solo prince of pop here in America. Well, actually, Justin Bieber is Canadian. I could claim him for North America, but that doesn’t really seem necessary. Bieber is an American product: after the small-town childhood and the single-mother upbringing, he was a near-overnight YouTube phenomenon at 13 — a phenomenon carefully fostered and orchestrated by recording-industry superstars. Bieber’s success is staggering but strangely focused: he wholly absorbs his target demographic, without much penetration beyond. A decade or two removed from that fan base, I know him for his fame alone — the only song I could’ve sung along with before starting this piece is the one that repeats the word “baby” about 500 times (title: “Baby”). And this is coming from a person who really enjoyed a One Direction concert.

But maybe that ubiquitous fame is all that really matters. That’s where we start with Teddy Wayne’s new novel, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, whose eponymous protagonist is clearly drawn from a Bieber archetype — sometimes the satirical masking feels so light that it’s hard to imagine that reality is much different. The superficial details of his life match his counterpart: raised by a single mother in St. Louis, he, too, was discovered on YouTube and promptly snapped up by a major record label. We meet him in the middle of his second tour, which doesn’t seem to be going as well as his first, with his mother and manager, Jane, and a small cast of handlers — bodyguard, choreographer, and tutor, the latter of whom helpfully assigns Jonny a series of slave narratives to read. The strictness of his regime is painfully clear from the start.

At only 11, Jonny is a good deal younger than your average teen pop icon, which serves to make the impact of his megastardom all the more extreme. His general confusion reads like the classic child star narrative, pre-adolescence deeply muddled by fame: he has more knowledge of the adult world than any child ought to have, but in other matters, he’s achingly clueless. He prides himself on his accuracy pinpointing adults’ exact ages and weights — and between stringent calorie-counting and pre-show vomiting, it’s clear he’s got an eating disorder himself. His only frame of reference for friendship seems to be the single good friend he left behind in St. Louis, and he has to substitute his good-natured, middle-aged bodyguard for both best friend and father figure. He relies on a video game, “The Secret Land on Zenon,” for distraction and as a template for making sense of the world. And when he speaks, mostly in internal first-person narration, we get a mix of normal, if slightly awkward 11-year-old boy and strange corporate recording-industry drone — a walking embodiment of a marketing plan presented to him, “JONNY VALENTINE 2.0 BRAND-EXTENSION STRATEGY” — parroting adult voices with hollow certainty. It’s this juxtaposition that gives Jonny poignancy. When he returns to St. Louis for the first time, he pauses before an interview on a national morning show:

Being a consummate professional means doing your job when you don’t want to, so I sucked it up and pasted on a huge smile when the camera light blinked and Robin introduced me as America’s Angel of Pop and the girls screamed like they were getting attacked and I got ready to give answers in Auto-Tune mode, where they sound right but have nothing behind them.

Jonny is quick to scrub away self-pity with self-chastisement, and it all works to make him a deeply likable and thoroughly heartbreaking character. He is being mismanaged on every level, and whether that’s a critique of the personal or the professional is impossible to sort out, because they’re so intricately entwined. Much of the blame should land squarely on the culture at large — and that, of course, is the main target of Wayne’s satire. We get snippets of media, articles that ring uncomfortably true across a range of publications, and we get Internet comment threads full of celebratory snark after a man tries to assault Jonny during a concert. “It’s like people are afraid to be the first one to be an asshole, but once some others clear the way, they get super-excited about it,” he thinks. “Except with most blogs, the blogger himself is the biggest asshole, so all the commenters think it’s okay to write whatever they want from the start.”

It’s air-tight satire, particularly because Wayne doesn’t have to do much to alter modern-day America — we’re admittedly a bunch of celebrity-sucking vampires, after all, just as so many celebrities jump to bare their necks to us — and as the narrative rings true, the boy Jonny’s forced to mold himself into becomes all the more tragic. He lives a deeply false life, but our complacency in this, whether we’re teeny-boppers or not, lends us that same cheapness. It’s masterfully done, but it does leave us mired in the age-old questions of celebrity and authenticity, wondering what about any of this is new.

3.
And then there are the Latchkeys. The opening act on Jonny’s tour is a four-piece band of 20-somethings, with “literate” and sexuality explicit lyrics and a heartthrob lead singer, Zack Ford, whose female teenage fans overlap with the older end of Jonny’s demographic. Zack plays a lot of roles in the novel: an older brother for Jonny; an idol and a role model, usurping Tyler Beats, the Justin Timberlake figure who looms in Jonny’s mind as a benchmark for enduring pop stardom; a well-meaning bad influence, slipping whiskey into ginger ale under the table; and, occasionally, a homoerotic point of focus as Jonny grapples with puberty. And perhaps most importantly, Zack is a foil, as Jonny haltingly stumbles over questions of authenticity and the definition of success. Because Zack is working through the questions that Jonny can sense but can’t yet articulate: he worships The Clash’s “Complete Control,” to the chagrin of his band-mates. “They said we’d be artistically free / When we signed that bit of paper.”

The Latchkeys are described disdainfully by a minor character as “corporate indie rock for the masses. The Urban Outfitters of bands,” despite Jonny’s defensive protests that they weren’t, in this girl’s words, “cooked up in some music laboratory by a group of record executives to sound exactly like it wasn’t,” just a bunch of college friends that had made it big. But in a way, the distinction no longer matters. And she says as much — when she accuses the band of being “rich white boys” and Jonny talks about Zack’s working-class roots, she says, “He’s rich now. All that matters is what you are now.”

Does it matter to us how culture is made? Won’t we swallow the cooked-up laboratory celebrity just as easily as the authentic talent? And does it even matter if, like Jonny, it’s a case of both? The past decade has seen the conversation surrounding “reality” reach a fever pitch; the children born and raised under the shadow of this conversation must inevitably turn to Jonny Valentine, or Justin Bieber, or whoever else ticks all the right boxes, as brand strategists figure out which boxes matter the most. As long as we take our cues from them, nothing changes.

Mick Jagger, who once said, “I’d rather be dead than singing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m 45,” turns 70 this July. Tickets for a string of Rolling Stones 50th anniversary concerts last autumn sold for thousands of pounds online. “Everybody all right in the cheap seats?” Jagger asked at the O2 Arena in London last November. “They aren’t so cheap though, are they? That’s the trouble.” There’s another moment in Crossfire Hurricane, in which an off-screen interviewer probes a black turtlenecked-Jagger about his appeal to young people. The camera stays tight on his face.

Interviewer: Why, then, if you think that most of your work is about dissatisfaction and so on, why do you think you’re so popular?

Mick Jagger: Because most young people are dissatisfied.

I: In what way?

MJ: With the generation which they think is running their lives.

I: What things are you dissatisfied with?

[and here Jagger gazes off-screen for a moment, his brow furrowing in thought, before looking straight at the camera, like he’s telling the punch line to the world’s most serious joke]

MJ: The generation that runs our lives.

Image source: waitscm

That’s because I’m a mediocre musician, with poor sight-reading skills and no piano handy, and Song Reader, if you didn’t already know, is just sheet music. No CD, no link to downloadable MP3s, nada. I have to puzzle out the melodies on my guitar, drawing on long forgotten undergraduate music theory to get the rhythms right. It is a pain in the ass. The album would sound better if it were professionally recorded, by a real artist.

And yet. When I finally manage to play through “I’m Down,” and “America, Here’s My Boy,” and “Do We? We Do,” it is revelatory. I have just channeled Beck’s spirit through printed paper! The first versions of Beck’s songs I hear are my own! This is an amazing feeling.

If you are not musically trained and do not have a musician near at hand, Song Reader may be a tough sell. True, the artwork is nice to look at. You can read the lyrics, and the introduction by Jody Rosen, and the foreword by Beck himself. These are worthwhile activities. The graphic design is skillful. Beck’s lyrics read well, for song lyrics. The introductions are illuminating. And as you look all this over you will think, for the first time, probably, about how back in the day people did not buy albums, they bought scores, and you sat in a park or your parlor (whatever that is) and listened to someone’s interpretation of those scores, maybe a friend or a relative, or you interpreted them yourself.

But then you will want to hear the songs, and they are not readily accessible. In fact, a few months ago they weren’t accessible at all. When I first received the album (in the mail!), only four of the songs had been recorded and shared online, and the renditions ranged from decent (The New Yorker staff) to tragic. By the time I sat down to write this essay, though, over 100 had been uploaded to the official McSweeney’s website and YouTube. There is already one very polished video of “Old Shanghai,” the pre-released sheet music single. The Portland Cello Project has now recorded the whole thing and posted it on YouTube.

These options will still leave some people dissatisfied, and they may remain so until Beck releases “official” versions. Which he will, of course, in due time (though according to an interview not anytime soon). That’s why there’s no reason for anyone to complain.

As for me, I’m trying to steer clear of other people’s versions, at least until I’ve made my own.

2.
I’ll leave it for accomplished music writers to review the music. I want to talk about Song Reader as a book. It is a great book. It is better than Choose Your Own Adventure books, or Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, or The Clock Without a Face, a 2010 McSweeney’s production whose busily illustrated pages hid clues to a real-world treasure-hunt.

Beck’s book is better than all of these because it does not feel forced or gimmicky. It is the hipster tendency to appropriate anachronism at its very, very best. Why? Because it requires hack musicians like myself to push their abilities. Because it is nostalgia in its purest form. (See the moon begin to rise / just like it did back home, I sing as I play “Old Shanghai.”) Because it trains patience. Because through anachronism it succeeds in making brilliant use of current technological forms, reproducing endlessly, an album with infinite authentic tracks. Because I will practice Beck’s songs, along with thousands of other people, and we will watch and listen along with Beck as the world plays his music. He will find out how his music sounds. I will find out, too. Neither of us will have the final say. It is ultra-quaint and ultra-post-modern simultaneously.

This is a really fantastic book.

Did I mention it sounds good? I mean, I sound good when I read the pages out loud, and that’s saying a lot. The songs are user-friendly, in easy musical keys, consciously written for people like me. Thank you, Beck!

3.
Classical musicians and jazz musicians and producers of musicals regularly encounter music in its raw and unprocessed state. What makes Song Reader nothing short of genius is the way it upends the expectations of its audience, most of whom (I assume) do not read music for a living, or even recreationally. No one gets to instantly download the songs. There are no traditional reviews. No previews on iTunes. When people discuss the relative merits of the album, the conversation cannot help but become a meta-conversation: “What is an album?” “Where is the album?” “Whose album is it?” I have had a few of these conversations. They are everything philosophizing should be — earnest, enthusiastic, and revelatory. Someone points out that no one can pirate the album. Someone else wonders about copyright law: can you just perform Beck’s songs, or does he get royalties? The conversation veers towards cover bands, and whether they have any legal or financial obligation to the original band. We think about music, and law, and authenticity through the lens of Beck’s book, as though for the first time. Song Reader is about firsts.

One of those firsts, for me, is the realization of a reward built into sheet music that cannot happen any other way. Playing Beck’s songs is like discovering home-cooking after a life of eating at restaurants. This feeling of discovery is not better than listening to Beck play his own songs, no more than preparing my own pasta is better than going out to my favorite Italian joint. Home-cooking is not better or worse than eating at restaurants. It is an entirely different activity. This is what Beck wanted: “Learning to play a song is its own category of experience.”

Some activities should not be forgotten by popular culture. Cooking is among them. So, too, is the musical experience that Beck has recreated. There is no word for it, but now I know what it is, and it is beautiful and exciting and profoundly different from any experience of music I have ever had. Like cooking, it has been eclipsed by technologies of convenience. It takes time and effort to play through Beck’s album, or to wait for other people to do so, or to call your musician friends and have them do it for you. This is time and effort many people won’t want to spend.

Too bad. It’s worth it. You won’t just hear the album, you’ll work for it. And that work will add to the music, just like you can taste your own labor in a home-cooked meal. I’m not saying every album should come out in the form of sheet music. Neither is Beck. But in its exceptionalism, Song Reader reminds us of the invisible losses that accompany cultural movement and technological innovation, losses that need not always be accepted. (There is probably a lesson in here somewhere about the relationship between paper books and e-books.) Be careful, says Beck’s experiment. Move slowly, and make sure you haven’t left anything important behind. Why did you leave it? Was there room to bring it along?

At Slate, Geeta Dayal describes Song Reader as a signpost of the new earnestness in our culture, offering tepid praise: “It’s not a bad thing — it’s a constructive impulse, and a sincere one.” But she also warns us not to “mistake it for a manifesto,” pointing out that Bing Crosby, whose song “Sweet Leilani” inspired Song Reader, couldn’t read music, and neither could Jimi Hendrix. Beck, she complains, made much use of the recording studio. So let’s not get preachy about halcyon days, right?

Maybe. But Beck (and McSweeney’s) never meant Song Reader as an anti-technology manifesto. Otherwise there wouldn’t be an official website for people to upload their songs. What makes it feel like a manifesto (a fuck you, according to Dayal) is latent insecurities in our own culture, insecurities that I share, about loss and progress. Fox-hunts do not look like manifestos because we are not sad about what their disappearance represents. At best they seem romantic, at worst a reminder of a barbaric past better forgotten entirely.

That’s not the case with Song Reader. When Song Reader is stuck in my head, I feel a strange kind of longing. My iPod can’t give me what I want. Neither can the Internet, really, since what I want is more versions of the songs that belong to ME. I want to hear more of my Beck album! But now I’ve played through all the songs I can sight-read easily. So I’m either going to have to work harder or get some help — two activities I would never have associated with listening to music, but which are now integral to one of my favorite albums in a long, long time. And I can say “favorite” confidently, without even having listened to the whole thing.

The Sands was a real casino, my father explains. It was Sinatra’s favorite den. Of bloody reds and kingly golds, money greens and piano-gloss blacks. This place — the Seminole Casino Coconut Creek, just outside Pompano in South Florida — isn’t that. I roll a critical eye around the space. Its Tuscan palette reminds me of a California Pizza Kitchen piped with ropes of rainbow lights. On walls, framed promotional posters seduce; “FIND THE FUN YOU!”

Another appletini slips by our hightop table; at the bottom of its glass, one merry cherry like a clown nose. I watch a Native American man in a sky-blue windbreaker quietly receive this, his second drink. Meanwhile, my father has pulled out and is scanning what he calls “the destructions.” Turn camera ON. Take little black thingy off. Avoid eye contact with daughter. Talk to Frank Sinatra, Jr… yourself! He reassures me, he’s only joking. But he does not look like he’s joking, and I worry a piece of arugula between my fingers, thinking, This was probably a bad idea. (The lettuce tears.)

Above us, in the casino restaurant, white speakers the size of dinner plates happen to be playing Frank Sinatra. Dad sings: Scooby dooby-doo… scooby dooby… scooby dooby-doo… “Strangers in the night…” (he’s packing up the camera)… “lovers at first sight…” (he’s lifting his glass of red toward the ceiling, toward Sinatra). Dad’s phone buzzes and he answers, “How are you, handsome?” His business call manners are something I remember always liking. Even when I was a kid — at first, mobile phones were the size of bricks — and we were in the car, and I would wait half hours to get a word in. I learned to prepare speeches in my head in the meantime, to audition subjects and rehearse lines of conversation. If I was going to say something, better make it good. But listening to my father’s voice (umpiring — conciliating — barking), I couldn’t imagine having views important enough to pronounce as loudly, with his same command. Like Frank Sinatra, my Italian American father was born in Hoboken, New Jersey. In 1998, my father’s grandfather, my great-, had attempted to crash Sinatra’s funeral. He was determined to pay his respects to the man who had so much to do with making Italian an okay thing to be in America. “I’m just going to ask him,” says my father now. “‘So, Junior — what’s it like, baby?’” I try to give him a look learned from my mother. It means, “Just now? I am not amusable.” It means, “Don’t try.” My father swallows the last of his Cabernet with difficulty. “Hahaha, ha!”

Two weeks ago, I told my father I’d been assigned to report Frank Sinatra, Jr.’s concert, told him I had a second press pass for a photographer. My father heard me loud and clear. He went out and bought a telescopic Nikon. It is now July 12, 2012, a Thursday. An hour ago, I showed him how to hold the camera like a pro, by cradling the lens in his left hand. We were in the parking garage waiting for an elevator. The long window looked out on the complex where a water tower sprouted behind the honey-colored stucco. Behind it was a backdrop of perfect pool blue sky. “Try to shoot that,” I said, pointing. He tried. But the auto-setting didn’t like the light conditions. The shot wouldn’t take. “Well,” my father mumbled; his eyes danced over the machine. “How do you do it manually?” It was at that point that dread began to gnaw on his daughter.

Walking toward the venue, we pass banks of slot machines: $TINKIN’ RICH, KITTEN KABOODLE, WITCHES RICHES, SNEEKI TIKI… FRANTIC ANTICS. “Cory,” I whisper to myself. “Cory.” I might have to call my father by his first name. If so, I’ll need to keep a straight face. I make eye contact over my shoulder: “Corrado.” I can feel the twist of my mouth and tightness around my eyes. This expression is historically given to my father when I know I’ve done something bad, but also know that I know my patriarch; and he may remonstrate, he may do that, but his brown eyes are oily; on the inside, he’s cheering, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!” Anyway… it was a ridiculous pretense. We two are olive; we have wavy dark hair, the same face, and are unfortunately dressed in bootcut jeans, crisp button downs, boat shoes/moccasins, and European-seeming frames, as if to match. Who, in their right, professional mind, would bring their father on a magazine assignment? But it’s too late.

I am supposed to write about the Sinatras. The tree, the apple… the grassy stage in between. The New Yorker once called Junior’s predicament an “Oedipus Hex.” Much has been made of the Sinatra redux, how Jr. doesn’t quite cut la figura of his father. Junior isn’t his father, is the problem. There is also a Frank Sinatra III. In 2010, he sent a fistful of pills down his gullet — and people said it was doing with that name of his. He cannot bear being the grandson of Sinatra. He lived, but the world will not hear from him because he doesn’t want any part of all that. Maybe his trouble had nothing to do with being a Sinatra, but from Sinatra it is hard to descend. Decades ago, one of my several “uncles,” distinguished men from my father’s circle, saw Junior play The Playboy Club in Lake Geneva. That was in 1976, early in the career of Frank Sinatra, Jr. “He was just bad,” Jim told me. They’d all fallen asleep. It had been a day, but still. They slept through the damn concert. Jim is one who’s spent an eccentric amount of time in Vegas over the years. I asked how many times he’d been. Say, fifty? More than that, came the reply. He’d seen Frank Sinatra at the inimitable Sands — its bloody reds, kingly golds; its money greens and piano-gloss blacks — twice. Sinatra was the Maker! Porkpie. He got one? Then you’d better, too. Silk mohair suit, got to have it; didn’t you see his latest movie?

Outside the venue, Cory is given a lanyard and dispatched to the press pit. I am handed a civilian ticket. I find my seat in Row J; it is behind a soundboard that looks as if a penny slot machine has snuck into the concert. I wonder. Was I just upstaged by my father? I cross my legs. Well that’s just… hilarious, actually. I scribble “THE IRONY” in my notebook, then text my dad, “Just monkey-see, monkey-do it. Good luck!” I’d noticed the other photographers’ lenses were bigger, and Dad would’ve noticed, too. I can overhear the people sitting behind me in Row H. A woman says to another woman, “So then why’d you guys come again?” “I don’t knooow,” the woman clucks. “Because we had tickets.”

Junior opens with “That Face.” His own face is ovoid and doughy. I’m aware his eyes are hazel, not blue. He wears a light gray blazer over a white dress shirt with an oblique-striped white and navy tie, and charcoal pants. He sounds — My God. — like velvet. He sounds a hell of a lot like his dad, a fact for which, somehow, I wasn’t prepared except notionally. So taken aback am I, tears spring. I can’t believe it. The Pavilion seats an audience of 1,200, mostly white hair. The venue is nearly sold out. Junior travels with a sight: a full orchestra of 21 jazz musicians. The brass are brassy, the strings are strung out, and the singing is Frankly, for sure. The audience erupts now and again in plaudit. “Do you hear that band?” Junior asks. “‘bones?” The trombonists stand up and blow, their brass instruments flashing like Rolexes. The lights throw paisley shapes on the brown curtain. “Thank you so much,” he says gently. “O!” And the lights scatter like surprised mice. He is singing one of Senior’s bills now. “Here’s to the losers. / Here’s to those who still believe. / The losers.” I look around. Ladies’ earrings are swinging like chandeliers. People are nodding; they’re putting their whole bodies into it. “You like the standards — so do I,” Junior says. He’s fisting the microphone. “Venus de Milo / Is noted for her charms . . .” He delineates an hourglass figure with his free hand.

At 8:26 p.m., a text message appears from my father. “I made a deal with the real photographers.” I reply with an emoticon:  “:-).” There is no time to process what a deal could mean. Junior is warning the crowd, “Don’t be fooled by reasonable facsimiles.” “The great days of these shows are in another era.” So he’s gonna do something for them he’s started doing, which is to “resurrect” the past, “the classic night club acts.” “Enough,” he says.” He asks the drummer, “May I have a rolling timpani, please?” Junior must be sharper than his namesake. He has outsmarted us all. He has beaten everyone to the punchline by tuning his voice. He pantomimes tossing back a stiff drink. Eh. He takes another swig of thin air, sings, “When you’re drinking / Sure looks good to you!” It is Dean Martin up there! Junior is doing Dino. “I love it in Florida/ So carefree and gay / I’d even work here / Without any pay . . . / My clever agent / Worked out this deal . . . “ They know what’s next, but when he turns on dad with “Without A Song,” the distance between a Jr. and a Sr. collapses. Some fatness in the peaks, that is what’s added; that is what makes the son sound like the father. In purple light, the stage is dyed the color of a Roman emperor’s robe. Under it the harp looks like a wishbone. When the lights turn to gold, all the white and gray hair in the crowd becomes blond.

An hour into the show we get “Strangers in the Night.” I brighten. Dad must be loving this. I’m shaking with laughter, remembering him singing it two hours ago in the restaurant. “Wond’ring in the night! / What were the chances…” After the song, Junior relates a time in the ‘90s, when he was working at the end of his father’s career — at the end of father’s life — conducting the band. By this time, Senior could not always remember the lyrics, let alone the lineup. This one time, Junior was onstage “makin’ pizza” in front of the orchestra, and Sinatra leaned over: “What’s next?” So Junior told him. “Oh, that,” Sinatra sneered. Later that night in Senior’s hotel room, Junior had to get it right. Did his dad not like that song? “I hate that song,” sniffed Senior. Nine… million… records. Nine million! And he… hates this song? Well, that’s what Junior was thinking. “I’ll take a hand-me-down!” he told his audience now. “I’m not proud at all!” Junior’s reviews were in places like Guns & Ammo. He could never enthuse the way his father did. From the beginning, Junior was encouraged to chart different territory. In the ’60s, when country music was really happening, managers thought he should try that. But Junior wouldn’t have it. (In his opinion, if the music wasn’t in the Great American Songbook, it wasn’t worth anyone’s time of day.) There was one he damn-near recorded, because the title was so good. It was called “You’re the Reason Our Children Are So Ugly.”

For his second-to-last tune, Junior gets the house to sing “New York, New York” as if we’re not in Florida. The stage displays sunset-red. The crowd shimmies in their seats; they kick their legs side-to-side like showgirls. Then Junior tells us “Put Your Dreams Away.” He smiles. That’s a “family heirloom,” he says. “Thank you for remembering the music of Sinatra,” he says, and let’s fly a refrain I hear as a sad fact of Junior’s life: “YES . . . / It was mmmy wayyy…” “Goodnight, everybody.”

Soon after, powerless, I watch the harpist encase the wishbone and cart it offstage. It’s clear there will be no interview. There is no backstage access at this concert, though PR did not inform my editor it would be the case. I meet Dad on the shoulder of the casino floor fifteen minutes later. “Dad, there is no backstage.” The little girl in me steels. “—I tried.” (I better have, for my father is marked by an ability to finesse “NO” into “YES.” Getting backstage is a game, not of luck, but skill. “Guess what? We’re…,” my mother frequently reports. To which I can only respond: “How?” “You know your father,” says the mother.) But I’d spoken to Steve, a large man in charge. And Steve was adamant. Another reporter and photographer — incidentally, boyfriend-girlfriend — are disappointed too. My father had already doled out Heinekens. After the first song, when the photographers were required to disperse, he had prostrated himself at the woman’s feet, or something like that. She’d agreed to provide his daughter the necessary photos. Later, Dad would slip me a business card; I’d find out he’d convinced a second photographer to do the same — for back up. Now, do I want a beer? I don’t want one, no. I am auditing the bits and pieces, trying to figure if I can pull a minor (a very minor) Gay Talese… when the venue doors pop open. It is Junior and his entourage. They are coming out. I have enough time to think, They’re all wearing all black. Then I feel my father’s hand pressing on my back. He pushes me toward Junior — “Frank, this is my daughter Chantel.” Junior actually turns around. “Chantel. What a pretty French name.” His handshake is warm, significant. He moves to greet the coupled reporter and photographer; he bids — “Chantel, it was a pleasure” — and is gone. My father’s hand comes to rest on my shoulder.

People feed the slots. They crowd the green, felt stages of blackjack tables, and it’s not immediately clear who are the winners and who the losers — but there is congratulatory cigar smoke in the air. As we, father and daughter, make our way to the elevator, there again is the voice of Frank Sinatra. Softly over the speakers, Sr. sings. “Don’t you know little fool? / You never can win.”

Photo courtesy of Stephanie Shacter

Compare:
I want to run, I want to hide
I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside
I want to reach out and touch the flame
Where the streets have no name.
(U2, “Where the Streets Have No Name”)

Way down South they gave a jubilee
Them Georgia folks they had a jamboree
They’re drinking home brew from a wooden cup
The folks dancing there got all shook up.
(Chuck Berry, “Rock and Roll Music”)

Now, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, and because I’m one myself I know how devoted rock and roll fans are to their favorite bands, but it must be seen that compared to the Chuck Berry lyric, the U2 lyric is, well, shit. I say this as a fervent admirer of U2 and one who was lucky enough to witness the band perform “Where the Streets Have No Name” in 1987 or so, when to hear it for the first time was to be swept up in a tide of communal idealism. Who could argue with such lofty sentiments, especially when accompanied by the surge of the Edge’s ringing guitar and the most propulsive rhythm section in all of rock? Alas, there isn’t a word, phrase, or image in the whole song not utterly staled by cliché. As in much of the best rock and roll, the majesty of the music disguises the triteness of the lyrics.

There’s no triteness to be disguised in “Rock and Roll Music.” It is what “Where the Streets Have No Name” manifestly is not: poetry, or at least a variety of folk poetry that delights in language and its own expressiveness. Not that “Rock and Roll Music” will ever be mistaken for “Sailing to Byzantium” or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In the first place, it’s a song, with lyrics not intended to be experienced apart from the music. Secondly, it derives from and relates to pop culture, not high art; as he cheerfully admits in his Autobiography, Chuck Berry has read a total of six books in his life. Yet who would disdain the wit and ingenuity of a typical Chuck Berry lyric merely because it lacks the density of Yeats’s Byzantium poems? Good and great poetry lies all around us. Whether it comes to us over a car radio or in a heavily annotated textbook, it’s still poetry.

In a long-ago television interview I half remember, Berry described his songwriting method as entirely commercial. He studied the market and hit upon three common denominators for the mass (mostly white) teenage audience he aspired to reach: school, because school was the locus of teenage social life; cars, because teenagers in the car-crazy fifties and early sixties couldn’t wait to get the keys to the ignition in their hands; and love, because “everybody falls in love, or wants to fall in love.” Two things struck me about that interview – that Berry conceived of songwriting in terms more collective than subjective (the opposite tendency – I hurt! I suffer! I’m famous! – tends to be the norm in rock and roll); and that he had the delicacy to understand that while everybody wants to fall in love, some people never will. So in addition to his acuity and catholicity, I’d add another attribute to the list of Chuck Berry’s compositional distinctions: his humanity. That he himself, according to Keith Richards and others who have worked with him, has all the charm of a rattlesnake only adds to the poignancy of his lyrics. When I consider what Chuck Berry the man might have wanted to do with a sweet little sixteen-year-old girl (he says almost as much in his Autobiography, a book that does nothing to allay his reputation for sleaziness), the tender solicitude of that song seems even more remarkable:

Sweet Little Sixteen
She’s got the grownup blues
Tight dresses and lipstick
She’s sportin’ high-heeled shoes
Oh but tomorrow morning
She’ll have to change her trend
And be sweet sixteen
And back in class again.

Exactly: a sixteen-year-old girl is at once an innocent child and a sexual agent. This doubleness so disturbs us that we (meaning middle-aged men like me) tend to conceive of such a creature as childlike or provocative but not both. Well, sorry – this sixteen-year-old girl is hot as a volcano but still elicits all the paternal protectiveness the song bestows on her.

Note also that Sweet Little Sixteen isn’t “wearing” high-heeled shoes; she’s “sportin’” them. You could say that “sportin” is to “wearing” what poetry is to prose. Or you could say that it’s the right verb for the right line, providing the necessary linkage, as it were, between vehicle and tenor. Or you could say nothing at all and just dig it. I could no more define poetry than I could play guitar like Chuck Berry (I’ve tried – it’s harder than it looks), but I do know that the one thing all poetry must have is a love for language that ultimately transcends instrumentality. Words mean things, and the better the poem, the more meanings attach to the words, but in the way that painters fall in love with paint itself – pushing it, pulling it, scumbling it, scraping it – poets fall in love with words. Like any true poet, Berry has what James Schuyler, in “The Morning of the Poem,” called the “innate love of words,” the “sense of / How the thing said / Is in the words, how / The words are themselves / The thing said.” Given the poverty of the standard rock and roll lexicon, where words like “baby,” “love,” “run,” “hide,” “want,” “need,” “live,” “die,” and “bodacious” circulate with depressing regularity, the key words in Berry’s songs stand out as poems in themselves: “calaboose” for car in “No Particular Place To Go” or “hound” for Greyhound bus in “The Promised Land” or “motivatin’” for what might be described as “motoring joyfully but with determined purpose” in “Maybellene.” Those six books he read more than sufficed. Berry’s idiomatic exuberance derives not from the written word but from oral traditions in African American and even Southern white culture. No surprise that a black musician would draw on the structural template of the blues, but that the same musician would see the compatibility of blues structures with the narrative sense of country music – that sounds a bit like the birth of rock and roll, actually. (Elvis Presley made a similar discovery coming from the opposite direction.) The catalog of place names in the first verse of “Sweet Little Sixteen,” for instance, is echt-country, yet the song itself is as stolid a twelve-bar blues as any composition by, say, Willie Dixon, who, as a matter of fact, played bass on it. So where are they rockin’?

They’re really rockin’ in Boston
In Pittsburgh, PA
Deep in the heart of Texas
And round the ‘Frisco Bay
All over St. Louis
And down in New Orleans
All the cats want to dance with
Sweet Little Sixteen.

You could draw a pretty comprehensive map of America from the poetry of place names in Chuck Berry’s songs. Norfolk Virginia, downtown Birmingham, Houston town, Albuquerque, Los Angeles: they’re all there in “The Promised Land,” inventoried with great good humor even when the traveler encounters, as we all do from time to time, “motor trouble that turned into a struggle.” Wouldn’t “The Promised Land” make a better national anthem than that unsingable and bellicose dirge we’re stuck with?

I left my home in Norfolk Virginia
California on my mind
I straddled that Greyhound and rode him into Raleigh
And on across Caroline . . .

Workin’ on a T-bone steak a la carte
Flying’ over to the Golden State
When the pilot told us in thirteen minutes
He would set us at the terminal gate.

Swing low chariot, come down easy
Taxi to the terminal zone
Cut your engines and cool your wings
And let me make it to the telephone.

Los Angeles give me Norfolk Virginia
Tidewater 4-10-0-9
Tell the folks back home this is the promised land callin’
And the poor boy’s on the line.

Now, some people might suspect the motive of a songwriter who could write such a paean to place when the place in question subjected him to constant racial harassment. But Berry never concealed his motive – to make as much money as possible. How American is that? That a man who had every reason to begrudge his country could write “The Promised Land” or the even more besotted “Living in the USA” (“Looking hard for a drive-in, searching for a corner café . . . / Yeah, and the juke box jumping with records like in the USA”) is, for me, cause for the profoundest patriotism. Furthermore, unlike “This Land Is Your Land,” Woody Guthrie’s national anthem of Depression-era populism, “The Promised Land” doesn’t ask that you hate the rich or share the singer’s sectarian politics. (Listen to the rarely sung verses four and five if you don’t believe me.) I do hate the rich, but that’s because I’m not as generous of spirit as Chuck Berry is. All that “The Promised Land” and “Living in the USA” ask of you is that you love American place names, not be a complete stiff, and maybe appreciate a “rare hamburger sizzling on an open grill night and day.”

Although the right word is ideally a poem in itself, you still have to put one next to another. This too Berry does with masterly efficiency. The way his words roll off the tongue in “Tulane” and “Downbound Train” and so many others turns language into music – a useful quality for a body of songs not known for their melodic invention. (Let’s face it, Chuck’s thing is rhythm, not melody.) Most pop song lyrics don’t scan on the page and don’t need to, but sometimes Berry’s compositional regularity requires the assistance of some classical versification, as in the giddy triple meters of “School Days”:

Up in the  /morning and / out to school
The teacher / is teaching / the golden / rule
Ameri/can his’try / and practi/cal math
You study / ‘em hard and / hopin’ to / pass
Workin’ your / fingers right / down to the / bone
The guy / behind you / won’t leave you / alone

Ring ring / goes the bell
The cook in / the lunch room’s / ready to / sell
You’re lucky / if you / can find / a seat
You’re for/tunate if / you have time / to eat
Back in the / classroom op/en your books
Gee but the / teacher don’t / know
How mean / she looks.

No, Berry probably didn’t know he was using anapestic, dactylic, and amphibrachic feet, but neither, I suspect, did the anonymous author of “There Once Was a Man from Nantucket,” and he (or she) was a genius too.

Chuck Berry has had a hard life: reform school, two prison terms, financial exploitation, bankruptcy, racial discrimination, and much else. It is not his manner to rehearse his private grief in public, though the sly braggadocio of “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” and the crypto-autobiography of “Johnny B. Goode” trade playfully on his public image. Whether the pathos of “Memphis, Tennessee” derives from his own domestic sorrows is, strictly speaking, beside the point, though in a song this tender and touching, no supposition seems entirely extraneous. At any rate, “Memphis, Tennessee” is one of the greatest story songs in American music, all the more affecting for being so offhand and bouncy. (Berry himself, so he says in his Autobiography, played the swooping bass and “the ticky-tack drums that trot along in the background.”) What appears on first listening to be just another comic ditty about frustrated pedophilia (or so I used to interpret the top-forty version by Johnny Rivers that I knew as a child) turns out to be the desperate plea of a divorced father barred from any contact with his six-year-old daughter. The narrative builds to its final revelation piece by piece, with incidental details carrying an emotional load too freighted to be acknowledged outright: that the girl is furtively trying to reach her father; that the father has taken refuge with relatives; that although he now lives in the sort of place where messages are written on the wall, he once lived in a house high on a ridge overlooking the river; that the girl’s mother, not he, has broken up the family. And all of this – the heartbreak, the loss, the wit – by way of a conversation with a telephone operator:

Long distance information, give me Memphis Tennessee
Help me find the party trying to get in touch with me
She could not leave her number but I know who placed the call
‘Cause my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall . . .

Last time I saw Marie she’s waving me goodbye
With hurry home drops on her cheeks that trickled from her eye
Marie is only six years old, information please
Try to put me through to her in Memphis Tennessee.

Berry’s take on the song in his Autobiography may seem naïve, but to me it sounds like the very definition of classicism: “The situation in the story was intended to have a wide scope of interest to the general public rather than a rare or particular incidental occurrence that would entreat the memory of only a few. Such a portrayal of popular or general situations and conditions in lyrics has always been my greatest objective in writing.” Add a “sir” and complicate the syntax a bit, and this could be Dr. Johnson speaking to Boswell or Sir Joshua Reynolds. Although “Memphis, Tennessee” addresses a more adult audience than Berry’s more typical ballads of teenage life, even the ballads of teenage life are classicist: we were all teenagers once and we have all fallen, or (to observe Berry’s astute qualification) want to fall, in love.

Blues, country and western, Johnsonian neoclassicism: these are the traditions that nurture Chuck Berry’s lyrical art. But really, who gives a damn about the categories when you’re listening to something as smoking as “Brown Eyed Handsome Man”? Many critics have taken this song to be a pointed avowal of black pride (not exactly a safe career move in 1956), and since the songwriter himself is unquestionably a brown eyed handsome man, blackness (or brownness) is very much to the point. In fact, the opening lines – “Arrested on charges of unemployment / He was sitting in the witness stand” – call to mind all too clearly the sort of harassment that black Americans have had to endure. But there’s that classicism again – all women, everywhere, have been falling for a certain kind of handsomeness “Way back in history three thousand years / In fact ever since the world began.” This would include the Venus de Milo (here reimagined as a modern girl named Milo Venus) who, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is “No more, but e’en a woman.” Why should it be any different for her than for the judge’s wife in the first verse who “called up the district attorney / She said you free that brown eyed man / If you want your job you better free that brown eyed man”? Never, it seems to me, has the universalizing tendency of classicism been more cogently expressed:

Milo Venus was a beautiful lass
She had the world in the palm of her hand
She lost both her arms in a wrasslin’ match
To get a brown eyed handsome man
She fought and won herself a brown eyed handsome man.

Robert Christgau, in Grown Up All Wrong, wrote that Chuck Berry “was one of the ones to make us understand that the greatest thing about art is the way it happens among people.” Berry himself makes no such claims. He really seems to believe that compared to a transcendent “artist” like Joan Crawford, who “will go down in the history books of even Russia, China, and Arabia,” he is a mere satellite, “circl[ing] a few years in the foreign magazines and then fad[ing] away in the next conventional war.” Far from being a “star,” he merely has a job to do and a check to pick up. Although Berry’s underestimation of his own talent seems incomprehensible, it did save him (and us) from the windy grandiloquence of songs like “Where the Streets Have No Name.” Anyway, it’s a refreshing twist – the rock auteur who, for once, doesn’t think he’s a genius.

For people of my parents’ generation, rock songwriting seemed a paltry thing, and they certainly would have believed that Chuck Berry lacked anything like the sophistication of Ira Gershwin or Cole Porter. That may be. But I didn’t grow up with Broadway musicals, I grew up with rock and roll, and it is to that happily debased art form that I owe my first exposure to poetry. Before rock and pop lyrics in the late sixties and early seventies turned to the outer reaches of narcissism (gloriously exemplified by Joni Mitchell and John Lennon, among others), they tended to follow in the more impersonal and commercial lines laid down by Berry and that he too was following from lines laid down by Nat King Cole, Louis Jordan, and others. I will concede that, lyrically, Brian Wilson was no match for Lorenz Hart, but the Beach Boys got to me first, and when I was ten years old the perfect couplets of “I Get Around” conjured up a world as glamorously ritualized and unreal as the Arthurian romances, which I read avidly in those days but found a tad pale by comparison:
I’m getting’ bugged driving up and down this same old strip
I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip
My buddies and me are getting real well known
Yeah the bad guys know us and they leave us alone.

It was like first looking into Chapman’s Homer. Language (and not just Wilson’s superb compositions and the band’s gorgeous harmonies) had revealed to me a world more beautiful and desirable than the one I lived in, even if I dimly perceived that no such world could possibly exist. (It sure didn’t exist for Brian Wilson and his brothers, whose hellish upbringing in what looked like a picture perfect California household went unmentioned in their songs.) Not every song, not even every Beach Boy song, held such wonders. Even then a catchy chorus and flashy guitar break served to deflect attention from the nullity of the lyrics. Anyway, if the song was as great as “Be My Baby” or “Louie Louie,” who could complain? Yet as an unprecocious child I had heard enough real poetry in the songs of the Beach Boys and Smokey Robinson and Chuck Berry (usually in cover versions by later bands) to know that words could be more than functional. When, a few years later, pop musicians were suddenly writing lines like “Half of what I say is meaningless / But I say it just to reach you, Julia,” I was ready. If this more inward approach sacrificed some of the charm and playfulness of the Chuck Berry/Beach Boys/Smokey Robinson manner, it offered instead audacious explorations of the self and the permutations of consciousness. I’d call that a pretty fair trade-off.

So I owe a lot to rock and roll lyricists. I wouldn’t necessarily say no John Milton without Chuck Berry, but in my case the great songwriters like Berry helped me do some of the necessary prep work. They helped me to love language. And if there were more sophisticated lyricists before Berry, there have been more sophisticated lyricists since Berry. By now the proposition that certain rock and pop songwriters have achieved depths of feeling comparable to the best poetry isn’t even controversial. Ray Davies, Shane MacGowan, Randy Newman, Lucinda Williams, Tom Waits, Warren Zevon, Morrissey, and many others – some working in a more confessional, others in a more impersonal tradition, and others making any such distinction ultimately meaningless – have all written songs that do what all good poetry does: moves, enlightens, disturbs, delights. Yet it all had to start somewhere, and in rock and roll, much of the greatest lyric writing started with Chuck Berry. (As for the basic musical D.N.A. of rock and roll, Berry pretty much created that too.) He could have said, as many rockers would have, knowing that the music would do most of the work, “Let’s go for a ride in my car, baby.” He didn’t. He said, “Climb into my machine so we can cruise on out.”

1.
RJ Smith doesn’t draw an exact line marking when James Brown, the 5’6” son of a South Carolina turpentine maker, became James Brown, Sex Machine/Black Elvis/Mr. Please, Please, Please/etc. But I will.

It happens about a third of the way through Smith’s remarkable new book, The One: The Life and Music of James Brown. Brown’s smash album, Live at the Apollo, has just spent 66 weeks on the pop charts, vaulting the performer from the sweaty dives of the chitlin’ circuit into a higher, neon-lit level of exposure. Money is pouring in fast enough for Brown to buy a mansion in Queens with a moat, and, after $65,000 in renovations, an interior lined with faux leather and pictures of himself. The singer has renovated his body, too. He pays a California dentist to fix the gap between his teeth and hires a traveling hairstylist to whirl his hair into shining bouffant praised, in the slang of the time, as “expoobident.”

Meanwhile, Brown’s tour is becoming more militaristic. He hires goons to clear the way to and from shows. Onstage, he fines his musicians for missed notes or wrinkled uniforms. Offstage, he is armed and ready. “You notice how many pictures of James Brown, he’s got a coat over his arm?” the Rev. Al Sharpton asks, in the book. “That’s because he had his gun under it.”

Most importantly, Brown is leaving behind blues, rock, doo-wop, and gospel in favor of a raw sound filled with screams, popping bass, and furious counter-rhythms. He is inventing the genre we currently refer to as “funk.” Smith describes the singer’s February 1965 stop in at a converted barn in Charlotte, N.C., where a control booth sits in the old hayloft. “It was time to record a tricky piece of rhythm Brown had been thinking about for a while,” he writes:

The musicians set up, playing this and that while waiting for the boss to arrive. Finally, Brown’s customized white Cadillac with the tinted windows appeared, and the singer swaggered in. “He stopped the place. You just knew that somebody of significance was present,” said Clay Smith, Arthur’s [the owner of the studio] boy. Constantly in motion and talking so fast he could have used a translator, Brown was not one of the guys. “James was in charge,” Arthur Smith remembered later. “I knew I owned the studio, but I knew he was going to do what he wanted to there.”

What Brown wanted to do was lay down a strutting, macho anthem marked by explosions of brass and a guitar that sounds like chrome wheels spinning. He hums a melody to the sax player and a bass line to the bassist. He thumps out a beat for the drummer. He watches a trumpet player struggle, fires him, then re-hires him moments later. And when the singer is ready, he screams out a set of lyrics scratched on a sheet of paper. The song is called “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”

“Keep on Fighting” is the title of the chapter in which all of this takes place. And no matter how many superhero movies you have seen, the transformation it describes is exhilarating. Like Bruce Wayne becoming Batman or Clark Kent becoming Superman, we have just watched James Brown become Soul Brother Number One.

2.
A former Los Angeles magazine editor and contributor to Blender, Spin, and The Village Voice, Smith is not the flashiest, most purely talented writer to take on the Godfather of Soul. That title, I believe, goes to Jonathan Lethem for his dazzling 2006 Rolling Stone profile, “Being James Brown.” (More on that in a minute.) In the beginning of The One, Smith struggles slightly to find the tone to tell this story. Some of his images fall flat, like when he writes that the chord structure of “Cold Sweat” was “as visionary and protean as Frida Kahlo’s one eyebrow.” At other times, his voice cracks when he reaches beyond his natural range. His description of the “lachrymose mood” of Brown’s early ballad “Try Me” feels over-academic for a performer as lusty and physical as Brown. Elsewhere, Smith sounds uncomfortably un-academic. After a street fight with estranged band members early in his career, Smith ventures inside Brown’s head. “At least them motherfuckers weren’t gonna be calling him Monk Brown to his face anymore,” he writes, in an ill-advised estimation of J.B.’s inner monologue.

As a funk nerd (an oxymoron, but still true), I have other quibbles with the book. I would have liked to learn more about the nine children Brown fathered with nearly as many mothers. We see them playing Monopoly with real money during one scene, then suing for royalties later on, and that’s about it. I would have also relished a glimpse or two more inside the marathon, early-’70s recording sessions that produced “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing,” “Mind Power,” and other predecessors of modern hip-hop.

But, it would be unfair to judge Smith’s book on a few slip-ups, especially when the majority of the book feels so good. Like his subject, Smith is man of stamina and drive. The fruits of his prodigious reporting are evident on every page: a secret tape of Richard Nixon whining “I don’t want any more blacks, and I don’t want any more Jews, between now and the election,” before a visit from Brown at the White House; a heartwrenching moment when Brown’s guitarist, Jimmy Nolen, asks his wife to pass on a message to Brown after Nolen’s death. “’The next person you get to work for you,’ the wife dutifully reports to The Godfather, ‘I hope you treat them better than you did us.’”

These facts and details provide a driving, powerful rhythm for the book, and, over time, the story seeps into your bones. In a scene that is jarringly reminiscent of the first chapter of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, we learn that, as a young man in Augusta, Ga., Brown was blindfolded and thrust into a boxing ring for a “battle royal,” while wealthy white men smoked cigars and looked on. Later in Brown’s career, we learn that country musicians in Nashville recorded a white-response to “Say it Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” with the lyrics, “I’m proud and I’m white with a song to sing…” We are also there inside Brown’s Learjet when the engine stalls and the plane begins to drop precipitously. After the engines kick back in, Brown calmly turned to an acquaintance and asks if he was scared. When the man says, “Yes,” Brown responds, “It’s not your time. You with me.”

Smith’s reporting is never better than his account of the singer’s 1967 trip to perform for troops in Vietnam. From the USO press release describing “primitive and somewhat savage” beat of  Brown’s music to a walkie-talkie squawking, “Get ‘em out of there, there’s a mortar attack coming in” as the band traveled between shows, we are not simply reading, anymore. We are being hauled across time and space to an amphitheatre carved out of a hillside east of Saigon:

At the end of a song, from behind the stage, the musicians suddenly heard the unmistakable ack-ack-ack of American guns firing on VC to the rear. Everybody was watching the band, and now they were really watching, as confusion and then anxiety played across the musicians’ faces. Finally, one of the guys sitting cross-legged at the front of the stage spoke to the band: “Aw, don’t worry. We won’t let Charlie get ya!” And then Brown took the microphone and continued the show: “Hit me!”

Indeed, it Smith’s dogged research that leads to the book’s greatest achievement. James Brown was a man who went to extreme lengths to conceal any signs of weakness. The author includes plenty of examples of this — going back on tour the day after his son Teddy’s funeral, for example — but he also provides access to the man during rare moments of distress. We watch Brown nearly knock out his teeth as he learns the tip-the-mic-drop-to-a-split-then-bounce-back-catch-the-mic trick that would later appear effortless. As his grip on the singles charts weakens in the late 1970s, we see him tell his trombonist, Fred Wesley, to write knockoffs of other artists’ hits, like David Bowie’s “Fame.” (This was “a head-scratcher,” Smith writes, “because ‘Fame’ itself is a pale version of Brown’s 1970s sound.”) And when the IRS comes searching for millions in unpaid taxes we watch the collision of Brown’s colossal ego with one of the few forces strong enough to tame it. With the government threatening to throw a padlock on his mansion, Brown summons his accountant, Fred Daviss, to downtown Augusta one night, where they sit quietly in the singer’s van. His hair was tousled. He was sweating. “Finally, he reached under the seat and pulled out a sack of money, like he was extracting a molar,” Smith writes. “’Hold on to it as long as you can,’ he told Daviss, ‘But then pay ‘em.’”

3.
“Someday, someone will write a great biography of James Brown,” Lethem wrote in Rolling Stone in 2006. “It will by necessity, though, be more than a biography. It will be the history of a half-century of the contradictions and tragedies embodied in the fate of African Americans in the New World; it will be a parable, even of the contradictions of the individual in the capitalist society, portentous as that may sound.”

Smith has written such a book: a clear, linear, trustworthy account of one of the most complex and influential musicians in American history. His biography upholds the mystique of a man whom characters in the book call “black messiah,” “the personification of Blackness,” “the ultimate god of funk,” a man with “more musical genius than Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart put together,” and, in the case of a disgruntled former drummer, “a black Hitler.” At the same time, it gamely steers through the cloud of myth and misinformation that Lethem identified as “The James Brown Zone of Confusion,” and returns the singer back to earth.

Toward the end of Brown’s life, the author ushers readers into a new James Brown Zone of Confusion — one based entirely in reality. The elderly Brown’s life was marked, on one hand, by laurels from the Kennedy Center and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and, on the other, ever-stranger behavior due to drug abuse. The collision of these two worlds, as Smith reports, was often surreal. At one point Brown gets a young Wall Street investment banker to secure a $30 million loan against his future music royalties. When they meet each other to finalize the deal, Brown asks the startled banker, “You ever smoke gorilla [PCP]?”

All of this is not to say that The One is the “definitive biography of James Brown,” as the book’s promotional copy reads. Such a book will never exist. Smith’s book is not a substitute for Fred Wesley’s indispensable, Hit Me, Fred: Recollections of a Sideman or many of the pieces (including Lethem’s) in 2008’s The James Brown Reader: 50 Years of Writing About the Godfather of Soul. “Entire forests have been decimated to build the newsprint mountain that recounts his exploits, declarations, and influence,” wrote Nelson George in the introduction to that anthology. The term “definitive” attempts to seal off a man whose music, if not his heart, still thumps on.

On vinyl, on YouTube, and in the musical DNA of countless current performers, James Brown lives for a new generation of writers like me, who want to drop to the floor in splits; to dance, scream, and sweat, in his honor. RJ Smith has perhaps gone further than any writer before in telling this man’s story, but his book is not definitive. It is merely expoobident.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Nostalgia is a funny thing. The idea of sentimentality attaching meaning to objects, places, and people is as natural as anything human can be, but ultimately the form it takes depends largely on context. Michael Chabon once poignantly suggested that, for teenagers, imagination is about all you have to work with, and that during his own adolescence “my imagination, the kingdom inside my skull, was my sole source of refuge, my fortress of solitude, at times my prison.” True indeed. After all the lunch table ressentiment, the zits, the homework, harried teachers, haranguing parents, and the general gauntlet of puberty as it is and was and always shall be, one can usually find escape and release in the secret world of your bedroom. The limits to this world are physically confined to the walls, bed, and window but, as Emily Dickinson insisted, the brain is wider than the sky.

When I was too young to take refuge anywhere else, my room was indeed my castle, which consisted of what alt-rock albums I knew best and could get my hands on — Smashing Pumpkins, R.E.M., and Nirvana were definitely in the retinue. I wore R.E.M shirts and parted my hair like Billy Corgan. One of the really unfortunate facts of adolescence is that at the precise time when one’s passion and cultural curiosity are at their highest, when everything is so new and fascinating, the range of available options are limited to the reach of allowance money, the radio, and word of mouth. Don’t get me wrong — those were, and are, great records. It just took me some time to appreciate that there was a world apart from alternative radio programming and to discover the work of people like Lou Reed, Son House, and Thelonious Monk. I didn’t look back for years. I still don’t. But when grunge and alt-rock were what I knew, oh how I listened! I remember sitting hunched over my black Sony boom box, listening to Alice In Chains, staring out the window at a bright spring day, and feeling like the birds in the trees just didn‘t get it. I wrote my favorite lyrics in notebooks, across the white borders of my walls, and in the snow on the backs of cars on my way home from school. Hearing that Nirvana’s Nevermind was 20 years old was kind of like seeing an old drinking buddy turn to Jesus in his autumn years. I was happy for him and everything, but I missed the old days when we shared the fortress of solitude.

It’s past the point of cliché now to call Nirvana’s Nevermind a Watershed Moment In Rock History, the Voice of the Disaffected Youth, A Generational Moment, ad nauseam, oh well, whatever, nevermind. Whoever initially decided that Kurt Cobain was the voice of a generation has probably disappeared by now into tastemaker obscurity, paying the bills with commentary on a VH1 special or in the arts section at Newsweek.  Nevermind, as a cultural artifact, enjoys the same status that, say, Bringing It All Back Home, Kind Of Blue, and Sgt. Pepper’s have maintained for years. You might not ever listen to it, but you probably worshipped it at some point, and now you pretty much have to have a copy hanging around somewhere if you want to call yourself a respectable human being. The baby on the cover, a lad by the name of Spencer Elden, was quoted a propos the anniversary that “Quite a few people in the world have seen my penis, so that’s kinda cool. I‘m just a normal kid living it up and doing the best I can while I‘m here.” Somewhere, the afro’d tyke on the cover of Ready To Die is laughing.

What’s strange, for me, is that I’m not entirely convinced that Nevermind wasn’t the voice of my generation, and yet when it was released in autumn of 1991 I was all of 10 years old. This makes my personal attachment to Generation X pretty tenuous, and I’m decidedly too old to be a millennial. I’m a member of what Doree Shafrir, writing in Slate, half-jokingly named “Generation Catalano.” I never watched My So-Called Life in its one-season heyday, but pretty much everyone else around me did. (I take umbrage at the name, too — I still get compared to Brian Krakow, but that’s neither here nor there). Nevertheless, I knew exactly what she meant when she referred to being “too young to claim Singles and Reality Bites and Slacker as our own (though that didn’t stop me from buying the soundtracks).” I also remember life without the Internet, as much as I remember innocently downloading songs from Napster, harvesting a handful of Nick Drake songs by the time the sun came up. My youngest sibling, 10 years my junior, says he remembers a time before the Internet but I still think he’s referring to dial-up.

Being a sentimentalist at heart, I decided to investigate the contours of my Nirvana nostalgia. Where was that teen spirit, which once seemed to signify so much? Was it still around? Where did it go? Did it even matter? It became clear that the only proper way to do this was to go old school and resist the temptation to sit and download away and let my computer do all the work. I’m more sedentary now than I was back in the day, anyway, and after all I’ve always believed a good test of any music is whether or not you can take a walk with it. I went down to my local alternative record store (it’s still open, somehow) and picked up the newly released 20th Anniversary Edition, two discs packed with demos, live cuts, and rare tracks. I went next door for a shiny, metallic gray Discman — $30 at a CVS, the only one on the shelf — and some batteries. I clicked the lid shut, fired it up, adjusted the headphones, felt again the old excitement of the disc whirring to life in the palm of my hand, and began to cut a swath through my major urban metropolis.

Come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be … About two-thirds of the way through the first disc I was wobbly, electric, ecstatic. I’d forgotten the sheer monolithic power that Nirvana’s verse-chorus-verse, loud-quiet-loud format really had. There’s fire, propulsion, and enough atavistic punk under the clarity of the mix (which Cobain always hated) to keep the nervous energy bubbling without drowning the hooks, the solos, and the unbearably tight rhythm section. Dave Grohl really was Nirvana’s secret weapon, and his drumming is Bonhamesque in its power and dexterity. I was churning, head down, at a steady clip, turning corners, on a plain, feeling stupid and contagious. I dodged a telephone pole or two. One lady I passed suddenly looked at me and began gesturing angrily at her coffee. I looked back at her, genuinely puzzled, shrugged it off, and turned around. I don’t wanna destroy passersby, but no one ever said rock was about sidewalk etiquette.

The opening chords of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” still buttonhole you, look wildly into your eyes, and burst into flames. The song is equal parts indignation and charisma (“It’s fun to lose/And to pretend … Here we are now/ENTERTAIN US!”), and yet melodically elegant, as more than one cover version has demonstrated. It’s just as immediate, anthemic, and vibrant as it ever was. The burbling, aquatic “Come As You Are” still mesmerizes. Cobain’s raggedly perfect pitch beckons the listener in, even as the chorus’ emphatic “When I swear that/I don’t have a gun” seems eerily less random in hindsight. The white noise of “Territorial Pissings” still pummels and wails Krist Novoselic’s sarcastic quotation of The Youngbloods’ “Get Together” is as funny as it was the first time. As for outtakes, both early demos and boom box rehearsal recordings are included, which give the set a multifaceted, complex, remix-friendly feel. You can enjoy their nifty cover of The Velvet Underground’s “Here She Comes Now,” as well as the harrowing “D-7” from a pre-Nevermind John Peel session.

“In Bloom” is, lyrically, one of Cobain’s finest efforts. The near-haiku of “Bruises on the fruit/tender age in bloom” registers even more compellingly when intoned between the rolling, raucous choruses. Assuming pop lyrics have an intuitive logic can be a path to madness, but there’s a sarcastic familiarity with which Cobain sings “he’s the one/who likes/all our pretty songs” that always made me wonder if he might be sizing up a certain kind of face in the crowd, the bubba who’s just there to slug brew and get his rocks off, waiting to yell for “Free Bird” during intermission. Cobain did, after all, grow up as the artsy kid in a logging town, which might have contributed a bit to his well-known aversion to fame. It must have been frustrating, to say the least, to have to write in your own liner notes that if any of their fans were in any way racist, sexist, or homophobic “please…leave us the fuck alone! Don’t buy our records and don’t come to our shows!” The grimly sympathetic “Polly” — a first-person rendering of a brutal crime and a gutsy imaginative leap for an avowedly feminist and pacifistic songwriter — became a grotesque illustration of the authorial fallacy. This fact is mentioned at the outraged end of the very same liner notes, which makes it a bit easier to see why Cobain’s professed alienation from his audience was more than just a pose.

In many ways, this was a part of what the “grunge” or “alternative” culture was all about. Alternative culture rejected the celebrity industry and preferred keeping the personalities of popular musicians away from theatricality. The lyrics were predominantly personal, symbolic, and seemed to come from a private world of dreams, in-jokes, and memories. There was a politics, certainly, but not much in the way of overt social critique. Quadrophenia and The Wall offered sociology (“Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone!“) along with their angst. Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, not so much. Of course, there was that perennial adolescent theme of adenoidal meathead vs. sensitive bohemian going on at the same time. Mötley Crüe put out two volumes of Music To Crash Your Car To, while Soundgarden brooded about black hole suns and Chris Cornell implored the spoonman to save him.

I never quite bought into the ‘I-hate-being-famous’ credo, being far from the only music-addicted youngster to put on marathon air guitar concerts for the benefit of his wallpaper. It seemed too dour, too tragically hip, too affected when I heard it from people I would have given anything to see live and never did. When I eventually read Tennessee Williams’ essay “The Catastrophe of Success“ it began to make more sense. After the personal and professional triumph of The Glass Menagerie, Williams describes years of penury and creative frustration suddenly giving way to nightly room service, sycophantic fans, and alienated disaffection: “I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed. I was out on a level plateau with my arms still thrashing and my lungs still grabbing at air that no longer resisted. This was security at last … I found myself becoming indifferent to people. A well of cynicism rose in me … I got so sick of hearing people say, ‘I loved your play!’ that I could not say thank you any more.”

This is precisely what Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder and Billy Corgan had been saying, and fighting against, for a long time. It might be a reason why virtually every American performer who gets to the top either begins to lose their grip (Elvis, Marilyn) or become a monster (Michael Jackson, O.J.). The 1990’s media generation was always hyper-aware of the duplicity of pop stardom. One couldn’t open a magazine without seeing mannequin-blank anorexic models in pre-ripped jeans and vintage Clash shirts topped off with scarves that cost a month’s rent. The irony of commodification and the solipsistic pressures of mass consumption were enough to drive anyone to the brink. Don’t forget that “Fake Plastic Trees” came out in 1995. For Tennessee Williams, the means of survival lay in getting back to the art itself, cutting out from the glitz and glamour and finding a solitude in which to create: “It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial.” Using art as a survival technique is as old as the act of creation itself. It can inspire artists to transform themselves and make some of the greatest, most redemptive work of their professional lives. The downside is, of course, that some just don’t survive the transition.

For me, then as now, some of the most effective moments on Nevermind are the ones with few pyrotechnics; the songs that don’t kick and thrash around but instead slowly unfurl a spookily effective, surreal, totally unique sonic landscape. Apparently Kurt Cobain was a bit of an amateur installation artist. Friends of his would recall arriving at his apartment to find skeins of dark cloth, furniture akimbo, and various found objects (stuffed animals, plastic figurines, characters from a nativity scene) arranged like miniature sculpture. He‘d destroy them the next day. Some of his best work was like that. “Something in the Way,” recorded live in one studio take, with the phones unplugged and air conditioners silenced, was a devastating choice to close the record. It’s all in the vocal murmurs, the muddy acoustics, the narrator describing living beneath a dripping bridge, surviving on grass, and trapping animals for pets. The chorus has that devastatingly understated cello line, tolling like a church bell as the mournful backing vocals weave in and out of the melody like a winding sheet.

I think the mood Nirvana creates has to do with an almost Beckettian concern for the empty, the absurd, the gleaming light above a void, which still resonates many years later. For all the hand-wringing hullabaloo in the 90’s about negativity in popular music totally bumming out our youth, I think the issue is more that Nirvana’s music reflected something dire about the human condition which other music didn’t quite grasp.  I’ve never forgotten the glimmering unreality of the Unplugged concert, the stage set (at Cobain’s suggestion) with stargazer lilies and funereal chandeliers, the way the odd covers and band repertoire are in total synch, and the look in Cobain’s eyes as he sings the last line of Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” — he’s already gone. At that moment, whether he knew it or not, he had less than six months to live.

Recently, a beloved friend from my high school years and I got back in touch. One day, he called and suggested we go see The Smashing Pumpkins. I didn’t really listen to them any more, not since roughly 1999, when Billy Corgan shaved his head like Pink from The Wall and started looking and acting like an evil robot. I’d read little else of his poetry book but the title alone – Blinking With Fists — made me feel like responding in kind. I’d still never actually seen them live and it sounded like a fine idea. There I stood amid hundreds of bodies, stage lights flashing over us, a teenage dream fulfilled. There was that extra buzz of approval a crowd acquires when it likes what it’s hearing and wants more. Billy played everything electric that night, nothing acoustic, and I found myself doing something the teenage me would have never done. I sang along, word for word, to songs whose titles I hadn’t heard in years and couldn’t for the life of me remember.

It was in the middle of “Silverfuck” where the music stops, the bass throbs like a heartbeat, and Billy’s modulated voice sings “bang, bang you’re dead/hole in your head” repeatedly, with variations. At first the voice is quiet, tentative, then matter of fact, spelling out the syllables one by one and eventually rising on the third word to rest, at last, on the percussive thud of the last syllable. The entire audience (an older bunch, unsurprisingly) followed his melody to the letter, soaring and sinking along with him, until the bomb drop of the guitars came in and the whole crowd was on its feet, shouting and flailing along in unison with the frenzy of the coda and the thunderclap of each chord, up to and including Billy’s concluding upward swipe at the strings. As the sound faded I noticed the smirk on his face hadn’t left since the show began. Leaning back, he made guns with his hands and darted them back and forth. I wasn’t too keen on the gesture, but that was ok — I wasn’t thinking about the words by then, anyway.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Besides Allen Ginsberg, there was perhaps no bigger mover, shaker, or self-promoter in the mid-’60s East Village than Ed Sanders. Born in Kansas City in 1939, he founded The Fugs with the poet Tuli Kupferberg, immortalized in Howl!, who “jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley ways & firetrucks.” As a singer, bookstore owner, and poetry zine publisher Sanders found national notoriety, including a February 1967 cover of Life, and helped network the New York counterculture to a larger national platform. Like Neal Cassady in the west, Sanders provided a link, as well, between the Beats and the hippies, and — in Sanders’ case — soon the Yippies. “We’re on the EAST SIDE,” The Fugs sang proudly on “We’re The Fugs,” a sloppy and joyous theme song that came two years pre-Monkees, and giggled in the face of congenial West Village guitar strummers. “Dope, peace, magic Gods in the tree trunks, and GROUP GROPE,” Sanders declared on “Group Grope.” They never quite made it big — they didn’t quite crack the top 50 on the Cashbox chart — but it was enough.

There is glee in Sanders’ vivid telling, playing straight man to an absurd world, despite being the one making the pornographic avant-garde films and selling Allen Ginsberg’s pubic hair and “well-scooped cold cream jar” through a rare books catalog he operated from his bookstore, where he spat out publications on a mimeograph. He is fond of asides that call lightly on deeper traditions he locates himself in, often the Egyptian hieroglyphics he taught himself to read at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  “Allen and Peter Orlovsky located a three-room pad at 704 East Fifth Street, near Avenue C, on the sixth floor. It was just $35 a month — Hail to Thee, O Rent Control!” For Sanders, the glory of the City is as a staging ground for what he has called “the forces of peace,” a thread he traced in his nine-volume America: A History in Verse, published between 2000 and 2008, which reads like an upbeat Howard Zinn and (besides The Fugs’ first recordings) is arguably Sanders’ most essential work.

In Fug You, those Forces wander local bars and underground newspaper headquarters, weather obscenity busts and CIA tails, and engage in pornographic avant-garde cinema and the still-thriving poetry scene. Sanders spews a dense and heady stew of facts, dates, and addresses with a mostly compelling lightness, cutting it every now and again with some groovy beauty. Here he is on The Fugs’ entrance to a 1968 gig in Los Angeles:

The club had rented a searchlight the night of our rite, which beamed white tunnels of psychedelic allure up towards Aquarius. There was an anarcho-bacchic Goof Strut parade into the parking lot of the club behind a mint-condition ’38 Dodge (similar to a Kienholz work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

But Sanders’ details can grow mechanical (or, worse, self-aggrandizing) as they accumulate. He enthusiastically catalogs group gropes and the varieties of drug use, but rarely gives much of his own experiences. There is almost none of his midwestern upbringing, and precious little on the brilliant and vivacious Tuli Kupferberg. Sanders himself has been a slightly-too-enthusiastic ’60s memoirist since at least 1975, when he published the first volume of his Tales of Beatnik Glory novels, and it’s possible he’s just out-biographied himself, which might account for Fug You’s occasional cold formality, despite its title. Though there is an element of archetypal ’60s solipsism to Fug You, and much of Sanders work, Sanders was there and kept his bearings.

For all that, though, Will Hermes’ Love Goes To Buildings on Fire comes across as more personal than Fug You. A Queens teen in the mid-’70s, Hermes himself shows up throughout, offering surprisingly tender evocations of his music-loving youth. “I’d been mugged on trains a few times, twice at knifepoint, coming home from Manhattan shows alone at night,” he writes, segueing from a Village Voice cover story about the atrocious state of the subway.

But the worst was in May [1977], when I was stuck on a broken-down E train for an hour en route to the Port Authority Bus Terminal to meet a girl I was cross-eyed crushed-out on. She had tickets to see the Grateful Dead five hours north that night, at Cornell University’s Barton Hall. When I finally arrived, the girl and the bus — the last Ithaca run of the day — were gone. …Fucking subway.

Though drugs and the Dead turn up enough times to communicate that Hermes is writing from his continued position as a serious music head,  Love Goes To Buildings on Fire is hardly a memoir in a literal sense. Instead, he picks up not long after where Sanders left off, the East Side counterculture almost in ruins at the outset. Though plenty of books have covered similar subjects — notably Legs McNeil’s and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me, Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, and Tony Fletcher’s All Hopped Up and Ready to Go — Hermes finds fresh details everywhere, a dizzying succession that piles luminously atop another in a bright layering of punk, hip-hop, disco, Latin, avant-garde, and jazz history.

In a typical passage, he writes, “As it turned out, Einstein [on the Beach]‘s most indelible music involved the incantations of ‘One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight,’ which were being rehearsed on Spring Street just as the Ramones, down at CBGB, counted off every song “One-two-three-four!” He specializes in sudden juxtapositions, jumping from Robert DeNiro and Martin Scorcese’s favorite post-work Chinese-run Latin joint (La Tacita de Oro on 99th and Broadway) while shooting Taxi Driver, to Rubèn Blades’ favorite post-work Chinese-Cuban place (La Caridad on 78th and Broadway) not far away, near the Beacon Theater.

Two of the genres whose births Hermes recounts — hip-hop and disco — arguably evolved into the two most global pop genres of the 21st century, both in forms directly traceable to New York in the mid-’70s. Other developments in punk and minimalism forever changed the conversation, sound, and infrastructures of rock and roll and classical music. Though the ceaseless crashing of names might prove overwhelming to non-music obsessives, quick trips to YouTube are an easy fix. At its most basic, the book is a rich and invaluable crash course in the roots of contemporary music.

As much as it belongs on that of any serious music fan, Love Goes To Buildings on Fire especially, belongs on a long NYC-centric bookshelf that begins with Russell Shorto’s Island at the Center of the World. Read as an oddly upbeat and unintentional sequel to Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, the heroes of Love Goes To Buildings on Fire are themselves pivot points in New York’s history between “Ford To City: Drop Dead” and the MARCH squads dispatched by the Rudolph Giuliani/Michael Bloomberg-era NYPD to crack down on illegal artist lofts. Mark Alan Stamaty’s Buildings on Fire cover illustration depicts the teeming City perfectly, musicians’ caricatures sprouting like towering fauna from the cement. It was a City growing denser. In 1960, just before Ed Sanders arrived in New York, there were roughly 336 artists, writers, and musicians per 100,000 American citizens, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census. By 1980, just after the end of Hermes’s period, that number was up to around 565 per 100,000, and likely even greater in Manhattan, where the general population had shrunk to its lowest level in a half-century, a City about to transform into something beyond its own oddest dreams.

The sounds and ideas of disco and hip-hop and punk and salsa and minimalism and free jazz made their way across rivers and around the world on the backs of ever-cheaper technologies. Everywhere, they mushed into advertising and bland pop mutations, but also freethinking new turns, where the blueprints for counterculture remain deep inside the music, ready for deployment against lame government, bureaucracy, or blandness. And though those people making wondrous new things in their bedrooms or garages might not identify themselves as the Forces of Peace as much as Sanders and his Pentagon-levitating brethren may like, there is little else they could possibly be.

The author and musician Alina Simone published her first collection of essays, You Must Go And Win, this past June. Unlike most writers who toil in obscurity before landing an agent, Simone’s editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Eric Chinski, found Simone on Pandora.com, a free, personalized Internet radio service. After Chinski listened to Simone’s songs, he contacted her to propose that she write a book. “It seemed like he already viewed music and literature as part of one continuum,” Simone says. “Certainly, the best songs out there read like the best poems or short stories.”

Of late, publishers and authors have begun to experiment more with audio as a natural step in the promotion of their books. Listening to music has always been an organic piece of literary consumption — anyone who has queued up a favorite record of sad ballads while reading a heartbreaking novel, in order to up the emotional catharsis can attest to that. But recent trends suggest that readers are looking for even more direct ways to incorporate music into the reading experience.

At readings for You Must Go And Win, Simone also performed her songs live, and since then, all of her appearances have morphed into music and literary mash-ups: She played live at benefits for the literary mentoring organization Girls Write Now, for Guernica Magazine, and at other writers’ book release parties, including Evan Hughes’ Literary Brooklyn, as well as the Brooklyn Book Festival this fall.

When her book came out, Simone also contributed an author playlist to Largehearted Boy, a books and music blog run by David Gutowski. Since 2005, Largehearted Boy has run a beloved feature called Book Notes, for which recently published writers are asked to create a playlist for their novels; their song selections are explained in the context of both the writing experience as well as the characters in the story. Gutowski recently posted the 900th entry in the series, and has also started a Largehearted Lit series at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, dedicated to authors who participated in Book Notes, plus musical guests.

“There has definitely been a rise in author soundtracks as promotional items in a variety of formats,” says Gutowski. “From my experience, music is a great way to create a unique bond between writer and reader.” A number of authors have told Gutowski that writing the playlist essays are one of the most enjoyable pieces of promotion attached to their book tour.

New Yorker editor Ben Greenman contributed two playlists to Largehearted Boy, timed to the release of his books. In the essay that accompanied the playlist for his short story collection A Circle Is A Balloon and Compass Both, Greenman wrote, “When I write, I don’t really listen to words with lyrics — too distracting — but many songs are in my mind, and as soon as I’m done writing, I run off and listen to them.” Greenman says that for him, the playlists are a way to amplify some of the themes in his books. “There were songs about romantic confusion or betrayal that were on a loop in my head as I wrote: Graham Parker songs, in particular, or Lou Reed songs,” he said of Circle. “It’s not that those songs helped me make the stories, but they helped me isolate the emotions that in turn helped me make the stories.”

The novelist and essayist Corinna Clendenen is familiar with that line of thinking; it’s part of what led to her decision to write Double Time, a love story following a Dani and Dylan, twin sisters who are obsessed with music and choose to make it a powerful agent of change in their lives. Double Time came out on Audible.com in September as an audio book — it has no printed form as of now. Songs punctuate the book’s 44 chapters, and Clendenen selected each track to underscore the unfolding events of the novel. Among them are Vampire Weekend’s “Oxford Comma,” Matt Costa’s “Vienna” and “Not Your Lover Anymore” by Blitzen Trapper. “The blending of story and song was something that developed organically as I was writing the book,” says Clenenden. “Early in the writing process, I started hearing songs in my head and putting their lyrics into chapter openings.”

What began as a curiosity morphed into the notion that the songs she was listening to and connecting to the character of Dylan, a rising indie musician, could actually be incorporated in the book itself. Acquiring the copyrights involved clearing permissions with the artists involved, as well as the recording studios and occasionally the publisher. Clendenen also established an annual grant to an indie musician after Double Time has been available for sale for a year; the funds will be awarded to a band or artist in the form of five percent of the net proceeds from the novel.

While Audible.com senior editor Matthew Thornton notes that audio is becoming a bigger part of literary consumption for readers thanks to audiobooks, he explains that books like Double Time are still a rarity. “We think it’s wonderful that authors are experimenting with creative ways to enhance listeners’ experiences of their audiobooks, not only with music but with different kinds of narration,” Thornton says. “But the weaving together of music and text is still relatively unusual.”

By contrast, Richard Nash is the vice president of content and community at Small Demons (and formerly the publisher of Soft Skull Press), a site that catalogs endless cultural references found in books, from music and movies to people and objects. He sees incorporating audio and other cultural reference points as a way to allow readers to truly live inside a novel. “David Gutowski made it interesting and fun and gratifying,” Nash says of how Largehearted Boy weaves music and literature together via the Book Notes playlists. “But music is but one piece of a larger puzzle,” Nash says. “That being, how do we connect books to the daily elements of everyone’s cultural lives, to music, yes, but also to movies, to restaurants, to landmarks, to drinks.” As the Small Demons database expands, authors will be able to add greater context to the details pulled out by the site, and users will be able to find links between the references in their favorite books. Nash says readers will also be able to listen to the music that the author heard while writing. “You might choose to listen as you’re reading, or as you traverse a path taken by the protagonist as she listens to that music. Or you might stop reading, and close your eyes,” he says.

Another service, Booktrack, demands that the reader listen to a preselected soundtrack while they read something on an iPad or tablet: As you work your way through the story, the app matches music to various plot points to create what vice president of publishing Brooke Geahan calls an “immersive” experience that audio playlists don’t necessarily take far enough, particularly “when the music and mood do not match up.”

But on Spotify, a new digital music service that offers access to an enormous library of songs available both on PC and smart phones, both casual users and publishing companies have began to crank out playlists for books and authors. Mediabistro’s GalleyCat blog created a playlist in homage to Haruki Murakami, it offers a compilation of songs mentioned in his novels South of the Border, West of the Sun, Norwegian Wood and 1Q84. And publishers like Knopf are working directly with their authors to create custom playlists that readers can spin while they read; Jennifer Egan and Colson Whitehead are among the participating writers. If you’re reading (or re-reading) the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad with Egan’s Spotify mix, you’ll be listening to Death Cab for Cutie, Massive Attack and The Who. In the U.K., Spotify has worked directly with publishers to support forthcoming book launches, including James Corden’s autobiography and a book based on the television series The Inbetweeners.

Still, despite the ease with which music and literature has intersected for her book, Simone suggests that the crossover often gives readers more insight into the author rather than the text, which is still a bonus for obsessive fans. “The key is keeping the quality high,” she says. She and Greenman, as authors, both worry about the promotional static diluting the value and impact of the book. “In the end, books are books, and albums are albums,” Greenman says. “They’re cooked differently, served different, and eaten differently.”

Image credit: Flickr/Michael Casey

How much has the world changed in the forty-nine years since the 1962 release of Bob Dylan’s eponymous debut album? What is the difference between the 1964 wake-up call that “the times they are a changing” and the 2000 pronouncement that “things have changed”? And what of the 2009 premonition from his latest studio album, “I feel a change comin’ on”?

The easiest and most common critique of Dylan is his inconsistency. True, the muddled, much maligned material from the “Christian period” does not stand up to the revelatory highs of the iconic songs that pin us to a wave of cultural history and personal emotion that has already crashed on the shore of the past, or do a better job than a mirror of showing us who we are by putting us in the shoes of a jilted lover. The intervening decades have raised the notion of consistency to an ideal, whether we’re talking fast-food burgers or internet connectivity. But lurking in everything Dylan has ever done, for better or worse, is the myth of America, its chameleon-like quality to be everything to everybody its greatest asset, permitting openness, not for the sake of change but because of its necessity. This is the history Dylan, who turns 70 years old today, has drawn from to create his own history.

First published in 1925, William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain confronts “history”: “It is concerned only with one thing: to say everything is dead . . . History must stay open, it is all humanity.” From the fading echo of Walt Whitman’s chanting in praise of his country, Williams calls out where we as a culture went wrong, how Whitman’s shamanistic energy was bottled into an antidote for a sickness we never felt, though we were told the ailment afflicted us all: “That force is fear that robs the emotions; a mechanism to increase the gap between touch and thing, not to have a contact.”

Dylan has kept his ear pressed to Williams’s “back door gossip,” fearlessly transcribing the secrets of the American condition into songs – not Whitman’s chants, more Williams’s rants, gasping in verse, at times not bothering with a chorus, charged with emotion, the byproduct of change. Love, hope, faith, doubt, hubris, death – the challenges and majesties of relationships, which in so much of Dylan are relationships of thoughts, not always bodies in places, but feelings in one’s mind. Yes, the songs brim with sense of place – shadows in meadows; “hot chili peppers in the blistering sun”; lonesome valleys; honeysuckle blooms – and yes, there are people, too – Angel flies in from the coast; Alicia Keys makes a cameo; sisters Mary Anne, Lucy and Betsy are reminded to “pray the sinner’s prayer.” But all of these places and people are of the narrative past, still kicking around in the present, at times with the permanence of a regrettable tattoo: “You try so hard but you don’t understand what you will say when you go home.”

Dylan’s interest in change is more about the phases of his life than the cultural changes afoot at any given time. This is why the songs are timeless – we as listeners can situate ourselves in them, both in the lyrics and the sound of the songs, the pure emotional release they enable, whether pangs of heartache or the fancy of running along a “hilltop following a pack of wild geese.” Like any great writer, Dylan forges anew something we take for granted: “The sun’s not yellow it’s chicken.”

I don’t think Dylan has ever written a song to influence change. But he has long mined that vein of American identity, the one you can’t quite see through the skin except when you strain, though if you sit still in a quiet place you can always hear and feel its beat. The themes pounded out have not changed, and in this sense neither has Dylan. He casts his net of perception and pulls in songs. The anger that has bubbled up from Dylan not promoting dissidence during a recent tour of China misses the point of Dylan’s purpose. He sings that you’ve got to serve somebody. He serves himself. This is not to say he is indifferent about injustice, say the arrest of Ai Weiwei, but for all that his words freight, they speak beyond us as individuals, though we listen and make them our own. Writing at Slate, Ron Rosenbaum asks why these critics expected him to sing his most political songs, or do as Bjork did at the end of a 2008 concert there, shouting “Tibet.”

If there is one thing Dylan knows for sure is that one shout, one song, these do not change the world, especially in 2011. Today, if Dylan made his move from acoustic to electric, would the crowds even boo or would they just hold up their phones, uploading their discontent?

Dylan, like Williams, Whitman, and others of their poetic, patriotic ilk, sucks the marrow from America, gnaws on its bones and slurps – not so much concerned with decorum but getting the flavors – the grease stains on his sleeves, the gristle stuck in his teeth, evidence of the contact. These flavors he tastes are not always the same or always enjoyable, but they spring from deep-running sources, some of which are polluted or diverted, but their purity remains unquestionable. Unlike the aforementioned men of letters whose legacies have grown mythical after their deaths, Dylan has lived side-by-side with his own lore, equal parts his creation and the creation of others.

Imagine living a life where people think you did change the world, or that you have the power to change the world. True, for some people, Dylan has changed their world, influenced their personal histories. But how has it impacted the country, the world at large?

Acknowledging that he does pay some attention to what is said about him, Dylan recently addressed the China issue via a post on his website. What is more interesting than his assertion that he in no way was censored by the Chinese government is his closing remark: “Everybody knows by now that there’s a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I’m encouraging anybody who’s ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book.”

A hyper-political protest singer, a shill for Victoria’s Secret, a seventy-year-old curmudgeon – think whatever you like of him. Write your own history of Bob Dylan, he dares us, it’s the only accurate one that will ever exist.