(Untitled)

[freakytigger]

How come rock'n'roll didn't trigger the birth of rock criticism? (i.e. why wasn't Crawdaddy or an equiv started in 1957 or 1958?)

And indeed how come swing and jazz didn't start a fanzine culture?

Comments

[robincarmody]

I don't know so much about pre-rock popular music, but in the context of early rock'n'roll I just don't think it was taken sufficiently seriously at the time, nor were the majority of people who liked it seriously concerned about smashing any kind of system. The divisions between high and low culture were still very, very strong pretty much everywhere, and early rock'n'roll was merely the precursor to later forces which would blow them down, not something to do that in itself - the idea of devoting a magazine specifically to writing either more seriously or more ultra-rebelliously about it was not something that would have occurred to most people. The culture hadn't reached that level yet

[koganbot]

I just don't think it was taken sufficiently seriously at the time, nor were the majority of people who liked it seriously concerned about smashing any kind of system

To draw out the threads of this (various possibilities); of course some people took it seriously: Charlie Rich took it seriously, Bob Dylan took it seriously, Mick Jagger took it seriously, future critic Dave Hickey took it seriously. The question is why didn't this seriousness rush itself into prose?

(1) People who took it seriously didn't take themselves seriously - or anyway didn't value their own ideas enough - to consider their ideas worth writing down and distributing. (People who took it seriously would generally be teenagers, often from poor families, not bookish

[robincarmody]

Some good points. You always flesh these things out much more than I can

[koganbot]

The group that seems to be missing in action - or perhaps not missing, but whom I don't have knowledge of - would be 1950s writers in their twenties and older who already took popular culture seriously, movie reviewers, jazz critics, etc. John Hammond was a critic as well as a producer, but I don't think he ever reviewed rock 'n' roll. Nat Hentoff wrote for Downbeat in the '50s but I don't know if he'd yet turned to rock 'n' roll either. According to Wikipedia, Ralph Gleason interviewed Fats Domino, Hank Williams, and Elvis Presley for the San Francisco Chronicle, presumably not just as part of his job but because he thought they were worth the attention. He went on to co-found Rolling Stone with Jann Wenner. What I've read of his is far too sentimental, but I don't know his '50s work.

Presumably lots of local journalists covered rock as the records and concerts and riots came through their towns, maybe sometimes with a smart ear. If Otis Ferguson had lived he'd have been a natural for it (film critic for The New Republic, also wrote

[koganbot]

In the '30s and '40s there were people who wrote about jazz and blues and popular music, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the writing was self-published or written for magazines that would barely pay. But fanzine culture is about self-expression, do-it-yourself, everybody's a star. And if any equivalent of that existed for jazz or swing, it probably didn't take written form.

[dubdobdee]

hegel says that a political party doesn't truly exist until there's a split and it divides against itself: you don't need criticism until the fans start to disagree what's good in a given field

[dubdobdee]

so there would always already have been generalist magazines paying not enough attention -- or being frustratingly wrong enough -- and particularist magazines paying attention but in a subsection kind of way (as in 60s jazz-mag does give coverage to R&B, but always considers it less important and of less value than jazz)

initially this would be "good enough" for the dedicated fan-reader: it would take time for it to become maddening enough to take the step -- esp. if you were a teen yrself -- of starting yr own publication (and there's a costs issue here too)*

*the technology for super-cheap fanziney publication -- web offset, photocopying -- really doesn't emerge till the late 60s: a "proper" magazine is a complex undertaking just logistically... you needed a fair amount of cash to get it off the ground even if it turned out to be a hit (who funded crawdaddy?)

[dubdobdee]

aha, crawdaddy was (a) a student magazine, first pub.at Swarthmore, and (b) founder paul williams was an SF fan as a teen, and had already run a SF fanzine (aged 14!)

SF mags grew out of the DIY radio-ham craze of the teens and 20s, when Hugo Gernsback started putting fiction into his mail-order electronics catalogues...

eg the thing to be looking at -- to be honest this is true of RnR the music also -- is confluence of (often unlikely) precursors: we have a strong hindsight sense of what "real rockwriting" is, and that it began in 1966, but there's a ton of stuff which is "quite like it" (except eg about the wrong type of music, or in the wrong venue) leading up to it...

UK rock writing as we understand it -- ie charles shaar murray, nick kent -- began in the Underground Magazines: Oz, it and frendz

[dubdobdee]

another precursor: new departures -- an underground UK poetry/literary mag founded in 1959...

[swanofkennet]

I firmly believe that things happen when they are ready to happen, and all the things needed are in place.

In 1979 I helped to produce a fanzine of sorts. It was more a scurrilous sheet based around goings on in the company in Leeds where I and 39 others were undergoing our basic computer training. It was put together using a portable typewriter and Letraset, both of which had been available for years, but the production of a viable number of distribution copies depended on the easy availability of a photocopier, not something available to the 50s and 60s generations. The increased availablitity of the photocopier also released significant numbers of second-hand duplicating machines into the public domain.

[koganbot]

To fill this discussion out a bit:

(1) Who was writing about rock 'n' roll in the '50s and what were they writing? E.g., trade mags like Billboard, Cashbox and Variety; teen magazines like Seventeen, Teen, and Hit Parader; fan/fanclub magazines (if any); local reporters (covering concerts, riots); national news and general interest magazines like Time, Newsweek, Readers Digest, Look, and Life (did they have anything to say about r'n'r?); gossip and tabloid mags like Confidential, Modern Screen, and The National Enquirer; general pop music magazines like Melody Maker and NME (any in America?); specialist music mags like Jazz and Pop, Downbeat, and Sing Out! that might or might not have occasionally noticed rock 'n' roll; intellectualized opinion magazines like the Nation, the New Yorker, the Partisan Review, and the National Review, if they had anything to say about r'n'r; letters to any of the foregoing; showbiz and gossip columnists (interesting sidenote: this was Ed Sullivan's business before he got his variety show on TV; he

[koganbot]

Luc here. There's very little to add to this discussion, except that there was indeed a 1930s semi-equivalent among jazz fans. I'm on the road at the moment so can't cite anything, but Fred Ramsey and his co-authors of Jazzmen (1939), among others, did issue little magazines then (fanzines are a much later phenomenon that arose from the science-fiction fan base). Those magazines were a bit less devoted to deep criticism than you might wish, but that's in part because they were still trying to get a purchase on the subject. Hence they were trying to fill out discographies, track down players (especially early figures on the New Orleans scene), argue endlessly about who took the second cornet solo on the third take of "Royal Garden Blues," and so on. This was absolutely crucial stuff at the time--you could fit the serious writing on jazz done in the '20s into a teacup, and there were no reference materials of any description

[sm_woods]

(1) A name that might be worth investigating for the purpose of this question is Al Aronowitz. He definitely falls more on the journalism side of the divide than the critical side of the divide, and his main claim to fame (so to speak) seems to be that he was instrumental in introducing Dylan to the Beatles, which is later than the period being asked about on this thread. Still, according to Wikipedia, he "became a journalist in the 1950s and his work in that decade included a 12-part series on the Beat Generation for the New York Post." He also wrote extensive pieces on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the (early?) '60s and was the first American to write a mammoth Beatles piece, in 1964, for the Saturday Evening Post (10,000 + words). I'm piecing this together from various sources. Point being that, if he wrote extensively about the Beats in the fifties and the Beatles from the time they landed on U.S. soil, I'd be hard pressed to believe he didn't provide some coverage somewhere about other pre-Beatle rock stuff. But this is a