ARTS

When words lose all meaning

Michael Henderson regrets the elevation of pop music journalism to such heights It was the late Frank Zappa who thought that pop music journalism was an exercise conducted by people who can't write and People who can't talk for the benefit of People who can't read. It took a dimwit to spell it out but, for once in his life, the chap with the goatee beard was bang-on. Though his background was in classical music, Zappa lacked the talent to master his preferred discipline, so he turned to the less demanding field of rock — or 'progres- sive' music, as it was called in those days. If time has not been kind to his work it has certainly vindicated his judgment of the People who write about it. What a shame he's not around today to enjoy the drivel that masquerades as criticism. When pop music came of age 30 years ago it was regarded as light entertainment. Nowadays, when it is at best a debased form of entertainment and at worst an aural pollutant, it attracts more coverage in broadsheet newspapers than what its sup- porters sneeringly call the 'mainstream' arts. Like some mephitic form of pond life it has multiplied and like pond life it stinks.

It is virtually impossible to pick up a Paper these days without being bombarded by reviews of pop concerts or interviews with personalities that are really puff- pieces engineered by record companies. The Daily Telegraph once carried an encounter between an Icelandic pop star and Darmstadt Man himself, Karl-Heinz Stockhausen. If Bernard Manning had been despatched to interview Ernst Gom- brich it could not have been more embar- rassing.

`A battening sub-art': that is how Antho- ny Burgess, who was a musician by training, described pop. Yet how reverently its advo- cates chart its toings and froings, sensing it Offers a short cut to intellectual respectabil- itY• When words like 'transcendent' are applied to the mewling and puking of post- adolescent youths — and they are — what adjectives are left over for Schubert?

Oh, for some sense of proportion. On a BBC television programme to honour Brian Wilson, who wrote songs for the Beach Boys, some fool compared him with Beethoven. A sensitive editor would have Poked this chap in the eye. A diligent one Would have left his contribution on the cut- bag-room floor. It went in unchanged. Had somebody compared a middle-rank- ing novelist with Balzac, the programme would never have gone out but in this upside-down world you can say all manner of daft things and get away with it. A chip- PY Scot, reviewing a record in the Guardian, excoriated 'the banality of English evil, and the evil of English banali- ty'. It didn't mean anything and wasn't sup- posed to. It was simply a way of awarding himself high marks for supposed icono- clasm.

Of the many forms of youth fascism this elevation of trivia is the most insidious because broadsheet newspapers, searching for the new (i.e. young) readers, use it as a marketing device. If you quibble about boring things like taste and point out that Mozart was, all things considered, greater than Billy's Bouncing Buttocks, then you're fair game for the foot soldiers who march under the banners of 'relevance'. Last year an American professor put up Bob Dylan for the Nobel literature prize. Who said Americans lacked a sense of irony?

Pop music is not all bad and in the Six- ties it was often very good. Wilson, for instance, was a good songwriter until he lost his marbles. Dylan, who was not partic- ularly good, still had his moments. Pop does not have the emotional complexity of orchestral music but it's not supposed to have. It is a young person's enthusiasm, an aide-memoire. The problem is, when you exalt trivia to the level of profundity then words lose all meaning.

To write, as did Michael Gray, a biogra- pher of Dylan, that 'the way he shakes his leg is more interesting than anything Anthony Burgess has ever written', gives the game away. On a good night Dylan might have gone a couple of rounds with Oscar Hammerstein. Put him in the ring with Lorenz Hart or John Mercer, howev- er, and he wouldn't reach the first bell. They were genuinely literate men from the golden age of popular music, yet neither was ever described as a 'bard'. Somewhere between Oklahoma and Highway 61 a minor diversion became an unwholesome obsession.

Whereas proper art forms such as the- atre, music and painting require qualities of discernment, pop has only ever fed off celebrity. In order to write as well as they do, men like Michael Billington and Michael Kennedy had first to acquire a wide experience of matters beyond their main discipline. These days young men and women who can barely spell their own names use a few smart-alec generalisations as depth charges, to bomb entire tunnels of communication.

No wonder pop, which sees the world through a fog of reflexive anti-establish- mentism, has never thrown up a decent chronicler. Instead there is a compound of triumphalism, inverted snobbery and win- dow-dressing. Robin Denselow, the BBC reporter, challenged to justify his choice of `the best record ever made', replied: `Because it is.' Dear, oh dear! Please tell, Herr Hanslick, why Brahms is greater than Wagner. Because he is, you insolent young pup.

Tony Parsons, whose polytechnic cock- ney brightens many a dull night on The Late Review, has compared one pop writer with Lord Byron. That writer, in turn, com- pared one group's first pop record with King Lear. James Delingpole, an I specialist who aspires to these giddy intellectual heights, told an American songwriter he reminded him of Joyce, 'because you were ahead of your time'. Even the performer, who is not known for his humility, drew breath sharply.

This game has, alas, reached even the Times where Richard Morrison edits, in my opinion, the best arts pages. Trapped between Rodney Milnes and Benedict Nightingale, who can really write, young Caitlin Moran was always going to struggle, but it hasn't stopped her shouting. 'Bum! Bum! Bum!' she seems to say. 'Why does nobody take any notice of me when I'm such a groover?' There's the rub. Far from being rebellious these people are essential- ly conservative. They conform to what is expected of them.

The promotion of trash, and the persis- tent sniping at what is genuinely serious, accords with the spirit of our times. In Britain today it seems that unless some- thing is immediately understood by every- body then it is somehow 'elitist', and therefore undemocratic. Only here is 'the easy, mediocre taste of the multitude', as Robert Tear, the opera singer, puts it, con- sidered a force for social good.

Does it matter? Most certainly. First, there is the corruption of language. Adjec- tives like important, significant and seminal are tossed around willy-nilly to celebrate the banal. Second, there is the perversion of manners. Pop stars and their lickspittle attendants refer routinely to drugs and anti-social behaviour as though it was all a complete joke, and in the patronising search for younger readers newspapers have chimed in with this grim mood.

In his book, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom said of pop music that `never was there an art form directed so exclusively to children'. Selfishness, he wrote, 'becomes indignation and then transforms itself into morality'. The evi- dence is all around us, every day of the week. Which brave man will be the first to take away the toys?

The author writes on sport for the Times.