A rage for respectability
Marcus Berkmann
I'M A MAN by Ruth Padel Faber, £12.99, pp. 409 Hard' though it may be to believe, some people take pop music a bit too seriously. Musicians we can perhaps for- give, although they usually compound the sin by taking their own music far more seriously than everyone else's. Critics are paid to take it seriously (although never quite enough, I have found). And teenage boys are hormonally compelled to take it seriously, for reasons so wholly embarrass- ing most of us spend the rest of our lives trying to blank them out.
But poets? Are poets particularly vulner- able to pop's self-mythologising tendencies and its terrible craving for respectability? I wouldn't have thought so before opening this well-appointed volume, but now I'm not so sure. Ruth Padel, who has published four books of poetry, started out writing a book about 'women, opera and desire'. But at some point in the process she was waylaid by the experiences of female rock artists in what she soon realised was the most aggressively male of media. (`Rock' here is used not as a synonym for pop music, but as a subset of it, its distinguish- ing characteristics being guitars and `attitude'.) Padel became fascinated by what she heard and saw, not least because it was all new to her. Relatively unusually these days, she had had no contact with pop music.in her teens or young adulthood. (She was too busy playing in string quartets and writing poems.) A decade or two later, the leery numbness of rock posturing clear- ly came as something of a shock to her. So women, opera and desire went out of the window — no doubt with a loud crash and instead here is I'm A Man, Padel's long and slightly earnest attempt to place rock's male myth-making into some sort of cultur- al context.
It's an interesting idea, and one that cuts to the very heart of rock's appeal. Rock music was made by men and is fundamen- tally about being a man. The authenticity it so aggressively clings to is authentic male- ness. Padel is especially acute on rock's need for authenticity, that catastrophic teenage value system that praises black over white, loud over soft, angry over everything else and, tacitly, male over female. There's a terrific story about the Charlatans, a dull early 1990s baggy band whose keyboard player was killed in a car crash. They were asked if they wanted to pull out of their next gig, and sent back a telegram: 'THERE WILL BE NO CHANGE. WE ARE FUCKING ROCK' It's perfect: strangely admirable and completely ridicu- lous at the same time.
Padel goes further, though, and starts tracing back such daftnesses to ancient Greece, home of male myth-making and the concept of 'hero'. This is where the book and I part company. After an acute and well argued introduction that promises much, the early chapters take us on a `Greek Myth for Beginners' course which, though entertaining in itself, sits uncom- fortably next to the more down-to-earth rock stuff. You read on, waiting for it to end, but it doesn't. It emerges that, having stated her thesis, Padel is now setting out to prove it with academic rigour — foot- notes, attributions, a huge bibliography and a determination to intellectualise things that don't need to be intellectualised. To back up her arguments — historical, anthropological, psychological — she quotes awful pop lyrics, which is like build- ing a skyscraper on quicksand. All the book's early momentum is dissipated. In the end, to be frank, it's a bit of a slog.
Some male reviewers have concentrated on Padel's lack of hands-on rock experience, which is in effect the classic teenage put-down, You Had To Be There. But what she does seem to have missed in the writing is rock's fundamental ridicu- lousness. Indeed, after that wonderful introduction, the book is almost devoid of humour. The eminent author Andrew O'Hagan, providing the now obligatory Famous Friend's quote on the front cover, calls the book 'the Golden Bough of rock', which is an interesting way of looking at it. But do we need a Golden Bough of rock? Pop music is all about emotions, and the bigger and sillier the emotions, the better. Intellect is a useful adjunct but no more. Ruth Padel writes wonderfully on the subject, when she allows herself to. But she too has been seduced by the respectability to which pop so often (and pointlessly) aspires. It's a serious shame.
Previous page
