Is Rock And Roll Here To Stay?

Intriguing argument by Renaissance Terry Teachout, a cultural critic for all seasons, and a former working musician, that, contra Danny & the Juniors, rock and roll will die.

I'm unpersuaded but then again rock and roll is the music I grew up with and and stays in my head. So I have, I'll cop to this, a vested interest in my position. 

A few quick criticisms. 

The whole of rock and roll is too wide and deep, too vast, to somehow say, reductively I'd argue, it will all die. 

For a few examples, Teachout makes no motion of doo wop or ballads or the girl groups or enduring instrumentals or of soul or the entirety of the "British sound" or that some rock and roll tunes have become standards and have joined into the great American song book. He talks, for instance, about rap displacing rock and roll, but says nothing about sampling. 

As well, the rhythmic back beat of rock and roll--which Teachout concedes is compelling but is outweighed by the music's simple mindedness--is more of a force for rock and roll's endurance than he allows for. He misses the contrast between its compelling, physical, bodily power rooted in its beat and the more cerebral, sophisticated aesthetic of older American standards, which he thinks are musically superior and sees making a revival.

Too, Teachout, while he dips into R&B, doesn't mention rock and roll's other main sources-the blues, country, and the sophisticated ballads of groups like the Ink Spots. For as long as these vital, authentic and beautiful forms of music last, and why wouldn't they, so will their progeny rock and roll.

Finally, I question whether Teachout deals adequately with what musical survival means. What are the criteria for that judgement; how does what's happening now point to rock and roll's demise?

Anyway, people can come to their own judgments.

Lawren Harris

Something I wrote elsewhere today:

....We went today after a few false starts to the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) to see the Lawren Harris exhibit, entitled The Idea Of North--title appropriated from Glenn Gould--curated by Steve Martin, who spoke so sympathetically and knowingly about Harris in a looping video as part of the exhibit. 

What can I tell you? 

I was underwhelmed and under-evoked. 

Only a few of the paintings moved me even as I thought the exhibit was curated extremely well in that I learned a fair bit about Harris, the father of the Group of Seven, and in that Martin imposed a tightly coherent framework on the art. 

In seeing the exhibit I felt the same gap that I felt when I saw the most disappointing Basquiat exhibit at the AGO about a year ago, the gap, that is to say,  between high falutin art talk--full of words like "iconic," "explore," "investigate," "spiritual," "metaphysical," "experience," "intersection," "tension'" "inner," "reconcile," "landscape as an idea," don't even get me started on conceptual art talk, and on and on--and the actual works' lack of punch, crudeness and lack of inner coherence. 

These are fine words; and literary criticism, which I know more about, certainly has its share. But they tend to the fatuous and maddeningly pretentious when what they're applied to seems not stand up either technically or evocatively. Then, they tend to reify, i.e. make a non existent mountain out of nothing or maybe a few pebbles.

But, but, but, and now I likely show my low visual art IQ, but, but, here's some text from Harris on display that I found revelatory:

...If we view a great mountain soaring into the sky it may excite us, evoke an uplifted feeling within us. The artist takes that response and its feelings and shapes it on campus with painting so that when finished it contains the experience...

This insight opens up conscious worlds for me, making plain and clear a formative idea, a first principle of visual art, that had never formed itself plainly and clearly in my own mind. It moves me from a static understanding of a static relation between artist and subject to a clearer and deeper understanding of the objective and subjective reciprocal dynamism in that relation, between, that is to say, the "out there," the world as it is, and the "in here," our thoughts, feelings, intuitions, generally, our experience of the out there, as transforming each other and finding some resolution or even irresolution in the work itself...