Bruce Baugh, "Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music"

Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock MusicAuthor(s): Bruce BaughSource: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Winter, 1993), pp. 23-29Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/431967Accessed: 21/09/2009 10:20Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.The American Society for Aesthetics and Blackwell Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.http://www.jstor.org

BRUCE BAUGHProlegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock MusicCan there be an aesthetics of rock music? Myquestion is not: Can traditional ways of interpretingand evaluating music be applied to rockmusic, for clearly they can, with very mixedresults. My question is rather: Does rock musichave standards of its own, which uniquely applyto it, or that apply to it in an especially appropriateway? My hunch is that rock music has suchstandards, that they are implicitly observed byknowledgeable performers and listeners, and thatthese standards reflect the distinctiveness of rockas a musical genre. Rock music involves a set ofpractices and a history quite different from thoseof the European concert hall tradition upon whichtraditional musical aesthetics have been based.That being so, any attempt to evaluate or understandrock music using traditional aesthetics ofmusic is bound to result in a misunderstanding.It is not that rock music is more modern, sincethere are many modernist composers in the Europeantradition, their modernity being precisely afunction of their relation to that tradition, whichthey aim to radicalize and subvert.' The differencebetween rock and "serious" music isthat rock belongs to a different tradition, withdifferent concerns and aims. In this paper, I willtry to get at the nature of those differences, andin so doing, if only in a negative way, the routethat an aesthetics of rock music might take. Iwill initially make the contrast between rock andEuropean concert music as strong and sharp aspossible, which will lead to some one-sided andsimplistic distinctions between the two genres.Nevertheless, even when the distinctions are properlyqualified and nuanced, I think the differenceremains real and substantial.If I were to indicate this difference in a preliminaryway, I would say that traditional musicalaesthetics is concerned with form and com-The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51:1 Winter 1993position, whereas rock is concerned with thematter of music. Even this way of putting thingsis misleading, since the form/matter distinction isitself part of traditional aesthetics. But leavingaside the inappropriateness of the term, by "matter"I mean the way music feels to the listener, orthe way that it affects the listener's body.One important material aspect of rock musicis the way an individual tone sounds when playedor sung in a certain way. Making a tone sound acertain way is a large part of the art of rockmusic performance, something rock inherits fromthe performance-oriented traditions from whichit springs, particularly the blues. This is obviousin the case of the voice, which is why in rock, asin blues and most jazz, it is the singer and not thesong which is important. But it also true in thecase of the electric guitar, an instrument whichtakes on the expressive function of the voice inmuch of rock music. The emphasis on the verysound of a musical note as a vehicle of musicalexpression was summed up in guitarist EricClapton's statement that his ideal is to play asingle note with such feeling and intensity that itwould cause listeners to weep (and not, cynicsplease note, because the music is painfully loud,but because it is painfully beautiful.)The materiality of tone, or more accurately,of the performance of tones, is only one importantmaterial element of rock music. Two othersare loudness and rhythm. Both of these are alsomore properly felt by the body than judged bythe mind, at least as far as rock music is concerned,and the proper use of both is crucial tothe success of a rock music performance, a successwhich is judged by the feelings the musicproduces in the listener's body. The fact thatrock music aims at arousing and expressing feelinghas often been held against it, as if arousing

24feeling were somehow "cheap," or unworthy oftrue musical beauty. But the alternative is to lookat the material properties of rock music, or thoseproperties correlative to the bodily feelings itarouses, as the key to rock's own criteria of musicalexcellence. These material or "visceral"properties of rock are registered in the bodycore, in the gut, and in the muscles and sinews ofthe arms and legs, rather than in any intellectualfaculty of judgment, which is why traditionalaesthetics of music either neglects them or deridesthem as having no musical value.Classical aesthetics of music explicitly excludesquestions concerning how music feels orsounds, and the emotional reactions music provokes,from considerations of musical beauty.This exclusion is argued for in Kant's Critiqueof Judgment, and follows from Kant's definitionof "the beautiful" as that which is an object ofa judgment claiming universal validity.2 Whatpleases me because of the sensations it producesin me, says Kant, is merely agreeable. I callsomething beautiful, by contrast, when I claimthat anyone should find its form, or the arrangementof its parts, intrinsically pleasing, not becauseof the sensations the form arouses or becauseof its usefulness, but because the form isinherently suitable to being perceived, and soleads to a harmonious free play of the imaginationand the understanding. Pleasures and painsbased on mere sensation (Empfindung), whichconstitute the "material" part of a perception(Vorstellung), are interested and purely subjective.The idiosyncratic responses sensory stimuliproduce in me because of my particular dispositionsand physical constitution cannot be thebasis for a judgment that claims to be valid for allperceiving subjects, since "in these matters, eachperson rightly consults his own feeling alone,"and these feelings will differ from person to person(Kant, p. 132). The elements of a work of artthat produce sensations, then, such as tones orcolors, may add charm to the work or provokeemotions, but they add nothing to beauty. Whensomeone speaks, improperly, of a beautiful musicalnote, this is "the matter of delight passedoff for the form" (Kant, pp. 65-66).Kant does allow (in section 14) that certaintones and colors may be intrinsically beautifulwhen they are "pure": that is, when they areconsidered not in their immediacy as mere sensations,but reflectively, as having a determinateThe Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticismform in virtue of the measurable frequency ofvibrations of light or air, or the ratio of one frequencyto another in the case of juxtaposed tonesor colors. Even here, however, the beauty belongsto the form of the tone or color (its frequencyor ratio), and not to its merely felt or subjectivematter (see sections 51-52). In any case, toomuch attention to the individual notes is a dangerousdistraction from the proper object of aestheticregard, compositional form. "The matterof sensation ... is not essential. Here the aim ismerely enjoyment, which ... renders the souldull" and the mind dissatisfied (Kant, p. 191).This is a moral fault, and not just an aestheticone. The hearer who seeks pleasurable or excitingsensations in music forms judgments concerningmusical worth that are conditioned byhis body and his senses (Kant, p. 132), since theyare based on passively experienced pleasuresand pains (Kant, p. 149). Such judgments ofmusical beauty are heteronomous: free, active,judging reason is subordinated to the passivebody's involuntary reactions. The beauty of fineart, on the other hand, is not based on sensations,but on the mind's free and autonomousjudgment of the suitability of a form for perception(section 44). Consequently music, since somuch of its appeal depends on the actual sensationsit produces in the listener rather than oncomposition alone, "has the lowest place amongthe fine arts" (Kant, p. 195).Kant, notoriously, was no music lover. Everyoneis familiar with his complaint that musiclacks urbanity because "it scatters its influenceabroad to an uncalled for extent ... and ... becomesobtrusive," a remark that contains a grainof truth, especially in an age of powerful stereosystems and "boom boxes," but which does notindicate much appreciation for music. Yet althoughKant himself was insensitive to musicalbeauty, others more sensitive took up his preoccupationwith beauty of form in their aestheticsof music. So Hanslick, who knew music well,made every note of the musical scale "pure"' inKant's sense of having determinate form, in thateach note is "a tone of determinate measurablepitch,"3 inherently related to every other tone invirtue of the ratios between the pitches, whichdetermine their relation on the scale (Hanslick,p. 95). By making notes "pure" in this way,Hanslick partially rescued musical notes fromthe disreputable position of being merely the

Baugh Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music25cause of conditioned, subjective sensations andpleasures, which could form the basis only ofimpure and heteronomous aesthetic judgments.This, though, was only a first step in Hanslick'sproject of elevating music from the position oflowest of the fine arts to the highest and mostformal art of all. "Music is unique among thearts," wrote Hanslick, "because its form is itscontent and ... its content is its form" (Hanslick,p. 94). In music, unlike painting or literature,there can be no content apart from the formitself, no subject matter independent of the compositionor organization of the work. Musicalbeauty, then, is entirely based on form, that is,on tonal relationships (Hanslick, p. xxiii), andnot on any feelings or emotions aroused or expressedby the music (Hanslick, p. 95). By makingthe matter of music (musical tones) formal,and by making form identical with content, Hanslickmade the art Kant regarded as the basest andmost material into the highest and most formal.Of course, the story doesn't stop with Hanslick.The preoccupation with musical form continueson into twentieth century aesthetics, notablyin Adorno's philosophy of music, but in amore everyday way, formal concerns predominatein music criticism in general, from journalismto academia.4The obvious rejoinder to this characterizationof traditional aesthetics is that it is not exclusivelyformal, but takes into account non-formalor material elements as well. The timbre of avoice or instrument is clearly of great importanceto European concert music; if they weren't,top caliber bel canto sopranos and Stradivariusviolins wouldn't command so much respect andsuch high prices. Music criticism also takes performanceaspects of music into account. Buttimbre and performance are usually secondary,and are often discussed in terms of the "faithfulness"or "adequacy" of the performance/interpretationto the composition performed or tothe composer's "intentions." One justificationfor playing music on period instruments and inperiod style is that this better captures what thecomposition was trying to express, not simplythat it sounds better or is more pleasant to listento. In that case, performance and the notes'sounds are judged in terms of what the compositionrequires. In classical aesthetics of music,matter is at the service of form, and is alwaysjudged in relation to form. Even though tradi-tional aesthetics is not exclusively formal, formalconsiderations predominate.When this preoccupation with form and compositionis brought to bear on rock music, thechief result is confusion. Usually, rock music isdismissed as insignificant on account of the simplicityof its forms, a simplicity which is real,and not a misperception by those unfamiliar withthe genre. Alternatively, more "liberal" criticswill try to find significant form where there isvery little form at all, and at the expense ofneglecting what is really at stake in rock music.This liberal tolerance is a worse mistake thanconservative intolerance. In the first place, itis highly condescending to suppose that rockmusic has value only when it approximates thecompositional forms of baroque or romantic music.The Beatles, in particular, were victims ofthis patronizing attitude. Is "Penny Lane" abetter rock song than "Strawberry Fields" becausethe former contains flourishes of Baroquetrumpet and the latter doesn't?5 Does knowingthat "She's Leaving Home" ends on an Aeoliancadence add to our appreciation of it as a rocksong?6 I don't think so. Yet for a time, in the late1960s and early 1970s, critics fawned over complicatedworks by Yes or Genesis because traditionalaesthetics of music could find somethingto say about their form, never noticing that crite-ria appropriate to the music of Handel or Boulezmight be inappropriate when applied to rockmusic, and have very little to do with the informalstandards of practice and evaluation employedby people who actually perform or listento rock music on a regular basis.To the extent that some rock musicians tookthis sort of criticism seriously, the results weredisastrous, producing the embarrassing, pretentiousand-in the final analysis-very silly excessesof "art rock." To the extent art rocksucceeded, it did so because it was rock, notbecause it was "art." This was especially noticeablein the case of the mercifully short-lived sub-genre, the "rock opera." The Who's Tommy7 wasa good rock opera because it had good rockmusic and was done tongue-in-cheek (hence its"Underture"), but other attempts were merelybombastic, neither rock nor opera. Rock's borrowingsfrom "classical" music had similar results.Combining a soulful rhythm and bluesvocal with a Baroque organ line worked in ProculHarem's "Whiter Shade of Pale,"8 but in

26other instances the incorporation of "classicalmusic" (usually this meant a string section) ledto rather slight pop songs collapsing under theweight of extraneous instrumentation.9So what standards are appropriate to rockmusic? I think that the basic principles of anaesthetics of rock can be derived from turningKantian or formalist aesthetics on its head. WhereKant prized the free and autonomous judgmentof reason, and so found beauty in form ratherthan matter, an aesthetics of rock judges thebeauty of music by its effects on the body, and sois primarily concerned with the "matter" ofmusic. That makes beauty in rock music to someextent a subjective and personal matter; to theextent that you evaluate a piece on the basis ofthe way it happens to affect you, you cannotdemand that others who are affected differentlyagree with your assessment. But that does notmean that rock's standards are purely and simplyan individual matter of taste. There are certainproperties a piece of rock music must have inorder to be good, although knowledgeable listenersmay disagree concerning whether a givenpiece of music actually has those properties. Inevery case, these properties are material ratherthan formal, and they are based on performancebasedstandards of evaluation, rather than compositionalones.The most obvious material property of rock isrhythm. Rock music, from its origins in bluesand country and folk traditions, is for dancing.It's got a back-beat, you can't lose it. In dance,the connection between the music and the bodyof the listener is immediate, felt and enactedrather than thought. A bad rock song is one thattries and fails to inspire the body to dance. Goodrhythm cannot be achieved through simple formulas;the sign of a bad rock band is that the beatis not quite right, even though the correct timesignature and tempo are being observed. A songwith beat and rhythm is one that is performedwell, not well composed, and this emphasis onperformance is one rock shares with other formsof popular music. It is less a matter of tempothan of timing, of knowing whether to play onthe beat, or slightly ahead of it or behind it, andthis is one of those "knacks" that Plato wouldhave refused the status of truly scientific knowledge:it cannot be captured or explained by anystateable principle. It is not accessible to reason.It might be a bit unfair to claim rhythm andThe Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticismtiming as distinctive elements of rock music,since rhythm, beat and timing are importantconsiderations in traditional aesthetics, and arecapable of formalization in musical notation.Some classical music is based on traditionalEuropean dance forms; some music is writtenexpressly for dance, such as ballet; some musicis structured primarily around rhythm, ratherthan tonal sequences. All these forms of music,then, have a prominent relation to the body becauseof their connection to dance.Yet the relation is not the same as in the caseof rock music. In the first place, the forms ofdance that found their way into classical musicwere already highly formalized versions of whatwere (perhaps) once folk dances. Whatever theirorigins, the courtly dances to which Beethovenand Mozart provided the accompaniment wereappreciated for their formal qualities (precisionand intricacy of movement, order and geometryof patterns), not for their somatic or visceral aspects.On the contrary, in courtly dance, matterand the body are subject to form and the intellect.This was never more true than in Romanticballet, where the chief effect of the dance con-sists of the illusion that highly strenuous and athleticmovements are effortless, and that the bodiesof the dancers are weightless. Here the body isused to negate the body: in ballet, the materialityof the body itself becomes pure form. This is lesstrue of modern music, such as Stravinsky's, buteven in this case the music and its performanceare regulated by formal structures to which themusicians and dancers must accommodate theirmotions. In contrast, the effect of the music onthe body is of prime importance for rock musicand its antecedents (blues, jazz), so that the musicis regulated by the dancers: musicians willvary beat, rhythm and tempo until it feels goodto dance to. Rock music has no correct tempo,beat or rhythm independent of its effects on thebody of the listener or dancer, which is whywhen non-rock musicians play rock, it oftensounds "flat" and feels "dead": it is not that themusicians are playing the wrong tempo, notes orbeat, but only that no standard score captures thesubtleties or timing and rhythm that a good rockmusician can feel. Feeling is the criterion ofcorrectness here, probably because the danceforms on which rock is based do not deny thebody's physicality, but emphasize it: feet stomp,bodies gyrate, bodily masses are propelled by

Baugh Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music27masses of sound with insistent and compellingrhythms.But beat is not the only thing, or the mostimportant. There is a significant body of highlyregarded rock music which has no swing, andwhich you can't dance to because you are notmeant to dance to it. From the mid-1960s onward,rock music broke out of the rigid confinesof verse/chorus/verse in 4/4 time. But the significanceof this change is not that it made rockmore interesting formally. The importance of thechange lay rather in the way it called into questionsome of the boundaries rock set for itself,and opened up new possibilities for expressionthrough the matter of music, through elementsother than rhythm. Let me briefly summarizethe history of how this transition took place.In rock music, the voice had always been themain vehicle of expression, and the factor thatcould make or break a song. One need onlycompare a Fats Domino original with its pallidPat Boone "cover" to see that the expressivity ofthe voice itself, rather than the composition,makes a rock song good. As in blues, it is theperformance that counts, and standards of evaluationare based on standards of performance.In this sense, rock music reverses the prioritiesof European concert hall music, and questionsof "faithfulness" to the music rarely arise. Theonly question is whether the performance/interpretationis convincing, not whether it is "faithful"to some (usually non-existent) score. No onegot too upset when Joe Cocker performed theBeatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends"in a way that was not in the least suggested by theoriginal recording. In fact, the originality ofCocker's interpretation was counted a virtue bymost. Listeners to European concert hall musicare not nearly so tolerant in this regard: they willaccept some deviation from the original score,but within limits established by the score itself,rather than by the effectiveness of the performance.Few discerning rock listener's liked Deodato'spop version of Richard Strauss' Also SprachZarathustra, but they disliked it because it wasinane, not because it was a misinterpretation anda "sacrilege." Again, it is a matter of degree,but there is a heavier emphasis on performance,rather than composition, in rock music.These performance elements of rock musicare not easily accounted for by traditional aesthetics.The performance standards for rock vo-calists have little to do with the virtuosity of anopera singer or with an ability to hit the noteindicated in the composition at the time indicated.Some of the best rock vocalists, fromMuddy Waters to Elvis to Lennon to Joplin, aretechnically quite bad singers. The standards haveto do with the amount of feeling conveyed, andwith the nuances of feeling expressed. On theother hand, it is not the vocalist who can sing thelongest and loudest who is best, either, heavymetalnotwithstanding. A good rock vocalist caninsinuate meaning with a growl or a whisper.This does constitute a virtuosity of sort, but onethat connects directly with the body, provoking avisceral response which may be complicated andhard to describe, but easy to recognize for thosewho have experienced it. Still, what the bodyrecognizes may not lend itself to notation orformalization, and it is unlikely that a moreadequate form of notation could capture these"material" qualities.In the 1960s, the modes of expression that hadbeen uniquely associated with the voice weretaken up, with various degrees of success, by theinstruments themselves, especially by the guitar.I will mention only two fairly striking examples,Cream's performance of the blues song "Spoonful"at the Fillmore Auditorium in 1968,10 andJimi Hendrix's "Machine Gun," recorded inconcert on New Year's Day, 1970.11 Neither ofthese songs, as performed, have much in the wayof musical structure, and they do not swing.'2But they do allow Clapton, with Cream, andHendrix to explore different ways an electricguitar can sound. Both guitarists have been guiltyof virtuosity for its own sake on many occasions,but in these performances, their playinggoes beyond mere show-boating. Clapton's playingranges from droning sitar-like passages tobursts of tightly clustered notes; Hendrix's useof feedback in the central passage is the anguishthe music conveys, rather than the bald symbolismof his Woodstock performance of "TheStar Spangled Banner."13 In both cases, the guitaristshave dropped their "see what I can dowith a guitar" pose in favor of "hear what I cansay with a guitar." And in both cases, it is amatter of how the tones are played, not the tonesthemselves, that makes the music successful.In instances like these, rock achieves the expressivitythrough musical instruments moreclosely associated with jazz or blues, a use of the

28guitar far removed from its earlier uses as eithera rhythm instrument or a bit of instrumental"filler" between choruses. On the other hand,neither Clapton nor Hendrix, nor any other goodrock instrumentalist, takes an intellectualizedapproach to music. Both play with an intensitythat still connects directly with the body, andlike good rock singers, both are often not thatgood technically; they take chances and theymake mistakes. Which is why they are unpredictableand exciting in a way that flawless musiciansare not. Even when they hit the wrongnotes, they do so in interesting and even excitingways, creating a tension that can add to musicalexpression. When they hit the right notes, it isnot because the notes are right that makes themgreat guitarists, but the way the notes sound, andthe "timing" of the notes.Part of the intensity of rock performance hasto do with an aspect of rock that is often heldagainst it: the sheer volume or loudness of themusic. Loudness, in good rock music, is also avehicle of expression. Obviously, very loud musichas an effect on the body, and not just on theears; you can feel it vibrate in your chest cavity.This can, of course, become simply exhaustingand overwhelming, but used properly, it can addto expressivity. The best rock performances,such as the ones discussed here, make extensiveuse of dynamics, much as a good blues singerdoes. And just as the blues sometimes must beshouted or hollered to convey the right emotion,so some passages of rock music must be playedloud in order to have the proper effect. Bad rockmusicians, like any bad musician, take a mechanicalor rule-based approach to dynamics andsonority, resulting in derivative and simplisticmusic. But loudness can be good, if used wisely.14Rhythm, the expressivity of the notes themselves,loudness: These are three material, bodilyelements of rock music that would, I submit,constitute its essence, and might form the basisfor a genuine aesthetics of rock. Adorno calledfor the emancipation of dissonance; an aestheticsof rock requires an emancipation of the body,an emancipation of heteronomy. Such an emancipationis also required for the many forms ofmusic centered on the voice and on dance, ratherthan on compositions and the mind's free judgmentof formal beauty. In fact, preoccupationwith formal beauty is appropriate to only a verysmall fragment of the world's music.The Journal of Aesthetics and Art CriticismI realize that this brief account of rock musicleaves out of consideration the question of whatmakes a good rock song, which raises a wholedifferent set of questions, ones where issues ofcompositional form are clearly relevant, and whichwould have to deal with the vexed question ofthe relation of words to music.'15 But my concernhere has been with what the knowledgeable listenerfinds important in rock music, which isalmost always performance rather than composition,and the "matter" of the notes ratherthan the form of the whole. Whatever form theaesthetics of rock will take, it will not be theKantian one that underlies conventional musicalaesthetics. If theseprolegomena do nothing morethan avert the misunderstandings that arise whenformalist aesthetics over-reaches its proper domainin being applied to rock music, they willhave done enough.'16BRUCE BAUGHDepartment of PhilosophyUniversity College of the CaribooKamloops, B.C. V2C 5N3Canada1. See TheodorW. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music,trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York:Continuum, 1985).2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. JamesCreed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); furtherreferences given parenthetically in the text.3. Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans.Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), p. 71; furtherreferences given parenthetically in the text.4. In addition to Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music,see his In Search of Wagner, translated by Rodney Livingstone(London: New Left Books, 1981), which deals atlength with the formal qualities of Wagner's superficiallyformless music (form as repetition of gestures and motifs;harmony, color and sonority as elements in composition, etc.).As did Hanslick, Adorno makes even the apparently materialaspects of music into formal elements of composition.5. Released as the "A-side" and "B-side" respectively ofa "single" in 1967; later included in Magical Mystery Tour,EMI/Capitol, 1967.6. On the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper s Lonely Hearts Club Band,EMI/Capitol, 1967.7. Decca, 1969.8. Released as a single by A&M records in 1968.9. This was the problem with most of Procul Harem'smusic, at least on their first three albums. In the Beatle's "ADay in the Life" (on Sgt Pepper s), strings were used in anunorthodox and interesting way. In less capable hands, thesame technique had awful results; cf. the Buckingham's"Susan"(1967), a song that has mercifully faded into obscurity,where the string passages bear no plausible relation to

Baugh Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music29the song, but are there simply because "A Day in the Life"received critical praise. Rock music does not get any worsethan this.10. On Cream, Wheels of Fire, Polydor/Atco, 1968.11. On Jimi Hendrix, Band of Gypsies, Reprise/Capitol,1970.12. "Spoonful" is based on a descending progressionfrom G to E; all the rest is variation, the point being that theimprovised variations are what count here.13. On Woodstock, Warner-Cotillion, 1970.14. The clearest illustration of stupid and derivative rockis the movie, Spinal Tap. Unfortunately, the heavy-metalmusic portrayed there is actually far more laughable than theparody.15. To my mind, the best essay on this subject remainsRobert Christegau's "Rock Lyrics Are Poetry (Maybe)" inThe Age of Rock: Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution,ed. Jonathan Eisen (New York: Random House, 1969),pp. 230-243.16. I would like to thank a number of people whosethoughts and comments are incorporated in this essay:Adrian Shepherd,. James 0. Young, an anonymous refereefor the JAAC, and Jamie Baugh. None of them are to blamefor what appears here.