The Accidental Evolution of Rock ‘n’ Roll
A Misguided Tour Through Popular Music
by Chuck Eddy (Da Capo Press)
by Nik Rainey
Boy oh boy, was I rarin’ to savage this one. For those of you who don’t keep a regularly-updated rock-crit scorecard (you poor, deluded souls with lives and some hope of a future, you), Chuck Eddy is the member of the dancing-about-architecture fraternity whose ubiquity (his writing’s appeared in practically every rock mag of note) is matched only by his bottomless ability to piss people off. This is the guy who, when asked to contribute a personal top ten album list to the Spin Alternative Music Guide, dared to include –without irony, mind you! – Quarterflash’s first album. This is also the guy who, at a time when most skree-scribes were earnestly deconstructing every last manic-depressive grunt and grumble of grunge, turned in a review of a Barney singalong record to Rolling Stone (the editors assigned it one star out of four, but I suspect Chuckles was a trifle more sympathetic to the Jurassic Nerfball than that). More than that, he consistently flouts the conventional wisdom of our too-hip tribe by negation – he has no time for critics’ darlings like Can, Sonic Youth, and My Bloody Valentine and considers Nirvana far less important than Def Leppard. (This book, in fact, was originally going to be structured around the songs on D. Lep’s Hysteria and titled Pour Some “Sugar, Sugar” On Me!) So, hell yes, I was slobbering for second-generation faux-Bangs blood when the advance copy arrived here on the 93rd floor of the Lollipop Building. I took up my Nick Tosches-autographed silver stiletto, cracked the spine of this tome, and went looking for an opening in the jugular department, crying out the only four words Sting ever said that mean a toss to me: “I WILL KILL HIM!!”
Damn. Wouldn’tcha know it? The bastard disarmed me. His taste in tunes may not sit well on the jaded palates of the toffee-nosed scoffers that fill muso-mags (big and small), and his second book is rife with minor factual errors and sinful omissions (like all of them, I guess – though a man who defends disco as much as he does should know the spelling of Giorgio Moroder’s last name), but from the moment he calls Michael Foucault a “highly respected and incomprehensible French discourse doofus” and follows that with a reference to “structuralist juice,” he had me in the palm of his delicate little writer’s hands. The Accidental Evolution of Rock ‘n’ Roll just happens to be the loosest, goofiest and most apt full-length take in a long while on an art form that fully deserves (but rarely receives) such treatment.
Eddy distinguishes himself from the Greil Marcuses of the world by avoiding highbrow snob games of the sort that keep me from getting more than two-thirds of the way into Lipstick Traces (not that I don’t think John Lydon had medieval heretics and obscure Gallic art-brute subcults in mind when he wrote “I’m a lazy sod,” but still…). Greil and his Marcusite minions’ biggest fault is that looking for highbrow answers to lowball questions reeks of grad-school condescention, a tactic that Eddy is careful to avoid. His strength is that he likes what he likes, without recourse to crypto-fascist notions of musical correctness; by paying heed to bands and styles that most of us wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot stylus, he frees himself to build strange bridges between dark continents unvisited by most travellers and rearrange familiar ones into new landmasses and integrate the populace. The Fall rubs shoulders with Debbie Gibson, Poison shares makeup tips with the Cover Girls, and Dr. Hook and the Geto Boys’ Bushwick Bill compare eyepatches – sounds like a party to me, albeit one during which I’d probably opt to hang out behind the punch bowl.
The most crucial ingredient here, the one that holds this haphazard cartography together, is a wild streak of humor (another aspect that eludes the rockologist majority). This is one of the few rock tomes (maybe the only one written so far this decade) that’s laugh-out-loud, embarrass-yourself-on-the-subway funny. (I’m not at all sure that a statement like “For fifteen years, Kix were the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world” was meant as a joke, but I laughed nonetheless.) And without getting too precious about it, that’s the Eddy difference – most critics are so tight-assedly cool these days that they wouldn’t dare attempt something so base as to crack you up (or piss you off, for that matter). Eddy does both without shame, which may indeed make him the proper heir to Meltzer, Bangs, and Christgau that he’s been hyped to be.
I don’t think this is quite the Aesthetics of Rock for the nineties, as some have claimed (Joe Carducci’s Rock and the Pop Narcotic is) – I’d say it falls a little closer to Meltz’s followup volume, Gulcher, which surveyed the litter on all sides of the cultural street and gave it significance through its very insignificance. ‘Cept this time, Eddy put the music back in. Throw down your mirrorshades and grab this book – if, by some quirk of millennial fate, Quarterflash ends up getting posthumously lionized like the Count Five and ? and the Mysterians did (thanx to Les), you can tell the Johnny-come-latelies of the future that you were hip to it all along. God help you.
