Sex, hate and hypocrisy

Fifty years after the debut of Elvis Presley, Michael Henderson says that rock'n'roll remains an essentially juvenile genre

Un less you have been living in a cave for the past month — and if you have, good for you — it cannot have escaped your attention that pop music, rock music, call it what you like, celebrates its 50th birthday this month. People have lit candles in newspaper columns and on television, and even the opera-loving Jim Naughtie felt obliged to loosen his tie, don his blue suede shoes and inform listeners of the Today programme that, be-bop-a-lula, he was ready to rip it up.

We've got that tub of lard, Elvis, to blame. He started the whole shebang with 'That's All Right Mama' only five years (to supply a historical perspective) after a very different singer, Kirsten Flagstad, had given the first performance of the 'Four Last Songs' of Richard Strauss, a composer who first shook 'em up in the 1880s. Even in 1949 the 'Four Last Songs', glorious as they are — indeed the greatest songs of the last century in any language — seemed like an anachronism. Strauss was a throwback, admittedly to the greatest musical culture the world has ever known. The postwar world, increasingly obsessed by youth, needed a standard-bearer to sing its own songs, and anointed a gauche kid from Tupelo, Mississippi, whose gift was to transform the raw music of poor blacks into comforting, bite-sized chunks for white record-buyers. At a stroke, the teenager was born, an unsettling development for men and women who were still coming to terms with the fracturing consequences of a horrible war.

Half a century later it seems that teenagers, and the people who cater for their easy, pliable tastes. have taken over the world. And don't imagine that being a teenager simply means awaiting the key to the door. Some people carry their teenage years into middle age. Mary Ann Sieghart, for instance, who loves to reheat her dismal annual dish about attending the Glastonbury festival, is still a 15year-old swinger at heart. John Peel, the 60something disc jockey, once confessed to a television audience that he wished he had 'the courage to be a terrorist', proving that Tom Wolfe wasn't jesting when he referred to the 'radical chic' of those who are cut off from more regular lives. As for Janet Street-Porter, that living, breathing embodiment of inverted snobbery, a grateful nation can only offer thanks for sharing with the rest of us the extended joke that is her public life. Let's spit it out. Pop culture may be 50, it may even have provided some innocent (and not so innocent) entertainment along the way, but it has never grown up and it never will. Ignore the claims of its admirers, most of whom can't spell their own names, and listen instead to those who know a thing or two about the genuinely liberating effects of high culture. Anthony Burgess, the novelist and critic, who considered himself a musician by vocation, damned pop as 'a battening subart'. Harrison Birtwistle believes it supplies nothing more than 'a cosmetic continuum' to our impatient lives. But these observations pale beside Allan Bloom's withering volley. In his ferocious tract The Closing of the American Mind he really drew back his bow. 'Never,' he wrote, 'was there an art form directed so exclusively to children.'

Anybody who looks closely at the development of pop music over the past 50 years, and recoils with horror at the position of absolute privilege it now enjoys, may feel that those men came closer to telling the truth than the battalion of critics who clothe the excesses of its performers with the garb of artistry. Rock music, wrote Bloom, was based on a selfishness 'that becomes indignation and then transforms itself into morality'. It is rooted in three great themes, 'sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love'.

He might have gone further. He could have said that, with few exceptions, it is melodically obvious, harmonically non-existent and lyrically execrable. He could have said that many performers cannot play their instruments properly, and make a virtue of their incompetence. He could have said that with its manufactured sense of outrage, juvenile emotionalism, bogus egalitarianism and grotesque sentimentality, pop lacks the capacity to express any feelings other than the most basic; that by trying to be rebellious in some inchoate, let's-goad-the-parents sort of way, it has turned out a succession of illiterate chumps who are more conformist than the 'establishment' figures they find it daring to mock. How else does one account for those oafish lumpenproletarians, Oasis, who appear to have walked out of a Theodore Dalrymple column?

He might have added that no form of entertainment, not even the film industry, has produced so many unpleasant people, addicted to drink, drugs, sex or self-regard, and that no art form (if we can call it that) has been so indulged by the media. Far from it. Drug-taking and sexual excess are held to be an indispensable part of a rock'n'roll 'lifestyle', and the casualties (Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, Moon, etc.) are venerated as latter-day saints. How many thousands of young people seduced by the promise of 'liberation' have discovered instead that the road of excess leads not to the palace of wisdom but to a life of enslavement?

Which is not to say that popular music has no place. It lacks the depth of orchestral and chamber music, but at its best it can pack a middleweight punch. Think of 'Ticket to Ride', 'Keep On Running' and 'Monday, Monday'; or, in a different key, 'Dear Mr Fantasy' and 'Meet on the Ledge'. In his scorching novel The Human Stain, Philip Roth describes how Coleman Silk, a humanities professor in his late sixties, yields to the band music of his youth when it comes on the radio. 'None of the serious stuff he'd been listening to all his adult life put him into emotional motion the way that old swing music now did. "Everything stoical within me unclenches and the wish not to die, never to die, is almost too great to bear." ' Most of us have been there. Lest anybody should imagine I'm a spoilsport who resisted the customary follies of teenage years, I plead not guilty. At the age of 12 I had bought my first King Crimson album — there's precocity for you! By 13 I was 'into' Captain Beefheart (a throaty American singer, m'lud) and a year later I was grooving to performers as various as the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Tangerine Dream, Van der Graaf Generator, and — absolutely essential, this, for pretentious young shavers — the Velvet Underground. Any young boy at Repton in the early Seventies who wanted to know which records were worth owning had only to visit my study. And they did.

No Led Zeppelin there, you'll note, and certainly no Emerson, Lake and Palmer. There was a war of taste to be won, and it had to be waged by all necessary means. If you could get a letter printed in the Melody Maker, which the trendy boys picked up every Thursday before breakfast, it was like winning your First XI colours. People pointed at you in the street. It's odd to recall now, gazing down at those distant valleys from the Alpine heights of Covent Garden and Salzburg, that between the ages of 14 and 18 I appeared in the Melody Maker as an `LP winner' (awarded to the writer of the best letter) on more than a dozen occasions.

It was utter balls, of course. Yet what fun it was, particularly after I had found 'my' group. Every teenager must have a group of his or her own, and mine was Roxy Music, who for 18 months were the most original band rock music has produced, and ever will. 'They're just a bunch of homos!' one boy (a Cat Stevens fan, poor chap) sneered when I brandished a copy of their first album. When 1 eventually got to see them — on a Sunday evening of pure delight in October 1973, at Manchester's Free Trade Hall — and when Bryan Ferry sloped gracefully from the wings

to the front of the stage in the manner of a fast bowler approaching the crease, to sing 'Street Life', it felt like the most memorable single moment of my adolescence. It still does. Four months later, on a reckless night of booze and dope, a gang of us caught Brian Eno's first solo concert, at the King's Hall, Derby. Don't worry, darlings, we heard the chimes at midnight all right!

But, if you are wise, you grow up. In my case it was Beethoven's Seventh Symphony that opened a gate into a meadow of endless possibilities. Great music, like great art and great literature, broadens one's perspective because it has nothing to do with 'relevance' or social utility. Pop music can supply excitement, but not true joy. It cannot ennoble, but it can demean. It has no capacity for personal growth, and is hostile to the very notion of beauty. It lacks tenderness, compassion and forgiveness, and without those qualities there can be no art.

It doesn't stop the critics rolling their logs, though. Two years ago, when Brian Wilson, the former Beach Boy, came to London to perform his Pet Sounds album, these deadbeats competed with each another to acclaim his gifts. 'How do you review an icon?' asked one who shall remain nameless — no, let's give her a name: Barbara Ellen. Well, first, you could avoid words like icon, which sound grand but mean nothing. Then you could do what opera critics do whenever Domingo visits Covent Garden: tell readers whether he held the tune, or bumped into the scenery. Miss Ellen (and others) merely simpered, and failed to mention the not insignificant fact that Wilson sang flat throughout the two-hour show. This year, when he returned to the Festival Hall, they were at it again, some going so far as to pronounce him one of the 20th century's greatest composers.

Ho-hum. If you genuinely think that Wilson is a 'great' 20th-century 'composer' — in other words, a man fit to stand comparison with Sibelius, Mahier, Janacek, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartok, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Britten, to list only the most obvious names — as opposed to a songwriter with a pleasing harmonic talent who wrote perhaps a dozen good songs, then you shouldn't be writing about music. You should be digging roads.

It is more appropriate, certainly less embarrassing, to think of Wilson, and others like him, in terms of Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Harold Arlen, and even then he would not be sure of a place in the American first team. When you put him alongside John Mercer or Stephen Sondheim, who has taken the union of words and music to dazzling new heights, his achievement seems unremarkable.

Wilson is now a burnt-out case who has to be plonked in front of a piano (which he doesn't play) before the show can begin. Bob Dylan, who evidently has no home to go to, sounds more than ever like a Midwestern George Formby. Paul McCartney resembles an overgrown Boy Scout in bob-a-job week. Pete Townshend is on a list of sex offenders. What a marvellous advert these troubadours are for pop? 'Won't get fooled again' was the defiant roar of the counter-culture that nurtured them, but surely only a fool would have been fooled in the first place.

Yes, there have been some good moments along the way: Buddy Holly, The Kinks, Dusty, early f3yrds, some Motown, Steve Winwood, the Dylan of Blood on the Tracks, Paul Simon, The Band, Little Feat, The Grateful Dead c. 1970, Steely Dan and Elvis Costello. But, on the whole, Allan Bloom was right. 'As long as they have the Walkman on,' he wrote of his less curious students, 'they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf.' After 50 years, shouldn't we be aiming a little higher than that?