The struggle to bring film, television, and popular music into the liberal arts curriculum thus has not been easy given the fact that for many intellectuals and academics in the 1950s and the 1960s the mass media, including film, pop music, and television, were seen as lowest common denominator opiates—which in some cases is true--that were of little interest to those who studied culture, meaning high culture, in the academy. By the time I went to university in the 1970s, however, film was comfortably ensconced in English, Comparative Literature Departments and even Film Programmes and Departments began to appear. Eventually, Popular Culture, if in a more practical and pragmatic key, was added into the curricular mix as those neo-liberals who ran and run the increasingly retail oriented bureaucracies known as universities and colleges discovered that there is students to be matriculated and monies to be made from the teaching of film, television, and pop music as a “profession”, even if they are all professions that, like professional sports, are not easy to break into.
As someone who came of age in the 1960s I grew to love film, popular music, and eventually television, once it, from my perspective, matured. By 1963 I had grown to love the Beatles and could barely wait for the next Beatles single or album release to appear at the record store, department store, or drug store down the street from my Dallas home. By 1967, thanks to the Beatles albums Rubber Soul. Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band, I had increasingly come to see popular music as an art form. In this I was not alone as William Mann’s famous 1963 review of Beatles songs as art in the Times and the rise of “intelligent” rock magazines like Rolling Stone, NME, and Melody Maker make clear. By 1968 I was listening to what we would now call an alternative FM radio station in Arlington and developing a taste for progressive art rock and progressive psychedelic bands like King Crimson, the Moody Blues and later on Yes, Genesis, Van der Graaf Generator, Spirit, Kansas, Captain Beyond, and, in particular, Gentle Giant. Prog became my popular music of choice—I was already a devotee of classical music--though I continued to enjoy selectively other pop music genres in the increasingly segmented world of popular music including pop, power pop, soul, hard rock, punk, new wave, new romanticism, goth, hard rock, grunge, and even a bit of heavy metal.
Another of the bands I "got into” in those years was Rush. I first heard the Canadian rock trio in 1974 when I bought their eponymous first album. I liked it and still do. Despite this I really didn’t connect with Rush’s subsequent albums until Permanent Waves came out in 1980. I suspect this was because I was never a comic book nerd, a science fiction geek, or a fan of Ayn Rand and her cult. I was more into Hitchcock, Mark Twain, and Max Weber. Permanent Waves, however, with its, what seemed to me at the time, more progressive nature, appealed to me a lot and made me a Rush fan again. I bought every album they released afterwards save for Clockwork Angels, which I will hope to pick up at some point.
Even though I was into rock I was never an inveterate reader of rock magazines. I tended to dismiss rock "critics" because of their, what seemed to me, low level “criticism", a “criticism that seemed to me a hodgepodge of new journalistic narcissism and arrogance a la Pauline Kael blended with an inability to comprehend that beauty and value are in the eye of the beholder. What I valued was what I, for whatever cultural, economic, political, demographic, or geographic reason or reasons, liked. The fact that what I liked was not liked by most “critics” particularly at Rolling Stone, didn’t matter to me. I did not give a crap what they liked for whatever musically correct reason. I liked what I liked and that was good enough for me. After all, I was never someone to wilt before peer pressure.
When I matriculated at university I discovered that there were books on popular culture. I discovered Robin Wood’s book on Hitchcock. I discovered Dick Hebdige’s book on the mods, the punks, and subcultural style. I discovered several of Simon Frith’s many early books on popular music. I discovered John Tulloch’s and Manuel Alverado’s book on Doctor Who, a show I grew up with. I discovered the publications of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and even thought of applying there for postgraduate work there. I was lucky I didn’t as I did not anticipate the devastation and destruction Margaret Thatcher left in her godzilla like wake. I even began to, if tentatively, write on popular culture when I wrote an essay on Punk Names for an Anthropology seminar on Names and Labels though it was not at the heart of what I studied in university.
Given all this it is not surprising that I would eventually get around to reading Canadian ethnomusicologist Chris McDonald’s Rush, Rock Music and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). McDonald does an excellent job of bringing together textual analysis, sociology, ethnography, and history in his analysis of Rush. For McDonald Rush and its science fiction and fantasy lyrics, its dispassionate lyrics, its musical virtuosity, its musical inventiveness and experimentation, and its emphasis on hard work and professionalism, is a middle class band whose music particularly appeals to other White middle class male nerds—like myself—including middle class musician nerds—not like myself--who too feel like outsiders in the suburbs they grew up in. McDonald also does a nice job of exploring the different cultures into which White middle class male critics—many of whom act as rock’s tastemakers for many listeners--are inscribed one of which has made Rush and its progressive rock confreres virtually the spawn of a rock and roll Satan.
I did have a few problems with McDonald’s book. McDonald seems to take the position that Canada, from where Rush hails, is either like the US or converging with it while not arguing for either position. Did the US academic publisher balk at too much Canadian content? He does not inform us where those he interviewed are from. Does he think it not matters? But does it matter? Still I found Rush, Rock Music and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown an excellent analysis of Rush and its contexts and recommend it to those with an intellectual interest in popular culture. Those who respond to any scholarly work on popular culture, like the aptly named Xtreme who offers a rather typical knee jerk anti-intellectual “review" of the book and the aptly named Tom Brady, who doesn’t grasp that the formulaic claim that something is “boring" tells us little about what is being reviewed and a lot about the “reader” or “listener” doing the “review", on Amazon, one of the many brave new digital world sites that has opened its coffers up to the lowest lowest common denominator, need not apply. They, after all, appear to prefer their world unexamined so they can continue to live their lives in a world where myths and fairy tales are mistaken for reality.
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