The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [121]
Then, if you happen to be born into a black, single-parent family in the inner city—impoverished, disadvantaged, along with all the shocks and traumas that man is heir to—by the time you go to school, if you’re not a Hasidic or Sikh child who’s learned to lick the honey-coated letters (wherever the written tradition is important), you’re already completely resistant to learning. And the more poverty and greed of the Reagan-Bush kind around you, the greater the attraction of the streets—the instant gratification of crack, television, fast food.
Anything of a serious nature isn’t “instant”—you can’t “do” the Sistine Chapel in one hour. And who has time to listen to a Mahler symphony, for God’s sake?
In the introduction to your book ‘The Infinite Variety of Music’ [1966], you wrote: “At this moment, as of this writing, God forgive me, I have far more pleasure following the musical adventures of Simon and Garfunkel or of the Association singing ‘Along Comes Mary’ than I have in most of what is being written now by the whole community of ‘avant-garde’ composers. . . . Pop music seems to be the only area where there is to be found unabashed vitality, the fun of invention, the feeling of fresh air.” What do you think of rock music today?
Boo, hiss! I’ve become very disappointed with most of it. In the Sixties and Seventies there were many wonderful musicians I liked. And to me the Beatles were the best songwriters since Gershwin. Recently, though, I was at a party where there were a lot of kids in their twenties, and most of them didn’t even know songs like “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “She’s Leaving Home,” “She Said She Said” or any one of ten other Beatles masterpieces. What is that? And if I hear one more metallic screech or one more horrible imitation of James Brown, I’m going to scream.
When I was in Spain several years ago, I remember watching huge rings of people in the square of a Catalonian village, joining arms and dancing sardanas to a type of band called a cobla—dances with twenty-seven counts, dances of such complexity that I couldn’t learn them. Talk about innate dance and musical competence! Those people just did it. Like those drunken Greek sailors who come into a tavern and start dancing in fives or sevens . . . and the band doesn’t know that it’s playing in fives or sevens. That is extraordinary music—much more exciting than almost anything the current rock world has to offer.
I want to ask you about your refusal to accept an arts award from President Bush and to attend a dinner given by John Frohnmayer, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, in response to the latter’s decision to withdraw the agency’s sponsorship of an exhibition about AIDS—a result of congressional legislation against government financing of supposedly “obscene” and overtly political art.
The last time I went to the White House was during Jimmy Carter’s administration, when I was honored along with Agnes de Mille, James Cagney, Lynn Fontanne and Leontyne Price, among others—a good bunch. I love the White House more than any house in the world—after all, I’m a musician and a citizen of my country—but since 1980 I haven’t gone there because it’s had such sloppy housekeepers and caretakers.
With regard to the Jesse Helms–inspired restrictions on federal funding, the worst thing concerns the removal of politics as an acceptable subject of artistic works. Because then you’d have to forget Goya, Picasso’s Guernica, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Forget everything. And as for “obscenity”: Almost the entire Metropolitan Museum of Art would have to come down—Mars fucking Venus, the Rubens collection of large, fleshy ladies with wet thighs and the naked ephebus from ancient Greece, Hermes with his cock up innumerable inches! And the picture of little Jesse Helms running around the Senate as if it were the boys’ lavatory of a high school, showing dirty pictures to the other senators, is