The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [80]
The way we conceive such figures serves a number of functions other than our desire for something—anything, really—to worship. They make telling the story of art or of philosophy or of science much easier: you narrate it as a history of breakthroughs and compelling characters. In the bewildering chaotic welter that is the world of art or of ideas, they provide nodes; they are a way of simplifying experience and history into a shorthand consisting of a few names or biographical sketches. And they are absorbing as character studies, or studies in symbolic pathology, always poised in our imaginations between hyper-effectiveness and mental illness. The promotion of any given actual person to this status is—I think—well-nigh arbitrary. But it makes things easier and satisfies our basic impulse to have something or someone to admire unqualifiedly.
This is not to say that everything is just as good as everything else, or that some artists aren’t better than others. But I do want to say that no one is as better than everyone else as figures such as Picasso or The Beatles are imagined as being.
Avant the Avant-Garde
In part, this deification of The Beatles was made possible by the rise of avant-garde art. The avant-garde arts arose in the West in the nineteenth century, roughly with Manet. They proceed by a series of radical innovations, or looking at it the other way round, through a series of radical rejections of the past: a series of negations. Overcoming or destroying the past is a mark of the genius, and avant-garde arts consist of an ever-accelerating series of movements, each defined in part by its destruction or negation of the previous movement:
impressionism/fauvism/cubism/dadaism, for example
or
expressionism/minimalism/pop/conceptualism
In the avant-garde, the authenticity of the artist and the work is established by his or its overcoming of the dead weight of tradition; the avant-garde artist frees himself and us from the oppressiveness of what has come before and the rules or restrictions associated with it.
In the traditional arts, very differently—and here I include crafts such as pottery or fabric arts—the authenticity of the work and of the artist is established through continuity with the past or mastery of the techniques associated with the tradition. They tend to have a guild structure, in which the artist serves an apprenticeship with a master and absorbs precisely the sort of strictures and skills that the avant-garde artist is dedicated to destroying.
Now let’s apply these distinctions to popular music. Country music is a pointedly traditional form, and new artists constantly pay their respects to the generations that have gone before. Indeed it is very likely that a country song will be about country music itself, and it might mention Hank Williams or Patsy Cline. And it will often try to establish its connection to traditional themes, settings, and objects: beer, for example, or trucks (which put in many an appearance in Taylor Swift’s country-inflected pop songs), or small towns.
Even in very mainstream or poppy or crossover country music you will hear the traditional sounds of pedal steel guitar, or fiddle, or mandolin. And of course the basic song structures or even specific melodic themes, fall into a fairly narrow range. Likewise, the blues is a traditional form. The twelve-bar structure of the blues, with its pattern of recurring lines and the typical turnaround, are identifying features, and though artists have some freedom to alter or depart from these forms, a too-radical departure disqualifies the item as a blues song.
Blues and country music have changed radically over time. They have been electrified, and virtuosos have introduced many innovations; think of the guitar styles of Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Eric Clapton, and even Jimi Hendrix in this light; or the harmonica work of Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter,