I'm surprised that I never posted this here until now. It originally ran in the Indiana University student newspaper as a letter to the editor, sometime in the 1990s, responding to a friend's careless remarks in his opinion column about John Mellencamp. Now, I've never been a fan of Mellencamp, but I find his music inoffensive, and my friend's comments reflected a kind of snobbery that I've been guilty of too, but have tried to outgrow. Still, this piece wasn't an attack on him, though he took it as one and was afraid that it would upset his editor. It didn't, but it bothered my friend.
As I hope my readers will see, this piece is meant playfully. I think it describes tendencies in pop music that are real enough, but it was fun to write and I hope it's fun to read. The musical references are dated, but most of them will be recognizable even to younger readers. Their recordings are still in print, and many get regular reissues to commemorate the anniversaries of their original releases. That's one reason to post it now: these musicians are now saints, if not Elder Gods. As for newer musicians, classifying them and their work can be left as an exercise for the reader.
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I was extremely annoyed by Scott Smith's elitist remarks on Hoosier rock in Thursday's ids until, like a bolt from Heaven, I realized that his objections to John Mellencamp were not musical but religious. Sectarian and theological, to be exact, not spiritual.
Scott is a gnostic; he believes, that is, that there is one true spirit of rock & roll, which ought not to be polluted by sharing it with the masses. For they are iron, and rock & roll is gold. Gnosticism has universalist pretensions, for it speaks of the spark of divinity in all human beings, whom rock & roll will save from the darkness in which they are kept by the record industry. But in practice it holds that the masses love their darkness, preferring the path that is wide and easy, and leads to Paula Abdul. The upshot of this is that any music which becomes too popular will be denounced by gnostics automatically. Gnosticism is also distinguished by its dismissal, indeed hatred of the flesh -- sex and women are evil – and of fun. Sexual references for shock value are gnostic, since they buy into the idea that sex is nasty. Punk is not always gnostic, but it has strong gnostic tendencies. Johnny Rotten/John Lydon is a prime example of gnosticism in punk and postpunk. Metal is often strongly gnostic, though this loses credibility when it plays to arena-sized audiences. Frank Zappa is a gnostic, as are Ian Anderson, George Harrison, rockabilly revivalists, and purists of all kinds.
From this you can see that the theological positions I'm sketching out transcend musical genre. George Harrison, for instance, has access to a mass audience by virtue of his having been a Beatle; this enabled him to make the great gnostic album All Things Must Pass -- austere, inhuman, boring -- with expensive production that few gnostics could afford. (The other post-Beatle gnostic album, John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band, was also produced by Phil Spector.) Zappa's probably the only other gnostic in the same league, though Yes' Tales of Topographic Oceans, Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Tull's Passion Play, and certain other British art-rock bands approach it. It's not so much the kind of music you make or listen to that counts, but your attitude to the audience. Is Prince gnostic? No, but he'd like you to think he is.
Like any musician who embraces (or at least seeks) a mass audience, John Mellencamp is catholic. Rock and pop catholicism is, in the original sense of the word 'catholic', all-embracing. It's also capital-intensive (lots of expensive, fancy equipment), oriented to spectacle, and professional, like High Mass in St. Peter's with vestments and incense. It has in common with gnosticism ambivalence about the flesh, and a distrust of women and sex, but as an institution which intends to last awhile, it makes uneasy provision for human love and marriage, and even for pleasure -- as long as it can charge you for it. Popular catholicism tends to the veneration of relics, tacky but innocent vulgarity: Elvis Presley's "It's Now or Never" being the paradigm case, Graceland Inc. its logical outcome.
Unfortunately, catholicism also encourages distance between the performers and the laity, I mean audience. This can lead to cynicism on both sides: the record companies and performers may come to regard the faceless masses as manipulable sheep to fleece, while the audience despise the clergy as venal, hypocritical, soulless hacks. This much is hardly news; it's the collegiate-rock-critic snottiness which animates Scott's column. But the music-business hierarchy isn't nearly as smart as it and its gnostic critics would like you to believe: if they could really manipulate and control consumers, the major labels wouldn't lose money on 90% of their releases. And a lot of rock catholics believe in what they're doing, like a humble parish priest who really tries to serve his congregation, and some manage to keep their integrity as they rise in the hierarchy. They believe that the forms of commercial music are a viable a medium for serious work as the avant-garde, and they want to address a mass audience, giving them accessible music with honest content.
It's surely a purely dogmatic question whether this is a valid position; I happen to share it. The Beatles are of course the prime example of a band who managed to be enormously popular without selling out, though there are others. (Is it a coincidence, do you think, that Beatlemania, Vatican II, and the Kennedy myth of Camelot were roughly contemporaneous? Now, there's a conspiracy theory for someone -- not Oliver Stone, please! -- to develop.) Other examples, lesser perhaps, include Motown, the Rolling Stones, Mellencamp, Springsteen, and Peter Gabriel (a gnostic art-rocker who became a Liberation-theology catholic rocker); it's almost redundant to mention Madonna. Of the Beatles, Paul MaCartney was the most purely catholic. Major-label metal is of course catholic, despite its pretensions, and "Satanism" in music as in religion is basically just catholicism turned upside down.
I don't see rock protestantism anywhere. The remaining trend I see in pop and rock is paganism. Paganism is grass-roots music, with as little distance between performer and audience as possible: amateurish, sloppy, often anti-intellectual, ecstatic. Though sometimes it only seems so: Elvis Presley's Sun sessions are pagan, though Presley later became catholic. The Beatles began as a skiffle band, a pagan English form. Garage bands are pagan. The Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" is pagan. Ringo Starr is the pagan Beatle. The Grateful Dead are pagan, partly because of their intimacy with the grassroots movement of Deadheads and partly because of their ability to sound sloppy despite their technical ability. But paganism isn't all sweetness and sunshine; Sid Vicious represents the downside of Paganism, mindlessly self-destructive. Punk -- British punk, anyway -- was largely a pagan movement, despite its tendency to slide into gnosticism. Jello Biafra is a catholic (or maybe a gnostic) pretending to be pagan, with some success. Bob Dylan is a sort of pagan gnostic. At their best the Butthole Surfers are pagan, at their worst they're gnostic. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether you have a gnostic or a pagan on your hands: paganism can be as inaccessible as gnosticism, vide early Meat Puppets.
Please note that there are no bad guys or good guys in my scheme of things: I enjoy music from all three categories, each on its own terms and for its own virtues. When gnosticism earns its elitism, when catholicism earnestly seeks to serve and entertain, when paganism achieves true ecstatic union among the performer, the audience, and the cosmos, they are at their best. On the other hand, the puritan snob in me enjoys gnosticism's shock tactics, the tacky Hoosier in me enjoys Madonna, and the five-year-old in me enjoys making doo-doo mudpies with the Butthole Surfers. Nor are the three tendencies mutually exclusive, as I've suggested already. The Beatles probably came as close as anyone has to embodying all three. It may be that there's no way to keep the devotees of each sect from sneering at the others, unfortunately.
