Jeff Schwartz

American Culture Studies
Bowling Green State University
jeffs@bgsuvax.bgsu.edu

 

 

Simon Reynolds and Joy Press. The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995.

 

The Sex Revolts, which appeared this past spring from Harvard University Press, is unquestionably a major publication in the field of popular music studies. But it is also a deeply troubling one, one which points to significant problems concerning the status of popular music within the academy, and particularly within cultural studies.

 

Reynolds and Press offer a typology of cultural narratives of gender which dominate rock, mainly the rebel, who must escape the smothering femininity of mother, home, family, committed relationships, etc. for the freedom of the open road, the all-male world of adventure, and the possibility of machine-like autonomy, and the mystic, who seeks reunion with the lost maternal through mysticism, psychedelic drugs, and the embrace of nature (xiv). They conclude by surveying attempts by female artists to negotiate with these dominant narratives. The book is organized in these three sections: Rebel Misogynies, Into the Mystic, and Lift up your Skirt and Speak, and each section proceeds through an exhaustive survey of artists both well-known (The Rolling Sto nes, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Pink Floyd) and obscure (John’s Children, Radio Birdman, Can).

 

As the first book devoted entirely to how gender is treated in rock, The Sex Revolts deserves our attention and even our praise. Yet it also calls out for some serious criticism, since it is in some important respects a deeply flawed piece of work. It is my hope that in beginning to excavate these flaws, I will be embarking on the kind of critical engagement with the book that will assure not its undoing but rather the productive unfolding of some of its unrealized potentialities in the coming years.

 

Essentially the book suffers from three glaring weaknesses. First, although the dust jacket features a Warhol portrait of Mick Jagger with pink lipstick and green eye shadow, promising a decadent, cynical, knowing attitude towards gender performance, Reynolds and Press present a version of rock which is completely heterosexualized. Their examples are chosen to support their theory, not to complicate it. Queer musicians are not featured (a scan of the index reveals no entries for David Bowie, Lou Reed, Tom Robinson, Melissa Etheridge, or Elton John, to pick some prominent names at random), and those male artists who do appear who have made sexual ambiguity part of their persona, such as Jagger, Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, and Kurt Cobain, are treated only with regard to the putatively heterosexual content of their lyrics. Likewise, female artists’ use of sexual ambiguity is read as negotiation with the maculinist dominant narratives of rock, without any possible queer connotations. Such a blindness to the complex performativity of gender and sexuality within rock ‘n’ roll is astonishing, and constitutes a real obstacle to understanding.

 

The second serious flaw in the book is the authors’ almost exclusive emphasis on lyrics. Reynolds and Press seldom discuss the non-lyrical dimensions of the music, and when they do they resort to vague and highly impressionistic language. Thus, for example, the music of Trobbing Gristle is said to have “mirrored a world of unremitting ugliness, dehumanization, and brutalism. They degraded and mutilated sound, reaching nether-limits that even now have yet to be under-passed” (91). These are perhaps valid things to say about Throbbing Gristle, but they don’t go very far toward explaining what the music actually sounds like or how the sounds can be understood as mirroring such social conditions as “dehumanization.” It is unlikely that a book on film, painting, fiction, or any art form other than popular music could be published by a major academic press if it contained no formal, technical, or semiotic analysis of the medium and texts in question. This is not to say that only musicologists should write about popular music. Given the culturally conservative character of contemporary musicology, this would be a poor idea. But those of us in cultural studies who write about music have an obligation to acquire some familiarity with its mechanics, just as film scholars learn the conventions of camerawork and editing.

 

The lack of rigor in popular music scholarship is due to the failure of popular music to be accepted in the academy as anything other than a (more or less transparent) social symptom. Courses on topics such as “Rap and African-American Politics” or “Madonna and Postmodern Feminism” are widespread, while those on the formal aspects of popular music or on popular artists as composers and performers are scarce to nonexistent. The basic tools needed for serious analysis of music are monopolized by a musicology which has little interest in popular music or or in the socio-political concerns of cultural studies. This situation has begun to change in the past decade. But the changes have come almost entirely from within musicology, where a new generation of radical musicologists (such as Brett, McClary, and Walser) has been slowly emerging. A corresponding shift within cultural studies has not yet materialized.

 

With musicology still largely hostile to, and cultural studies still largely incapable of rigorous engagement with, popular musical forms, a kind of semi-scholarship has tended to fill the void. If one runs through the list of university press books on popular music, one finds mostly books written by non-academics or by academics whose primary work is as journalists. The tendency has, I suspect, been exacerbated by university press editors, who, increasingly confronted with a bottom line, are likely to see their popular music titles as a best bet for the coveted crossover market. I do not intend here to marshall a defense of the academic gates against the journalistic barabarians. My point is simply that the particular circumstances of contemporary academe have given the field of popular music studies a somewhat anomalous set of contours — contours whose limitations are evident in the book under review.

 

To be blunt, The Sex Revolts is not a scholarly book. And while in some respects this is refreshing, it also leads to the third and greatest of the flaws I am enumerating. In their handling of cultural theory — of the range of theoretical materials from which contemporary cultural study draws its assumptions and practices — Reynolds and Press are often clumsy and irresponsible. Names familiar to PMC readers are dropped every few pages: Kristeva, Irigaray, Deleuze and Guattari, Virilio, Theweleit, Sartre, Burroughs, Marinetti, Bataille, Sade, Nietszche, Bachelard, Caillois, Catherine Clement, Marjorie Garber, etc. But there is no evidence that these different and in some cases quite contradictory thinkers have been seriously or systematically engaged. Their names are simply tossed off as the authors string together well-known theoretical catch phrases and brief, striking quotations. The text is no more than garnished with contemporary theory, and this window dressing can’t obscure the fact that Reynolds and Press are basically working with a Jungian myth-symbol criticism that emerged back in the 1960’s. Admittedly, twenty years ago this approach produced Greil Marcus’s masterful Mystery Train, but it also gave us such foolishness as David Dalton’s study of James Dean (wherein Dean is Osiris) or, more recently, Danny Sugerman’s tedious book on Guns ‘n’ Roses (Axl Rose is a shaman) — not to mention the works of Camille Paglia.

 

Paglia, in fact, is one of the more frequently cited theorists in The Sex Revolts, along with Robert Bly and Joseph Campbell. And the habitual recurrence to these three, whose work is more or less compatible with the pseudo-Jungian approach of Reynolds and Press, leads to their unlikely — not to say hilarious — combination with other cultural theorists whose work is conspicuously incompatible with such an approach. Bly, for example, is yoked together with the brilliant theorist and historian of the Nazi imaginary, Klaus Theweleit; Paglia is paired variously with Sartre, Kristeva, and Ferenczi (85-86).

 

As I said, it is not a scholarly book. And yet it is one that I think will be genuinely valuable to scholars in a field which offers so few points of productive departure. The Sex Revolts has the great advantage over other works in the field that it at least poses some of the important questions, and gestures, however haphazardly, toward some of the theoretical tools that could be used to answer these questions. Even a conceptually bizarre combination like Bly/Theweleit might lead to a worthwhile mutual interrogation once it is unpacked from Reynolds and Press’s rather artless framework and taken up by someone more adept at contemporary cultural and political theory. For all its faults, The Sex Revolts succeeds in suggesting some of the productive directions that an as-yet barely emergent, more rigorous and thoroughgoing cultural study of popular music might take.

Works Cited

 

• Brett, Philip. Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds. Queering the Pitch: The New Lesbian and Gay Musicology. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Dalton, David. James Dean: The Mutant King. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974.
• Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. New York: Plume, 1975.
• McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.
• Sugerman, Danny. Appetite for Destruction: The Days of Guns N’ Roses. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
• Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Havover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1993.