MYSTERY TRAIN - GREIL MARCUS

Boomer garbage. That’s really it, I’ll expand, but at its core, this is like the ur-text for Baby Boomer rock and roll nostalgia. The basic premise is that rock-n-roll and popular music generally are important american art forms and you should talk and write about them the way you would, say, a painting or a play. All that fine, fair enough even. It's fun and enlightening to talk about silly pop songs, to spend more time parsing the lyrics than the horny teen took to write them. It might be a little ridiculous to get paid to do this by a university like Cal, but again, I have no issue with any of this, in the abstract. And perhaps Marcus deserves credit for this, the book is old and it is possible that no one would take pop music “seriously” as an artform that tells us something about America without it (though I doubt that a) this is true and b) that this would be a bad thing). But I’m being too nice, this book contains some of the worst, dumbest takes I’ve ever read. I got the book because I had heard that it connected major american artist to popular archetypes, which sounded cool, and I was/am thinking alot about Gucci Mane and so I  wanted to read the Sly Stone/Staggerlee section of the book. I meant to only read that part but I saw an early chapter was about Robert Johnson, whom I admire and always enjoy reading about, and read that first. It really was the silliest take on Johnson I’ve ever seen: “the blues singers, in their twisted way, were the real Puritans...This side of the blues did not come from Africa, but from the Puritan revival of the Great Awakening, the revival that spread across the American colonies more than two hundred years ago. It was an explosion of dread and piety that Southern whites passed onto their slaves and that blacks ultimately refashioned into their own religion. The blues singers accepted the dread and refused the piety.”

Where to begin? It is peak professorial nonsense to assume that pre-Revolutionary War American slaves had dread “passed onto” them rather than developed it as a natural condition of being a slave. Why would you possibly need your master to instill this? Show me the calm, untroubled slave that this “history” implies. Marcus takes it for granted that the Puritan spirit of early New England America is all over blues but doesn’t really muster evidence besides that they both movements are interested in the devil. Even this he gets wrong. The devil implied in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” the quintessential Great Awakening sermon has basically nothing to do with the devil that appears in Johnson’s music. Johnson’s devil has precedents, tons of them, stretching back to African figures like Eshu, but Greil misses all of them. He misunderstands religion in the South, he misunderstands race relationships and how they map onto religions, he misunderstands the difference between a fundamentalist/evangelical and a puritan, he misunderstands which Great Awakening (the second) has the most to do with Johnson’s worldview. All of these mistakes stem from an over eagerness to situate Johnson in the larger, White narrative of American history and archetypes. This impulse blinds Marcus to other forces at play and makes him stretch to connect the seemingly low-cultural country blues of Johnson with the Great Awakening rather than exploring the actual (largely African-American) predecessors for his music. You really don’t have to go back to Puritans to figure out why a music meant to be heard by black sharecroppers in the pre-civil rights South would be suffused with dread and obsessed with the devil.
The Elvis chapter thought, is worse. Full disclosure: I don’t get Elvis. He’s fine, I guess, but having been born over a quarter century after he was relevant and a phenomena, all that is left to me is the music. And the music isn’t good. Or, again, it’s fine, but clearly only remembered for his real innovation, being white. Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Ike Turner, Bo Diddly, the list people who made more interesting and exciting music goes on and on. Even if you want to talk archetypes and what the biographies of the famous say about American culture, Rock n Roll’s actual founder Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a forgotten queer black southern woman, has the more instructive story that tells us a lot about America. Marcus ignores all of these. He focuses on Elvis because if you’re a white Californian like he is, Elvis would have sounded new and exciting, even though he isn’t. Additionally, Marcus again misreads the racial situation: “Singing in the fifties, before blacks began to guard their culture with the jealousy it deserved, Elvis had no guilty dues to pay.” Marcus seems to think that the fact that the black originators of rock and roll didn't’ confront or denounce Elvis stands as a sort of endorsement. It is amazing that a professor of American culture can’t think of any other reason that a Black person, in Memphis in the 50’s, might be hesitant to accuse a white man, who is clearly stealing, of stealing. But Marcus wants to like and admire Elvis the way he did as a child so he ignores his racism (both personal racism, you can look up no shortage of fucked up shit Elvis said, as well as the more broad, racist culture-vulturing) and declares Elvis a “real” blues singer: “Real white blues singers makes something new out of the blues...What links their music to the blues is an absolute commitment to the material, an expressive force open to some whites because they have been attracted to another man’s culture in a way that could not be denied. This is the music of whites not so much singing the blues as living up to them.” It seems like Marcus’ stance is that White blues singers are “real” if they’re good. And again, he seems to think that if they “can’t be denied” or no one stops them from doing it, they’re good. He fails to show how the Black folks that created blues could have “denied” Elvis and chooses to take their failure to do so as an endorsement on their part.

The rest of the book is not great either, lots more stuff about Boomer bands and how important and cool they were. Lots and lots of Marcus talking about how great his taste was in 1968 or whatever and how amazing it was to hear this stuff on the radio. Occasionally, he’ll remark that someone or another is like Huck Finn or Ahab or something like that. And for this he is an American Studies professor at Cal. The Boomers really are the worst generation since the concept of a generation was codified. I think I’m overreacting to this slightly but their insistence, as a cohort, of running the planet into the sun before relinquishing an iota of power, of being the center of attention culturally for half a century, the constant mythologizing, the toxic nostalgia, makes this a really hard read. I typically don’t read books I don’t like, I stop after a 100 pages or so (actually, usually around 50, that’s my normal cutoff), but I read this because it so offended me I wanted to write a negative review of it. This book comes so highly recommended, there are many gushing blurbs on the back from writers I respect, it was shocking how stupid it was. 0 trains, 1 awful generation.