“Ruined right there”: the moment rock ‘n’ roll died, according to David Byrne
Why did I get into music journalism? I hear no one asking. There are, of course, a number of reasons that inspired my decision to write and cover an art form that will always be vitally important to modern society, but underneath it all is a desire to be a part of a necessary cultural conversation.
Without the ability to craft a song like David Byrne, my role as a journalist is to engage with the art form from the fan and observer perspective, either supporting or challenging the ideas that are presented in the art to help relate it to the culture it exists in.
Despite the toxicity many like to smear journalism with, in a modern democratic society, its role remains vitally important, and that extends to the subjectivity of art.
But journalism isn’t quite as glamorous as the art it reacts to. No journalist can be found stomping up and down a stage, in an elaborate outfit, to a chorus of screaming fans. Inherently, the contrasting disposition of a music writer can feel damaging to the glamorous artistry of rock and roll, which serves largely in the subjectivity of art and is devoid of the sensibility of pragmatism.
But ultimately, rather dull reality served as a pin to the broadly inflated world of rock and roll, according to Byrne. The man who possesses a truly generational songwriting ability, that many of the world, largely including the journalistic, would kill to have, took a swipe at the media world as the reason that rock and roll’s burning spirit turned to embers.
“I don’t get too hung up on the words,” he said, beginning his attack on the literary world. “The sounds of the words have as much meaning as their literal sense. But intelligent lyrics and rock and roll don’t have to be antithetical. Rock and roll lost its innocence in the ‘60s. Once Rolling Stone appeared, it was ruined right there. But even simple rock and roll has that kind of intellectual awareness, or maybe just smarts. The Rolling Stones or John Fogerty, who I think of as playing basic rock ‘n’ roll, have something else in the music.”
To Byrne, innocence essentially means music that’s devoid of criticism. Because the introduction of a music magazine ultimately brought with it some accountability to artists who were either underdelivering or, more importantly, being extremely damaging in their artistic rhetoric.
What would The Rolling Stones actually have become, if no one was there to highlight the truly awful reality of their lyrics in ‘Brown Sugar’ – while the 1960s may have tried to paint it as so, there was, in fact, nothing at all innocent about the lyrical content of that song, and so journalistic criticism ultimately helped bring that to light.
Perhaps a common misconception in history is that the true spirit of rock and roll is nihilism or apathy, but as time has evolved, with a little help from external criticism, we’ve learned that those are just the baseless misconceptions about rock and roll, and instead, it’s truly about the ability to portray authenticity.
