Introduction

Rock criticism in the US started in all innocence. Until the mid-1960s, rock criticism did not yet exist and hardly anyone knew exactly what hip meant. When Richard Goldstein became the Village Voice’s first full-time rock critic in 1966, even his editor did not know what a rock critic actually was. In his memoir, Another Little Piece of my Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the ’60s (2015), Goldstein illustrates the numerous possibilities this lack of knowledge offered to a young aspiring writer from the Bronx. Rock journalism as a form had still to be defined, its contours were still blurry, and its rules had yet to be invented. The Voice, according to Goldstein, offered freedom. The editor proofread your piece on the way to the printer and hardly ever interfered. From his memoir one gets the impression that Goldstein had sufficient time to find his voice as a rock critic and that he could invent himself as an author. He underscores that he “was in it for the openness—there were no rules or standards to meet. To me, a critic didn’t have to get it right; he just had to notice things. My job was to write what I saw, heard, and felt about something I loved” (36–37). Goldstein makes clear that in the mid-1960s rock journalism was more than simply writing about the bands and singers one found interesting. Although most of his articles concentrated on music, he also “covered everything from the counterculture to the revolution it spawned” (35). From this it becomes obvious that already at its inception rock writing was a protean genre. Later texts such as, for instance, Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989) or Paul Morley’s Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City (2005) would confirm that writing about rock music could take a rather unusual form, i.e. an intriguing blend of Berkeley-trained political activism and an individual writer’s very own definition of aesthetics in rock music.

While American rock critics like Goldstein in the 1960s had the feeling that their attempt to establish an intimate relation between words and sounds offered unheard-of possibilities of shaping the minds and musical tastes of their readers, contemporary music journalists would either tend to ridicule their colleagues’ naiveté or look back on the 1960s with a feeling of nostalgia. Since the digital revolution, rock journalism is suffering from a profound uncertainty as regards its future task and form. Is the rock writer’s traditional role as a gatekeeper and arbiter of taste still necessary in a time of music blogs and instant access to electronic musical archives? Have we really “become victims of our ever-increasing capacity to store, organize, instantly access, and share vast amounts of cultural data” (xxi), as Simon Reynolds claims in his much-discussed Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (2011)? If the “energy and insight of pop comes from juggling its contradictions rather than purging them” (xiv), as Bob Stanley contends, might it not still be the task of the rock journalist to elucidate the multilayered complexity of precisely those contradictions?

Concerning the task of the rock critic, Greil Marcus not only condemns en passant academics who write about pop music (“So much of the academic writing I read on pop music is so terrible. It’s so patently fraudulent,” Bonomo 96); he also stresses that criticism plays neither a gatekeeping role nor that of moral guardian. He elaborates on this as follows: “But I don’t think there’s any good critic who sees himself or herself as protecting the public or guiding the public, protecting the public from what’s bad and guiding the public toward what’s good” (169). The critic’s function, according to Marcus, is rather that of a translator, that is, someone who is able to fully experience a work of art and who is then capable of illuminating what makes it different (seductive, boring, appealing, or appalling). As Marcus himself has shown in numerous books and essays, translating rock music’s constellations of sounds, voices, gestures, and symbols into rock journalism can offer exciting new perspectives and insights. In an interview with Oliver Hall, he claims: “That’s what criticism is all about. It is the attempt to get inside the moment that is already speaking lucidly and translate it—not because the world needs you to do that, but because there’s something appealing about it, if you have a certain sensibility” (168).

It is interesting to ask what happens when one sees the American rock critic not only as a translator but also as an Americanist. This was one of the most important questions that led us to organize an international conference on American rock journalism at the University of Siegen, Germany. From 28 February to 2 March 2014, American and German scholars and journalists discussed many aspects of this topic. The articles collected in this special issue of Rock Music Studies began as presentations at our conference. Although discussing a wide range of topics, one aspect that unites the first three articles is the question of whether the idea of authenticity, one of the bêtes noires of most contemporary rock critics, should still play a role for rock writing.

We were happy to welcome Richard Goldstein, one of the founders of rock journalism, as one of the keynote speakers at our conference. In his autobiographical piece, “Present at the Creation,” he offers a fascinating perspective on the creation of rock journalism in the mid-1960s. When he began writing his “Pop Eye” column for the Village Voice, as he emphasizes, there were no professional full-time rock critics. Touching upon topics as varied as the significance of the Voice, the importance of the New Journalism, the drugs, and the ever-present dialectics of race and class, Goldstein also calls attention to the crucial role queerness played for the creation of rock writing in the 1960s. Furthermore, he discusses the important question of whether rock writing can be authentic about its time and whether it can also be regarded as an authentic representation of the writer’s self.

In “‘Visions and Versions of America’: Greil Marcus’s Rock Journalism as Cultural Criticism,” Ulf Schulenberg seeks to elucidate to what degree Marcus’s rock journalism can be considered an American cultural criticism. His essay asks whether it is possible to advance the idea that Marcus’s rock journalism is more than rock writing. Moreover, the question of what role America plays in this context is posed. When both early American rock journalism and the field of American Studies try to answer the question “What is America?” it becomes obvious that the latter would profit from analyzing rock writing. However, this promising dialogue exists only in rudimentary form. By discussing Marcus’s texts (especially Mystery Train and his writings on punk rock), Schulenberg’s essay offers one possibility of establishing this dialogue.

Hans Frese’s piece, “Rise Above: Nostalgia and Authenticity in Representations of 1980s Indie Rock and Hardcore Punk,” discusses Michael Azerad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981–1991 (2001) and an issue of the fanzine Scam that concentrates on the making of Black Flag’s album Damaged. What role does a simplistic understanding of authenticity that ties in with conservative notions of purity and integrity play for the reconstruction of the mythical 1980s in indie rock? Frese argues that in 1980s indie rock authenticity and postmodern irony appear as no longer mutually exclusive poles. Consequently, a feeling of nostalgia for the real 1980s when musicians were still authentic and uncompromised by the mechanisms of the market misses the complexity of what it longs for. Discussing authors as varied as Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon, and Judith Butler, Frese shows that our retrospective accounts of musical eras constantly run the danger of being too one-dimensional and reductionist.

The second half of this issue devotes ample space to the cultural work, the aesthetic effects, and the canon of American rock journalism. In pondering the very act of writing music journalism Julian Weber, a renowned music editor at the German daily taz, is interested in the interrelationship of authenticity and art in American music journalism. In his article “What is the American in ‘American Music Journalism’?” he argues in favor of the artistic and creative aspects of music journalism and stresses its sense of contingency and urgency. Weber understands the music journalist as a creative artist who uses his or her understandings of music history, political science, and sociology when formulating his or her critical approval or dismissal of select music and artists. In order to test the feasibility of such an understanding, Weber interviewed six American writers who are still extending, shaping, and defining the very essence of American music journalism: the blogger and Frequency Series curator Peter Margasak, the writer and DJ Jace Clayton, the author and frequent contributor to The Wire Dave Tompkins, the writer and composer David Grubbs, the cultural critic and author Greil Marcus, and Lisa Blanning, the former editor for the English edition of Electronic Beats. Weber’s essay seeks to identify how the work of these select writers reflects American cultural ideas and practices that channel the cultural value of the music they are writing about.

On a different note, the media scholar Konstantin Butz, in his essay “The Authenticity of a T-Shirt: Ryan Gosling, Roddy Dangerblood, and the Rebellious Genealogy of Thrasher Magazine,” is interested in the cultural aesthetics of a skateboard magazine and its significant role in allocating means for self-narration and self-stylization by white American males. While the magazine itself is an important source for both skateboard culture and the respective music scene, it by the same token seems to canonize and monopolize a sense of rebellious coolness that is intrinsic to skate rock, skateboard culture, and both its performers and consumers. In exploring what renders the very dimensions of cool in skateboard culture from a transnational American Studies perspective, Butz’s article excerpts and analyzes the sources, the very narratives, and the tropes that pervade the rebellious stylization of a publication such as Thrasher. By such an original approach, Butz manages to find new ways of accessing and comprehending the dialogical processes and collective histories of surf and skateboard culture, and thus understanding the discursive regimes that stylize the icons of newly emerging punk scenes.

Finally, the Americanist Marcel Hartwig is interested in rock journalism’s most prevalent consumer group—the hipsters. His paper “‘We Can Always Empathize with Ourselves’: Pastiche, Parody, and Rock Journalism in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991)” studies the hipster as the neoliberal offspring of the yuppie. In order to understand the pillars of these youth cultures, Hartwig’s paper inquires about the staging of a youth culture’s musicology and the music industry’s according modes of production to create the lived experience of both these subcultures. For a closer reading of these, the parodied rhetoric of music journalism in the novel American Psycho serves as a starting point for discussion of the relevance of economic and cultural capital in subcultural style or fashion statements. From this perspective, Hartwig can retrace notions of hipness in the neoliberal contexts of both the yuppie culture and the contemporary fandom surrounding the “hipster-hop” artist Kanye West.

We believe that the essays collected in this special issue provide a representative sample of the various dimensions of American rock journalism as an academic subject. Taken together, the essays collected here show the direct influence that American rock journalism has as a cultural practice on the aesthetics, tastes, and strategies for self-stylization of its contributors and audiences. We believe that this collection is a vital selection of discussions and reiterations of rock journalism, its criticism, and its functions in the contemporary digital age. Altogether these essays revisit the fluid categories of “criticism,” “rock,” and “taste” and ponder the ethical, social, and political implications of their respective objects of study. As other studies of American rock journalism surface, we hope that this special issue will join them in usefully contributing to the understanding and critical assessment of the very procedures and strategies of this American cultural practice.

Notes on Contributors

Marcel Hartwig is an assistant professor for English and American Studies at the University of Siegen. He is author of Die traumatisierte Nation?: ‘Pearl Harbor’ und ‘9/11’ als kulturelle Erinnerungen [A Traumatized Nation?: ‘Pearl Harbor’ and ‘9/11’ as Cultural Memories] (2011)) and he co-edited the volume Media Economies: Perspectives on American Cultural Practices (2014). He has contributed research papers in academic readers and European journals in the field of media studies, television studies, literary criticism, gender studies, and popular culture. Currently he is working on his post-doctoral project in the field of transatlantic studies entitled “Transit Cultures: Early Medical Discourses in England and the New World, 1639–1751”.

Ulf Schulenberg is a visiting professor of American Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander University at Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. He is the author of Zwischen Realismus und Avantgarde: Drei Paradigmen für die Aporien des Entweder-Oder [Between Realism and Avant-garde: Three Paradigms for Aporias of the Either/Or] (2000), Lovers and Knowers: Moments of the American Left (2007), and Romanticism and Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture (2015), as well as the co-editor of Americanization-Globalization-Education (2003). He has published widely in the fields of literary and cultural theory, American and European intellectual history, and American Studies.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.