Night Beat: A Shadow History of Rock and Roll

Rating:
Summary: Corporate blah
Review: "Shadow history of rock and roll", pshaw. Gilmore writes for Rolling Stone, for godsake. Let's get some perspective here.

This book is chiefly interesting as a window into the mind of a perfectly average corporate shill of an American pop music writer. Gilmore's lack of comprehension of the music going on around him is evident on every page. He takes every artist at the word of his or her publicist - witness his abandoned buying-into the myth of Sinead O'Connor, in which he utterly fails to realise that her real value is as an irritant celebrity, not as a music maker (let's face it, her music is too limp and lame to be taken seriously, while her vocal range has only two registers - Bawl and Whimper). His article on punk is risibly stupid. A writer as intelligent as Michael Azerrad recognised that, for a while, the most vital rock music in America was being made by a clutch of poor bands on small independent labels. Gilmore dismisses them in a paragraph, going on to discuss The Punk Scene as a slightly worrying development cause why aren't we all grooving to the healthy sound of Bruce Springsteen? Because he's a ridiculous clown, Mikal, that's why. Richard Meltzer has cross-examined the Springsteen myth better than I ever could in his superb "A Whore Just Like The Rest", but it still needs to be said. These are the writings of a man who genuinely believes that, because it's on the Billboard Top 100, it must be good. It is not anti-democratic to suggest otherwise. The fact that a record is commercially successful is not necessarily evidence of the healthy will of the US record-buying public, rather proof of the total control major labels exert upon the playlists of FM radio. But Gilmore can't bring himself to see that, which is why this book is largely a collection of worshipful articles about mediocrities.

This is perhaps the only writer who would seriously consider that an article on someone as lacklustre as David Baerwald was worth preserving in the files, let alone reprinting in book form. I don't care that Mikal is Gary Gilmore's half-brother. So his family life is tortured. It didn't make him a good rock writer. He has a tin ear, and a wretchedly feeble "liberal" conscience that mistook vain posturing and empty quasi-music for artistic achievement. (He takes U2 seriously. Puh-leeeez.)

This book is awful. A far better one, covering the same period, is Joe Carducci's "Rock and the Pop Narcotic". Buy that instead.

Rating:
Summary: Corporate blah
Review: "Shadow history of rock and roll", pshaw. Gilmore writes for Rolling Stone, for godsake. Let's get some perspective here.

This book is chiefly interesting as a window into the mind of a perfectly average corporate shill of an American pop music writer. Gilmore's lack of comprehension of the music going on around him is evident on every page. He takes every artist at the word of his or her publicist - witness his abandoned buying-into the myth of Sinead O'Connor, in which he utterly fails to realise that her real value is as an irritant celebrity, not as a music maker (let's face it, her music is too limp and lame to be taken seriously, while her vocal range has only two registers - Bawl and Whimper). His article on punk is risibly stupid. A writer as intelligent as Michael Azerrad recognised that, for a while, the most vital rock music in America was being made by a clutch of poor bands on small independent labels. Gilmore dismisses them in a paragraph, going on to discuss The Punk Scene as a slightly worrying development cause why aren't we all grooving to the healthy sound of Bruce Springsteen? Because he's a ridiculous clown, Mikal, that's why. Richard Meltzer has cross-examined the Springsteen myth better than I ever could in his superb "A Whore Just Like The Rest", but it still needs to be said. These are the writings of a man who genuinely believes that, because it's on the Billboard Top 100, it must be good. It is not anti-democratic to suggest otherwise. The fact that a record is commercially successful is not necessarily evidence of the healthy will of the US record-buying public, rather proof of the total control major labels exert upon the playlists of FM radio. But Gilmore can't bring himself to see that, which is why this book is largely a collection of worshipful articles about mediocrities.

This is perhaps the only writer who would seriously consider that an article on someone as lacklustre as David Baerwald was worth preserving in the files, let alone reprinting in book form. I don't care that Mikal is Gary Gilmore's half-brother. So his family life is tortured. It didn't make him a good rock writer. He has a tin ear, and a wretchedly feeble "liberal" conscience that mistook vain posturing and empty quasi-music for artistic achievement. (He takes U2 seriously. Puh-leeeez.)

This book is awful. A far better one, covering the same period, is Joe Carducci's "Rock and the Pop Narcotic". Buy that instead.

Rating:
Summary: Fine, strong, interesting writing about passionate noise
Review: I don't buy or listen to much popular music anymore. (Just so you know, my favorite bands between ages 12 and 25 were, in chronological order, the Beatles, Creedence, Deep Purple, Yes, and Gentle Giant, although I had everything from Led Zep and Pavlov's Dog to the Carpenters and the Banana Splits in my collection. Now I listen to Oregon, Bobby McFerrin, Tingstad & Rumbel, the Bobs, Bartok, Stravinsky and Bach.) But I still love to read rock criticism. Gilmore strikes me as one of the best.

This is a collection, smoothed out and updated, of his writings from roughly two decades of work for Rolling Stone magazine and various other publications. Gilmore's judgments seem quite fair, and never dismissively exclusive for effect the way many lesser critics can be, and his prose doesn't wave its hands in the air a lot to distract you, which tends to happen with the late Lester Bangs, or Greil Marcus. (Don't get me wrong, I enjoy them both!)

I admired his heartfelt weighing of the career of Michael Jackson, who is so easy to hate. Perhaps the loveliest surprises were his extended pieces on people the young folks of our era won't know as well and won't be able gain access to via recordings -- Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg and his crowd.

If I have any complaint it is that Gilmore succumbs to a verbal flourish at the conclusion of too many of these pieces on the order of "we will not likely hear this again" or "better than anyone ever will," which may be true in every case, but somewhat gratuitous and ultimately unknowable. (I also remain skeptical that "irrestrainable" -- page 144 -- is actually a word.)

Rating:
Summary: Our finest rock writer offers his "greatest hits."
Review: Mikal Gilmore is the finest critical voice in popular music writing today, as immediate as the great Dave Marsh or Greil Marcus, but without the former's bluster or the latter's almost serial tendencies toward stretching historical comparison. Throughout his 25 year career, Gilmore's greatest gift has been his ability to find and document the seedier underpinnings of the musician's craft, a keen night vision which has owed as much to a violent upbringing (chronicled in his excellent memoir Shot in the Heart) as to a proclivity toward music whose makers and listeners exist on the fringe of economic and political power. Night Beat is a compendium of those documents, a "greatest hits" of Gilmore's published work, some of which the author reconsidered, restructured, and rewrote specifically for this volume. This "shadow history" tells the stories of acknowledged icons (Elvis, the Beatles, Dylan), iconoclasts (David Baerwald, Sinead O'Connor, Tupac Shakur), and peripheral figures (Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary) in a way which casts each as a seam in the fabric of the music as a whole, bearing the implication that without any one figure, rock's patterns and product would not be the same. Cultural ties are also implicit; the voices Gilmore records often speak for others who cannot - a bond between listener and artist which sustains each through difficult circumstances. Nowhere in Night Beat is this more evident than in the extended essay "Bruce Springsteen's America," which chronicles the evolution of Springsteen's music and audience through the Reagan/Bush years. Gilmore sees the edgier motifs in Springsteen's 1980s work as a negative response to the knee-jerk patriotism of the time, and not (as it was widely felt then) an embrace of it. Such sloganeering put a glossy sheen on exclusionary economic policy and a general mean-spiritedness toward the working class and the poor, whose stories were at the heart of Springsteen's songs. The music was so misunderstood, Gilmore suggests, because it was so co-opted by the forces it was meant to rail against. Reagan's willful tactics to confuse message and meaning rendered "Born in the USA" as simply another "Morning in America" - a feel-good slogan, regardless of the bitter, brutal realities beneath it. Realities which still exist today, regardless of the balance of power. "These are pitiless times," Gilmore writes, times reflected in the chaotic street stories of Shakur and the angst-ridden anthems of Kurt Cobain. That both Shakur and Cobain are gone belies the perilous nature of shadows, the danger of the truths hiding in them. If Night Beat contains a caution, it is that our finest artists and their work offer a reflection of our own tendencies and times - their stories are our own, and good care must be taken.

Rating:
Summary: Our finest rock writer offers his "greatest hits."
Review: Mikal Gilmore is the finest critical voice in popular music writing today, as immediate as the great Dave Marsh or Greil Marcus, but without the former's bluster or the latter's almost serial tendencies toward stretching historical comparison. Throughout his 25 year career, Gilmore's greatest gift has been his ability to find and document the seedier underpinnings of the musician's craft, a keen night vision which has owed as much to a violent upbringing (chronicled in his excellent memoir Shot in the Heart) as to a proclivity toward music whose makers and listeners exist on the fringe of economic and political power. Night Beat is a compendium of those documents, a "greatest hits" of Gilmore's published work, some of which the author reconsidered, restructured, and rewrote specifically for this volume. This "shadow history" tells the stories of acknowledged icons (Elvis, the Beatles, Dylan), iconoclasts (David Baerwald, Sinead O'Connor, Tupac Shakur), and peripheral figures (Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary) in a way which casts each as a seam in the fabric of the music as a whole, bearing the implication that without any one figure, rock's patterns and product would not be the same. Cultural ties are also implicit; the voices Gilmore records often speak for others who cannot - a bond between listener and artist which sustains each through difficult circumstances. Nowhere in Night Beat is this more evident than in the extended essay "Bruce Springsteen's America," which chronicles the evolution of Springsteen's music and audience through the Reagan/Bush years. Gilmore sees the edgier motifs in Springsteen's 1980s work as a negative response to the knee-jerk patriotism of the time, and not (as it was widely felt then) an embrace of it. Such sloganeering put a glossy sheen on exclusionary economic policy and a general mean-spiritedness toward the working class and the poor, whose stories were at the heart of Springsteen's songs. The music was so misunderstood, Gilmore suggests, because it was so co-opted by the forces it was meant to rail against. Reagan's willful tactics to confuse message and meaning rendered "Born in the USA" as simply another "Morning in America" - a feel-good slogan, regardless of the bitter, brutal realities beneath it. Realities which still exist today, regardless of the balance of power. "These are pitiless times," Gilmore writes, times reflected in the chaotic street stories of Shakur and the angst-ridden anthems of Kurt Cobain. That both Shakur and Cobain are gone belies the perilous nature of shadows, the danger of the truths hiding in them. If Night Beat contains a caution, it is that our finest artists and their work offer a reflection of our own tendencies and times - their stories are our own, and good care must be taken.

Rating:
Summary: I expected a lot, and I got it & more
Review: Mikal Gilmore is, simply, a marvelous writer. I have followed his work since his first piece came out in Rolling Stone in 1976, and now-a-days I only pick up the magazine when I see his name in the table of contents -- not nearly often enough. I bought NIGHT BEAT the first day it was available, and read it straight through over the next two days. I expected a lot from Gilmore -- and I wasn't disappointed. One of the things I love about his style is that he shows a gentle respect for all of his subjects, even those who are clearly buttheads. He doesn't presume to "know it all", and, even after thirty-some years, he is as compassionate for Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur as he was for Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison. At the same time, Gilmore has his dark side -- his is not a series of "don't worry, be happy" rock writing. Neither is this a bunch of semi-nostalgic profiles from rock and roll's archaic past; each piece breathes new life into how American culture got from there to here. Gilmore's skill in word-shaping presents indelible portraits of rock's illuminati, including Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Lou Reed, Ella Fitzgerald, Randy Newman, Sinead O'Connor and -- yes! -- Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson. The highest praise I can think of for a book like this is that even people with no specific interest in rock and roll would enjoy reading NIGHT BEAT as a well-written and fascinating historical chronicle. Gilmore writes, "I've tried to put it all thgether in an orderly way that might make for a story arc of sorts." It does. Mikal, thanks for the memories.