In article <3315DBBF.6D6F@mail.earthlink.net> Neil Koomen 
<neilkoomen@mail.earthlink.net> writes:

>In a way, pop music wasn't an art form until the
>1960's: previously, it wasn't taken with the level
>of seriousness that developed in the late 1960's,
>when pop music criticism (in magazines like Creem,
>Eye, Rolling Stone, and Trouser Press) appeared.

You may be close to right on this, though some would argue with you
whether rock-and-roll was *ever* an artform. :-) I'm reading such a book
right now...more about it in a minute.

>Until then, I don't think people took pop music so
>seriously. Whether this is good or bad, I'll let
>you decide.

I'm not aware, in fact, of any rock criticism that treats its subject with
musicological seriousness *before the Beatles*. If I'm wrong, I'd
appreciate a pointer in the right direction. And please don't tell me
about Steve Allen's explication de texte of "Be-Bop-A-Lula". :-)

Rock critics have since attempted to evaluate the contributions of seminal
influences like Holly, Berry, Presley, the Everlys, and movements like
Motown/Tamla and Spector's groups. 

But it strikes me that William Mann's piece in The Times (of London) in
December 1963 may well have been the first attempt to explore pop/rock
with the same depth and techniques used for classical works. Any earlier
critiques in the same vein, in the same milieu, before Mann talked with
rapture and reverence of the Beatles' "aeolian cadences"?

>For some reason, people took the Beatles much more
>seriously--perhaps because of the pop art movement
>and the awareness and of popular culture as being
>worthy of artistic consideration and
>intellectualism within their era. 

Maybe that was it; or maybe there was a sudden preponderance of
college-trained experts who were beginning to define the field of popular
culture.

>Also, the Beatles did some really interesting
>stuff, like take drugs, and they behaved in a
>somewhat provocative way in a very provocative era,
>and probably stretched the idea of what pop stars
>could do. In other words, perhaps the Beatles
>merited the attention.

Well, Bix Beiderbecke drank himself into unhappy oblivion in the twenties;
Charlie Parker was a very public example of what bad drugs can do to a
good man; they're only two examples of musical tragedy from a pre-Beatles
era.

All three, of course, were very public in their personal as well as
professional experimentation. But Bix and Bird didn't inspire the
heightened level of interpretive writing that the Beatles did *within
their own era*, though they had their very obvious contemporary
appreciators and champions.
 
>After the Beatles, bands were expected to write and
>perform their own songs, something that might be
>normal in blues or other popular forms, but wasn't
>a necessity for Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra,
>whose art was more in the way they interpreted
>songs.

Neither man was talented at writing, either. "Hound Dog" could be great by
Big Mama Thornton as well as Elvis; Sinatra could do pop and jazz
standards that had been made popular previously by scores of artists...yet
Elvis as well as Frankie always made their renditions distinct.

As you mention, the Fabs had many talents, but one of them was
revolutionizing (one might say plebiscizing...if there *were* such a word
:-) the songwriter's function in pop music. Just as skiffle, in England,
had made thousands of teens think they could make music, the Fabs taught
thousands of fans that it was possible (though not likely) that they too
could write a hit record and play the hit version as well. They convinced
the Rolling Stones...what more could one want? :-)

>As to whether previous pop music was art, I'd say
>yes, just as much as the Beatles' music was. 

The breadth of popular music prior to the Beatles' reign is stunning in
its richness and complexity. You might want to read about it in Donald
Clarke's "The Rise and Fall of Popular Music" (1995, St. Martin's
Griffin). 

Mr. Clarke was an editor for the previously published, and eminently
dependable "Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music". He was a great grasp
of music history, and manages to make enthralling all arcane issues
relating to medieval broadsides and ballads; he traces popular music back 
to its very roots. His account of the rise of modern pop, from American
folk and hill country songs to minstrelsy, vaudeville, and tin-pan-alley,
is irresistible.

Yet the minute he embarks upon the first fruits of rock-and-roll, he falls
into Frebergian froth, dismissing an entire era of accomplishment almost
as if he had personally experienced some affront by its growth. 

Clarke is an American (though he writes like a British musicologist,
ironically and irreverently). He was born in 1940, technically Lennon's
era; but everything from 1955 onward seems to make him seethe. 

He grudges that "Heartbreak Hotel" was okay, but not much else of
Presley's was worth a farthing. He complains that Spector's productions
restrict artistic breath (a bizarre complaint, when you consider the
heavenly tropospheric rushes of "Da Do Ron Ron" or "Then He Kissed Me").
He's utterly nasty to every Brill Building songwriter of the early
sixties. And as for the Fabs....

Well, he doesn't seem to like them very much. Nor the Stones. Nor anyone
else. The whole of sixties pop he dismisses as "layers of this lucrative,
faddish rubbish". In fact, he doesn't stop with the sixties. He thinks the
subsequent decades are all a waste of time and ears, as well. (Disco *is*,
of course, faddish rubbish; I'd been waiting *for years* for permission to
call it that. But the rest...well, let's not be too hasty!).

Mr. Clarke is the first "serious" critic I've read in the nineties who
dismisses "She Loves You" as "typical of the trashiness of pop", and
portrays "I Want To Hold Your Hand" as "cheap white imitation of melisima
to disguise the paucity of the lyrics". He likes the later Fabs' works a
bit more, we can be gratified to learn.

Yet his pronouncements about the Beatles and others are so far from real
experience of the music that one can only surmise that Mr. Clarke never
understood any fundamental truth of sixties pop and rock, nor was able to
make the leap from discussing Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin and
Ira Gershwin's lyrics to comprehending the shift in focus in the
sixties...from timeless words and music, which could be sung well by any
accomplished artist, to a performance/recording-based artistry. Come
on---who can imagine someone doing a better version of "Sunny Afternoon"
than the Kinks? And as for "She Said She Said".... I dare any singer from
now till doomsday to try to outdo the Fabs!

This is central to understanding the revolution of sixties pop---this
emphasis on personal (if not singular) interpretation. No one else can do
the definitive rendition of the song. And you'll search till your final
breath to find that elusive copy of Richie Barrett's "Some Other
Guy", because you *know* it's the only version that matters. :-)

>If anybody wants to read up on pop music and its
>history, a great start is Charles Gillette's book
>"The Sound of the City," perhaps the first book to
>really analyze rock and its roots seriously. It was
>published in the early 1970's--check your
>library--I'm not sure it's still in print.

It is, in a new edition, from 1996, with a new prologue, a new
bibliography, and photos as well. Mr. Gillett has much more perspicacious
things to say about the roots of rock---blues, gospel, rhythm and blues,
as well as the rise of pop and rock, plus the commercial industries that
supported (as well as hindered) talented artists all during that era. 

You can't beat Mr. Clarke's tome for the first two-thirds or so. Read the
rest, if you dare; but here switch to Gillett's volume for a more balanced
look at the groups who made rock-and-roll the force that it was.

And then for good measure---and in the spirit of roundness---pick up Alan
Clayson "The Beat Merchants" (1995, Blandford Press) for a fill-in-the
blanks treatment of the rise and suzerainty of British pop.

>Nope, despite what many of their fans think, the
>Beatles didn't invent great music, they just made
>much more of it! 

But they had their own innovations. No room for that now...read Lewisohn
and Kozinn for a hint of it!

>And there's plenty more great music out there, by
>lots of other artists... all you have to do is
>listen!

If we had world enough, and time....