0
false
18 pt
18 pt
0
0
false
false
false
In a recent Village
Voice piece (“Rock and
Rollercoaster,” Feb. 7, 1984), Voice senior editor Robert Christgau rounds up some seemingly disparate elements of
pop music culture to sound the count for rock and roll as a significant
socio-political/youth-movement force.
Although certain warrior types may want to crucify Christgau for his
conclusions (thank God for their loyalist hearts and intentions), the man is to
be commended for his tenacity, as his piece is painstakingly researched,
informed by a perpetually tested personal commitment, and devoid of prophetic,
finger-pointing pomposity. However, for Christgau and other “serious” pop music
journalists, rock and roll’s cultural disintegration is hardly apocalyptic. Pop
culture is certainly multifarious and rich enough, especially in its elements
nurtured by and dependent upon rock and roll, to keep its artists, journalists
and fans foaming at the mouth for a long, long time.
All this is just fine for us over-the-hill types who dumped
our air-guitar chops and piss-on-the-Pentagon aspirations long ago. For a massive
part of young America, though, there is still a demand for a perversely
traditional kick from rock and roll, even if that kick feeds primarily upon
overstated orgasmic fantasies and ritual bombast, rather than cultural
“substance.” Like us old folks, this youth depends on its, uh, passions. Number
One with the youngsters is Detroit’s own Creem,
“America’s Only Rock and Roll Magazine.”
All Growled Up
Anyone who even occasionally browses newsstands must be at
least marginally aware of Creem. The rag
has been gracing (?) the market for 15 years now, ever since local media
hustler Barry Kramer founded the journal as a low-budget affair out of the Cass
Corridor. Kramer envisioned Creem to
be a medium for the then-burgeoning craft of rock criticism, and he succeeded
in helping establish the careers of the late, great Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh,
and a host of other significant scribes. Kramer also created a ticket for his
acute business and twisted media senses, as Creem
quickly evolved into a big-bucks concern and a showcase for rock and roll journalistic wildness, no mean
feat. Subsequent to his death in 1980, Kramer’s wife Connie assumed the
publishing helm and has helped steer Creem to even greater economic gain.
Buckaroos, however, do not guarantee respectable
journalistic content, and Creem has
certainly lurched through the years in that sense. In the early days, Bangs,
Marsh, and their cohorts established a loose school of rock and roll writing in
which literate, poignant criticism was mated with a lust for outrage that
resulted in a style perfectly suited to the music it served. Endemic to that
outrage were the political and social forces at work in the late ’60s and early
’70s. As things chilled in those arenas in the mid-‘70s, Creem was left with a mag-dog tradition that was all growled up
with nothing to bite, especially in terms of the music it fed upon.
The late ’70s brought about the inevitable punk explosion,
which produced life-giving fresh fodder for journalistic rudeness. This,
unfortunately, left Creem with a
problem. As means for survival, Creem had earlier turned to covering limp, glitter-rock types and associated heavy
metal species, in service of kids a sub-generation removed from the political
and social madness that fueled Creem’s
earlier rantings. Creem had, out of
necessity, established a primarily teen-age constituency that couldn’t care
less about the subsequent significance of the Sex Pistols and the Ramones.
Those who wanted substantial information concerning punk and its descendants
could like elsewhere, to Christgau and other “serious” journalists. Creem was forced to cater to the rock
star syndrome, and its innate shalloweness, which earned the rag a “comic book”
rep that still haunts it to this day.
Sensory Warfare
Anyone who picks up a copy of Creem these days can easily understand the “comic book” tag. You’re
first smacked with the audacious, loud cover, which screams with excitement
(however smart-assed) over this month’s coverage of Van Halen, AC/DC, Kiss,
Motorhead, ad nauseum. Inside, you get a careening barrage of full-color
merchandise ads and photos to accompany the stories on the aforementioned
geeks, all delivered with Hustler-pinup subtley. As for sexual balance, you get
women all right, basically T&A city, leg, leg, leg, all over the damned
place. Granted, some of these women receive print due to their music. But all,
in essence, are there as artillery for the sensory warfare that is Creem’s look. If this ain’t stupid and
cheap enough for you, you get loads of gossip (“Kiss and Tell”), more gossip
(“Film Fox”), coverage of other garbage (“Creemedia”), and enough patently
offensive verbiage, via Creem’s
legendary photo captions, to insure no one gets out unscathed.
If the above were the entire scam, one could certainly
question the Metro Times, with its
orientation toward Detroit success stories, as being an appropriate forum for
investigation. Okay, the punch line: Creem aren’t all they’re repped to be. I freely admit to being addicted to the damned
rag myself, and it ain’t because, as some may assume, that I crave the
“features” listed above. It’s primarily because there’s a vital, critical
intelligence and sardonic humor at work there, at odds with the rock star
bullshit Creem depends on for
sustenance. Per month, the reader concerned with “serious” pop journalism can
easly come up with enough “substance” to raise questions concerning the
validity of this “comic book” curse.
Calling a Moron a Moron
I recently met with Creem
editor-in-chief Dave DiMartino and senior editor Bill Holdship to raise
such questions. Nice fellows, these guys, 30-ish, normal-at-odds with the
“morons” they cover for a living and, as I’d expected, both possessed of an
intelligence and critical acumen that could raise hellish conflicts with what
they do for cash.
DiMartino: “In a business sense, there is no conflict. I’m a
professional, and as such I deliver a product that suits the needs of our
readers and publisher. I suffer absolutely no conflict over the direction of
the magazine. But I feel that I can speak for our staff as a whole in saying
that we have a legitimate desire to include material that transcends the
supposed scope of Creem. We’re
increasingly successful in doing so, a fact that has been noted several times
recently in the ‘serious’ press, and I’m proud of that. But, foremost, we gotta
meet the needs of the kids.”
Holdship: “This conflict arose when Lester Bangs left the
magazine a few years ago. What Creem was left with was a bunch of people who inherited Lester’s sense of humor but
not his passion for the music. This basically caused Creem’s downfall and led to the ‘comic book’ image. We’ve been
trying, over the last couple of years, to clean this up. But it’s still a
struggle.”
C’mon, gents. Are you really trying to be more responsible
aesthetically, or are you just treading water?
DiMartino, forcefully: “I’m responsible to no one but Connie
Kramer and myself, and our sales justify my handling of those responsibilities.
But, for Christ’s sake, we’re adults, and we know there are others like
yourself who read Creem. So we make
sure to include features that mean something to people like us.” Given that, do
you guys consciously try to service the more “serious” reader? “As a service,
we’re probably most concerned with getting to some kid in Iowa who doesn’t have
access to the information you and I do,” says Holdship. “We’ll give the kids
the goods he’s tossed his couple of bucks for, and, with any luck, maybe he’ll
pick up some of the stuff outside teen crap. But basically we try to servide
him, and everybody else, with entertainment. That’s what we’re paid for.” Adds
DiMartino belligerently: “We provide our greatest service by calling a moron a
moron. We don’t kiss ass. There’s far too much of that garbage already in the teen
press and, especially, in the ‘serious’ press.”
Whoa! Do we have an issue of low-brow reaction here? “Sure
do, on both professional and personal
level,” replies DiMartino, warming up. “So many of these so-called ‘serious’
writers suck up like crazy to their editors or publishers or to this week’s
rage or some pathetic soapbox aesthetic. They fall into this trap of people who
write well but who have a sick perspective on music, as opposed to the kind of
writers we try to publish, who may not be as gifted technically but who
honestly love the music. The ‘serious; papers are chock-full of self-conscious
ego-flashing, Nietzshe quotes in reference to some rock and roll record, that
sort of trash.” Holdship expands: “The pretentiousness I get out of the ‘serious’
press bugs the hell out of me. That kind of classroom elitism has nothing to do
with rock and roll. Ultimately, it’s negative and destructive. We try to
function as an alternative to that vain, bullshit attitude.”
Facing Facts
Obviously, we have quite a journalistic polarity here. Could
this have a lot to do with target readerships or, more specifically, with the
ages of those readerships? “Sure,” replies DiMartino. “Let’s face the facts.
Though I can’t state this categorically, I’m certain Duran Duran, Boy George or
Van Halen can’t mean the same thing to these kids that, say, the Beatles meant
to us, or what people like Lou Reed or T-Bone Burnett may mean to us now. This
culture has drastically changed since Creem’s
early days, and we can’t be harping on some aesthetic that made sense then but
has no place now. Then, there was the rock and roll ‘us versus them’ ethic. I
take exception to that having any bearing on anything now. As Christgau pointed
out in that Voice piece, rock and
roll culture has dissolved into the mainstream. Rebellion as a barometer is
meaningless there. We’re often attacked for our politics, but I feel we’re more
correct in a populist sense than the serious journals. We try to give the
readers what they want, not what we think they should want.”
With this sense of reader-dictated priorities in mind, it’s
easy to predict, and regretfully understand, Creem’s relationship to black music. “This was a real problem,”
confirms Holdship. “We had two black covers last year, and we’ve followed up
with as much as we feel we can get away with. The drag is, with every effort we
make, here comes the hate mail. Still, we’re working to appease ourselves
there. We have a black issue coming up, which we’re hopeful about. We’re gonna
keep plugging.”
In retrospect, I feel frustrated wit the series of conflicts
DiMartino, Holdship and I discussed. Granted, Creem leaves itself wide open to criticisms for its tastelessness
and excess. But, ultimately, for me, Creem redeems itself through the enthusiasm, competence and wit of such staffers as
Laura Fissenger, Rock Johnson, John (Amore) Kordash, DiMartino, and Holdship.
Such monthly features as “Letter from Birtain,” the “Christgau Consumer Guide”
(reprinted from the Voice), the
extensively researched “Rock ’n’ Roll News” and a plethora of musician-oriented
articles, most notably the column “Extension Cords,” all add up to a package
that beats the “comic book” curse. Here’s hoping that the pointless gulf
separating Creem and the “serious”
journals can in due time be bridged, and that this amorphous mass called “pop
culture” can be courted and criticized evenly, and with good humor, by all
involved.
This article appears in Feb 22-28, 1984.