{"id":155755,"date":"2021-11-10T15:57:48","date_gmt":"2021-11-10T20:57:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=155755"},"modified":"2021-11-11T13:27:55","modified_gmt":"2021-11-11T18:27:55","slug":"roadrunning-joshua-clover-in-conversation-with-alex-abramovich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/11\/10\/roadrunning-joshua-clover-in-conversation-with-alex-abramovich\/","title":{"rendered":"Roadrunning: Joshua Clover in Conversation with Alex Abramovich"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Jonathan Richman around 1972, with Modern Lovers, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.<\/p><\/div>\n

What follows is part of an email exchange between Alex Abramovich and Joshua Clover about Jonathan Richman\u2019s song \u201cRoadrunner.\u201d Their conversation takes the scenic route, beginning with a materialist definition of rock \u2019n\u2019 roll and ending by arguing over the Velvet Underground (too ironic? Too elitist?). Along the way, they touch on the nature of influence, poetry versus criticism, art versus revolution, the specificity of rock \u2019n\u2019 roll freedom, and what it means to drive with no way out.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Dear Joshua,<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about the talk <\/span>you gave recently<\/span><\/a> as part of the \u201c<\/span>Popular Music Books in Process<\/span><\/a>\u201d<\/span>\u00a0series. I loved this talk<\/span> because the definitions of rock \u2019n\u2019 roll that it points to are so obvious, simple\/not simple, and right. Quoting selectively, starting at about <\/span>the six-minute mark<\/span><\/a>:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There are ten thousand freedoms but <\/span>rock freedom<\/span><\/i> is definitely set\u2014in the first instance\u2014in a car, when it\u2019s<\/span> late outside. It can be ecstatic, it can be boring, it can be adjectiveless, but you have reached escape velocity, faster miles an hour, you have no particular place to go, and you have the radio on.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you <\/span>did<\/span><\/i> have a particular place to go, that is to say, if you were not free, where<\/span> would it be? That may seem impossible to answer but in some sense I think it is schematically clear. It\u2019s important to remember that rock \u2019n\u2019 roll is truly an invention of massive industrial growth. That provides the key. You are free at the wheel of your automobile because of a complementary unfreedom, which is, to simplify, the person working in the auto factory. When you buy the car you are purchasing their misery. And the important thing is, the driver and the factory worker, one circulating through the world of consumption with its pop songs and Stop & Shops, one immobilized in the world of production with its assembly line \u2026 these are not different people, despite what they tell you in Econ 101. They are the same person, it\u2019s just a different time of day.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I should stop here and say at the outset (as you do in your new book,<\/span> Roadrunner<\/span><\/a><\/em>) that the first version of \u201cRoadrunner\u201d was recorded in 1972\u2014just before \u201cthe collapse of manufacturing and industrial profits, the tilt from Boom to Bust, ruination for the postwar compact of Bretton Woods, oil shock and oil crisis, stagflation, the hollowing of the labor movement, final humiliation in Vietnam, and on and on\u201d of 1973. It\u2019s a pivotal moment: peak America. A few years later, Neil Young\u2019s going to release <\/span>On the Beach<\/span><\/i>: <\/span>the album has the ass-end of a Cadillac sticking out of the sands of the westernmost part of the nation.<\/span><\/p>\n

The end of the road.<\/span><\/p>\n

But, as you also point out, the road Jonathan Richman\u2019s on (Route 128, around Boston) is a beltway\u2014a road with no end:<\/span><\/p>\n

Even if you are not <\/span>literally<\/span><\/i> an autoworker, this structural relation, this contradiction, is still 100 percent in place. You are still part of the vast class that has to labor to buy back the very things it produces<\/span>\u2014<\/span>at a premium. That spectral freedom of the highway is inevitably purchased with your own unfreedom. The ring road always turns away from the factory, from this truth. And because it\u2019s a ring road, it always turns back toward it, too.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s fascinating, the ways economics and culture keep bleeding into each other. Your book looks back, not just to Chuck Berry, but to the Federal Highway Act. It looks forward, not just to Cornershop and M.I.A., but to<\/span> Long-Term Capital Management<\/span><\/a>, the War on Terror, Tyson Foods, Tamiflu, the Tamil Tigers and, finally, COVID<\/small>-19. But it\u2019s not really criticism, is it? Here\u2019s a note that I made: \u201cIt sounds a lot like music criticism but, in reality, Joshua\u2019s doing theory. Or so he thinks. Because what he\u2019s <\/span>really<\/span><\/i> doing is poetry.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Would you disagree with that? Or are those distinctions now without a difference? I\u2019d love to hear a bit about your method.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lastly, since we\u2019re discussing freedom in the rock \u2019n\u2019 roll context, I\u2019m wondering what you make of that old Michael Lydon article in <\/span>Ramparts<\/span><\/i>; <\/span>the one where he says that rock \u2019n\u2019 roll isn\u2019t and can\u2019t be \u201crevolutionary music because it has never gotten beyond articulation in this paradox [the obvious pleasures America affords\/the price paid for them]. At best it has offered the defiance of withdrawal; its violence never amounting to more than a cry of \u2018Don\u2019t bother me.\u2019\u201d I\u2019m also reminded of the incredible<\/span> Ellen Willis piece on Woodstock<\/span><\/a>. To what extent (if any) is your book a discussion, or argument, with those perspectives?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As ever,<\/span><\/p>\n

Alex\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

Dear Alex,<\/span><\/p>\n

Y<\/span>ou give me too much credit, though that\u2019s not your fault; it may be an artifact of my approach, arguably my hubris. When I started out, I am not sure I had clear-headed plans. I just thought that having to make a book out of a four-minute song was a formal problem asking for solutions that would be interesting or would bomb or both, especially given the constraint that I had no intention of engaging in much of the biographical, autobiographical, or<\/span> academically musicological. What did that leave me with? History, or my obsessions. These are pretty close together. Since the 2008 economic collapse and the global political ferment that followed,<\/span> most of my thinking and writing, whether it be scholarly or in more public writing or even in anonymous and collaborative screeds, has been about crisis, particularly the long crisis of American capitalism that I date to around 1973, and about how its transformations\u2014notably toward intense and desperate strategies of circulation for profit-taking\u2014shape how people fight to get free.<\/span><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t choose \u201cRoadrunner\u201d because its recording timeline and its image of a person literally circulating through the night allowed me to discuss these things. I chose it because it\u2019s magic<\/span>. I have felt its magic for a long time but never had a good story about it.<\/span> And because I couldn\u2019t figure out a path to a book about \u201cTell Me Something Good,\u201d a song at least as magical. That book goes \u201cSomething something\u2014wait! Did you know that Chaka Khan got the name \u2018Chaka\u2019 when she joined the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Chicago?\u201d And I am not sure I know how to tell that story in a way that does justice to Chaka, and Rufus, and the BPPSD, and Chairman Fred. So there I was with \u201cRoadrunner.\u201d And once I set out along Route 128, there was no way for me not to situate<\/span> it within what is for me the true metanarrative of the U.S. present:<\/span> the catastrophic trajectory of capitalism.<\/span><\/p>\n

And the thing about capitalism, you know, it has to expand just to stay even, just to keep functioning, capitalists as a whole have to be able to turn money into more money or they\u2019re out. And that means two things, immediately. One is that it has<\/span> to dominate more and more of the planet, more and more of our lives. People sometimes complain that Marx\u2019s thought \u201ctotalizes,\u201d that it draws everything into its logic, which is \u2026 a confusion. The thing that totalizes\u2014the thing that is compelled to draw everything into its own logic, its own circuits\u2014that\u2019s capitalism itself, that\u2019s its inner character. Marx is just narrating that action, he\u2019s not making it happen. The other thing about this compulsion to expand is that, when it can\u2019t do that anymore, it enters<\/span> into crisis. The end of growth isn\u2019t just a lull, it\u2019s a disaster that we\u2019ve been living through for fifty years and one that isn\u2019t going to reverse.<\/span><\/p>\n

Okay, so that\u2019s the theory part. The poetry part is finding a language for it. I wanted to find a form\u2014spoiler, it\u2019s basically the run-on sentence\u2014that was at once true to the particular motion of a car going around and around, going past this and that without ever stopping, and also true to the general motion of expansion that wants to go out toward everything, that can\u2019t resist trying to <\/span>bring in<\/span><\/i> everything. So, a run-on, but increasingly full, not, er, running on empty. Anyway you\u2019re generous to suggest that the book confuses poetry and theory, as it might be the case that it merely confuses style with history.<\/span><\/p>\n

But if I knew from this history that I would be starting the book near the onset of the long crisis that opens onto the present, I definitely did not know that I would also leap backward into the heart of long postwar boom. I had no idea I was going to go back to the source, and end up proposing my own version of, \u201cHere\u2019s what rock & roll <\/span>really<\/span><\/i> is, man.\u201d Maybe it is inevitably true that if you have a theory of the end you end up with a theory of the beginning. That\u2019s the ring road. Anyway, trying to get my head around that was exciting and daunting and I loved writing that chapter. But that is also the moment of hubris, inevitably, and of exaggeration. I believe what I said, it\u2019s pretty easy to convince yourself as you go, but let me take at least one step back. Even if you buy my pitch, the limit of this exaggeration is, I make claims only about what rock <\/span>is.<\/span><\/i> I am a materialist. I don\u2019t think rock <\/span>does<\/span><\/i> much outside the world of representation, ditto poetry and movies and video games. It is an account of the world in inverted form. And rock became for a while the orienting type of popular music because it got at something vast and true. It knew the terrible thing and still it sang. And I love listening to the truth at 45 rpm, even when it is upside down.<\/span><\/p>\n

But now let me bring it all back home. I am grateful to be compared to Lydon and especially to the great Ellen Willis, but I should demur. They are among other things reflecting\u2014especially Lydon\u2014on rock\u2019s failures to do what it seemed to promise. To me that\u2019s in par with chiding, I don\u2019t know, Bororo myth for failing to be revolutionary strategy. Like, you don\u2019t say! Blaming rock for failing to play a role in changing the world is akin to blaming Marx for the fact that capitalism is totalizing. Rock just says a truth about the condition of the world, it doesn\u2019t bring it into being. It\u2019s surely true that the generation of Woodstock didn\u2019t make the rev. That\u2019s on them, not on Jefferson Airplane except in so far as Paul Kantner failed to join Weather Underground. And if we fail, that\u2019s on us. But if we succeed, it happens on the Standing Rock reserve, at the John Deere factory, in the streets of Oakland. And then there will be songs.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Joshua,<\/span><\/p>\n

I did not know that about Chaka Khan! But <\/span>Jonathan Richman at Town Hall was the last concert I saw before New York went into lockdown. The friend I saw him with didn\u2019t like that concert\u2014and it didn\u2019t help that Will Oldham came out and sang at some point. Oldham is sort of Richman\u2019s opposite, right? Everything held at a tremendous distance; a walking definition of irony (although, I would argue,<\/span> the home recordings he made in lockdown<\/span><\/a> were the opposite of that). Afterward, Dan and I went over to Jimmy\u2019s Corner\u2014the old boxing bar off Times Square, which was closed for most of the pandemic and reopened just a week or so ago. Once we\u2019d gotten our drinks, I did my best to convince him, \u201cNo, no. That wasn\u2019t an act. Jonathan Richman\u2019s the most sincere artist who ever lived. There\u2019s so much purity, goodness, and joy.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Did I convince him? I don\u2019t know. Maybe it was a dumb argument, like the one you and I had earlier this year about the Velvet Underground. The way I remember that is, I\u2019d said \u201cSomething, something, \u2018Sister Ray.\u201d And you\u2019d said, \u201cOh, no. Richman and \u2018Roadrunner\u2019 have nothing to do with VU.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Obviously, this is absurd. There\u2019s the biographical part: Richman saw <\/span>eighty<\/span><\/i> Velvet Underground shows\u2014he\u2019s the reason that band played so often in Boston. He practically lived with the band. He\u2019s all over that new VU hagiography Apple keeps trying to get me to watch. There\u2019s the musical part. John Cale <\/span>produced the original recording<\/span><\/i>. When it comes to the chord structure, instrumentation, arrangement, et cetera, \u201cRoadrunner\u201d is pretty much a cover of \u201cSister Ray,\u201d isn\u2019t it?<\/span><\/p>\n

You dismissed all that, if I recall, on the basis of you just don\u2019t like\u2014in fact, hate\u2014the Velvets. And so, we started to argue that: You said they were elitists, and the fount of elitism in rock.<\/span><\/p>\n

I said: \u201cWell, they weren\u2019t elitists. How could they be? Didn\u2019t they sing for the outcasts? Weren\u2019t they outcasts themselves? It\u2019s not their fault that elitist schmucks came in their wake. That\u2019s like Michael Lydon or Ellen Willis blaming rock and roll music for the failures of the sixties. If anything, the anti-elitist position you\u2019re staking out now is as elitist as anything else.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Unless I\u2019m mistaken, you see VU as arch and ironic\u2014diametrically opposed to Richman\u2019s sensibility\u2014and so, you look past VU and go back to Chuck Berry. I don\u2019t see VU that way all but, of course, you\u2019re not wrong: all roads really do lead back to Berry. Not only is \u201cSubterranean Homesick Blues\u201d the same song as \u201cToo Much Monkey Business.\u201d Another Chuck Berry song (about, you guessed it, going down the highway at night) is the father of \u201cCome Together,\u201d by the Beatles, \u201c1970,\u201d by the Stooges,\u201d and<\/em> two songs (\u201cState Trooper\u201d and \u201cOpen All Night\u201d) off the only Springsteen album that I truly like.<\/span> He was not <\/span>sui generis<\/span><\/a>, but who is?\u2014so, of course, start with him.<\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, grounding your argument in Chuck Berry sets you firmly in the world of cars (the place where rock and roll freedom, in that first instance, is set). A freedom whose flip side is Fordism and alienation. There\u2019s a difference, I guess, between Berry\u2019s driving songs and \u201cRoadrunner\u201d in that Berry always seems to be going down the open road. It\u2019s still the fifties; the economy\u2019s still expanding; we can still cling to ideas of expansion and progress. Worse comes to worst, we can always go west. (Or so the fantasy goes. In real life, just a few days before the end of the fifties, Berry was busted and imprisoned for violating the Mann Act: specifically, for transporting a fourteen-year-old girl across state lines. Which is to say, he lost his own freedom, in part, because he was driving while Black.)<\/span><\/p>\n

But I can\u2019t help thinking of \u201c<\/span>Rock and Roll<\/span><\/a>\u201c\u2014a song that makes room for \u201ctwo TV sets and <\/span>two <\/span><\/i>Cadillac cars\u201d (albeit garaged), and casts a cold eye on the commodities we surround ourselves with (to make up for all the ways capital fails us) while making bold, explicit claims for the soul-saving, revolutionary potential of \u2026 rock \u2019n\u2019 roll? Lyrically, it\u2019s<\/span> much closer to \u201cRoadrunner\u201d than \u201cSister Ray\u201d is. It seems at least as relevant because it\u2019s such a clear example of ways rock <\/span>does<\/span><\/i> make promises having to do with freedom:<\/span><\/p>\n

You could dance to a rock and roll station \u2026 and it was alright \u2026<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

She started dancing to the fine, fine music\u2014her life was saved by rock and roll\u2026<\/span><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To me, that\u2019s the whole kit and caboodle. Just those words, saved<\/em>\u00a0and alright<\/em>. They\u2019re so \u2026 loaded. In the Holiness church, Lou Reed\u2019s favorite refrain (\u201cI feel alright\u201d) meant a specific thing: you\u2019d gotten happy. You were possessed, now, by the Holy Spirit.<\/span><\/p>\n

In that moment, you were free.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rock \u2019n\u2019 roll turned some of that on its head. It kept the building blocks, starting with the backbeat. (\u201cI was raised in the Holiness Church,\u201d Lionel Hampton wrote in his memoir. \u201cI\u2019d always try to sit next to the sister with the big bass drum. Our church had a whole band, with guitar, trombone and different drums. That sister on the bass drum would get happy and get up and start dancing down up and down the aisles, and I\u2019d get on her drum: boom! boom! That heavy backbeat is pure, sanctified, Church of God in Christ.\u201d) The songs still had to do with ecstasy (literally, a \u201cstanding outside of oneself\u201d). But now, through some weird, self-reflexive trick of the light, <\/span>rock \u2019n\u2019 roll itself<\/span><\/i>\u00a0was the vehicle that delivered us there. Rock itself became<\/span> the answer to problems that life in industrial society presented. (\u201cI\u2019m gonna rock, rock, rock\/rock my blues away.\u201d) It promised and, in theory, it seemed to deliver.<\/span><\/p>\n

But in practice, the freedoms that rock \u2019n\u2019 roll offered turned out to be much more transitory. Things <\/span>are <\/span><\/i>alright, for a while. Then we get older and start listening to Steely Dan. (I\u2019m partial to <\/span>The Royal Scam<\/span><\/i> myself.)<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s what Lydon and Willis were getting at, I\u2019d imagine: rock songs <\/span>do<\/span><\/i> promise something. Maybe<\/span> something as simple as, \u201cyou don\u2019t have to grow old.\u201d And they fail us, and maybe they fail<\/span> because they <\/span>don\u2019t <\/span><\/i>know the terrible thing<\/span>, after all. (The terrible thing being, we <\/span>do<\/span><\/i> grow old, and the factory awaits us all.)<\/span><\/p>\n

I still think we\u2019re on the same sort-of side: \u201cRoadrunner\u201d <\/span>is<\/span><\/i> the perfect<\/span><\/i> song for you to have written about, because it never does make that promise. It describes the things Jonathan sees on that ring road, and the way those things make him feel, and there\u2019s a soundtrack (\u201cradio ON!\u201d), but there\u2019s no destination; just the going around and around and around, staying in that churchy, Velvety back-and-forth I-IV chord progression that never resolves.<\/span><\/p>\n

As you said in your talk:<\/span><\/p>\n

I do my best to re-narrate something like the founding myth of rock and roll, which I sometimes call the \u201cur-story.\u201d And it goes something like this: It\u2019s about freedom. I know that is impossibly corny, but I hope you\u2019ll stay with me out of generosity alone. I think \u201cRoadrunner\u201d is worth a book because it\u2019s the truest telling of this ur-story, this myth. The song is so minimal because it is really committed to refining this inner nature down to its essence. With its two or three chords, and nowhere to go\u2014that is to say, its utter constraint\u2014\u201cRoadrunner\u201d is the freest song I know. Anything could happen next. And doesn\u2019t.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I guess what I\u2019m saying is, Jonathan <\/span>does<\/span><\/i> know the terrible thing, He knows, and that\u2019s why he never gets off the ring road. Personally, politically, there\u2019s nothing there for him\u2014so he stays. And he never grows up. <\/span>Which, to go back to biography, is just what happened: Jonathan never grew up. That\u2019s what I was trying to get Dan to believe, back at Jimmy\u2019s Corner. If ever there was a true Lost Boy, it\u2019s him. If ever anyone was delivered by \u201cRock and Roll\u201d (the song, as well as the music) it\u2019s Jonathan Richman. But, I am guessing, it came with a price.<\/span><\/p>\n

Alex<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Dear Alex,<\/span><\/p>\n

Welp, I guess we\u2019ve gotten to the part where I alienate all of our readers. Clearly we cannot escape the question of the relation between VU and Jonathan Richman. I have a lot to say, but I hope to think less about which act one prefers (though this would be disingenuous to ignore) than how we think about influence.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Maybe a good place to start is with \u201c<\/span>Can I Kick It?<\/span><\/a>\u201d<\/span>\u00a0by A Tribe Called Quest. That it has Lou Reed in it is a factual matter; it samples \u201cWalk On the Wild Side.\u201d It is literally <\/span>in-fluenced<\/span><\/i>: that sound <\/span>flows in<\/span><\/i>. But, so what? Stuff is made from other stuff. I say this somewhat contra Modernist lore. The double myth of Euromodernism features on the one hand the fantasy of pure originality, of creation <\/span>ex nihilo<\/span><\/i>: Stein, claiming to be quoting Picasso, writes, \u201cwhen you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don\u2019t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty.\u201d And then on the other hand, we have the Eliotic fantasy of \u201cthese fragments I have shored against my ruin,\u201d of keeping alight the guttering flame of white European culture, preserving the line of cultural transmission. So there is the authentic origin, and there is preservationist lineage or heritage\u2014and both sides of this Modernist mythos place an undue emphasis on the unremarkable fact of influence.<\/span><\/p>\n

But this can\u2019t explain something important. \u201cCan I Kick It?\u201d is, you know, much better than anything Lou Reed ever did. <\/span>Which should not surprise us, nor should it surprise us if it were worse. It\u2019s not such a big deal. Stuff is made from other stuff, as that collagist Picasso knew perfectly well. The problem arises when you move from the mere factuality of influence, from the fact that materials have sources, to its priority. That\u2019s when it risks obscuring more than it reveals.<\/span><\/p>\n

So in this regard I think it\u2019s unfortunate that people, especially critics, are so stuck on the <\/span>significance<\/span><\/i> of the relation between VU and Jonathan. On the priority. I think it obscures far more than it reveals about the bottomless and extensive and mysterious character of \u201cRoadrunner.\u201d I also think it\u2019s basically anti-teenager, as if the adjacency of an elder means Jonathan could not have forged this extraordinary thing without some grand inheritance. As a thought experiment, I encourage everyone to take the terms Richman\/VU and swap in Rimbaud\/Verlaine. Okay, let me leave Modernism behind for the particular of the case at hand.<\/span><\/p>\n

I would never say that VU and Jonathan have no relation\u2014they have a profound one that I touch on in the book. It\u2019s factual. And it\u2019s of course about automobiles: for a while Jonathan serves as Lou\u2019s driver, using his dad\u2019s car. But it is also about music: Jonathan absolutely takes in all of that sound as part of his knowledge, as he takes in Chuck and the Beach Boys and so many others. This in and of itself tells us very little. When you make a thing, you make it from all that you know, and if it is extraordinary or even unique this is not because it has no history, no influences, arises out of nothing.<\/span><\/p>\n

This may seem odd, but for me it\u2019s crucial: to say X is <\/span>influenced<\/span><\/i> by Y is not to say X is <\/span>like<\/span><\/i> Y. The character of X, its extraordinariness, comes from its relationship to the everything, what it does with it. And that may even be unique, whatever goes into it.<\/span><\/p>\n

More often it is not unique. Maybe it is just an interesting rehash which by the way I am fine with, I love pop music and I don\u2019t need art to be some durable lasting <\/span>objet<\/span><\/i>. But sometimes songs are extraordinary, like \u201cRoadrunner.\u201d And if your understanding of musical relation is chord changes, then sure, you can say \u201cRoadrunner\u201d is \u201cSister Ray.\u201d If your understanding of musical relation is genetic\u2014there was that music, and then it evolved into this music\u2014go for it. And if your understanding of musical relation is subcultural, where this dude knew that dude and the wisdom was passed down, cool. That\u2019s not really how I understand things. My first obligation is to history. There is not one pair, Richman\/VU. There are two pairs, Richman\/history and VU\/history. Now, how do these two pairs relate? That\u2019s an actual question. And I would argue that VU and Jonathan stand in opposite and even antagonistic relations to history, to the world itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

VU are super-duper into knowing about the world, recognizing it, classifying it, possessing it in mind and in song. They are the exemplars of this German term <\/span>Besserwisser<\/span><\/i>, a better-knower. They know better. Their fans know better. They <\/span>discern<\/span><\/i>. They might like fake I-get-the-joke Warhol pop, pop that knows about pop. But they do not care for pop itself. In the heat of the Top 40 moment, they scorn, say, ABBA, a far more influential band,<\/span> until enough time has passed to ironize and sterilize the taint of pop<\/span><\/i>. Liking ABBA only twenty years later is the surest sign of a bad character, period. Show me the person who in the moment, in 1976 said, in all sincerity, \u201c<\/span>Rock and Roll Heart<\/span><\/i> is very lovely album, but I like <\/span>Arrival<\/span><\/i> a bit more, it\u2019s smarter and more fun, they\u2019re my two favorites,\u201d and I will be very pleased to buy this person drinks all night long.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fortunately for my Venmo, that person basically doesn\u2019t exist because that is the nature of knowing better. Maybe it is simply a weapon of the weak, of the outcast, to know better. I don\u2019t think so. This was certainly not my experience as a teenager who was particularly interested in social class. Knowing about VU, and being really into them, was just a class marker of private school kids. I am not sure I would use the discourse of elitism, which is so messed up these days, but the role of VU as a prestige-conferring taste\u2026I mean, anyone can <\/span>claim<\/span><\/i> to be an outcast, I guess? Everybody imagines themselves bullied and not the bully. But the <\/span>Besserwisser<\/span><\/i> sits near the center of an entire worldview that reviles the forty-year-old woman driving around in her Yaris listening to John Denver, who has more good songs than VU by a margin of two.<\/span><\/p>\n

I really think all of this is present in your inquiry. \u201cRoadrunner\u201d is about driving through the world, and music on the radio is part of that world. \u201cRock and Roll\u201d is about \u2026 rock \u2019n\u2019 roll. They know all about it. We can discuss the racial politics of Lou Reed saying \u201cand the colored girls go\u2026\u201d in \u201cWalk on the Wild Side,\u201d which I think leaps out as a problem because it happens in the context of a broader racial erasure and by the way he demanded and got 100 percent of the publishing for \u201cCan I Kick It?\u201d But I suspect we can agree that his gesture is a knowing commentary on the mechanics of pop songs. IT\u2019S META MACHINE MUSIC. Oh shit I did not see that coming. Anyway, VU knows how it works. And we listen with the pleasure of that knowingness, if that is something in which we can take pleasure. They know what happens next.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jonathan does not know, much less know better. I am not claiming he is somehow ignorant. I am not claiming he is a holy fool, that he is free of influence. It\u2019s the stance he takes toward the world, toward what I am calling history. He\u2019s the farthest thing from a <\/span>Besserwisser<\/span><\/i> we could imagine. No matter how many VU concerts he has seen, he does not know what happens next in his own song, and neither do we, and the song is that not knowing, that capacity to be amazed and spellbound by what you see as you come over the hill even if you have driven this road a thousand times, the exact opposite of a VU song, and that makes the song unbelievably thrilling despite its extraordinary restraint. I just don\u2019t know what to do with people who hear in the downtown art drone of VU and in the repetitions of \u201cRoadrunner\u201d the same thing, whatever the fucking chords are.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But to insist on Jonathan\u2019s lack of knowing is finally in tension with your claim that he <\/span>does<\/span><\/i> know the terrible thing, a claim with which I agree! So I contradict myself and here we need a sidebar of a zillion words to deal with kinds of knowing. But the terrible thing he knows is, there\u2019s no right move from the starting position named \u201cteenager.\u201d No amount of knowing dissolves the essential problem. For this holy moment you have no particular place to go. But you will, and soon. You\u2019re gonna have to pay off your own car before too long. Whether you go to work in the shoe factories that for a long time dominated Natick, or go to work in the Factory like Lou Reed, it\u2019s still the factory. Jonathan is just driving around looking for a way out. That\u2019s it, that\u2019s the book.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Joshua<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Joshua Clover is the author of seven books, a\u00a0former journalist, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at University of California Davis, and a communist.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Alex Abramovich is the author of several books (most notably,\u00a0<\/em>Bullies: A Friendship) and the coauthor of several others (most recently, Courtney Love\u2019s forthcoming memoir, <\/em>The Girl With the Most Cake).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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