Jagger versus Morley, or, The Life and Death and Living Death of Rock and Roll Music

While working on Retromania, I read a very interesting book, Is Rock Dead?,  by Kevin J.H. Dettmar. It's a scholarly but entertaining work that is not an attempt to take rock's vital signs, not at all,  Rather it's an examination of the decades-long discourse of rock vitality versus rock necrosis : the way that, almost from the very start of this music, fans, critics, and artists have fretted and fought over questions such as: "is rock dying?", "is rock already dead?", "it is about to be reborn?", "can we bring it back to life?", and sometimes even whether rock and its culture had degenerated to the point where it is something that needs to be killed off quickly and completely. Dettmar is fairly caustic about the impulse to proclaim rock to be ready for the knacker's yard, on its last legs, in terminal decline and decay. He characterizes that as a form of projection by the no-longer-young, with the babyboomers being particularly prone to this kind of "generational ethnocentrism". He diagnoses a syndrome in which the state of the critic's flabby, middle-aged body and depleting libidinal reserves gets fatally confused with the vigour of the music. In a Blissblog post spurred by Is Rock Dead?, I argued that the insistence on the possibility that a given music form could die (usually referring not to the exhaustion of musical resources so much as the genre's relapse into the blandness and respectability it once opposed) was actually a form of fidelity to the sheer force of its life in its emergence. Dettmar himself makes the  similar point that "the birth and death of rock aren't just coincident… they are, in fact, two different ways to talk about the very same thing."

Now just the other week I came across a beautiful chunk of rock discourse that totally fits Dettmar's subject. It's one of those confrontational interviews that ye olde music papers once routinely did with  even the biggest stars, simply because the weekly press still commanded the centre space of the  Rock Discourse and accordingly the stars craved the attention and - to an extent - even the adjudication that the critics bestowed upon them, hostile though it might be. Here, in the New Musical Express, June of 1980, it is Mick Jagger -  who could quite easily have not bothered with being bothered by some spotty young upstart oh-so-eager to shove him into a grave and shovel dirt on top -  who submits, warily, to a dialogue with Paul Morley. The dynamic between the two - the middle-aged myth gamely parrying the insinuations of irrelevance lobbed by the youth - is fun to watch. But the most relevant bit for this discussion is Morley's framing of the encounter - his intro and outro pivot precisely round the metaphorics of life and death.

(whole interview at the end of this post)

Throughout the interview, Jagger shrugs off the burden of all that the Stones - and rock, since the Stones are the quintessence of rock - have come to represent: the excessive expectations placed upon the music to its detriment, in his view.  Jagger insists that it's all been a drastic over-estimation; rock may not be just another form of Entertainment, but it's closer to showbiz than to being a vehicle for, or harbinger, of Revolution. Jagger says that Rolling Stones music is just the blues really, when you get right down to it. It's the band's favorite form of black music, which they've applied themselves to playing at once faithfully and yet authentically (not merely imitatively). Jagger discounts and downplays all the extra things that groups like the Stones brought to the blues - musical  things as well ideological and attitudinal baggage. Mick's a slippery fellow, cunningly yet casually evading Morley's angle of attack. So he'll acknowledge in one breath, the energy surge of punk, but then in the next he'll put it in its place, saying that just like the Sixties explosion the expectations around the New Wave got overblown, the movement was naive in its idealism, and none of the new groups really had the musical strength to sustain. 

Morley meanwhile is arguing that the Stones and the other key Sixties groups once manifested a vitality so excessive it was subversive. For them to simply carry on, professionally providing a milder version of their once electrifying energy, is to contradict everything they once embodied. Once they were living; now they are merely surviving ("survival" being a buzzword of the '70s). Indeed, they have survived, in the literal sense of living longer than their own peak of dynamism and relevance.  This  shameful continuance, the mere adequacy of their records (piss-took by the Stones themselves later with the compilation Sucking in the '70s) makes the Stones  - and people who still buy their records and turn up to their shows - into participants in a form of living death. The sparks of real life in 1980 are, Morley admits, small and marginalized in the scheme of things: almost unknown  (outside NME and Sounds) groups who make a raw racket in poky clubs in Glasgow, Edinburgh,  Manchester, Liverpool... 

Some nine months later, Morley will have a similar encounter with a living (just barely) legend of the Sixties -   Jerry Garcia - during the course of which he tells the bemused guitarist about a group from Edinburgh called The Fire Engines, who play 15-minute-sets, into which more zest and vim are crammed than in four hours of noodling slow-build intensity from The Grateful Dead (a name that rings out oddly in the context of this discussion). 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

In 2013, reviewing the Stones as septuagenarians headlining Glastonbury, Morley slipped back into this register: contrasting the Viagra Swagger of Jagger's pantomime of his lusty younger self versus the anachro-necro "liveliness" of groups like Arctic Monkeys on the same stage: 

"For better or worse, [The Stones] are old men playing young music, not young people playing old music. The Monkeys and the Mumfords are the dutiful archivists; the Stones are the bloody archive." 

Perhaps in this piece, Morley surprised himself by now feeling sympathetic to the Stones's persistence in the face of decrepitude.... After all, he too is an elder by this point: a legend still treading the boards of rockwrite, a couple of generations worth of whippersnappers sniping at his heels...