The Art of Mimicry: The History of Rock n' Roll or Any Other Art Form
Lately I’ve been obsessed with a podcast called “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs,” created and hosted by Andrew Hickey.
The title of the podcast suggests it will be a close reading of canonical songs, but it’s really not that at all. The songs are really just anchors, end points, that helps focus the episodes. But the episodes are really not focused. They are wideranging, casting wide nets, and full of tangential information. They provide histories of scenes, lives, sounds, rather than deep readings.
I find the episodes both thrilling and also necessarily corrective to the way not only rock music, but most art, is discussed in contemporary culture.
We still tend to treat artists - especially those titans of 1960s “classic rock” - as great originals, who have a vision and heroically persist in conveying this vision to their audiences. This follows the ideal of “communication” that I ofter refer to, developed by media theorist John Durham Peters in his incredible book Speaking Into the Air: you have something pure inside you, which is then necessarily corrupted by mediation and noise, leading to all kinds of anxieties about “communication failure.”
But this podcast portrays the production of art very differently. To begin with, the artist are not great Originators of Original Ideas. Rock music - like any other art form - is driven by mimicry. Artist are picking up moves and moods and textures from other recordings and try to recreate them for themselves.
Bob Dylan is of course the prime example. Often seen as the Ultimate Great Original, Dylan is more than anything else an astonishing mimic. His genius is really his ability to amass a perplexingly encyclopedia of influences that he mimics - from early rock n roll to TS Eliot, from Robert Johnson to Dylan Thomas. You can even see this mimicry in his very name. In his voice. He may be the Great Original, but only if you mean that he’s the Great Mimic.
I love this element of Hickey’s podcast, where he shows (auditorily) how different bands - including the supposedly “Greatest Originals” - imitate each other - and importantly often imitate lesser-known bands. But the thing about mimicry is that it’s so much more interesting than we generally think of it. As I noted in my essay on translation and mimicry, “In Defense of Mimicry”:
I am intrigued by the common rhetorical figure of the mimic and its related concept of mimesis. It seems to describe what translators do: we imitate the original, make doubles of it, become the double of the author. And yet the mimic embodies many fears about translation: the loss of selfhood and agency, the loss of the singular original, the generating of excess. I am intrigued by the figure of the mimic as a model for the translator precisely because of its excess, its noise—and the sense of mimicry as something bodily.
The excitement of this podcast is the excitement of this noise, excess.
According to the culture of the genius, we tend to think of the “songwriter” as the most important figure in a band. That person writes the song which the band is then tasked with bringing into existence in the truest, least mediated, least corrupted version (or original, not a version at all). The songwriter is the auteur. Again, this is something I write about in “Defense of Mimicry”:
Throughout my career as a translator, I’ve been told that my job is to “capture the spirit” of the foreign text. But I have often wondered, why do I have to capture it? Why does it have to be contained? And what about the body? What makes it so corruptible? Why must it be repressed in translation? Is there something about the body that resists capture? What is the relationship between body and mastery? And is mastery the best way to engage with the foreign?
Again, I’m writing about translation, but we could be talking about any art form. We tend to think in terms of an "original” spirit - something that needs to be “captured”, something that is unique, original, isolated from not only other writers, but also from in fact language itself. Accordign to the “communication” model, the poem (or song, whatever) exists like a spirit, outside of language itself. Once you bring it into language - or the bodily, the body - it is potentially mediated, thus corrupted. It’s very Christian (soul, body).
The podcast absolutely jettisons this model. What’s important to at least the early bands (1950s-1960s) is developing versions of songs. The song as written down is just a starting point, a skeleton, on which the band makes its version.
Over and over again in the podcast, bands are not initially interested in writing songs, but in playing them. In developing - or imitating - sounds, textures. So that the cast of characters in the band, and their relative skill (and often, lack of skill) are singularly important. And along with the band members, the producers become incredibly important, and the studio musicians. The great songs and bands come out of many circumstances - rather than coming from a pure/original spirit, the art comes from the body, the corrupt space.
(Often these circumstances are horrid - like the exploitation of Jimi Hendrix - but all the same, they are important. They shape the sounds to a large degree, though this is not to deny the greatness of many of the artists. )
Typically bands start writing their own songs when they discover that they will make more money - thanks to royalty - if they write their own songs, and so begin writing songs, often based on other songs. This is fascinating because it feels a little like the clash between oral and print culture described by McLuhan, Walter Ong and others. Ie the oral culture of playing music mixes with print culture of private ownership and copyright laws. In the first culture, art is something passed down communally, constantly deformed by new iterations, while the second era encourages closure. Bands start “owning” their songs.
Alternatively, some folks discover that they can make money just writing songs. Turning the typical myth of Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes - they are being utterly authentic, just jamming in the basement - on its head, Hickey suggests that these jam sessions are Dylan’s attempt to write songs so that he will get paid without having to go on tour (and get booed etc). Hickey also argues that one reason for the big shift in the lyric style of these recordings is that Robbie Robertson convinces Dylan that his songs need to be less pretentious and arty. Again, the shift doesn’t happen from some deep conviction, but through corruption. (For the record I prefer the pretentious and arty Dylan.)
The overall effect of this privileging of material circumstances of the recordings is that all these supposedly Great Records, which tend to feel so gigantic and eternal, as if they were always there, come to feel vulnerable, fragile. Rather than the inevitability of the canonical, we come to feel that so many little things had to go right in order for the record to come out the way it did. The effect of this is not, I don’t think, to lessen my appreciation of the records (except in some cases), but the opposite. It makes me excited to think records - or art in general - in this way. And for Hickey, this doesn’t lead - as it does in many academic articles on poetry - to lessen my sense of the greatness of the bands or songwriters. In fact the opposite. Because it feels more realistic, it makes the process feel exciting. Dylan’s genius becomes tangible to me again.
Whenever Jimi Hendrix shows up in an episode - if only for a few seconds - he just takes over the episode. I had forgotten how amazing he was - and his band(s).
The podcast also changes models of influence. Often in these episodes a little known or now-forgotten singer - and right now I can’t even remember their names - turn out to be more influential than the “great band.” The “great artist” may be seen as most influential, but they may instead be the most influenced, recording a zeitgeist, while the unknown may be highly influential (the most notorious case is perhaps Velvet Underground, who became famous afterwards).
Anyway, I haven’t had a chance to write one of these substack posts for quite a while because I’ve been incredibly busy writing, editing, corrupting myself and others with mimicry, and trying to take care of my kids, but I wanted to send a thanks to this show which has been so much fun. I can’t believe I’ve spent hours listening to the history of The Byrds while doing dishes…
I've watched several of their shows, and I like them a lot. I'm obsessed with music criticism in general. I like it much better than lit crit, mainly because music critics are less likely to try to explain away the greatness, unlike many literary critics. Most music critics know how to be insightful without implying a sense of superiority or—even more common—implying that the explanation is, by its very nature, on a higher level than the work itself. In short, music criticism tends to be less pretentious and repressive while maintaining an appropriate recognition of the greatness found in modern popular music. They are less afraid of acknowledging astonishment.
There are exceptions, of course (I'm thinking of Robert Christgau at the moment). But when music critics hate something, right or wrong, they tend to be straightforwardly snarky and mean, which I prefer to the "taste inflation" that plagues modern poetry reviews, or the bland understatement of the few reviews that dare to be critical at all.
When you read actual books by the artists—and I'm pretty obsessed—they almost without exception embody the position you described. Our greatest songwriters seldom hide their influences. Dylan took a lot of heat for this, but if you actually read his books, he is constantly acknowledging and documenting sources. He's a bit cagy about it, but he's persistent. That's the main point of his most recent book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, which must be read in print form to be fully appreciated. Joni Mitchell is the same. I've noticed countless allusions, remixes, or "thefts" from mostly literary sources—often existentialist writers—in her astonishing period of songwriting from Blue through The Hissing of Summer Lawns.
I have been obsessed with Paul McCartney for about two years now, and he is no different. He is constantly discussing and celebrating his sources: Little Richard, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, and, on bass, James Jamerson. He takes this to extremes; for many years, he almost single-handedly tried to promote a national holiday celebrating Buddy Holly. Lennon was mostly the same, though he was clearly insecure about Dylan's influence on his own work.