THE BEATLES
529
they have, by phrase and instrument, and they're very quick, as I've
discovered, to shoot down inflated interpretations. They should indeed
exercise proprietary rights. This is the first time that people of school
age have been tuned in to sounds invented not by composers approved
by adults but in to sounds invented by their own near contemporaries,
sounds associated with lyrics, manners and dress that they also identify
as their own. David Amram, the New York Philharmonic's first
resident composer, is understandably optimistic that this kind of
identification will develop an avidity of attention to music that could
be the salvation of American musical composition and performance.
Perhaps in some such way the popular arts can help restore all the
arts to their status as entertainment.
To help this process along it isn't necessary that literary and
academic grown-ups go to school to their children. Rather, they must
begin to ask some childlike and therefore some extremely difficult
questions about particular works: Is this any fun? How and where
is it any fun? And if it isn't why bother? While listening together to
recordings of popular music, people of any age tend naturally to
ask these questions, and I've heard them asked by young people
with an eager precision which they almost never exhibit, for want
of academic encouragement, when they talk about a poem or a story.
Their writing about this music isn't as good as their talk, at least
in the magazines I've been able to get hold of, like
Vibrations, The
Broadside
and, perhaps the best,
Crawdaddy.
In written criticism
they display some of the adult vices, including at times a nearly
Germanic fondness for categorization: the Mersey beat, the raving
style, trip songs, the San Francisco school, the love sound, folk-rock
and the rock-folk-pop tradition are typical of the terms that get
bandied about with desperate and charming hope. Reviews of popular
music in the major newspapers and magazines are much worse, how–
ever, and before the Sgt. Pepper album practically no space even
for an intelligent note was given the Beatles in any of them. Now
that they've begun to appear, any adult easily victimized by a reputed
generational gap need only read reviews of
Sgt. Pepper
in the
New
York Times
and the
Village Voice
by Richard Goldstein to discover
that youth is no guarantee of understanding. In his early twenties, he
is already an ancient. Some of his questions - does the album have
any real unity? - were not necessary even when originally asked
