It's been a busy 24 hours.

First off, R.I.P. Michael Jackson. I've never been the hugest fan of the self-titled "King of Pop," but it's hard to deny his sheer massiveness as a cultural icon. As much as he's become an object of ridicule over the last several years - and rightfully so, far as I'm concerned - it's made him all the more tragic, and his end was so sudden I can't help but feel a pang of loss.

There's no shortage of news circulating around about his death, but the Daily Hampshire Gazette did a story detailing local reactions in which I got quoted for a few short paragraphs. Here's the link:

http://www.gazettenet.com/2009/06/26/news-shock-local-fans-predictable-boost-sales

Last night was also the night of the New York Dolls show at Pearl Street, which was pretty great all in all. Opening act Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears were solid, high-energy R&B-infused rock and roll, good stuff. The Dolls played a set that was curiously heavy with new material, which means a lot of songs that much of the audience - including myself - probably didn't know so well. The new material was good, though, and it made it that much more exciting when the old nuggets from the band's early 1970s heyday came to the fore.

Highlight of the evening to my mind was the final two songs before the encore: "Trash" and "Jet Boy," two of the best from the band's first album. "Trash" was especially intriguing in performance, as the band changed up the second half of the song quite dramatically, shifting from its basic proto-punk style to a slowed-down, calypso beat and harmonic progression during which singer David Johansen briefly drifted into a skewed version of the 1950s Mickey and Sylvia tune "Love Is Strange," before the whole band finally moved back into the more straight-up rock of the original recorded version and brought the song to an exciting finish, made more exciting by the fact that "Jet Boy" came next.

"Jet Boy" might be my favorite of the old Dolls songs. It has weird comic book style lyrics about a boy who flies around New York, but what makes it so great is its killer main riff and even more so, the song's mid-section, where the band accelerates the tempo and the guitars rush into overdrive. The 1973 recording is one of the landmark songs in rock music, the band almost veering towards a sort of early speed metal with the power of the riff that plays during that midsection. In concert last night they did a great job with it but stretched it out a bit more than necessary, so it lost a bit of its punch. Still, it was great to get to see them play it, with Sylvain doing all the scene-stealing guitar posturing he could fit and Johansen wearing a goofy grin as he did through much of the evening.

I promised some unpublished writing on the Dolls in my last post; I'll keep it in reserve for my next post since this one's already running on the longer side. For now, here's a great old clip of the Dolls - the real Dolls - in action back in the 1970s playing "Jet Boy" (from the video All Dolled Up, which has amazing old video footage of the Dolls shot by photographer Bob Gruen):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAf0o6xZ_l8&feature=related

Good things are coming!

Two quick notices.

The New York Dolls are playing tomorrow night (Thursday, June 25) at Pearl Street here in Northampton. The Dolls are one of the great rock and roll bands of all time. The fact that 3 out of 5 original members (plus one other member who joined later) are dead is a major bummer. But David Johansen is one of the best front men in the history of rock and Sylvain Sylvain, the other remaining original Doll, is one of the most underrated rhythm guitarists in rock and roll history. Apparently tickets for this show have been selling slowly but anyone who reads this and lives nearby should get their asses to Pearl Street for what should be a killer night of live rock.

I will post something further after the show, which might include some unpublished thoughts on the Dolls that were once upon a time slated to go into This Ain't the Summer of Love but wound up on the cutting room floor.

On a more personal note, the documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil is finally going to be opening locally at Amherst Cinemas and if all goes well, I might be speaking at one of the screenings. It's supposed to be an absolutely great rock documentary, and if you don't know, Anvil was one of the most crazy, over-the-top heavy metal bands of the 1980s, a band that laid the groundwork for thrash metal but then was overshadowed by the likes of Metallica, Anthrax and Slayer. Stay tuned for more information.

As a brief follow-up to my last post, I've noticed that some reviewers, in describing the details of my book, draw attention to the cloth/hardbound edition rather than the paperback (and in the case of electronic sources like PopMatters, have also included links to the hardcover edition on Amazon). I know that reviewers often have a preference for cloth-bound books, but I find this frustrating nonetheless because U.California Press opted to issue This Ain't the Summer of Love in simultaneous paper and cloth editions, which means the cloth version is basically made for libraries - it's overpriced at $65, and it has no cover art because they didn't produce a jacket for it. The paperback edition is reasonably priced and you get the cover art, which is a plus.

I mention all of this because when I recently went to Amazon to check the sales ranking of the book - which I do with neurotic frequency - I noticed that the sales ranking of the cloth edition was higher than that of the paperback, and I suspect some of the reason why is the way that reviewers and other sources have highlighted the cloth edition over the paper.

So, if you happen to be reading this blog and happen to be interested in buying a copy of my book, unless you really have a thing for cloth-bound editions, do yourself a favor and buy the paperback. I get less royalties but you get a book that you'll probably be happier with for reasons of both expense and design.

Thus ends my public service announcement for the day.

Back in January, I started this blog in conjunction with the publication of my new book, This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk. Since then, the blog has taken on something of a life of its own, and so has the book in a manner of speaking. For the most part I've avoided using this space as a simple publicity mechanism for the book, but after 5 months I thought an update was in order, since the book has generated some good reviews and commentary (including my contact with the folks at National Day of Slayer, the subject of my last post).

For starters, I just did a nice interview with the local NPR affiliate, WFCR, about the new book. Of course the interview is heavily edited compared to the full conversation we had, but it's edited well, so that it actually makes me sound smart (almost too smart, some who've heard it have said - lots of "big words"). Luckily, WFCR has the interview available on its website as streaming audio; here's a link:

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wfcr/news.newsmain/article/0/0/1515774/WFCR.Local.Features/Smith.Professor.Explores.the.Tangled.History.of.Metal.and.Punk

I have to give big props to Tina Antolini, the 'FCR reporter/host who did the interview. She's a former student of mine who has quickly proven herself to be a big talent in radio and is rapidly moving up the ladder; it won't be long before she's receiving national exposure for her work.

For those who are interested, This Ain't the Summer of Love has been reviewed or received notice in the following publications:

Popmatters.com
City Paper of Baltimore
Valley Advocate (our local alternate newsweekly)
Reason magazine
Music Industry Newswire
Svenska Dagbladet (Swedish daily newspaper)
The Independent (UK daily newspaper)
The Wire

I'm especially happy about this last one, because I'd rate The Wire as one of the best monthly music magazines out there (I mentioned it briefly in one of my earlier posts). They reviewed my first book, Instruments of Desire, many moons ago, mostly postively although with a lot of caveats. The review of the new book was very positive, as have been almost all of the above with the exception of the Independent review, which was of a type I would have hoped had become outdated by now: rather than review the substance of the book in any considered way the reviewer mainly commented on how odd it was that an academic writer chose to concentrate upon subject matter like heavy metal and punk. Seriously? I mean, how long ago did Dick Hebdige's Subculture come out? (30 years ago, to be exact.) I don't know why daily newspapers have to continue to act as though cultural lines in the sand that most of us long ago stopped paying attention to are still of any consequence.

But I won't end on a note of frustration. So far, so good.

A few weeks ago I was contacted by someone on behalf of an organization, or a movement, or something, called National Day of Slayer, wanting to interview me for their website. I had not heard of this National Day of Slayer, but it sounded peculiar enough to pique my interest so I looked at the website. And became all the more intrigued.

As the name would suggest, the folks at National Day of Slayer want to establish a holiday commemorating the great, foundational, uber-heavy band Slayer. To a considerable extent they pursue this goal with a good amount of tongue firmly in cheek, which is a plus. At the same time, there are some serious undertones to the endeavor. National Day of Slayer, as a phrase, is a deliberate play on the National Day of Prayer, and the website and organization seem bent on using Slayer's well-established antipathy towards organized religion as a launching point for their initiative. They also seem to be legitimately concerned to promote the notion that heavy metal constitutes something like a culture unto itself that is worth taking seriously.

All of this became much more clear to me when I got the interview questions over email. These were not easy questions. When I read the first one I almost felt like I was back in graduate school taking an exam: "Are elective cultures, or those which are chosen and not born into, legitimately cultures in a pluralistic society?" Not what I was expecting, but a pleasant surprise. The rest of the questions followed suit, so I gladly replied in kind, though a part of me was still wondering whether there was a joke or a hidden agenda behind this exercise.

The interview went live on the internet a couple days ago, and I was glad to see that there was no hidden agenda - although I didn't know that I was one of three "experts" they had interviewed for a piece dedicated to discussing heavy metal culture. The other two interviewees are Keith Kahn-Harris and Martin Popoff, so I'm in good company and it's an interesting read apart from the typos that mar a couple of my responses. Here's the link:

http://www.nationaldayofslayer.org/slayer/experts/

For academic folks like myself, May is always one of the cruelest of months, especially when your school year ends on the earlier side as it does at Smith. So it is that I haven't posted anything here for nearly three weeks. But now the semester's over and I'm back in my home town of Simi Valley, CA, visiting my parents. And I have nothing but time on my hands.

A while back I blogged about how happy I was to have shipped all the remaining records I had kept at my parents' house to my home back in Northampton. It has indeed been great to have all my records living under one roof. But now that I'm visiting my parents for the first time since then, I'm having to face the flip side of the situation: aside from my parents themselves, I have very little stuff at their house now that I feel connected to. Even though my parents still live in the same house I grew up in, it feels a lot less like home to me than it ever has.

Simi Valley was a place I needed to escape from the time I was a teenager. That's pretty much one of suburbia's main functions, culturally speaking. While for some people the suburbs is the place to settle down, for others - and especially for those like me who grew up there - suburbia is the place to get away from. I got away a long time ago, when I left for college at age 18 and headed north to the hip(pie) atmosphere of U.C. Berkeley. But my parents have continued to live in Simi Valley and so my escape has never been complete. I come back here once, maybe twice a year and when I do I invariably relive some of the mixed emotions that I felt when I was growing up here all those years ago.

Back then, my records were one of the things - along with my guitar and my books - that made living here bearable. Indeed, as I've grown up it's been hard not to think that my principal passions in life - music, learning, writing, intellectual analysis - largely developed out of the isolation I felt growing up in such a culturally stifling environment. And that recognition has led me to think that the suburbs, however awful, are not all bad. They can stimulate all sorts of creativity, even if the stimulation often takes a negative form, a reaction against the environment. That's the flip side of the desire to escape: if you can't get away you have to figure out how to deal.

For the last several years before I shipped my records back east, I hadn't actually had a way to listen to them. My parents have never been hi-fi people. At an early age I pretty much appropriated the main home stereo system in our house as my own and soon moved it into my bedroom from its less cloistered position in the living room. After I moved out of the house my parents never got a stereo for themselves; my old one stayed around but in a deteriorating state and after a while it inevitably died. I actually went to the trouble of replacing it a few years back because the thought of visiting my parents and not being able to listen to my old records was intolerable. But as luck would have it, the cheap-ish (but overpriced given its quality) Sony turntable I bought at Circuit City stopped working just a couple years after I bought it and I took it as a sign that listening to my old records at my parents' house was no longer meant to be. Thus, the decision to move my records back home.

Even when I couldn't listen to them, though, having those records at my parents' house provided a sort of anchor. It was a sign that this was still familiar emotional territory, that there was something here that made my parents' house feel like my house too. That feeling hasn't entirely evaporated, but it's diminished, and I feel a little more like an alien in this Southern California suburb than I have in years past.

As I'm writing this I'm watching American Idol. I've been a regular Idol watcher for some time now, and am unembarrassed about it. It's a fascinating exercise in establishing what the mainstream of American popular music is understood to be, and shaping some very raw talent to fit the production standards of the music industry in its most blatantly commercial manifestation. I rarely like the music that's sung on the show, but it's really not a show about music per se, it's a show about cultural production.

Or at least that's how I justify my interest in it.

But tonight's episode is a trip because it's a full-on rock episode. Slash (!) is the guest mentor, and the first song performed this evening was Adam Lambert - he of the ridiculous high range that he likes to show off every chance he can get - doing a pretty decent version of Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love." Apparently this was the first time that a Zeppelin song has ever been done on American Idol, and it didn't completely suck. It was followed by Allison Iraheta - the only female singer left in the final four - who did an okay-not-great version of Janis Joplin's "Cry, Baby" (which they kept referring to as though it was "Cry Baby," so not the connotation of the song's lyric).

Idol has always had a strangely ambivalent relationship to "rock." I didn't watch the show much in the first few seasons, and part of the reason why was that its version of "pop" was pretty clearly non-rock, sweet vocal ballads and modern R&B having been the main idioms at first, neither of which get my mojo working. That began to change in season 4 (I had to look this up on Wikipedia) when Bo Bice, a "southern rocker" who was fairly lightweight as rockers go but had a decent bluesy rock voice, made it to the final two, only to lose to country singer Carrie Underwood. Since then the rock quotient has grown modestly but steadily, with the biggest breakout of course coming from Chris Daughtry in season 5, who made it to the top 4, was unceremoniously booted but then had a bigger album by far than any of his competitors. Last year, David Cook won with a sound markedly similar to Daughtry, and this year two of the final four (the aforementioned Adam and Alison) seem to be as much "rock" as anything else, stylistically.

What I find fascinating about all this is how the show, even as it absorbs rock more and more into its fabric, still maintains a significant element of the "rock" vs. "pop" binary - as though rock were not just another version of pop rather than its antithesis. Of course, rock fans have long had much invested in this binary, since it upholds their belief that rock is something of greater value than pop, more authentic, more real (Simon Frith, one of the founders of academic popular music studies, has spent much of his career analyzing these distinctions). But the pop industry has usually been quick to absorb the rebellious veneer of rock every chance it can get. That American Idol has often been more cautious in its approach to rock is, far as I can figure, the result of two factors:

1. It's on TV, which means it has to shoot for a more conservative notion of "mainstream" than, say, Top 40 radio, because TV as a medium (or at least, network TV) has always been defined by a decidedly middle American version of the mainstream.

2. The show began in the era of the high-gloss super-manufactured likes of Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and N'Sync, and its initial target audience - I gather - was the young audiences of those artists, for whom rock was deemed too "edgy." As those artists have lost much of their luster (Justin Timberlake excepted since he completely reinvented himself), Idol has redefined its own sense of the mainstream by incorporating more and more rock into its fabric.

Of course there are still limits to all of this. The decidedly non-rock Danny Gokey, another of this season's final four and one of the clear favorites, just murdered a version of Aerosmith's "Dream on." Not all artists can do rock well and American Idol still needs folks like Gokey to appeal to its non-rock fan demographic, which is almost certainly still a bigger part of its audience than its rock fan contingent.

And, strangely, rap music is still largely beyond the pale of Idol even though there's no doubt that in strictly commercial terms it's been the biggest thing going for the past 15 years (since Kurt Cobain died). I'd need a whole other post to try to make sense of that.