When Genres Collide: Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and the Struggle between Jazz and Rock. By Matt Brennan.
When Genres Collide: Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and the Struggle between Jazz and Rock. By Matt Brennan.
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当流派碰撞时：重拍、滚石以及爵士乐和摇滚乐之间的斗争。
DOI：
10.1093/ml/gcx105
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发表时间：
2017
影响因子：
0.3
通讯作者：
Williams J
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Williams J
在他的新书中，马特·布伦南试图研究流行音乐史上的两个难题：第一，研究为什么爵士乐和摇滚乐的学术研究即使不是相互排斥，也是如此的隔离;第二，为什么爵士乐和摇滚乐在媒体上受到不同的对待，尽管它们有共同的特点。在许多方面，第一个问题是通过对第二个问题的彻底调查来回答的，因为布伦南主要通过期刊《下拍》和《滚石》的透镜关注爵士乐和摇滚乐批评史。内容比标题所暗示的更全面。这本书不仅涵盖了两种流派碰撞的场合，还介绍了爵士乐批评的起源和1934年《Down Beat》的成立，一年后本尼·古德曼成为明星。每一章都可以单独阅读，尽管他们通过描绘爵士乐和摇滚乐在一种几乎共生的关系中各自崛起的画面来相互交谈，其中一种流派定义了自己与另一种流派的对立。第一章描绘了作为摇滚乐先驱的爵士乐文化的兴起，而第二章则概述了摇滚乐在《Down Beat》中的消失。第三章探讨了当时的爵士乐媒体是如何报道摇滚乐的兴起的。第四章，可以被看作是对第三章的文化回应，涵盖了摇滚评论家和其他创办出版物的人的出现，如滚石和克劳迪！以他们想要的方式讨论音乐。第五章重点介绍了1969年纽波特爵士音乐节上的新闻界，这是一次尝试将摇滚、放克和爵士乐的表演放在一起，导致了人群的骚乱。纽波特的接受成为讨论关于这些体裁和围绕它们的新闻话语的各种假设的另一条途径。布伦南告诉我们，专注于摇滚评论的新杂志是出于对爵士作家试图写摇滚的不满;作者认为摇滚记者过分夸大了他们的原创性和在更广泛的历史中的地位。他的观点是，爵士乐以前就有过这样的经历，1955年那一刻（摇滚乐成为主流）的激进化似乎让我们和流行音乐研究变得健忘。他们都是面向年轻人的音乐，其中大乐队爵士乐引领潮流，具有我们与流行音乐联系在一起的特征：“爵士乐可以说是第一个产生成熟艺术世界的流行风格，由评论家、能言善辩的音乐家和狂热的读者组成的社区在书籍、杂志、报纸和油印机上产生了前所未有的丰富的流行音乐话语”（第5页）。叙述和语气是一位称职的音乐历史学家的风格，他尊重故事、人物阵容和他们的声音。这本书充满了被遗忘已久的杂志封面，这让我们想起了《垮掉的一代》和《滚石》曾经涵盖的范围。比尔·哈利和彗星乐队以及披头士乐队出现在《Down Beat》的封面上，而Sun Ra则出现在《滚石》的封面上。这样的图像本身就可以成为一本书长度的研究的灵感。我们有来自摇滚和爵士作家的引文和采访，在许多情况下，他们被突出来讲述故事。作者很少依靠后见之明来理论化他的主题，或者至少让人得到他是在从头开始画一幅画的印象。换句话说，这不是关于我们自己的时代，尽管熟悉流行话语的读者会看到与本书范围之外的无数材料的相似之处。关于政治、种族和体裁的问题都得到了解决，但往往是在他们自己的话语世界中处理的。我们没有被击中头部...
In his new book, Matt Brennan seeks to investigate two puzzles of popular-music history: first, to investigate why jazz and rock scholarship are so segregated if not resistant to one another; and secondly, why jazz and rock have been treated differently in the press despite their shared characteristics. In many ways, the first question is answered through a thorough investigation of the second, as Brennan focuses primarily on jazz and rock criticism history through the lens of the periodicals Down Beat and Rolling Stone. The contents are more comprehensive than the title suggests. The book covers not only occasions when the two genres collide, but also the origins of jazz criticism and the founding of Down Beat in 1934, one year before Benny Goodman’s rise to stardom. Each chapter could be read on its own, though they speak to each other by painting a picture of jazz and rock’s separate rise to legitimization in an almost symbiotic relationship, where one genre defines itself in opposition to the other. The first chapter maps the rise of jazz culture as a precursor to rock’n’roll, while the second chapter outlines the dismissal of rock’n’roll in Down Beat. Chapter 3 looks at how the existing jazz press covered rock’s emergence. Chapter 4, which could be seen as the cultural response to chapter 3, covers the emergence of rock critics and others who founded publications such as Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy! in order to discuss the music in the way they wanted. Chapter 5 focuses on the press at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1969, very much an experiment in booking rock, funk, and jazz acts all together, which led to crowd disturbances. Newport’s reception becomes another avenue by which to discuss various assumptions about these genres and the journalistic discourses surrounding them. Brennan tells us that new magazines focusing on rock criticism grew out of a dissatisfaction with jazz writers trying to write about rock; the author makes the case that rock journalists over-exaggerated their originality and place in the wider history. His point is that it had been done before for jazz, and the radicalization of the 1955 moment (when rock’n’roll emerges in the mainstream) has seemed to make us, and popular music studies, forgetful. They were both youth-oriented musics, with big-band jazz leading the way with features we associate with popular music:‘jazz was arguably the first popular style to generate a fully fledged art world with a community of critics, articulate musicians, and avid readers producing an unprecedentedly rich popular music discourse in books, magazines, newspapers, and mimeographs’(p. 5).The narrative and tone are those of a competent music historian, one who is respectful of the story, its cast of characters, and their voices. The book is peppered with long-forgotten magazine covers, which remind us what a range Down Beat and Rolling Stone used to cover. Bill Haley and the Comets and The Beatles feature on the covers of Down Beat, while Sun Ra features on Rolling Stone’s. Such images on their own could have been the inspiration for a book-length study. We have quotations from and interviews with rock and jazz writers, and in many cases, they are foregrounded to tell the story. The author rarely relies on hindsight to theorize his subject matter, or at least one gets the impression that he is painting a picture from the ground up. In other words, this is not about our own times, though readers familiar with pop discourse will see parallels with myriad material beyond the scope of the book. Issues regarding politics, race, and genre are addressed, but very often treated within their own discursive worlds at the time. We are not hit over the head …