Happy new year 2025, everyone.

Back in 1936, the philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote a piece titled "On Jazz," which applied critical-theoretic ideas to the listening of music. Now, Adorno was also a music theorist and a pianist as well as being a philosopher, and so "On Jazz" comes across as esoteric. So, here, and to begin the new year, I'd like to try my hand at a brief critical theory of music. I have one major caveat to offer: since I don't know music theory, this will offer light on music theory. Instead, I will offer some passing insights about popular music from the Sixties and Seventies from my own critical theory angle. As explained below, even though this era is long gone, its relevance extends to this day.

First, some historical background. The Sixties and Seventies appear as the high point of the history of popular music, being the convergence of advancing musical technologies and the insights of what is sometimes called the Golden Age of Capitalism. Or, as I remember Frank Zappa explaining it: in the Sixties the music executives didn't know what would sell, so they were willing to trust you with something new. Later they pretended they did know what would sell, which screwed up pop music bigtime. At any rate, the Sixties and Seventies appear as the last big wave of creativity within Western Civilization crashing onto the music scene, infecting straight "rock-and-roll" with insights gained from classical music (Moody Blues, Yes, and so on), musique concrete (Zappa and others), jazz (The Doors, the Byrds, Steely Dan and so on), and other genres. The Seventies were the after-breath of the Sixties. Pretty much everything that counts as pop music today can be counted as a reconstruction and reworking of stuff that came out before Miles Davis and Frank Zappa died in the early Nineties, if not earlier. So, yeah, this is the relevant stuff. This is it.

So here are some initial choices for review:

The Beatles. There was something either childish or childlike about early Beatles, notwithstanding the adult material of some of the lyrics (no, I don't mean adult in terms of pornography or violence), and also something insecure, especially with John Lennon. No doubt this mixture was popular in the United States in the aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as indeed it was.

Mature Beatles music, from Revolver on, appears to have been aimed toward confident, upper-class "A" students in good high schools with high college acceptance rates, or maybe even college froshes planning their course schedules. (I mean such people as they were back then, and not now.) By the time the Beatles stopped touring in 1966, of course, they were so popular that most everyone enjoyed their music one way or another. Breakup post-Beatles were successful to the extent to which they could duplicate the aura they collectively attained in having created the White Album and the second side of Abbey Road. John Lennon was the exception to this rule: both Plastic Ono Band and Imagine clearly featured the voice of someone trying therapies in hopes of eventual mental health, and Double Fantasy an example of having found it. The transition from grown-up kid to upper-class high-school "A" student occurred in 1965, and so pretty much anything they put out in 1965 indicates a steep learning curve. Here's an example:

Talking Heads. The Talking Heads were a genuine college band. This was due to the younger version of David Byrne, who was also rather insecure, and whose insecurities apparently did not disappear when the band started making "happy" music especially beginning with with Speaking In Tongues in 1983. The memoir of the drummer Chris Frantz revealed as much.

Naturally, the whole project evaporated when David Byrne left the Talking Heads in 1991.

The Jefferson Airplane. The Airplane were a Sixties band, the epitome of the "San Francisco sound," also college-level in the audience appeal, but they didn't have much commercial success except with two singles, "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit," both of which were gifted them courtesy of Grace Slick upon her exit from her previous band, the Great Society, which had been even less commercially successful. As a psychedelic band they put out three really brainy albums: Surrealistic Pillow (1967), After Bathing at Baxter's (1967) and Crown of Creation (1968). And after that they became something far more regular. One has to imagine that the three brainy albums were the result of the temporary magnification of insight the Airplane gained from having taken LSD at that specific time in their lives. The band's most lasting creative spirit was Paul Kantner, who created Jefferson Starship in 1974, destroying it in 1984, and later bringing it back as a cover band. Paul Kantner died in 2016. Craig Chaquico sued the remnant cover band in 2022 over royalties, intending (I gather) to destroy it. Here's Jorma Kaukonen's most intelligent song, from "Crown of Creation":

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. There was something really smart about these four men, all plucked from different bands and brought together, at least while the Sixties zeitgeist was making them happen. CSN appeared significantly inspired by marijuana, but you also had songs like "Chicago" and "Ohio."

Neil Young was naturally the most interesting of the bunch -- a Canadian with a nascent American political consciousness. Of course, Young's political consciousness stays nascent, probably because rich popstars are generally eternal children, or perhaps because he liked to rush things into audience exposure in an intentionally and charmingly sloppy way. Neil Young must be given credit for having figured out who and what "Monsanto" is, though he gets demerits for divorcing Pegi.

David Crosby was an interesting mix of drugs, brains, and paranoia. Once again, however, Crosby was interesting mainly because he intersected with a counterculture and a specific decade. It was, however, nice to see him applying himself after he got out of prison. Prisons suck, though I suppose that, like everything else, they suck because capitalism sucks.

The Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead thought "tradition" was the antidote to pop music fads. So if you're wondering what happened to the Sixties counterculture, look at the history of the Grateful Dead. It's a history of cultural preservation, full of gigs, bootlegs, and set lists. You can draw a line from the Sixties counterculture to the Grateful Dead in the same way you can draw a line from Paul or Saul of Tarsus, inventor of Christianity, to the monastery of Mount Athos in Greece. So the Dead are the Mount Athos of Sixties pop music. Their most touching moments are best carried on by youngsters Mikaela Davis and Southern Star:

U2. I think playing in stadiums went to U2's heads, as no band with as little good content as U2 has deserves to play in stadiums. Also, their embrace of the neoliberal status quo is pretty scary stuff. Perhaps hanging out with George W. Bush also went to their heads. I think their biggest claim to fame is having piggybacked on the expertise of producer Brian Eno, a product of the Seventies. But here one recalls that The Unforgettable Fire was initially released in 1984, and here they are, still riding on the fumes of all that. Those, we must reckon, were (and are) some incredible fumes.

The Clash. Apparently The Clash had some commercial success back in the Seventies. I guess you could call them "semi-punk" or "popularizers of punk" -- they had a major label (CBS) and put out a triple album with a lot of different genres, including dub music (Sandinista).

As I understand it now, punk was a politicized Romanticism of musical pain: perhaps Crass made a better example. Perhaps The Clash was politically ineffectual because they encountered too many uncomfortable social imaginaries: the young neo-Confederates loved them when they toured the South. At any rate, Joe Strummer had a wonderful voice that persisted up to his death in 2002.

Okay, that's all for now. I will probably have to write a sequel to this one. At any rate, here we are in 2025, and if there's any real news that isn't depressing as Hell, it's happening at the local level and we're making it. See you again.