The chart of the various incarnations of the band is useful – the list of the lengths of service of every member is surprising and illuminating – but after a while, you begin to sense that Witts is up to something other than clarifying his points. Sometimes, for example, he treats the band as if they were a foreign object to be studied by a numerically minded scientist: he starts counting, and creates charts, lists and outlines of reasons to favour particular aspects of their work. This is the true double task of the pop critic-historian, and Witts goes to creative, sometimes comic lengths to accomplish it. Instead, he manages to defamiliarise the band and its career, while communicating all the necessary information. Witts, author of a biography of Nico and interviewer at one time or another (for Radio 3) of all the principals in the band except Lou Reed, could just as easily have produced a fan letter or a recitation of myths. I began with suspicion, but it won me over completely: it is careful, funny, refreshing, usefully revisionist about the Velvets, and a corrective to all sorts of illnesses in the genre. These liabilities are all somehow turned to strengths in Witts’s little marvel of a book. ‘The Velvet Underground,’ Witts says outright, ‘has always been a bit of a mess.’ Nor is it easy to identify the band as a unit, since members came and went. With a decidedly slim catalogue (four studio albums) but an outsized posthumous reputation, they are not an easy act to place in the history of popular music. There are confirmed music fans who can’t bear to listen to the songs considered their most characteristic (‘Heroin’, ‘Sister Ray’). The Velvet Underground were decidedly not these kinds of virtuoso. Yet the first book to appear, by Richard Witts, tackles the Velvet Underground. Each of these musicians is a virtuoso of one or another aspect of pop. In truth, most critics aren’t verbally equipped to describe any band’s vivid effects on its main audience: the listener at home, alone in his room.įurther books are scheduled in the series: on Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Björk. Perhaps worst of all, there is the curse of the rhetoric of social action and ‘revolution’, a faith-based illusion that pop songs clearly manifest social history, or an exaggerated sense of what pop achieves in the world. Then there is the curse of arid musicology and of Rolling Stone-ism, the gonzo rock journalist who thinks he is a rock star. This sort of writing fails the reality of pop: its special alchemy of lyrics that look like junk on the page, and music that seems underdeveloped when transcribed to a musical staff. Then there is the curse of Dylanology, such a blight on pop criticism: worship of lyrics as ‘poetry’, modelled on pop’s least representative major figure. Historical pop figures are remembered as either too good or too bad to need defending it’s guaranteed that anyone willing to read a volume on King Crimson, say, or Crosby, Stills and Nash, is already on board. It won’t forsake the impulse to praise figures who no longer need to be praised. But pop criticism can’t seem to escape the thrall of these biographies, and rarely has much to add. Everyone likes the autobiographies of even the most inarticulate musicians at least they can explain how they make the songs. Ordinarily, I couldn’t think of anything less auspicious. The volumes will be designed for ‘undergraduates and the general reader’. Equinox is publishing a series of books called ‘Icons of Pop Music’.
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