Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Wait long enough and every enjoyment is eventually placed on the altar, gussied up, and sanctified. Rock ‘n’ roll lyrics were once a readymade source of ridicule, regarded as gibberish written by and for bubblegum brains and blasting out of transistor radios to drive mom and dad mad. The late-night television host Steve Allen, equipped with Clark Kent glasses and a quipster’s fast draw, did a routine where he read aloud the lyrics of a popular pop song as if performing a poem at the 92Y in full authorial pomp. Most of the kinescopes from his show have been lost in the ghostly landfill of time, but Allen’s goof on Gene Vincent’s “Be Bop a Lula” circa 1956 somehow survives on YouTube, as Allen invites the studio audience and viewers at home to drink in the song’s simple beauty: “Be bop a lula, be my baby/bop a lula…I don’t mean maybe.” It was all in the timing, and Allen knew just when to pause for pregnant effect. Allen, a classic postwar liberal who jousted with William F. Buckley, Jr. on Firing Line, didn’t harbor hostility toward rock and roll, even though he was much more of a piano-tickling jazz guy; he was simply making sport of its conventions, much as he mimicked the hothead apoplexy of newspaper letters to the editor, and most of us wisenheimers who grew up with Mad magazine went along with the gag. But there were others watching in the cavernous dark of rec rooms across the land who took rock and roll more seriously, more protectively, and resented its being picked on. Allen’s mock-mimicry lodged in their craws as Exhibit 1 of the adult condescension toward the passionate, unfettered joy of rock and roll. These old gassers just didn’t get it! Rock and roll, it was righteously felt, would have the final say and the last laugh. Demographics were on its side. On our side, if you were a teenage baby boomer ready to stampede into tomorrow. It took awhile, but a counterblow was struck. It seemed a soft counterblow at the time, not a ringing manifesto, but it resonated nevertheless. In 1969, the pioneer pop journalist Richard Goldstein edited an anthology titled The Poetry of Rock, a choice floral arrangement of rock and folk-rock lyrics that was published as a slim Bantam Books paperback that fit neatly into a jeans pocket or small purse, like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, only groovier; it was the perfect everyday companion for English majors, pop fans, and studious aspiring songwriters of a sensitive nature, a sizable cohort back then. Goldstein had been miffed by Allen’s professorial buffoonery — “I recall being pretty pissed off with Steverino then for his dishonest presentation of rock,” he states in the introduction — and here was the rebuttal. “I do not claim that these selections constitute a body of ‘undiscovered’ poetry. This is no pop-Ossian. But I do assert that there is an immense awareness of language, and a profound sense of rhythm.” The timing of The Poetry of Rock couldn’t have been more propitious. By 1969, rock had largely lost its “and roll” and strengthened into a four-letter word of cultural prowess, a raised fist demanding to be reckoned with. Essays such as Richard Poirier’s controversial “Learning from the Beatles” in Partisan Review in 1967 and Albert Goldman’s reveille call “The Emergence of Rock” in New American Review in 1968 had elevated the status of rock, and the first ponderous stirrings of Dylanology rumbled through the forests, thickening in time into an academic industry. Woodstock Nation had become a kingdom of the imagination, a muddy, momentary Camelot. Although undertaken in an underdog spirit, The Poetry of Rock spoke to the cresting countercultural moment and went into multiple printings, earning a spot in the pop-studies curriculum and pride of place on countless dorm room bookshelves next to Stranger in a Strange Land and The Harrad Experiment. Thumbing through The Poetry of Rock today makes for a wistful ride in the wayback machine, the book’s graphics and fonts a garden of hippie nostalgia, its contents a reminder of how prophetic Goldstein’s anthology choices were. From Chuck Berry, “America’s first rock poet,” the idol of us all who “sang about an America of pure motion and energy” (“In a Chuck Berry song, you couldn’t tell the girls from the cars, and some of the best marriages ended up in traffic court”), to the flossier troubadours, social prophets, flower-power bards, and asphalt-jungle serenaders represented here, a pantheon takes shape. Each inductee benefits from Goldstein’s elegant inscriptions — deft, evocative, and seldom guilty of over-salesmanship. “The Supremes sing like satin,” he writes in the citation for Holland, Dozier, Holland’s “Baby Love”: “The lines move in even strokes, like a pendulum. You can sense the ebb and flow of feminine hips behind that gently rocking refrain.” He catches the inherent contradiction of the Rolling Stones’ “Lady Jane,” “a chivalric ode against a tinkling dulcimer” that is sung (tongued?) by Mick Jagger with his usual lewd larceny. He’s also quite sharp on how Lennon-McCartney contrive an enigmatic vignette out of the snug nest of “Norwegian Wood.” Fittingly, The Poetry of Rock finishes its survey of the hidden subtleties of the hit parade with a peer into the abyss titled “The End,” the nightscape tour guided by Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, Lizard King, and leather-sheathed shaman whose musky voice seemed to resonate from his majestic crotch with a swell of reverb echo. Not everyone was captivated by his charismatic ooga-booga. “Jim Morrison sounds like an asshole,” decreed Robert Christgau, the Dean of American Rock Critics, who recently celebrated his eightieth birthday. Christgau also deemed Jimbo a bad poet, and it’s hard to disagree when he cites pearls such as “We need great golden copulations” and “Death and my cock are the world.” Yet the Morrison mystique endures a half century after his death, and not only because of the erotic, vampiric aura of his persona that