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A New (Rock) Polarity
THE SEX REVOLTS
Gender, Rebellion and Rock 'n' Roll
By Simon Reynolds and Joy Press
Harvard University Press
Most histories of rock and roll are organized around one or several
familiar polarities: art and commerce, rebel and establishment,
young and old, black and white. The Sex Revolts doesn't claim to be
definitive, but it often feels like a history of rock and roll
organized solely around male and female. For Reynolds, a New York-based
Briton, and Press, his American wife, rock plainly belongs to
the avant-garde rather than the pop tradition. So it's not
surprising that they have plenty to say about the human longing for
infancy and nothing about the paradoxical involvement of full-grown
adults in what was originally conceived as teen music. And despite
a barely examined assumption that "for decades" this music was
"based on . . . an emulation of black machismo, flamboyance,
passion and self-aggrandizement," black artists are all but
ignored--however brilliantly Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, and Al
Green, to name just three, configured gender, they're "soul," not
"rock."
Nevertheless, both as an account of bohemian sexism and an
exploration of how sexual identity inflects musical form, The Sex
Revolts is thorough yet highly (if sometimes irritatingly)
idiosyncratic. Unabashed fans of four-on-the-floor male chauvinists
from Jim Morrison to Australian cult favorite Nick Cave, Reynolds
and Press are also eloquent in their praise of a more womanly
"oceanic" aesthetic they discern in figures as diverse as the
German avant-gardists Can, punk poet Patti Smith, and Joni
Mitchell's far-flung heiresses. Let's hope that theirs is not the
last cross-disciplinary work that owes its ambitions to the
cultural studies movement while refusing to succumb to academic
provincialism and jargon.
New York Times Book Review, 1995
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