Would you like to know how John, Paul, George, and Ringo destroyed
rock'n'roll? Me too, which is why I read all the way to the end of Elijah
Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock'n'Roll, even as I became
increasingly doubtful that the book would justify its title.

It sure doesn't. In fact, the Beatles feature only in the introduction,
epilogue, and final chapter (out of 17). The narrative runs from around 1890
to 1970, and spends relatively little time with the Fab Four. Paul Whiteman,
an early-20th-century big-band leader, gets much more ink than Paul
McCartney.

In many ways, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock'n'Roll is not a bad book. But
it doesn't deliver on its title, which is a bait-and-switch tease, or even
its subtitle: An Alternative History of American Popular History.

Alternative to what? To rock cultists who celebrate only the most obscure,
least commercial examples of the genre, apparently. But such people aren't
all that common -- they couldn't be, or the music they prize wouldn't be
obscure. And most of us cultists don't deny the appeal of mainstream pop. I
like Future of the Left, but am aware that Taylor Swift sells significantly
better.

While surveying pre-Let It Be pop in some detail, Wald advances two
theses, which are not entirely compatible. The first is that all (or nearly
all) innovation in American popular music comes from African-Americans. The
second is that white and black U.S. musicians were influencing each other
long before the 1950s.

Anyone who's been paying attention already knows the latter. It's convenient
to suppose that 1954, the year of Elvis Presley's debut and Brown vs. the
Board of Education, was a bolt of lightning that demolished cultural
barriers and freed white teenagers to dance to "That's All Right, Mama." But
the endless argument over the "first rock'n'roll record" keeps pushing the
genre's origins back to performers, both black and white, who significantly
predate Elvis.

Wald is aware of that. In his research, he found that Ella Fitzgerald was
singing about "rock and roll" with a ballroom orchestra in 1937. And she
surely wasn't the first person to use the phrase.

If such revelations are less than startling, Wald's book does offer some
entertaining minutiae. I was charmed to learn, for example, about DJ shows
in the early days of TV that illustrated the music with abstract or random
imagery: Detroit's Pat'n'Johnny Show displayed "parakeets, canaries,
hamsters, rabbits, guinea pigs, tropical fish and other animals while
records spin."

I have some quibbles, a few of them related to my hometown, Washington, D.C. To illustrate the importance of brass bands in the earliest days of the
recording industry, Wald notes that Columbia Records's first catalogue,
published in 1890, listed 50 cylinders by the U.S. Marine Band, then under
the direction of popular march composer John Philip Sousa. But he doesn't
mention that Columbia, Sousa, and the Marine Band were all based in D.C. If
Columbia had been founded in New Orleans or Kansas City, its repertoire
would have been rather different. (He also misses the importance to Al
Jolson of a childhood spent in ethnically and racially mixed southwest D.C.,
and Washington's role in "hillbilly" music after World War II.)

To Wald's credit, much of the material to rebut his arguments is right there
in his own book. He charts an 80-year process in which "hot"
African-American rhythms gradually overwhelmed "sweet" Euro-American
melodies and arrangements. Yet he concedes that plenty of black musicians
emulated white ones, and not just during the big-band era. In the 1950s,
when Presley and other rockabilly types were getting raucous, the
top-selling black performers included Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis.

#How the Beatles Destroyed Rock'n'Roll# seeks to elevate commercial
judgments over artistic ones. It wants to know which performers innovated,
but is more interested in which ones attracted a crowd. Yet these two things
can't be balanced exactly -- as every rock writer knows. While Wald travels
further back in time than many rock chroniclers, the art-versus-commerce
contradictions he encounters won't surprise thoughtful observers.

The book starts to get in real trouble around 1959, when Joan Baez signs to
the liberal-minded folk label Vanguard, rather than Columbia, the domain of
eclectic (and omnivorous) producer Mitch Miller. The new generation of "pop"
musicians who cared more about their idea of authenticity than about
pop-chart success challenges the author's simplistic analysis. Something
happened in the 1960s, and Wald doesn't know what it was.

He continues to assume that pop music is validated foremost by commercial
triumph. So he shortchanges Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, despite their
enormous influence, because their records didn't sell all that well. And he
treats the free agents of the rock era like the journeymen of an earlier
age: He writes that "Atlantic used Eric Clapton and Duane Allman on
recordings by [Aretha] Franklin and [Wilson] Pickett," as if 1970s
rock-guitar gods were 1930s session players dependent on producers for a
gig.

Wald's essential gripe is that art-rock separated white music from its black
cousin, and he thinks rock has suffered from that breach. Despite its title,
however, the book spends very little time explaining how everything went
wrong.

It seems to all come down to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,
certainly not one of funkiest records of its time. Wald even credits the
Beatles's psychedelic-music-hall period for "opening the way for the Velvet
Underground." Yet the bulk of Velvets's first album was recorded in April
1966, when the Beatles's latest single was "Nowhere Man." #Sgt. Pepper's#
was only 14 months away, but those 14 months would be very eventful.

And the Beatles's acid-washed experiments didn't last long. By 1968, Lennon
would be writing blues-based stompers; in 1969, McCartney would instruct his
own band to "get back to where you once belonged." If the Beatles destroyed
rock'n'roll, they quickly turned to reviving it.

Wald's book reads like a very long introduction to a history that's yet to
be written. He discusses only a few of the myriad influences that led to
psychedelic rock and its various successors, and ends a tale that chronicles
immense diversity and complex interaction by trying to pin late-'60s rock
entirely on a single band. Also, because he's so laden with pop history,
Wald can't hear what's new in post-Beatles music that recasts '50s and '60s
rock.

If the Beatles forever separated white artiness from black earthiness, what
explains the Pop Group's punk-jazz, Talking Heads's Afro-punk, Prince's
new-waved soul, DJ Spooky's art-school hip-hop, or the Dirty Projectors's
high-life guitars? Or the rappers who sampled Kraftwerk, Led Zeppelin, and
the Police?

What really happened to rock in the '60s and '70s was not that it split in
two, but that it splintered into thousands of pieces. A history that
stitched together those fragments would be more useful than How the Beatles Destroyed Rock'n'Roll, which simply hangs new details on a long-established historical framework.

The gap between black and white American music from 1890-1970 isn't that
hard to explain: The country was racially segregated. That a sort of musical
segregation continues -- although it's not so straightforward as Wald
imagines -- is a much more interesting topic. It calls for someone to write
a history, but not an "alternative" one, and not one that attempts to fit
the sprawling jumble that is popular culture into rigid ideological
template.

It's been a long time since Michael Jackson penned a hit song, but he did write one last nationwide sensation: the script the mainstream media has followed since his death. Jackson, we're told, was the "king of pop," who had "the biggest selling album of all time," and "broke MTV's color line." Every one of these dubious factoids was devised by Jackson or his agents.

In 1979 Jackson commenced a great solo run, starting with Off the Wall and on through 1991's Dangerous. The latter was knocked off by Nirvana's Nevermind, and henceforth Jacko was a "legacy" act, working his back catalogue-when he was working at all. (Speaking of that back catalogue, the singer's Motown-era solo albums - 1972's Got to Be There, 1972's Ben, 1973's Music & Me and 1975's Forever, Michael - yielded a sprinkling of hits, including a #1 in '72, "Ben," although all four records were wildly inconsistent. Hip-O Select has just reissued them, along with bonus and unreleased tracks, as a deluxe, limited-to-7000 copies three-CD set titled Hello World: The Motown Solo Collection.)

The first pedophilia charge came in 1993, and for the next 16 years Jackson was an object of scorn, horror, and ridicule: His music was upstaged by financial reversals, phony marriages, children by surrogates, and skin whitening and plastic surgery. So it's no small triumph that obituary and appreciation writers now hail Jackson as a culture-shaping luminary rather than a nose-mutilating freak.

I yield to no one in my admiration of "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" and "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," and I don't doubt Jackson's talent. Lots of people want to remember the guy as the King of Pop, or whatever, which is their right. But then many other people love the Jonas Brothers, Phish, or Slipknot. In their time, Pat Boone and Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass enjoyed chart-dominating epochs. None of them changed society, and neither did Jacko.

MJ did take credit for the three best numbers on Thriller, including "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," a song that's heavily indebted to Manu Dibango's "Soul Makossa." (According to the New Yorker's Kelefa Sanneh, the two musicians eventually reached a "financial agreement.") But the most of the album is unlistenable, and today would be extremely vulnerable to single-track downloads.

Jackson was primarily an impresario, not a musician, and his instincts soon failed him. Even with only one act in his stable - himself - he couldn't keep on track. By 1995's HIStory: Past, Present, and Future, Book I, Jackson the image-builder was portraying Michael the music-maker as both an abused child and a totalitarian dictator. He sent a 60-foot plaster statue of his Michaelness to tour major European cities.

 
Such weirdness continued for many years, yet has been largely excluded from the career recaps. This is partly because the non-trash media-from op-ed pages to Sunday morning talk shows-have to justify the amount of coverage their newspapers or networks have given Jacko. If he's just dance-pop's equivalent of a brain-damaged professional wrestler, the attention is unjustified. So MJ must have been significant.

This yields such straw-grasping punditry as the claim that "we" all identified with Jackson because he blurred racial and gender identity. But he did so in a way that was creepy, not inspiring, and revealed self-loathing, not self- acceptance. Anyone who seriously identified with the latter-day Jackson should seek professional help.

To some mainstream eulogists, Jackson's momentousness is all in a large and charmingly tidy number: 100 million. That's the supposed worldwide sales figure for Thriller, which very well could be the best-selling album of all time. But the international numbers are speculation, and in the U.S. Thriller was overcome by The Eagles' Greatest Hits almost 20 years ago.

In his essential blog, Hitsville, Bill Wyman questions the 100 million total. He thinks it likely that "this bogus figure comes from Jackson, who learned early at Motown that it was OK to out-and-out lie to the press about anything and everything. (If it came from Sony it would raise immediate questions from the Jackson camp about royalties, right?)"

But music sales are a matter of longstanding mystery to the establishment press, which equates big numbers with widespread cultural influence, and seldom checks to see if either truly exists. (Thus newspaper hacks regularly proclaim hip-hop the country's top-selling musical genre, which it never has been.) "Best-selling album of all time" authenticates Jackson's place in the universe-and therefore on the front page - so best not to check its accuracy.

Repeating the "king of pop" tag is even lazier. It makes for a succinct headline, but its source is Jackson himself, who adopted it in 1991, just before it became undeniably false. If Jacko had named himself "Lord Protector of Jupiter," would that also feature in the obits? Probably not, because Jupiter belongs to the "Science" section, which insists on facts. But pop music is the province of "Life" or "Arts," whose truths are squishier.

On the charts, "Billie Jean" was arguably Jackson's biggest success. In death, it becomes something greater: his racial-pioneer badge. For, as every TV or a newspaper commentator now knows, with that song Jacko "broke MTV's color barrier" and became "the first black musician to appear on MTV." So beat it, Rosa Parks, beat it.

Actually, before "Billie Jean," MTV programmed videos by Eddie Grant, Tina Turner, and Donna Summer, as well as a whole lot of Musical Youth's "Pass the Dutchie." MTV skipped Thriller's first single, "The Girl Is Mine," not because Jackson was black-the tune also featured the quite famous and rather white Paul McCartney - but because it was doggone treacle.

Then a relatively small operation with a largely suburban teenage audience, MTV programmed uptempo, moderately noisy music by performers who made videos, which at that time meant mostly Britons. (Music promo vids developed earlier over there, because BBC radio played so little rock.) "The Girl Is Mine" was unsuitable, but "Billie Jean," with its driving beat and high-gloss video, was ideal.

According to the myth, executives at Epic, Jackson's label, gave MTV an ultimatum: Play "Billie Jean" or else. But that was a publicity stunt. In Hit Men, his 1990 history of the music biz, Fredric Dannen recounts: Around this time Jacko added a new lawyer, John Branca, to his all-white management team. Not long after, Branca was also representing MTV. As racial showdowns go, this one sounds a lot like a boardroom shuffle.

Whatever Jackson's gifts, he was above all a guy in the right place at the right time. Thriller arrived as MTV was booming, and the era of made-in-the-U.S.A. videos dawning. Also, it was released just as labels decided to milk albums as long as possible, rather than scuttling off to the next prospect for a hit or two. So seven of the disc's nine songs became singles, and Thriller lingered over the charts like a stationary front, eventually selling 28 million copies in the U.S. (and another 40 trillion intergalactically, I'm pretty sure).

Great timing. Garth Brooks had it, too, but don't expect his obits someday to assert that he transformed society.

Selling lots of albums is consequential, but not in the way Jackson's analysts earnestly wish. So maybe it's time for the legit media to let Jacko go. He belongs not to
history, but to TMZ.

CRITICAL CONDITION

It's true: the rock critic has gone the way of the buffalo.

As the recorded-music industry withers, so does its unruly stepchild, pop-music criticism. Newspapers are jettisoning reviewers of all kinds, rock magazines are disappearing, and music websites tend to pay (if at all) even less than the defunct magazines.

While the space for pop-culture analysis shrinks, the two-thumbs-up universe expands. Websites like Yelp allow civilians to review pretty much anything, and online merchants encourage their customers to post critiques. Most of these comments are useless, but they're easily available, and usually attached to multi-star or numerical ratings. If you'd prefer a yes-or-no answer over reasoned consideration, the web offers a worldwide break from heavy lifting.

For critics dejectedly watching their self-image fade, the latest crisis is the "instant" album, a phenomenon that includes not just download-only releases but also hard-copy ones like The Raconteurs's Consolers of the Lonely. Never mind all the beginner-band, industry-dropout, and dubiously legal music that's sloshing around the Internet. People can actually walk into a record store—if they can find one—and buy a brand new major-label CD that no one from Rolling Stone has heard yet.

That doesn't mean that writing about music will disappear. But rock criticism as a paying career, never a prudent career option, is looking increasingly iffy. For rock writers, it's a good time to be independently wealthy.

But then it always was. While large metropolitan dailies and a few of the bigger alternative weeklies employ full-time critics, most rock writers are freelancers who support themselves doing something else. (Rock reviewers are no more likely than cult musicians to have health insurance.) The Bush administration's economic shambles makes life harder, but it doesn't change the fundamentals of freelance writing, a field no one enters to get rich.

Enough about money. The larger issue is the role of pop-culture criticism, an impure form that was never welcomed by most of its audience. It may seem that the golden age of rock writing is over, but actually it never happened. Pop-music critics really didn't have much influence, and were appreciated by the biz primarily for their willingness to fall into line. Mavericks could be tolerated if they were amusing, especially since it was clear that no cranky commentator could damage music's major franchises. (Remember when hip critics hated Grand Funk Railroad? It had so little effect on the band that ultimately many of the detractors converted. That also had no effect on the band.)

Rock critics, like film reviewers, are fundamentally at odds with most of their readers, who want just two things: tips on which new cultural products to consume, and validation of their own opinions. A reasoned analysis that challenges their own viewpoint is about as welcome a surprise as a rat's tail in a bottle of supermarket salsa. (Readers aren't always wrong to reject rock criticism, of course. Lots of it is worse than supermarket salsa.)

A timely review of a new pop-culture consumable serves several purposes. It's a news item, informing people that the album, movie, or whatever exists, and what broad category it inhabits. A review is also entertainment, offering such pleasures—depending on the writer—as well-turned phrases, incisive jibes, or crude appeals to accepted opinion. (Heavy-metal "rocks!" Chick flicks "suck!") Lastly, if there's room, a review is a consideration of style, craft, influences, development, integrity, and so on. You know, art.

In today's always-on mediaverse, few readers have the patience for such matters. Free-market efficiency channels cultural opinions, which can be Googled faster than a vending machines can dispense a bottle of Dasani: "A-," "one thumb up," "buy now," "wait for the DVD." And since every click can be tallied, pop-culture businesses know for sure what they always suspected: Most consumers don't care what most critics think.

This reflects new technology, but not such a new attitude. The rapport between music consumers and reviewers has been always shaky. It's no coincidence that the cherished zeniths of rock criticism occurred during periods when, or in places where, the music under discussion was hard to hear.

For English-language rock criticism, the standard was long set by British music weeklies. If callow, absurdly trendy, and often rash in their judgments, New Musical Express, Melody Maker, and Sounds were great fun to read. Their energy had something to do with their weekly schedule, but owed more to the stodginess of the BBC. With precious little rock being played on the radio or TV, the music press had a near-monopoly on manic pop thrills. When satellite TV, commercial radio, and the Internet arrived, Melody Maker and Sounds disappeared, and New Musical Express retrenched. I rarely look at it anymore.

Much the same happened in the U.S., albeit on a near-subterranean level, with glam-rock, garage-rock, and punk. The mainstream U.S. music mags didn't get the Stooges, Ramones or their followers, and neither did "album-oriented" radio, which was already drifting toward a "classic" format. The obstacles to hearing or acquiring this insurgent music were boons to print journalists, notably at alternative weeklies and fanzines. Something was happening here, and you had to read to find out about it.

There's more to read than ever, of course, on myriad blogs and websites. But consumers can skip straight to the MP3s, or take their guidance from specialized search engines. Skipping the informational middleman has never been easier—or at least, not since rock criticism first forced itself into the conversation, demanding to say more about the music than AM DJs or the rate-a-record teens on American Bandstand.

Rock criticism is still demanding its say, however hard it is to deliver commentary that is both timely and informed as an ever-increasing number of CD and digital releases zoom directly to potential fans. Reviewers have to accept that they're often behind the buzz, even as their editors insist that their reviews must run on the official release date—whenever that is. (Internet release? CD release? First gig at which a tour-only disc is available?)

Amid this frenzy, I'm hoping for more care and less haste, more in-depth analysis and fewer premature discharges. But I'm expecting lots of stars, thumbs, and letter grades. At least the writers who specialize in the latter will have a new excuse: The Raconteurs made me do it.

Mark Jenkins currently writes about music and film for the# Washington Post #and NPR.org, among others. He is the co-author of# Dance of Days: Two
Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capital (Akashic Books).