Dig this magic-hour, on-the-waterfront shot taken before the weather in New York turned to crap!
I was around 18 when I first read that famous quote that’s often attributed to Elvis Costello—”Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.” I was likely hanging ten in my childhood bedroom, head buried in a Rolling Stone, naive to the fact that a bespectacled genius had just annihilated my future calling. Hormonal, bored, and highly absorbent, I likely burped and turned the page to the rabbit hole that was the Columbia House ad (“10 CDs for a penny”).
Looking back, though, that quote went a long way toward discouraging me from attempting rock journalism and especially fiction inspired by popular music. The older I got, the more concerts I attended and sensed the futility of trying to capture the super-in-the-momentness of being riveted by song and performance. Rock ‘n’ roll shows are about being here now, to paraphrase John Lennon, and anyone I witnessed trying to pin it down like a rare insect looked damn foolish, myself included. (I’d link here to a bad college-era newspaper review of Calvin Johnson’s Dub Narcotic Sound System if I could find it.)
This theory gained even more weight during my early publishing days in New York (1998–2002). I read voraciously because I didn’t have many friends or much money. At work, I quickly established myself as the resident dorky punk kid who could tackle a biography of Throbbing Gristle or Bob Dylan with equal enthusiasm and speed. After that got old, I graduated to fiction that had little or a lot to do with the rock ‘n’ roll monstah: Bill Flanagan’s A&R (2000), Debra K. Marquart’s The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories (2001), Neal Pollack’s Never Mind the Pollacks (2003). All three were rooted in real-world music “experience,” but none delivered me from my drafty, doorless coffin of a bedroom in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to those hot minutes in the crush of a crowd when anything seems possible.
Maybe the best music-infused novel for my money
Luckily, there was Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, devoured over one Thanksgiving weekend in those Dinty Moore years. It didn’t inject me with adrenaline either, but it demonstrated an important trait—a successful music novel could (and maybe should) refrain from creating a band from the ether and depicting it LIVE! Hornby wisely focused on human relationships, in this case, several failed ones and why they’d gone wrong. Another plus was his then-untrodden choice of a record store setting and the simple but sturdy construction around those top-five lists. I held on tightly to its legacy throughout grad school, taking other things I liked from Balzac and Proust.
And, yet, when I finally mustered the ovaries to acknowledge I was writing my own “punk” novel around 2003, I was lodging the same complaints I’d used on Flanagan & Company. On one hand, I liked my tack of developing a dysfunctional sister-brother dynamic, a hero-worshipping scenario that goes awry, aka The Goddamn Story. On the other, it wasn’t offering the release of a Clash song coming out of a Marshall stack—and wasn’t that my aim? In his recent post “The Great Rock Novel,” novelist Richard Melo argues that “[f]iction…cannot re-create a rock music experience…English doesn’t have the language to capture what the music does to a fan.”
I wanted to agree with him last night because it would’ve ended this post sooner, and I was on the brink of crashing, head into screen. Truth be told, I’ve often lectured myself with his theory, just put another way—don’t ask novels to do the work of rock music, fiend! But then I remembered the transportive effects of Lester Bangs’s nonfiction (read his profile of The Clash in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung), even the highs I get from reading Edith Wharton contract and suppress passion in The Age of Innocence, and another quote came to mind, Elvis “Articulate Boots” Costello be damned:
Nothing makes us more vulnerable than love; even love for a band.—Ned Potter, librarian, Studio 54 lover, and REAL Wiki Man
The son of a musician, Ned was commenting on my post “Strummer und Drang.” No one has validated my position as a writer so eloquently before or since, and I can’t thank him enough. Despite the daunting technical complexities involved, I should and will attempt to re-create forever in prose the life-altering force that is music because it makes me obscenely human, the grist of fiction. Glory be to Lester Bangs! God save Peter Doherty! Good night—and good morning, wherever you are.
(Thank you to the Twitterverse—@RonHogan, @misconstrue, @wsstephens, @ColleenLindsay—for nominating your favorite music-themed novels. I promise to put them on a page someday, but for now check my stream on Oct. 13 and 14, 2010.)
Blogging Soundtrack:
- The Spinning Top by Graham Coxon
- Up the Bracket by The Libertines
*Ack, I’m just being provocative, really
The Nowhere in the Middle 
Toby
October 15, 2010
Heather, as someone who devours literature and rocknroll with equal levels of abandon, I know where you’re coming from.
And that makes me curious about the reverse – are there any pieces of music that feel like novels to you? Perhaps its those overlapping traits (if any) that can help us all discover the bibliosonic Rosetta Stone.
Heather McCormack
October 16, 2010
Helluva question there, Tobs. Good thing it’s Friday night, and I’m riding a second wind. I suppose I’m supposed to tick off a few Bob Dylan or Van Morrison albums here, but that doesn’t feel right to me. I only recently “discovered” Blur, and 13 and Think Tank really feel like complete worlds, with songwriting, music, production, and visuals collapsing into such powerful wholes. And I can’t forget U2’s Achtung Baby. Oh, man. That’s a fucking heart-smashing doorstopper that goes down like a thimble of the best scotch. Zoorpoa has a similar effect, though it’s more…optimistic. I wanna say Sandinista by The Clash, but that’s more akin to a short story collection. (I think Justin Hoenke would agree.)
How about you?
Richard Melo
October 15, 2010
I sounded more cynical in my post than I am when it comes to experiencing rock and fiction. I’ve written thousands of pages of fiction (with only a measly couple hundred getting published), and always, I’m trying to recreate the moving effect of a particular piece of music.
I think subtlety and atmosphere are key.
I don’t believe there is an overt way of “novelizing” Born to Run, as an example, or the effect it has on its fans. Rock fiction writing often descends into cliches and banality the writer isn’t aware of making. Another concern is when writers attempt to recreate a song’s lyrical content (which I’m guilty of all too often). Fiction does a much better job at re-creating a song’s mood and atmosphere.
Rock gives a fiction writer much to work with, and re-casting the effect that a song creates in the fiction genre is (at least for me) the only way to go.
rem
Heather McCormack
October 16, 2010
Yes, yes, completely with you on a conjuring a song’s effects. Fiction, when done well, can be King of Mood. My friend Ned Potter was saying in another comment that he’s never read a convincing novel that features a made-up band. Trying to catch readers up on its mystique usually proves to be too much of a challenge for most writers. I just didn’t see the point when I had The Clash at my disposal. But even then, I wanted to be sure not to turn the book into one big fangirl wank session. Lotta pitfalls to watch out for, eh? When it comes down to it, no matter what the vehicle it, you better have a Story.
jdhastings
October 15, 2010
There’s an Twitter feed that posts 140 characters of Swann’s Way every hour. I began to follow it because I found it hilarious. In practice, though, it leads me to catching stray snippets that I recognize and can backtrack and relive.
One of those passages was a snippet of Swann at a concert when he realizes the music he’s listening to quotes a portion of the Vinteuil Sonata he had been a fan of at the beginning of his relationship with Odette. That snippet thrusts him back into that past moment in time, and he feels how powerfully he once felt during the relationship. This makes him realize that how far off the romance had fallen. In short (and paraphrasing badly) the experience of the music is more legitimate to him than the original emotion was, more honest and faithful than the romance ever was.
When I read saw that passage appear in my twitter feed, it inspired almost exactly the same moment of rapture as he described (but not tied into any relationship). I was transported to the first trip through that novel and the experience of it. It was a poweful experience. And it centered on a novel exploring music. I think the key, though, is that Proust never tried to describe the music itself, focusing on its effect instead.
I just hope anybody else tackling the same issue does so more efficiently than him.
Heather McCormack
October 16, 2010
Proust is incredible. I like his tack of, as you said, of not describing the music but choosing instead to showcase its effects. I do both in my book, but try to stick to the latter. On the whole, it really does make sense *not* to be literal about music (how it is sung, what was sung, what guitar was played), when music’s not about…well, music, normally. It’s an interpretation of experience. But, oh, how we music nerds love the details!
Toby
October 16, 2010
My initial inclinations were also to head down the singer-songwriter route (The Mountain Goats’ Tallahassee may as well be friggin’ Revolutionary Road, as far as I’m concerned), but that seems like a case of following the letter of the assignment, whilst ignoring its spirit entirely.
In fact, as long as I’m making up my own rules for this little thought-experiment, I’m going to grade anyone who submits Desire or In the Aeroplane Over the Sea with the dreaded 89: the universal sign of Close, but No Cigar.
Now, Achtung Baby, on the other hand, is an A+ monster, and definitely helps illustrate what makes an album a novel, and why it’s so difficult to reconcile the two.
As The Edge brings the Wall down with those opening Zoo Station riffs, we’re left to rewrite the stories of disparate blocs into the saga of a continent.
With or without the author’s direction, there’s a tension that exists between the interpretations imposed by a novel’s many readers. The author can’t necessarily control how everyone is going to read their work, but they can at least do what they can to direct in one way or another. Before it even reaches the listener, there’s an inherent tension within an album’s interplay. The same story is often told simultaneously in three/four/twelve different ways. The listener has to catch up first, and then impose their own interpretation.
There lies the quandary faced by the rock novel: how do you illustrate the act of pulling a story apart when the act of putting words on paper intrinsically leads to said story coming together?
I’ll cut this short before I start making even less sense, but I’ll submit for your approval a few of the novelistic albums that spring to my mind: New Adventures in Hi-Fi. Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home. XTRMNTR. Rumours. The more I think about it, the more I realize these works are out there.
Heather McCormack
October 17, 2010
Whoa, Tobs, you’re cooking my brain! I don’t quite follow re: challenge to the rock novelist. I think I face the same difficulties as anyone else trying to tell a damn good story, but maybe I take extra pains to ensure I’m not simply…imitating music. That’s going to smack of falseness. The best writing on music I’ve ever read is Bangs’s because he focuses on its emotional effects. The rainbow of mood and tone it can set.
But I want to hear more on your albums that would make great novels. I think you’ve found the focus of your post, and I want to follow-up with an answer of my own.
Scott Hudson
October 16, 2010
The latest by Titus Andronicus is begging to be turned into a novel.
Heather McCormack
October 17, 2010
I’ve never head of zees TA. What are they like?!