Customer Reviews

The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism

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This is the best single book ever written on the general subject of rock and roll. It is free of the both the sloppy hype of trashy works on popular culture, and the ludicrously inappropriate jargon of high-toned academic treatments of the subject. Pattison demonstrates very convincingly rock's roots in nineteenth-century pantheism, and shows how, to a surprising extent, all of pop music's "rebels" conform to its tenets. The author is clearly a knowledgeable fan of rock but doesn't make outrageous claims for it; he shows amazing taste and discretion. A book as enjoyable and stimulating as it is neglected; I've never seen a reference to it in the rock press or met anyone else who has read it. It's definitely worth the effort to find it.

One of the best and most eurudite studies of Rock music as a cultural phenomenon and sociology. Pattison is both a critic and fan of Rock music, but the latter function doesn't turn him into a sniveling sycophant full of pretentious drivel like the usual Rock music magazine writers. He hits the nail right on the head with his comparison to romanticism. Pattison doesn't take his study far enough, however, as he ignores his own glaring exposes of the neo-pagan/religious dimensions of Rock music. He performs an intensive study of why Rock music is such mindless, vulgar pagan "jungle music" that people react to without thinking, a powerful cultural force. But in the last few pages he tries to discount everything he has written and substantiated in his book! He cannot accept the very conclusion he has so devestatingly exposed! He realizes that he seems to have come too close to the stance of the Christian right (and most of traditional Christianity) in its attack on Rock-n- Roll as "devil's music." As a true Rock fan (no true "holy roller" Rock detractor could have as much crucial information about Rock music and its details as Pattison), Pattison doesn't want to push his argument to its logical conclusion and condemn the music he so loves, therefore he makes a pathetic jab at the Christian right at the end and chicken's out. He is docked a star for this. Nevertheless, this is the best, most intelligent and objective study of Rock music that I have read, I have read a hell of a lot on the subject--most of it is drivel.

I read this book long ago when it was first published and found it fascinating. I found myself reflecting on it today as I was thinking about the slow death of "classical" music. The author makes the case that rock music is the product of the ideas of 19th century on democracy and individualism, the celebration of things common.

While there has always been a divide between the music of the upper and lower classes, I suppose it was not until late in the 19th century and continuing on that the "lower class" music began to be celebrated by the established musicians. I'm thinking specifically of the folk tune inspired works of composers like Brahms and Dvorak.

My reflection on Pattison's book now is that his thesis has been more than adequately proven with the continued growth of bottom-up trends in fashion and music. While rock and roll, as he argues, may have a mythical relationship to African music, modern hip-hop seems to have a very real relationship to current lower class culture. Other authors since then have dealt more generally with this theme I am sure (Theodore Dalrymple comes to mind), but I thought Pattison did great work showing how the ideas of the 19th century thinkers have influenced this development.

I keep finding myself coming back again and again to this excellent study from Pattison which convincingly argues that rock's aesthetic is a vulgarized form of the ideals behind the great romantic poets. Far from the clueless, absurd academic piece that one may fear, Pattison proves to be a real fan of rock music, in fact he is in many ways more thoroughly versed in rock than many respectable big-name rock critics like Marcus or Marsh. Black Flag, the Fall and the Meat Puppets are just a few of the groups touched on. The most insightful chapters, in my opinion, are the ones dealing with the white romanticization of black Americans as "soulful" others, as well as the myth of the noble lower-class hillbilly. Pattison provides the only believable explanation (too complex to go into here) as to why the racially divided south produced the great black-white musical hybrids of our time (country, blues, jazz and rock n' roll). Pattison doesn't see the pagan roots of rock n' roll or romantic poetry as negative.

I recently read Sytze Steenstra's excellent book about David Byrne in which he makes a convincing argument that the Romantic writers, thinkers, artists, and musicians from the 1,800s were, and continue to be, a huge influence on the art of Byrne.

It might have been from searching for that book online that I stumbled upon Pattison's "The triumph of vulgarity".
Pattison takes the Romantic influence one step further, and argues that the movement resulted in what Pattison describes as the vulgarity of all rock and roll. In the book, he makes the argument over and over and over and over again (did I mention he made it more than a few times?).

Pattison's argument isn't as convincing as Steenstra's. It's easy to draw a pretty clear line from the Romantics to the work of artists like David Byrne, Bob Dylan, Brian Eno, Tom Verlaine, David Bowie, or Lou Reed, just to mention a few whose art speaks for itself more or less explicitly in that regard.

It's a little more difficult to accept Pattison's thesis that -all- rock musicians, especially the most chauvinistic, lurid, and vulgar among the genre, have consciously, if at all, absorbed much, if anything, of what the Romantics stood for.

Much of modernist, post modernist, post industrialist, and post World War II art can also be traced to the Romantic movement, but connecting the vulgar component is a little more troublesome. While the book is a little dated having been written a quarter century ago (for one, Pattison's notion that rock is male dominated has, to a fairly great extent, changed in the interim), Pattison is clearly very knowledgeable about the subject of rock and roll.

He's correct about one of his arguments: Romantic music before it, and rock and roll more recently, have pretty much eliminated the distinction between music for the elites vs. music for the masses. Rock and roll belongs just as much to the blue collar factory worker as it does to someone driving down the street in their $100,000 Mercedes.

Pattison traces rock and roll from its beginning in 1954 in Memphis, TN, through the 1960s, which saw bands like The Beatles, Stones, Dylan, etc. become superstars, through the 1970s and up to the mid 80s when the book was written. Throughout, he relentlessly repeats the mantra that Romanticism begat vulgarity, which begat rock, which in turn allowed vulgarity to explode into broader Western society and beyond.

One can agree or disagree on the level of vulgarity inherent in rock and roll and society in general. My only nitpick about the book other than that Pattison could have gotten the rock and roll = vulgarity message across by saying it a few hundred times less than he did, is that "The triumph of vulgarity" is silent on what influence industrialism, followed by two world wars, followed by the Vietnam War and the widespread use of LSD along with the cultural revolution it produced had upon vulgarity in rock and roll as well as modern culture.

That said, still an interesting read if you're into rock and roll.

If you want to understand rock culture you must read this book.

Triumph of Vulgarity articulates what the rockers and the Christian Right instinctively sense but are mostly unable to say. The author offers great insight into one of the world's greatest cultural movements and by extension you will greatly increase your understanding of the cultural conflicts of our age, over which much blood is being spilled.


This book is not an easy read, if you want a Cliff notes version of Triumph of Vulgarity, check out the 1st chapter of Librarianship.Civic Librarianship: Renewing the Social Mission of the Public Library

OK, I used to be a student at the college where Robert Pattison taught and there were some rumors that he regretted a lot of this book. God, I hope so! This is chalk full of straw-man arguments about critics of rock music and, even worse, simplistic and flat-out lazy readings of Marxist and Frankfurt school criticism of mass culture. Also prominent is the stunt of throwing out quotes and dropping names left and right (here's a quote by Blake...here's a quote by Robert Plant...you see, they're the same!!!), a mechanized style of analysis that is really all cultural studies is capable of and that doesn't add up to any actual insight. Then there's the whole Walter Benjamin-inspired claim that vulgarity is neither good nor bad but some of both that is about as wise as the average "compare and contrast" essay someone writes in high school. I suppose the cherry on the top of this feces sundae is the idea that rock, like romantic art, isn't subject to "rational analysis" because it is about "feeling." All in all, I can't imagine that someone who likes rock would be much satisfied by the claims in this book, while the critics of rock this book ridicules will find their arguments poorly represented and just end up throwing this book in the fire.