Nobrow

Vintage Books USA

Excerpt

Right inside the door of the Virgin Megastore was a vast section of popularmusic labeled Rock/Soul, which ran the gamut from the Eagles to Al Green toPere Ubu, with vast stretches of irony, allusiveness, camp, and boring stuff inbetween. This giant culture deposit was thick with association. Here were bandsthat were the pop cultural equivalent of the pencil marks parents put insidethe closet door to show how much Junior has grown since last year. JacksonBrowne, James Taylor, Neil Young, and the early '70s folk rockers, many of themon the Asylum label started by the young David Geffen, oozing that peaceful,easy feeling that was my first pop love, and that I listened to in my bedroom, asullen and mopey twelve-year-old with the lights out. Punk rock rescued me fromthe Dan Fogelbergian miasma of folk rock: Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, the SexPistols, then the Talking Heads, who made punk mainstream. Although I did notunderstand it at the time, the shift from California folk rock to British punkrock ? from the "fake" mainstream California sound to the "real" Britishunderground punk sound ? was the decisive antithesis that would in one way oranother determine all my subsequent pop musical experience. After Talking Headscame the bands like Duran Duran, the Cure, and the Cars, who marketed the"authentic" sound of punk into the "fake" New Wave and turned me off pop musicin my early twenties. Then the big-hair bands of the '80s like Van Halen, Gunsn' Roses, and the second coming of Aerosmith, which had kept me away from pop.And then Nirvana, the band that changed everything.

Before Nirvana my cultural experience had followed a more-or-less statelyprogress up-hierarchy from commercial culture to elite culture. But after Iheard Nirvana, at the age of thirty-one, the stream of culture as it flowedthrough me slowed, stopped, and started moving in the other direction. AfterNirvana, I began to pursue pop music with an energy I had never devoted to it asa teenager, when I was too worried about how my adult life was going to turn outto pay that much attention to pop. Pop became a way of hanging on to my teenageself, which had become a kind of touchstone for me as an adult. I got intohip-hop, and then the subgenres of hip-hop, like gangsta, and then techno, andnow I was into the rich ground between techno and hip-hop ? acid, trance,jungle, big beat, ambient ? which seemed to be where the future of pop musiclay.

As a kid I thought that becoming an adult would mean putting away pop music andmoving on to classical, or at least intelligent jazz. Cultural hierarchy was theladder climbed toward a grown-up identity. The day you found yourself putting onblack tie and going to enjoy the opening night of Aida as a subscriberto the Metropolitan Opera was the day you crossed an invisible threshold intoadulthood. But for the last five years, pop music had provided me with peaks oflyrical and musical transcendence that I long ago stopped feeling at the operaand the symphony, those moments when the music, the meaning, and the moment allflowed together and filled you with the "oceanic feeling" that Freud saidcharacterizes powerful aesthetic experience.

A month earlier I had had an oceanic experience at a Chemical Brothers' showthat my friend had taken me to hear at the Roxy. The Chemical Brothers were twoyoung musician/programmers from the dance/Ecstasy subculture of Manchester,England, who had begun by deejaying in the clubs that flourished in the darksatanic mills left over from the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, andthat were now dark satanic malls of late-twentieth-century street style.

We waited in a long line outside the Roxy for an hour, freezing, while scalpersin big down parkas cruised by murmuring"whosellingticketswhosellingticketswhosellingtickets." As usual when we wentgigging, we were just about the oldest people there. Going out to hear hot newpop acts was one of the greatest cultural pleasures of our grown-up lives. Theseintense moments of ectastic communion with youth stood out from our otherwisepredictable diet of respectable culture ? interesting plays, the Rothko show,the opera, and, sometimes, downtown happenings at the Kitchen or the KnittingFactory. Afterward, we would go home to our wives and kids and our tasteful dietof highbrow and middlebrow culture, but here in the oceanic present of popmusic, we felt alive in a way we never felt when experiencing elite culture.

Finally we got inside and worked our way down into the crush of kids on thedance floor. Most were trying to figure out the optimum time to drop the drugsthey had brought along, so that they peaked when the music peaked. After a longtime somebody walked out onto the darkened stage and a buzz rippled through thecrowd. An evil-sounding pulse started to beat, pumping a black squishy liquidout of a computer and swirling it around the room. Then came a sampled sentencefrom a Blake Baxter song, repeated four times: dabrothersgonnaworkitout.With each set of four beats a new computer-modulated drum sound entered the mix,and on the last set a distorted-sounding guitar made an appearance. Because themusic was made on synthesizers it had the geometric regularity of code, and thismade it possible to feel intuitively where the lines of sound were headed andwhen they would converge. It was like reading a sonnet: you anticipated theshape of the form before the content arrived. Such a sonic convergence wascoming up. All the rhythmic variations and distortions that had previously beenat counterpoint with one another were about to come together into what promisedto be an amazing blast of unified sound.

My friend turned to me and yelped, "It's about to get REALLY loud . . . !"

Then ? THHHHRRRRUUUNKKK ? enlightenment struck in the form of a solidcleaver chop of sound to my breastbone ? from their hooooooouuuussse to ourhouse ? that knocked us backward like bowling pins. The flashing lightsilluminated the flailing hair of the blond Chemical Brother as he worked hisinstrument board, catching him at the perfect moment ? streaking upward fromhis subculture of clubs and drugs and computers, rushed into the mainstream bythe music industry and MTV, which was hoping to consolidate the different smallgrids of techno and house music into a single big-grid category, "Electronica,"in order to supplement the sagging sales of the "Alternative" marketing categorythat Nirvana's success had spawned. Within a month, the Brothers would be allover MTV. At one point in the frenzy of that night, I remember looking behind meand seeing Judy McGrath, the president of MTV, rocking out in the VIP area.

Then another flash ? POP! ? revealing a new kind of icon: theinformation artist at his console, reeling with sounds, styles, light andinsight, the jittery agonized struggle of the cortex trying to absorb thedigital information pouring into it. The heat in the hooouusse, the frenzy ofthe crowd, the potency of the joint my friend and I were now passing, allproduced an intense cultural experience, a Nobrow moment, that was still freshin my mind as I rode the megastore escalator down to Level B1, gently sinkinginto the bath of Buzz, heading for the Imports section, where I hoped to find acompilation CD of the legendary Chemical Brothers shows at the Heavenly Socialin London.

The megastore's Classical Music section was also down here, to the right of theescalator. Encased inside thick glass walls to keep out the raucous sounds ofthe World Music section, just outside, where salsa, Afro-Gallic drumming,reggae, and Portuguese fado mingled in a One World jambalaya, the ClassicalMusic section was an underground bunker of the old elite culture, its lastrefuge here in Times Square. There were a few discreet videos, usually showingJames Levine conducting or Vladimir Horowitz at the piano. Inside these thickglass walls of silence you could feel the sterility of the academy to which themodernists had condemned classical music, by coming to believe that popularityand commercial success meant compromise. All the most original innovations ofthe modernists, the electronics and the atonal variations and the abrupt yaws inpitch had long ago been spirited away from this room and found popularexpression in the Jazz and Techno sections in other parts of the store.Meanwhile, by continuing to put out, year after year, recordings of the world'sgreat orchestras performing the standards ? in spite of the fact that thedifference in performances was only interesting or even discernible to a veryfew people ? the classical music industry had all but destroyed itself,imprisoning what might be a vibrant genre in the forbidding confines of a roomlike this. The classical music room in the megastore was almost always empty: agood place, I'd discovered, to ring up purchases of pop music when there was aline upstairs.

I didn't find what I was looking for in Imports, but I did find some other CDs Iwanted ? one by the "junglist" L. T. J. Bukem, as well as a compilation ofrock/techno hybrid tracks called Big Beat Manifesto. (That was thetrade-off in the megastore experience, refinement for breadth and unexpectedsynchronicity.) Also, back upstairs, I found a CD by an Essex-based group,Underworld, Dubnobasswithmyheadman, which I'd heard was good. Twentyminutes later I was back in Times Square with $59.49 worth of music in a redplastic Virgin bag. At Forty-fifth I stopped, unwrapped the Underworld CD,cracked open the jewel box, extracted the precious polyurethane wafer, andpopped it into my Discman.

Clinton had finished addressing the citizenry, and the people in Times Squarewere turning their attention to other distractions. I stood there for a momentlonger in the yellow tornado light while the techno music in my ears reorganizedmy consciousness into cleaner lines than the gangsta vibe, and the vocals ?"Mmmmskyscraper I love you" ? implanting in the folds of my cortex the waypoetry used to before I got a Discman and made pop music the soundtrack to themovie of me walking around in the city.

I headed east on Forty-fourth Street past the delicate neoclassical scrollworkon either side of the Belasco Theater, and the fluted columns of the old eliteculture of New York City. East of Sixth Avenue, I cut through the RoyaltonHotel. The restaurant in the lobby of the Royalton, "44," was a kind of CondeNast commissary. Almost every day at the four banquettes, done in lime-greenvelvet, you could see the most important of the Conde Nast editors: Anna Wintourof Vogue, Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair, and Tina Brown ofThe New Yorker, with, perhaps, Art Cooper of GQ at the fourthtable, or maybe some up-and-comer who had finagled a marquee spot for the day.The place was often compared to the old Algonquin across Forty-fourth Street,but whereas the latter was associated with wit, "44" was all about status. Theair felt thick with appraising glances.

It was too early for the magazine editors I worked for to be lunching in theirrespective booths at "44," but there were some other media types loungingaround, studiously turned out in the suit-with-expensive-black-T, High-Low stylethat Si Newhouse, owner of Conde Nast, favored.

On Forty-third Street I made a left and walked a half a block east to 20 West,where The New Yorker was located. Three young women in black, who hadbeen in the atrium of the building having a smoke, scooted into the revolvingdoors in front of me. They were probably employees of Martha StewartLiving, a magazine that shared the building with The New Yorker.Modern-day Goody Mathers, they were off to enforce the morality of consumptionof the '90s. Martha's recipes and decorating tips were a latter-day version ofwhat the old Calvinists called "proof in works."

The New Yorker occupied three floors, from sixteen to eighteen. Theeditors and writers worked on sixteen and seventeen, and the people who sold theads and ran the business were above them. Though the businesspeople weresometimes seen on the editorial floors ? and in greater numbers, since TinaBrown took over ? still for the most part the traditional church and stateseparation of advertising and editorial was observed at the magazine. Thisrigorous separation of the writers from the ad sales force had been reflected inthe look of the old New Yorker, where blocks of text signified theeditorial, and photographs and other attention-grabbing flourishes signifiedads.

The only time I ever went up to the business floor was to attend functions inthe elegant New Yorker conference room, which our editor persuaded SiNewhouse to build for her, where a variety of synergistic events took place thathelped to promote the brand, including The New Yorker's regular"Roundtables," which were fabulous juggling acts by Tina ? New Yorker writersinterviewing famous subjects for an audience of advertisers, with a celebritylike Elton John or Lauren Hutton in attendance. The most infamous of theseRoundtables was the recent breakfast starring Dick Morris, the formerpresidential adviser, who the week before the breakfast had resigned asClinton's main strategist because of Morris's relationship with a prostitute.The conference room's walls were decorated with famous faces and cartoons fromthe magazine ? a portrait of a sodden-faced, seen-it-all Dorothy Parker, anauthentic member of the old Round Table, looked despairingly across the room ata picture of a frolicsome Donald Trump, a Tina-era profile subject.

The shiny interiors of the elevator doors slid together, a machine wentwhirrrrrp, and I felt upward pressure on the soles of my feet. I prepared forreentry into the editorial offices. In that thirty-second ride (without stops)up to the sixteenth floor, it was necessary to decompress, leave behind theculture of the street and enter a world where "culture" still meant civility andthe process of cultivating. I stripped off the headphones, removed my black capand my sunglasses, and smoothed my long hair in the polished metal interior ofthe elevator doors.

As a young reader I got an idea of what culture was like from the pages ofThe New Yorker, which sat on my parents' coffee table in southern NewJersey along with other middlebrow magazines like Holiday, Life, andLook. Culture as it was presented by The New Yorker was elite,but it was also decent and even quaint. Culture was something to aspire to, butit was democratic, too: anyone could have it, even if they didn't have a coffeetable to display it on. The New Yorker's famous editorial "we" suggestedthat there was a center to the culture, a perspective from which one could seeall the useful things, and what one couldn't see was not so important. We caredpassionately about the so-called legitimate, elite, canonical or high culture,those pursuits that made up the traditional arts of the aristocracy: painting,music, theater, ballet, and literature. We were quite interested in jazz, and wehad learned to appreciate movies from Pauline Kael, and even to take TVsemi-seriously, thanks to Michael Arlen, but we were not much concerned withrock and roll, street style, or youth culture, per se ? and we certainlyweren't interested in rap. Preserving the authority of that "we" ? the implicitclaim that the kinds of hierarchical distinctions and judgments practiced byThe New Yorker were universal, and not narrowly elitist ? forced themagazine, over time, to keep an ever-greater share of the commercial culture outof its pages. We might not like rap, but as rap entered mainstream, we weren'table to comment knowledgeably on it, and we ended up seeming kind of out of it.

In the old New Yorker a sentence was a sentence, and each took no morethan a polite, passing interest in its neighbors. Facts were presented one afteranother, with an almost self-conscious lack of ornament. Fancy leads, preciouswriting, sociological jargon, academic theory, anything that was obviouslyintended to attract attention or to start an argument ? all were scrupulouslyscrubbed from The New Yorker's photograph-free text. Most important ofall, in no way did the sentences attempt anything that might be called hype.The New Yorker subscriber could count on coming home and opening themagazine with at least a slice of the same feeling of privilege with which anaristocrat sauntered into his gentleman's club, knowing he was leaving thecrassy, noisy world of getting and spending at the door.

For more than a century, this was how status had worked in America. You madesome money in one commercial enterprise or another, and then to solidify yoursocial position and to distinguish yourself from the others more recently rich,you cultivated a distaste for the cheap amusements and common spectacles thatmade up the mass culture. The old New Yorker had been almost perfectly in syncwith this system, and that was what made the magazine so appealing toadvertisers. Just as the Cadillac offered the quietest of rides to drivers, justas the Phillipe Patek watch was the ultimate in understated luxury, so TheNew Yorker provided a tasteful, discreet, and quietly snobbish take on theaffairs of the world, blissfully free from the bawling, hollering Buzz outsideits covers.

There was a certain amount of hypocrisy involved in this attitude ? The NewYorker was, after all, a commercial cultural enterprise itself. But therewas also a lot to admire in the magazine's standards. Resisting the dumbing downof cultural life through advertising, Babbittry, and tacky talk show hosts,keeping the writing that the magazine provided to its readers blessedly freefrom that thing now called the Buzz was a primary source of the old NewYorker's moral authority, as it had been part of the larger moral authorityof the classic arbiters elegantiae, those tastemakers of old, whopracticed criticism in Matthew Arnold's definition: "a disinterested endeavor tolearn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world."

At the magazine that authority was derived from the personal convictions ofWilliam Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker from 1951 to 1987. Shawn'seditorial philosophy was later expressed in the April 22, 1985, Comment he wroteshortly after Si Newhouse bought The New Yorker for $168 million fromPeter Fleischmann, whose father, Raoul, had started the magazine with HaroldRoss in 1925. "We have never published anything in order to sell magazines,"Shawn wrote, "to cause a sensation, to be controversial, to be popular orfashionable, to be 'successful.'" Shawn's words seemed incredible now. How couldone possibly run a magazine that way? And a very "successful" magazine at that?

In 1987, after five years of writing reviews and journalism for other magazines,I sent a couple of pieces to Robert Gottlieb, then the editor of The NewYorker. About a week later, Gottlieb called me and asked me to come see himat his office.

The memory of this meeting, which took place in the old New Yorkerbuilding, across Forty-third Street from the present offices, remains in my mindlike a cherished postcard from a time that now seems as vanished as the world ofmedieval courtly love. The offices in the old building were filled with rattycouches, scarred desks, mounds of moldering manuscripts, dust, and grime: astyle that personified William Shawn's attitude toward glitz and glamour. Somefirst-time visitors to The New Yorker, expecting to find interiors thatlived up to their exalted idea of the place ? some sort of actual town houseto match the town-house view of culture in the magazine ? were puzzled andcrestfallen to find the offices so dowdy. But to me, this was thetoo-cultured-to-care attitude that I aspired to myself.

Gottlieb called me into his office, and we began chatting. It soon became clearthat on the basis of two clippings and a one-page letter I had sent himproposing to write a story on a modern gold-mining bonanza taking place in asmall Nevada town, he was going to offer to fund me to go out West for as longas I thought necessary and take a crack at writing the piece I wanted to write,for which he would pay me regardless of whether the magazine published it.

"About how long a piece?" I managed to ask.

"Any length you'd like," Gottlieb said. "Whatever you think the piece needs tobe successful juuuuurnalism." Gottlieb's way of pronouncing the word journalism-- "juuuuurnalism" ? had a note of nostalgie de la boue in it, asthough one were doing something deliciously lowbrow in even discussingjournalism. That attitude would later find its way into one of Gottlieb'sgreatest triumphs as editor, the publication of Janet Malcolm's long piece aboutJoe McGinniss and Jeffrey MacDonald, "The Journalist and the Murderer."

Formerly the editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf, and before that a wunderkind atSimon & Schuster, Gottlieb had been chosen by Newhouse to replace Shawn ? lessthan two years after Newhouse pledged he would keep Shawn as editor for as longas Shawn wanted to remain. Gottlieb, whose own cultural preferences ran higherthan Shawn's ? he was a famously devoted patron of the ballet ? had taken onthe almost impossible job of caretending Shawn's distinctions about what sort ofculture was appropriate for New Yorker readers, while at the same timetrying to make the magazine more commercial for Newhouse. Gottlieb tried tocompromise with camp. Camp was a way of being hierarchically nonhierarchical ?of bringing highbrow connoisseurship to lowbrow pleasures, and therebypreserving the old High-Low structure of culture as status, though it wasnecessary to wittily invert it. Since taking over Gottlieb had publishedhighbrow pieces about lowbrow subjects like Hollywood divas, Miami Beach, and aconvention of the Wee Scots, who collect Scottie-dog memorabilia.

I suggested that forty thousand words might be necessary to convey the completegold-mining story in all its complexity and to flesh out the many charminglyeccentric characters I was sure to meet in the pursuit of my idea of an old NewYorker piece.

"Great, that would be a two-part article," Bob responded cheerfully.

I asked about the deadline. At the other places I had been writing, deadlineswere much on editors' minds.

"Oh, we don't have deadlines around here," Gottlieb said, frowning slightly, asif a faux pas had been committed, although his camp manner made it hardto tell if he was being serious.

"Work on it until you feel it's finished," he went on, "then we'll take a look."

Risking an even greater faux pas, I asked, "And how much will I get paid?"

"A lot," he replied. He didn't say how much. Just "a lot."

If I needed money, I was to call the managing editor, Sheila McGrath.

"Now, it's spelled McGrath but it's said 'mac-graw.'" Vague on all the usuallyimportant matters, Gottlieb was very precise on this point, which, although Ididn't know it then, involved an elaborate in-house distinction between thepeople who said "mick-graath" and the people who said "mac-graw."

And that was all. I went away, struggled, despaired, missed my self-imposeddeadline, and finally wrote Gottlieb a letter explaining myself and asking formore time and money, which was swiftly answered with a phone call from Bob whotold me to call Sheila McGrath. ("Now remember, it's spelled McGrath butpronounced . . .") Eventually I produced a twenty-thousand-word piece, and inless than a week Gottlieb called to accept it. The piece had no peg, of course-- pegs were part of the vulgar world of juuuuurnalism ? but it was an outdoorspiece and felt springlike to Bob. In good time it was set up in type,meticulously fact-checked, beautifully edited by Bob and Nancy Franklin, andpublished in April at something like eighteen thousand words. It all happenedjust the way it was supposed to happen at The New Yorker. And that wasthe last time it ever happened quite that way for me.

Continues...
Excerpted from Nobrowby John Seabrook Copyright ©2001 by John Seabrook. Excerpted by permission.
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