The Heart of Rock & Soul

Is Dave Marsh the Original Poptimist?, asks David Cantwell

During the “Land of Hopes and Dreams” conference, a 2021 virtual celebration of critic Dave Marsh’s life and work, I was asked to elaborate on something I’d said, if half glibly, several years earlier. Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, moderator of the “On Listening” panel, said to me: “I think you once asked the question, ‘Is Dave Marsh the original poptimist?’.”

The short answer to that question is “Hell, yes.” During our session (and in conversation with critic Annie Zaleski, longtime Rock & Rap Confidential contributing editor Steven Messick, and roots rocker Alejandro Escovedo), I took a stab at explaining why I thought that was the case, as well as why it even matters. I’ll revisit some of those points below, but I’ve kept returning to the question ever since. Partly that’s because I know I’m not the only one posing it. During another conference session, “Listening Past the Myths,” the critic Ann Powers asked her esteemed and Marsh-admiring panel mates (Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus, Lauren Onkey and, may he rest in power, Greg Tate) a version of the same question that Schumacher-Rasmussen had asked me the week before: “Did he invent poptimism?”

Mostly, though, I’ve kept returning to the question because I think it deserves a better answer. With the recent release of Kick Out the Jams: Jibes, Barbs, Tributes & Rallying Cries, a collection of Marsh’s late-career short work (which I some wrote about a few weeks ago), it seems an ideal moment to continue the conversation around Marsh’s contribution, to reframe his immensely important but misunderstood legacy. And the Dave Marsh project that best clarifies his aesthetic values, and best illustrates why we’d benefit from engaging his ideas today, is 1989’s The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1,001 Greatest Singles Ever Made.

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Now, I totally get that the whole poptimism thing drives some people nuts, especially at this late date. (After Powers posed, if only in passing, her Marsh question, I’m pretty sure I heard Christgau quietly reply, “I hope not.”) And I also realize that the only term that irritates some people more than poptimism does, at least among the tiny cadre that bothers with these conversations at all, is poptimism’s conceptual raison d’etre, rockism.  

I don’t want to get too in the weeds here, and I want to get back to Marsh’s role as soon as possible. So just let me note that I continue to find both terms to be handy-dandy short hands for some significant and ongoing rock crit tendencies. What do they mean? Or, rather, what do I mean when I use them?

First, to account for the predictable concerns: Yes, you can be anti-rockist and still rock out to rock and, no, poptimists don’t need to like every damn thing that’s popular. From there, I find the most helpful definition of rockism to be critic Douglas Wolk’s, from his 2006 piece, “Thinking about Rockism,” for Seattle Weekly. “Rockism…,” Wolk argues, “is treating rock as normative… [as] the standard state of popular music… to which everything else is compared, explicitly or implicitly” and “it’s pernicious because it makes it harder to understand any other kind of music on its own terms.” How do we rid ourselves of rockism’s biases and limitations? “Mostly,” Wolk suggests, reasonably, “just by being aware of it and careful about it.” That critical intentionality in counteracting rockism, that “being aware of it and careful about it,” is a big chunk of what I’m waving at when I use the term poptimism.

“Look, there is no poptimism,” I can hear critic Frank Kogan insisting in a piece he wrote in 2009, “unless by poptimism you mean every interesting rock critic ever.”

I think Kogan is on to something there because…maybe that is what I mean? In the beginning, all the, uh, interesting critics were what we might now fairly label as proto-poptimists. Marsh included, of course, but no more so than Christgau and Marcus and, while perhaps less obviously, no more than Ellen Willis or Lester Bangs either.

The aesthetic values of the major early critics were poptimist values. They valued singles at least much as albums, looked to recordings as the thing rather than mere songs, and heard records in conversation with one another. These founding critics valued themes of both rebellion and reconciliation and, not unrelated, saw black musicians, audiences and sounds as rock and roll’s prime movers. These early critics were hardly opposed to artistic spontaneity, but because they understood art as bound up, by definition, with artifice and plenty of premeditation, they were undistracted by authenticity claims. They applauded when artists challenged their audiences with new sounds and ideas but knew pop had better affirm audiences, as well, reminding listeners that they aren’t alone with their dreams and troubles. We want great music to capture the complexity of life’s situations and emotions, but because pop is open to the changing ways we all feel, moment to moment and across our lives, it had better embrace simple energy and intense, unironic feeling, as well. Oh, and so important, it should be fun.

Most importantly, the founding critics were committed to taking very seriously this thing that all manner of powers-that-be dismissed, and even condemned, as nothing but trash.

As rock and roll became rock, however, as it became taken very seriously indeed and especially as rock criticism became codified through the seventies, these values shrank. The admittedly overstated binaries offered above as expansive artistic options were reduced to hierarchies. More and more, critics looked to albums as where the real art was happening, not to singles, saw rebellion as a more fertile artistic subject than reconciliation, simplicity as inferior to complexity, and saw rock more generally as, to quote Greg Tate, a “white male dominion.” This process ebbed and flowed across the decades, but it started early. All the way back in 1968, in a New Yorker essay, “The Star, the Sound and the Scene” (collected in Out of the Vinyl Deeps) Ellen Willis was already able to spend a few paragraphs noting some of these same “regrettable” shifts.

So, to cite a trivial but all-too telling tendency, we ended up in the 1980s and 1990s with albums list after albums list where the Top Ten best or greatest examples were mostly filled with white male singer songwriters who play guitar and who sing very seriously about serious shit. More-or-less predetermined as well was the unlikelihood of seeing many women on those lists, or black artists, or country artists, or disco acts, and so on again. [Cantwell’s note: Coincidentally, but right on cue, the same day I posted this essay, Jann Wenner provided additional damning evidence that rockist biases were, and remain, a thing.]

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Plenty of exceptions to these critical rules of thumb could be found and appreciated throughout the history of rock criticism, of course, the continuing contributions of Marsh and other rock-crit cofounders included. As Kogan is right to point out, that was always the case. What makes Dave Marsh more than just one more early critic who we could retcon as a poptimist—what makes me single him out as the original poptimist—is that he was the first to make a deliberate, self-conscious case for course correction during an era otherwise rampant with rockism.

Part of the antidote Marsh provided was his The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1,001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, the 1989 doorstop now widely viewed as his masterpiece. “It’s a great book” is how Robert Christgau, a man not prone to tossing superlatives about willy-nilly, put it at the Marsh conference, and Powers and Tate both went on at some length about the book’s importance to its time and place, and to them. (Another superlative from The Dean: “the best writing on the fifties that anybody has done as far as I’m concerned.”)

Marsh’s intervention starts with the title: The Heart of Rock & Soul is a small tweak of reader expectations but one that immediately pulls the rug from under the conventional wisdom. Rock & Roll is incompletely but routinely identified as a primarily two-guitars-bass-and-drum thing. And, at least since Beatlemania, that rigid misapprehension reinforces the segregation of the music as a white-dude thing. What Marsh’s choice of Rock & Soul signifies, and thank goodness, is a more capacious way of listening—and of envisioning pop’s political potential to anticipate and even aid in more fun, more democracy, more freedom.

Refocusing our attention from albums back to singles, Marsh argued, ensures more voices and ideas are heard. “Entire genres of pop—R&B, dance music and country, most obviously—have never been oriented to anything but singles,” Marsh observes in the first of the book’s two introductory essays, “If Loving You Is Wrong, I Don’t Want to Be Right.” (If he’d been writing just a few years later, he likely would have added hip hop to that list of critically undervalued genres. In 1992, he changed the name of his rock and politics newsletter Rock & Roll Confidential to Rock & Rap Confidential.) “One reason I’m writing all this is that the albums-only orientation of rock historians and critics has effectively marginalized such styles.” And their audiences along with them. (As someone who’s focused so much of his critical work on country music, I can confirm this marginalization firsthand.)

Marsh as poptimist may seem counterintuitive. As Schumacher-Rasmussen prefaced his question to me, Marsh’s reputation this century has leaned toward him being a kind of rockist’s rockist. Again, I’d stress that most all the founding critics played their part here, as surely as did their proteges, teaching generations of kids if only implicitly that albums were what mattered most, that rock was normative and white, and that judgements were best conveyed by letter grades or star rankings. Undoubtedly, the Marsh-edited Rolling Stone Record Guides, and their outsized importance as teacher or foil for generations, help explain (at least in part) why Marsh has taken so much of the antirockist fire.

To his credit, Marsh took the note. The Heart of Rock & Soul called for a critical course correction, but it was also an act of self-criticism. “Restoring voices of reconciliation to their equally central place in rock and soul history,” Marsh explained in “This Magic Moment,” the second of the book’s twin intros, “was my principal motivation in writing this book… But it also meant acknowledging the inadequacy of some of my own previous portrayals of rock history—most notably in The Rolling Stone Record Guide, which probably bears a large share of responsibility for fostering and codifying the ideas and attitudes I work to dismantle in these pages.”

Marsh underscored these points in “Spin the Black Circle,” his preface to 1999’s second edition of The Heart of Rock & Soul: “The aim is to make an argument against critical conventions about what great rock & soul music consists of… What I mean to do… is to question a lot of our assumptions about what makes good and bad pop music, and for that matter, what makes something art, good or bad or at all.”

Marsh continued questioning such assumptions in other books after that too. For example, his Louie Louie: The History and Mythology of the World’s Most Famous Rock & Roll Song…, from 1993, and his The Beatles Second Album, from 2007, are both poptimist moves, taking as their subjects a single and an album typically dismissed in their moments, and in the moment of his writing, as disposable and unserious. Both titles challenge assumptions about what counts for good pop music. Like The Heart of Rock & Soul, they fit right in with a major part of what the pop discourse has been focused on this century, and what the whole rockism v. poptimism debate continues to be about—no matter what terms we use to describe it.

Marsh has never used the term poptimist, at least not that I’m familiar with, let alone ever explicitly identified himself with poptimist ideals. The Heart of Rock & Soul predates that term. Nonetheless, what he’s up to in the book, as in so much of his essential work, sure makes him sound like the O.P. to me. - D.C.

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