Hitsville spent last weekend in Columbia, Missouri, at a University of Missouri conference called “On the Beat: Rock ‘n’ Rap, Mass Media, and Society.” The affair was designed as an academic-journalistic summit on rock, bringing together various professor types (the University of Illinois’ Larry Grossberg; DePaul’s Deena Weinstein, author of Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology) and critics (the New York Times’s Jon Pareles, Rolling Stone’s Anthony DeCurtis) for four days of meetings on campus and nightly music at Columbia’s beloved Blue Note, where participants saw Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Gil Scott-Heron, and Chuck Berry on successive nights.
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Two sessions stood out for me. One featured a paper given by the University of Florida’s Robert Ray. Besides being a professor of English and the director of the school’s film studies program, Ray is the songwriter and producer who gives Vulgar Boatmen records their lyrical density and conceptual framework. (Ray’s partner, Dale Lawrence, runs the touring band out of Indianapolis; the pair record with another band in Florida.) Ray’s paper was the most elegant and pointed of those I heard at the conference. His comments on contemporary rock criticism dovetail nicely with my own prejudices (indeed, they duplicated the themes of the panel I helped organize), so I’ll repeat them here.
The conference’s other signal moment came in a lengthy jeremiad by one Richard White, who leads a coalition that formed to oppose Washington State’s so-called “erotic music” bill. White’s presentation came at a closing-night panel on censorship, fueled by recent news that Warner Brothers had dropped Ice-T after a dispute about the cover art for his new album, Home Invasion. White’s screed, a mind-numbing recitation of anticensorship cliches, was delivered to a crowd of overwhelmingly liberal academics and journalists. The Washington law–which was passed as a “child pornography” bill and is now in the courts–is of course fruitcake legislation. But why is it that the issue fires up the most overbearing impulses in activists? Another crippling blow against censorship was struck later, as Jonathan Cummings, an ACLU fellow from New York, began grilling Blue Note owner Richard King, who had said he’d consulted with police before a recent Ice-T show, just as he did for concerts with other potentially rowdy crowds, from European techno bands to–get this–Kansas. The Ice-T show went on, but still Cummings chided King, who had “penalized the artist” by suspecting that his fans might cause trouble.
