A few years back, I was flipping through one of those massive Rolling Stone lists of “The Best Albums of All Time by People Who Make the All Time, All time Greatest Albums of All Time.” After I got done quibbling with the inclusion of Jagger’s Wandering Spirit as one of the ’90s best — it’s Jagger’s best solo effort, but c’mon — I noticed that I owned a sizable number of these supposed great works of canonical, Boomer-approved rockin’. Similar scannings of big lists by Spin or Pitchfork or whomever yield remarkably similar realizations. I’m never lockstep with year-end “Best Ofs” though. I suppose that my tendency as a listener is to seek out “important” releases — things that are established “classics” or notable examples of their genre or period. It’s not like I go record shopping with a tiny little Bob Christgau or David Fricke whispering in my ear, guiding my every purchase. But I often find myself wanting to know what’s up with records that are mentioned in all those High Fidelity-esque desert island lists. So much rock writing and rock fandom is focused on tastemaking and trendspotting and getting all gooey over the shock of the new. While I dig newness to an extent, my own predilection towards knowing history and allusion-spotting often leads me to track down the certified “great” albums.
As a result, I am a sucker for the meticulously packaged, overstuffed reissue versions of records that *maybe* 50 people purchased upon their initial release. And of course, that’s why I bought me some Jesus of Cool. Nick Lowe is most famous amongst the unwashed for being the dude who wrote that “…Peace, Love, and Understanding” song covered by Elvis Costello and his Attractions — a performance which requires a nuclear-powered irony detector if you ever want to cut through the layers upon layers of archness to get to something that could quite possibly be actual, real-live sincerity. Lowe was Costello’s producer of choice for his early records, as well as an artist on his own and as a member of Rockpile and Brinsley Schwarz. In short, Mr. Lowe was on and of the scene as “Pub Rock” and “Punk Rock” got all mixed up and became the marketable commodity known as “New Wave.”
I submit that New Wave (NW) and Punk Rock (PR) are forms largely interested in pop music and pop ethics and pop aesthetics as subjects. NW/PR are musics about music and about how folks should and shouldn’t react to different strains of popular culture/fashion. (Remember that the Johnny Rotten was picked to be punk because of his “I Hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt and that the Clash’s year zero manifesto “1977″ mainly targeted “Elvis, [the] Beatles, and the Rolling Stones.”) For my purposes, Nick Lowe would then seem the perfect punk — at least on Jesus of Cool. The album’s two titles Jesus of Cool and the American version’s Pure Pop for Now People are stunts. The album cover depicts Lowe in various parodic versions of established rock costume. Promotional schwag (kindly pictured in the deluxe reissue version’s liner notes) released to support the album irreverently mocked religion, the cheekily pompous album title, and the artist himself.
Moreover, the a good chunk of the songs on the original Jesus of Cool album and accompanying bonus materials from the same time period are about music and the music business. “Music for Money,” “I Love My Label,” and “Shake and Pop” are obviously tongue in cheek examinations of rock happenings that were already clichés by the late 1970s. “Rollers Show” is a paean to the greatness of the Bay City Rollers.
Even seemingly “not about music” songs like “Marie Provost” are partly about music. “Marie Provost” is titled like a typical powerpop “girl song” and initially sounds like one — ooh-wah-ooh vocals, a melodic bassline, and driving, strummy guitars. However, a closer listen reveals lyrics about a woman who died and was eaten by her dachshund. The song provides one set of expectations and then confounds them when the lyric doesn’t match the music — a joke that requires the listener to know the conventions of pop music.
NW and PR are polarizing styles because they changed the rules of popness. Before punk, “cool” culture was in opposition to establishment culture. This conflict often manifested along class lines (greasers v. socialites) or generational lines (youth vs. parents). However, as marketing and success and time made rock and roll an establishment item, a new, more nebulous conflict arose. Certain styles of rock and roll became enshrined and “classic” and, in a way, respectable. As a result — if we’re inclined to believe the party line on “The Punk Rock Movement” — new variants of rock crept in to challenge the established versions of rockness. In short, the conflict became a battle of one type of listener/fan versus another. Punks mocked classic rockers. Classic rockers bitched about disco.
However, a document like Jesus of Cool suggests a more nuanced development — mainly that NW/PR saw rock and roll coming to terms with self-awareness and irony. Rock became a set of values and tropes to think about in critical terms rather than something that would simply “never die” or continue “round the clock.” One might posit that Lowe is impishly tweaking rock and roll conventions because an audience exists to get the joke — enough rock history exists by 1978 that one can assume an informed audience.
In a way, Jesus of Cool and other “important” albums from the same PR/NW era mark the point when rock and roll lost its innocence on a wide scale. Just seven years after the punk explosion in 1977, enough people were thinking critically and playfully about rock cliché that someone made a movie about it — 1984’s Spinal Tap. Punk introduced a caste system of cool; commercially-successful records by well-established stars were less cool than sloppy, unknown albums that were never played on the radio. In many ways, rock began to emulate the “high” art world’s eye for the avant-garde and academia’s (over-)emphasis on smartness and obscureness and the tastes of a niche audience.
Which begs the question — do I own the super-fantastic, lavish reissue of Jesus of Cool because I actually enjoy this kind of music or because it helped usher in an era wherein rock listeners add albums to desert island lists because they like the smart feeling they get when they recognize the Thin Lizzy homage that is “So It Goes” and the little bit of “Heart of the City” that sounds like that song Joe Strummer’s first band put out?
