The Rock Canon

Talking to The Guardian newspaper in 2002, the poet and critic Tom Paulin complained about A-level, the British school-leaving examination that prepares for university: ‘I think A-level History is still a very good subject, but English is very watery now. Alan Bennett is on the curriculum, for fuck’s sake! Imagine giving an 18-year-old Alan Bennett’s monologues.’ From such tiny seeds do canons grow: taste strutting around as value, highbrow sneering at best-selling author much admired, and the public, national playground of school, with its door-opening qualifications, student numbers by the busload, bonanza sales for authors who luck out. The Rock Canon plunges energetically into these watery waters, figuring how so-called popular music finds itself saddled with an idea lumbered with the baggage of English literature and so-called classical music. The Rock Canon was Carys Wyn Jones’s doctoral thesis at Cardiff, where her daily work centred on ten records and the critical writing around them. The choice of albums matters a lot, and is mostly the ‘hundred greatest albums ever made’ as voted by critics for Dadrock magazine Mojo in August 1995, corroborated by ‘statistician Henrik Franzon’ (pp. 26–7). Alongside the writing specific to the albums, including single-author monographs, reference is made to other commentaries: essays in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, for example, or, with curious frequency, John Lennon’s 1970 interview with Jann Wenner for Rolling Stone magazine. All this is of great interest ‘for those about to rock’, as Brian Johnson would say, but perhaps few besides. However, another cluster of literature presents the material alongside debates in musicology referring to classical music, writers such as Joseph Kerman, Marcia Citron, and William Weber, and edited collections Disciplining Music (1992) and The Musical Work (2000). Finally, a first chapter brings on debates around the canon in literary studies, writers such as Harold Bloom, Frank Kermode, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and John Guillory, both his useful article in Critical Terms for Literary Study (1990) and impenetrable book, Cultural Capital (1993). Thus The Rock Canon should prove useful both for courses limited to popular music, and for courses in musicology that aim to take a broad or long view; it is also a subject of intrinsic and general interest.

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