Heroes and Villains

This is not to say that there is only one way to write great essays on culture—just as Miles Davis would surely have said that Bill Evans hardly represented the only way the piano should be played. But the essays in this book do contain something definitive, distinctive, and very rare about how, exactly, one should write about the arts. This book offers a broad range: a reconsideration of standards from Tin Pan Alley to hip hop; a revisionist look at the land where blues began, thrived, and mutated; aging pop icons; technology; weirdos; and more. Hajdu approaches these topics from the standpoint of a provocateur, but he is also supplicant to music, or the muse in general. His novelist’s gaze can be merciless in the groves of music—think Balzac in a jazz club—but his appreciation for beauty can be boundless. He is, needless to say, a tough room, but tough in the sense of tough love.

I first came across the writing of David Hajdu when I was an undergraduate and happened upon Lush Life, his biography of Duke Ellington’s then-under-appreciated collaborator Billy Strayhorn. I knew every chord and every word of the title song of Hajdu’s book up and down. (My attempt to imitate Johnny Hartman’s version was a sure-fire room clearer.) But I had never dared think about how Strayhorn, as a nineteen-year-old in Pittsburgh, 1937, could write, in the opening line of “Lush Life,” “I used to visit all the very gay places” and mean it with all its contemporary ramifications. But of course! Cary Grant did the same thing that year in Bringing Up Baby! Why didn’t I think of that? But then Hajdu showed me how, in prose that was so entertaining, it didn’t even feel like the academic scholarship I was also taking in. Yet it was just as startling, bold, and complex as any arguments I had seen from the scholars I was reading, even if it felt more like reading a novel.

The essays in this collection—on subjects as diverse as Mos Def, Paul McCartney, Billy Eckstine, Starbucks, Joni Mitchell, Bobby Darin, and Elmer Fudd—are, in the tradition of Edmund Wilson’s Classics and Commercials, all instances of cultural criticism. That is to say, they do the kind of work that academics do, they just do it implicitly, aphoristically, and for a broad intelligent audience. Before Hajdu came along, there was little writing on pop music and jazz in the pages of The New Republic (at least since the Otis Furgeson years) and The New York Review of Books, and as I was reading those publications in the midst of college procrastination (important things do happen in these moments), it didn’t even occur to me that there was a place in these venues for topics that had consumed my misspent youth. The reason, perhaps, that such publications spent little time on these topics was not because they were of no cultural relevance, but because so much of the writing on pop and jazz is too fig-ural and self-referential. How, in short, does writing on pop and jazz—not to mention comics and gadgets—fit into the literary world? There’s not necessarily a plot in the work of the work of the creative figures in this book—at least not the musical ones—but there is a story about them.

The stories are vast in this book, and the stories about the stories are even vaster. In his definitive profile of Wynton Marsalis, he shows how one stolen moment at the Village Vanguard could demonstrate both his brilliance and his moment of crisis, which is also, in turn, jazz’s moment in crisis. In the scene, Marsalis is in the middle of playing a glorious solo on the standard ballad “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You,” when an interruption from a cell phone threatens to ruin the magic:

This is jazz writing at its finest. We are viscerally there, nursing our drink minimum in Manhattan’s most illustrious cellar, taking in a moment of spontaneity and virtuosity. (When I taught the essay in a graduate seminar, a student said, “I wish I could have been there,” and I explained that such moments occur frequently in New York jazz clubs but are seldom reported.) Here we see a fall and a rise, but with a question that’s harder to resolve than an impeccably crafted solo. Marsalis won the moment, but there will be more cell phones, fewer record labels, and smaller audiences for the next young lions. Or not—Hajdu will be ready at the next cultural moment, whatever it is.

It is fitting that Hajdu would be so dead on when reporting in depth on Marsalis’s—and jazz’s—midlife crisis. Many of these pieces deal with subjects that began as youthful obsessions that matured into considered, elegant thought. Maturation is not usually appreciated by pop audiences, even by those who are getting on in years themselves. But Hajdu is no nostalgist. He can wear the hat of the professional fan, or he can be the intrepid anthropologist. The culture of music can be seductive up close, but Hajdu tends to cast a colder eye, or at least let the temperature drop a little. He is attuned to the irony about what happens when rock and roll stars stay in one place or veer into ambitious directions. On Elvis Costello, he is gentle; on Joni Mitchell, a little tougher; and on Sting, he is absolutely devastating. Hajdu begins the Sting essay with a portrait of the survivors of the first generation of rock and roll. Before he even contemplates the mixture of pretension and shamelessness that makes Sting’s career so frustrating and ripe for critical ribbing, he pulls back the lens on what happens when rockers never evolve:

This paragraph continues to deliver splendors, which you must turn the pages to attain. But even in this beginning of a beginning, it is already apparent that what will follow will be thorough and brimming with a finely tuned irony. The joke is that septuagenarian icons like Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Berry are still singing songs about adolescence as very old men performing, usually, for rather old consumers, ignoring what could be deeper art about the indignities of age, if only they could summon their inner King Lears. But then the payoff is coming: Sting, coming upon fifty, and an uncommonly skilled musician among his pop peers, looks further back—all the way to the seventeenth-century lutenist John Dowland, but it is ridiculous, a shameless audition for knighthood. Keeping up the teenage anthems in one’s seventies is poignant; egotistical rock stars with delusions of grandeur can make royal asses out of themselves, and Hajdu calls them like he sees them in prose that is as merciless as it is meticulously crafted.

If there is a grand theme that unifies all the essays in this book, perhaps it is the collision between youthful exuberance and maturity. I should know. When I was ten years old, while other kids were playing Dungeons & Dragons or reading Lord of the Rings, I was supplementing a subscription to Rolling Stone with as many dusty old issues as I was allowed to bring home. I thought at the time that there would be nothing finer than to write for the magazine, interview rock stars, get free records, and find an ink-stained way into the rock and roll fantasy. Then I learned about jazz, and realized most of the world wasn’t paying attention anymore. By the time I was a college sophomore, when I was listening to an increasing diet of classical music, I thought it was time to put away childish things. I was filling my head with great books, and found myself at a crossroads one day at the campus post office. One postcard came from Rolling Stone, and said something like, “Hey, dude. Roll up your buds and renew your subscription.” Another came from The New Republic, and began, “Dear Intelligent American.” I want to be addressed as an intelligent American! I thought, and flipped my subscriptions. Almost immediately after, I became a critic, and I found myself, like so many others that came before me, negotiating high and low, and learning through experience that only certain publications truly allowed one to be smart in public. Eventually, as David Hajdu became music critic for The New Republic, I realized: He’s a little ahead of the rest of us. It turned out that it was possible to draw upon subjects of my youthful ardor while also being an Intelligent American—or intelligent human, for that matter. The proof is right here. The essays in this book are for intelligent readers everywhere, but they also swing, rock, and draw funny pictures. All of it is played the way it should be played.