Question of the Week: It’s Only Rock and Roll?
2December 11, 2007 by A.C. Rhodes
The lyrics have become a saying, or a reaction, to just about any rocker’s (or rock writer’s) super bad behavior. But when does this become a cop out?
Bonus question for this week of weeks: Where were you when John Lennon was unfairly taken from this mortal coil?
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I don’t tend to gravitate towards critics who provide long-winded breakdowns of lyrics in their reviews* but the only time I consider it a cop-out is when critics dismiss a song based solely on the lyrics. It’s way too easy to cite examples of bad song poetry by removing song lyrics from their context (i.e., the rest of the music).
*the big exception to this, of course, is Meltzer’s *The Aesthetics of Rock*, which is almost entirely about lyrics and song titles, and rarely about beats or sounds.
Nothing on the first question.
But on the night Lennon was killed, I and a few hundred other people were at a listening party for Emmylou Harris’s new album, at the Variety Arts Center in downtown L.A.
The party was well on its way when the news broke, and — showing taste and consideration for the event — nobody who knew (maybe heard it in their car on the way down) made a big deal of it at the time. So most of us found out en route home.