I don't know so much about pre-rock popular music, but in the context of early rock'n'roll I just don't think it was taken sufficiently seriously at the time, nor were the majority of people who liked it seriously concerned about smashing any kind of system. The divisions between high and low culture were still very, very strong pretty much everywhere, and early rock'n'roll was merely the precursor to later forces which would blow them down, not something to do that in itself - the idea of devoting a magazine specifically to writing either more seriously or more ultra-rebelliously about it was not something that would have occurred to most people. The culture hadn't reached that level yet.

Of course early rock'n'roll *did* have symbolism to it beyond music - the beginning of the civil rights movement in the US, the backdrop to Suez and the collapse of imperial power in the UK - but I don't think it went far enough for a fanzine culture or anything similar to happen at that time. It did lay the cultural foundation stones for that to *eventually* happen, of course.

I just don't think it was taken sufficiently seriously at the time, nor were the majority of people who liked it seriously concerned about smashing any kind of system

To draw out the threads of this (various possibilities); of course some people took it seriously: Charlie Rich took it seriously, Bob Dylan took it seriously, Mick Jagger took it seriously, future critic Dave Hickey took it seriously. The question is why didn't this seriousness rush itself into prose?

(1) People who took it seriously didn't take themselves seriously - or anyway didn't value their own ideas enough - to consider their ideas worth writing down and distributing. (People who took it seriously would generally be teenagers, often from poor families, not bookish.)

(2) People who took it seriously didn't think of expressing this seriousness by writing (as opposed to forming a band or a fan club or riding a motorcycle like Marlon and Elvis).

(3) People who took it seriously didn't take criticism or intellectualizing seriously.

(4) People who took it seriously didn't think that criticism or intellectualizing was the sort of thing that people like them did.

(5) People who took it seriously and took writing seriously nonetheless didn't even have it occur to them to go into print with criticism and intellectualizing (either fanzine or legit), since they had no models or mentors. (Compare to, e.g., François Truffaut who in 1948 at age 16 starts a film society of his own and meets up with André Bazin.) Likely a writer in the '50s who takes rock 'n' roll seriously is going to veer towards fiction or poetry, with the Beats as his or her model. But I don't know if there was much or any fiction or poetry of the time that dealt much with rock 'n' roll, anyway.

(6) People who took it seriously and had the ideas bubbling up within them nonetheless wouldn't have started a zine or submitted articles to the legit press, the reason being that they couldn't imagine an audience for themselves, didn't have in mind a readership they'd be addressing.

smashing any kind of system

Well, less extreme than that, you'd need someone who respected some sort of literary-intellectual culture enough to want, in some combination, (i) to get literary intellectuals to turn their minds to rock 'n' roll, (ii) to use rock 'n' roll to shake up the literary intellectuals and make them better, (iii) to create one's own literary-intellectual culture.

In general, the prime audience would have been rocks, hoods, greasers. But most rocks, hoods, greasers want to be good at being rocks, hoods, greasers, which unfortunately means being anti-intellectual. Those hoods and loners with art skills might have felt differently, and along with renegade brains and beatniks and proto-freaks they would have been the ones who might possibly have thought of starting a rock 'n' roll zine (or breaking into an already existing mag). But, again, they'd have to find sufficient others like themselves who were open to the idea, and they'd be doing it without models or mentors.

But it would be interesting to know if Nik Cohn, Robert Christgau, Simon Frith, Greil Marcus, Tom Wolfe ever considered going into print or starting a zine in the '50s. Wolfe, in his 20s, did write journalism, when he was done with his American Studies thesis, but I don't know if he bothered with popular music until he went to Esquire in the early '60s. Marcus wasn't even a teen until '58, Cohn until '59. I don't have a DOB for Frith.

Some good points. You always flesh these things out much more than I can.

I think your reasons are pretty accurate: the people who took it seriously and the people who thought criticism and intellectualising were the sort of thing they either could do or particularly *wanted* to do, at that point, were for the most part not the *same* people. This is UK-specific, so apologies, but here I think the people who were excited by rock'n'roll who were in secondary modern schools for the most part thought writing seriously about things was what posh people did, a world that wasn't for them (the inferiority complex caused by failing the 11-plus and being confined to sec-mods, which often trained their pupils only to do heavy-industrial unskilled jobs which would have disappeared when that generation still had perhaps a quarter of a century's work ahead of them, was such that "not valuing your own ideas enough" was a chronic feeling in those schools), and those who were excited by it who were in grammar or private schools saw it as a means of *escaping* the very idea of writing, of language, which they saw as imposing the very fixed standards they wanted to escape via rock, and the time hadn't yet come for a halfway house. Certainly I'd suspect that John Peel - who was at one of Britain's elite fee-paying schools when he first heard "Heartbreak Hotel" - would, at that point, have regarded the very idea of writing about it as a form of embalming and thus destroying its instant impact, which had exploded his twilight-of-empire world (he wouldn't have thought it out on those terms, but would probably have instinctively come to that conclusion).

It took until about the mid-60s for the divides to come down sufficiently that literary intellectuals turned their minds to rock'n'roll and people who were into rock'n'roll were sufficiently interested in literary-intellectual culture that they wanted to use rock'n'roll to make it more open to change and less caught up in its ivory tower ("better" is too vague a word in this context, I think). You suddenly got people who knew about everything and wanted to mix it together, in a way you hadn't had before.

a propos Simon Frith, his wikipedia and rocksbackpages entries don't cite his DOB, but his brothers were born in 1942 and 1949, and I think he's between those, perhaps closer to the earlier date. He'd have been just the generation to feel the fundamental shift in British identity and sense-of-self that came with the first wave of consumerism and movement to the New Towns *as it was actually happening*, a territory he implicitly invoked in some of his later writing (specifically his February 1979 Melody Maker piece stating clearly, as some idealistic rock-leftists could not bring themselves to face, that rock music and Britain's then-powerful trade unions could never really be on the same side) but I'm guessing that his early experiences of rock were probably as they were for most of his generation - a shout of escape from the weight of imperial history around him, not something he'd have wanted to get down in words (I must admit I tend to think of the early rock'n'roll experience in terms of the dying empire its force was crushing: the American experience of it was obviously different in many crucial ways, but I think a lot of the stuff you cite above applies equally to both countries).

The group that seems to be missing in action - or perhaps not missing, but whom I don't have knowledge of - would be 1950s writers in their twenties and older who already took popular culture seriously, movie reviewers, jazz critics, etc. John Hammond was a critic as well as a producer, but I don't think he ever reviewed rock 'n' roll. Nat Hentoff wrote for Downbeat in the '50s but I don't know if he'd yet turned to rock 'n' roll either. According to Wikipedia, Ralph Gleason interviewed Fats Domino, Hank Williams, and Elvis Presley for the San Francisco Chronicle, presumably not just as part of his job but because he thought they were worth the attention. He went on to co-found Rolling Stone with Jann Wenner. What I've read of his is far too sentimental, but I don't know his '50s work.

Presumably lots of local journalists covered rock as the records and concerts and riots came through their towns, maybe sometimes with a smart ear. If Otis Ferguson had lived he'd have been a natural for it (film critic for The New Republic, also wrote a hunk about jazz; was killed in WWII); Ring Lardner, too (among other things, he wrote the radio column for The New Yorker in the early 1930s); he'd have been a cranky old man hitting his '70s when Elvis came along, and I can imagine him lampooning and sneering, but with penetration in his jabs.

I wonder if Britain had a Raymond Durgnat type turning his sights on music.

Durgnat himself had a reasonable interest in pop/rock - certainly much more than any of the BFI critics did (some of the early Monthly Film Bulletin reviews of rock movies have to be read to be believed, but are symptomatic of an official British culture panicking at all-round loss of power). I don't think he was hugely knowledgeable about it, but he was broadly supportive of what it meant culturally, and highly critical of both old-establishment and New Left (which latter movement he accused of thinking the working class weren't "real" once they had adopted rock'n'roll) puritanism against it, especially in MFB/S&S criticism.

I would have linked to his 1963 essay 'Standing Up for Jesus' but unfortunately it's disappeared from the internet.

But to answer your more general point, I don't think we had a critic of that ilk *at that time* who wrote *predominately* about pop/rock, at least not pre-Beatles. The closest thing we had to it, as I said, was probably Durgnat himself, who for a while was pretty much our only film critic who was allied neither to a high-cultural orthodoxy of decorousness nor to uncritical appropriation of whatever was most popular. You can sense the Monthly Film Bulletin tentatively beginning to change by about 1964 - Tom Milne as editor gave longer reviews in the "important" bit of the magazine to Roger Corman films, wholly unthinkable before that - but it was a long, slow process which took decades. It was quicker there than at Sight & Sound, though, mainly because Penelope Houston clung on far beyond her natural time.

We seem to have diverged. Don't mind me.

"missing in action": this exact phrase is germane -- the "missing" generation is the one whose teenage years were punctuated by WW2

the post-war effect (in the US) establishes an intellectual division: the GI Bill give vets free further education if they want it (but obviousy in doing so inducts them into established corridors of thinking); against this is where the vets who aren't interested find expression

well, "the wild one" -- which brings the notion of "teenage hood" into global pop culture, as well as brando's anti-verbal lingua franca of method-derived grunt'n'lipcurl -- is basec on the semi-legendary bikje-gang incursion into hollister, california, in 1948: the bikers geing (basically) vets on speed, addicted to the planless adventure they'd discovered at war in europe or the pacific...

In the '30s and '40s there were people who wrote about jazz and blues and popular music, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the writing was self-published or written for magazines that would barely pay. But fanzine culture is about self-expression, do-it-yourself, everybody's a star. And if any equivalent of that existed for jazz or swing, it probably didn't take written form.

hegel says that a political party doesn't truly exist until there's a split and it divides against itself: you don't need criticism until the fans start to disagree what's good in a given field

boosterism doesn't arrive until there's a critical mass of frustration that something awesome is routinely being ignored -- i think frank's right, that rock'n'roll "as we understand it" was backformed from the success andstated interests of a group of pop musicians who discovered they were likeminded (specifically, i think, lennon's and dylan's mutual acknowledgment, which forged a teenpop/folk alliance out of nowhere previously imaginable, and demanded and conjured up a response: the stones in the uk specifically broke with the jazz "establishment" of its day for the sake of R&B: brian jones famously wrote a letter to "jazz news" in 1962 attacking it for its attitude to the younger music

"melody maker" began publication in 1926, though it was a trade paper for musicians when it started
"down beat: jazz, blues and beyond" began publication in 1934
"sing out!" -- the crusading folk magazine -- began publication in 1950

so there would always already have been generalist magazines paying not enough attention -- or being frustratingly wrong enough -- and particularist magazines paying attention but in a subsection kind of way (as in 60s jazz-mag does give coverage to R&B, but always considers it less important and of less value than jazz)

initially this would be "good enough" for the dedicated fan-reader: it would take time for it to become maddening enough to take the step -- esp. if you were a teen yrself -- of starting yr own publication (and there's a costs issue here too)*

*the technology for super-cheap fanziney publication -- web offset, photocopying -- really doesn't emerge till the late 60s: a "proper" magazine is a complex undertaking just logistically... you needed a fair amount of cash to get it off the ground even if it turned out to be a hit (who funded crawdaddy?)

aha, crawdaddy was (a) a student magazine, first pub.at Swarthmore, and (b) founder paul williams was an SF fan as a teen, and had already run a SF fanzine (aged 14!)

SF mags grew out of the DIY radio-ham craze of the teens and 20s, when Hugo Gernsback started putting fiction into his mail-order electronics catalogues...

eg the thing to be looking at -- to be honest this is true of RnR the music also -- is confluence of (often unlikely) precursors: we have a strong hindsight sense of what "real rockwriting" is, and that it began in 1966, but there's a ton of stuff which is "quite like it" (except eg about the wrong type of music, or in the wrong venue) leading up to it...

UK rock writing as we understand it -- ie charles shaar murray, nick kent -- began in the Underground Magazines: Oz, it and frendz

another precursor: new departures -- an underground UK poetry/literary mag founded in 1959...

ton of stuff which is "quite like it"

The reason I cite Ferguson and Lardner, rather than, say, Martin Williams or Dan Morgenstern or Leonard Feather etc. is that Ferguson and Lardner had the look and the feel of rock writing, even though of course they didn't write about rock 'n' roll.

I was reading down through all the cultural stuff above thinking, this is all well and good, but nobody seems to have picked up on the technological side of it. And then your footnote beat me to my moment in the sun!
I think it was possibly the arrival of the exciting new photocopier in season 2 of Mad Men which was lurking at the back of my brain. Everyone talks about the democratising effect of the internet, but back in the day, the democratising effect of having access to a parent's office photocopier would have been just as crucial. There was a pre-existing zine culture for SF and comics, I suppose, but presumably those would appeal more to people who were also into amateur tech and the like, in a way rock'n'roll probably would not.

Mimeograph machines? Not sure how they work; but if elementary school teachers had access to them, and department secretaries, I bet an enterprising rock 'n' roll critic would have, too.

In 1965 my fifth-grade class put out its own "newspaper" (in actuality an occasional magazine) but I don't recall how we printed it. A piece announcing a Beatles fan club by a cute girl named Linda Smith was submitted to it, but I - the editor, age 11 - rejected it. And so rock criticism had to wait for another two years.

Actually, Paul Nelson and Irwin Silber* were already writing rock criticism in Sing Out!, and Richard Goldstein was also writing it, I think in the Voice. And Tom Wolfe's article on custom cars, which to my mind is as much about rock 'n' roll as it is about hot rods and teen car enthusiasts, was published in Esquire a year earlier. Don't remember when Ellen Willis started at the New Yorker**, or Ellen Sander at wherever she wrote for (Saturday Review etc.).

*Silber wrote quite vehemently and critically about Dylan, but my reading of, e.g., his review of Highway 61 Revisited was that he was becoming convinced that not only was rock music worth covering (albeit critically), but that the pop music/folk music divide was not in itself crucial. Or at least that's how I read him, and found his criticisms of Dylan as illuminating as Nelson's praise. He once called rock music "neurotic music," and I thought, "Yes, and that's why it's good."

But again, why didn't this argument take place in 1956, regarding Elvis and Chuck? Nelson (b. 1936 according to Wiki, though I'm a little skeptical about that date) didn't get involved in Sing Out! until 1963 [I'm getting my info via Google, so of course it's not authoritative], but he and his friend John Pankake started their own magazine in Minnesota in 1961, The Little Sandy Review, self-published in the hope that it would get them review copies of albums they couldn't afford to buy. First issue sold three copies, peak was one thousand, and obviously there was some way they could afford to print it. I'm guessing that the content was all "folk," but I might be wrong about that.

**Wiki calls Willis the New Yorker's first pop critic, but that's not true. As I said above, Ring Lardner had a radio column in the New Yorker in the early '30s, almost entirely about pop music, and when I was paging through back issues to read his stuff I discovered there was also another regular pop music column in those very same years, written, if my memory is correct, by someone who called himself "Pop."

was pop even called pop in the 30s?

mimeograph machines needed a typewriter, an inking-machine (printer) and a supply of "skins": essentially a kind of toughened paper that you typed on which acted as a stencil -- they were invented by edison (naturally) so were certainly likely to be around in schools and the like in the 1950s

Just want to say - fascinating thread (since I left it!). Has fleshed out a lot of stuff I feel better for knowing.

I firmly believe that things happen when they are ready to happen, and all the things needed are in place.

In 1979 I helped to produce a fanzine of sorts. It was more a scurrilous sheet based around goings on in the company in Leeds where I and 39 others were undergoing our basic computer training. It was put together using a portable typewriter and Letraset, both of which had been available for years, but the production of a viable number of distribution copies depended on the easy availability of a photocopier, not something available to the 50s and 60s generations. The increased availablitity of the photocopier also released significant numbers of second-hand duplicating machines into the public domain.

To fill this discussion out a bit:

(1) Who was writing about rock 'n' roll in the '50s and what were they writing? E.g., trade mags like Billboard, Cashbox and Variety; teen magazines like Seventeen, Teen, and Hit Parader; fan/fanclub magazines (if any); local reporters (covering concerts, riots); national news and general interest magazines like Time, Newsweek, Readers Digest, Look, and Life (did they have anything to say about r'n'r?); gossip and tabloid mags like Confidential, Modern Screen, and The National Enquirer; general pop music magazines like Melody Maker and NME (any in America?); specialist music mags like Jazz and Pop, Downbeat, and Sing Out! that might or might not have occasionally noticed rock 'n' roll; intellectualized opinion magazines like the Nation, the New Yorker, the Partisan Review, and the National Review, if they had anything to say about r'n'r; letters to any of the foregoing; showbiz and gossip columnists (interesting sidenote: this was Ed Sullivan's business before he got his variety show on TV; he continued with it during the time he was on TV), if they ever considered rock 'n' roll as part of their beat; general columnists and commentators, if they ever talked about rock 'n' roll; the role of photography (obviously this is not "writing" per se, but stories are built to accompany photographs as much as vice versa, and this is a subject we tend to overlook); TV and radio reports; press kits (if they existed in the '50s); academic studies (if any) by sociologists etc.; and other stuff I've forgotten to list.

(2) Note that Tom's original question assumes that little of what I just listed is rock criticism (or anyway that none of it had a significant impact as criticism, enough to establish a practice of rock criticism), and so does our discussion, for the most part.

Luc here. There's very little to add to this discussion, except that there was indeed a 1930s semi-equivalent among jazz fans. I'm on the road at the moment so can't cite anything, but Fred Ramsey and his co-authors of Jazzmen (1939), among others, did issue little magazines then (fanzines are a much later phenomenon that arose from the science-fiction fan base). Those magazines were a bit less devoted to deep criticism than you might wish, but that's in part because they were still trying to get a purchase on the subject. Hence they were trying to fill out discographies, track down players (especially early figures on the New Orleans scene), argue endlessly about who took the second cornet solo on the third take of "Royal Garden Blues," and so on. This was absolutely crucial stuff at the time--you could fit the serious writing on jazz done in the '20s into a teacup, and there were no reference materials of any description.

Also, I don't know if anyone has mentioned the pioneering work of popular-arts criticism in the US, Gilbert Seldes's The Seven Lively Arts (1924), which attempted to jump-start serious consideration of comic strips, jazz, newspapers, movies, animated cartoons, and musical theater--in a vacuum. It would be a long time before anyone else took up the baton on most of those subjects.

Don't forget how different conditions are in different historical periods, and how tough it is to break paradigms.

(1) A name that might be worth investigating for the purpose of this question is Al Aronowitz. He definitely falls more on the journalism side of the divide than the critical side of the divide, and his main claim to fame (so to speak) seems to be that he was instrumental in introducing Dylan to the Beatles, which is later than the period being asked about on this thread. Still, according to Wikipedia, he "became a journalist in the 1950s and his work in that decade included a 12-part series on the Beat Generation for the New York Post." He also wrote extensive pieces on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the (early?) '60s and was the first American to write a mammoth Beatles piece, in 1964, for the Saturday Evening Post (10,000 + words). I'm piecing this together from various sources. Point being that, if he wrote extensively about the Beats in the fifties and the Beatles from the time they landed on U.S. soil, I'd be hard pressed to believe he didn't provide some coverage somewhere about other pre-Beatle rock stuff. But this is a guess on my part.

Had an email convo with Simon Frith on this subject, which I'm pasting in here (with Simon's permission):

Simon: Swing and jazz certainly had a fan culture (collectors and earnest boys meeting to listen to and discuss records) but of course fanzines were made possible by postwar technol developments (photocopiers etc). I'm not sure why rock'n'roll should have triggered birth of rock criticism (as against rock'n'roll criticism). People certainly wrote about rock'n'roll records and even criticised them (in Britain in Melody Maker and NME for example) and there was some writing about r&b in jazz mags and this writing wasn't entirely irrelevant to way in which rock criticism itself later emerged in, say, Melody Maker. i was born in 1946 by the way!

Frank: I don't think asking in effect, "Why didn't rock criticism coalesce around rock 'n' roll in '57?" is any stranger in principle than "Why didn't heavy metal coalesce around the British blues and jazz scenes of the mid '60s?" And if Chuck can put the Kinks in his heavy metal book why can't we locate some "rock criticism" in the '50s? (I remember a big ILM fight over Chuck's calling the Chamber Brothers "dub-metal"; with one person insisting that you can't have dub-metal existing before either dub or metal exist, and someone else saying in response that there can be differing ideas of when dub and metal came to exist and what they are.) But another potential answer to Tom's question is that rock criticism did sort of exist in the '50s and earlier but it wasn't about rock 'n' roll, it was about folk and jazz and art and movies - though that wouldn't be an easy argument to make, and I don't have the knowledge to make it.

Simon: This partly becomes an argument about terms. Was there something in the 1950s which we would now call 'rock criticism' but wasn't then because the term didn't exist? Or is 'rock criticism' something that could only happen in the 1960s because that's when its conditions of existence appeared? I think the process was dialectical: 'rock' as a musical/cultural/ideological form was constructed by a certain kind of writing/criticism, but such rock criticism was only made possible by the emergence of a particular set of musical/cultural/social relationships which only coalesced in the 1960s. Ways of writing about jazz, folk and pop all fed into rock criticism but it only became rock criticism as such when the musical conditions were right. Which is a v convoluted and academic way of saying just as there couldn't be rock without rock criticism there couldn't be rock criticism without rock-- which is why there wasn't rock criticism in the 1950s!

lady godiva's (experimental) horse criticism

in the US: start with mark twain
in the UK: start with john ruskin

(these two theories are a bit hard to reconcile, since it requires rock writing to have i. been invented in the uk (but cf lady godiva's horse) and ii. by critical history's most famous virgin

BUT ruskin did actual know a lot about rock

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