The changing face of sound beyond the tracks

In the ideologically idyllic counterculture of the '60s, good looks and material riches were superficial values of the bourgeois establishment. Beauty was something that came from within, a reflection of the spirit, a property of truth. In hippiespeak, someone was beautiful if they were caring, unselfish, open, and warm. In "Are You Experienced?" Jimi Hendrix suggested beauty was not a physical condition at all, but a state of transcendence: "Have you ever been experienced?" he asked. "Not necessarily stoned, but...beautiful."

Gangling, with a scraggly moustache and a wild Afro, Hendrix was fortunate to be plying his trade at a time when pop heroes were icons of freedom, not idols to be mooned over - when otherness and artistic brilliance made people stars no matter what their bone structure. Music has always been a less looksist medium than film, since symphonies, songs, records, and radio live outside the visual. From Buddy Holly to Steven Tyler, from Chrissie Hynde to Kim Deal, rock's history is studded with individuals who probably had trouble finding dates for the prom, but whose music made them international sex symbols. Janis Joplin was voted the ugliest man on campus in college. Within a few years, the ugly duckling had become a swan, not because she'd changed her appearance, but because she had a voice that could knock you to your knees. As Leonard Cohen sang about her in "Chelsea Hotel Number Two": "You told me again you preferred handsome men but for me you would make an exception / And clenching your fist for the ones like us who are oppressed by the figures of beauty / You fixed yourself, you said, well never mind, we are ugly but we have the music."

Unfortunately, Cohen's faith in beautiful losers was not a tenet of the '80s. Preppies and yuppies were concerned more about the press of their suits than the state of their souls. The emergence of MTV coincided perfectly with this new superficial zeitgeist. Music videos' hyper visual style obliterated the tattered remnants of '60s rock culture; suddenly image, not performance, was everything. Madonna, the Material Girl, quickly became the ultimate MTV artist. Her voice then was a grating squeak next to Janis's pipes, but she was a genius at striking a pose - at striking a hundred poses. Far from being oppressed by figures of beauty, Madonna seemed to find liberation in becoming them. Her hair, makeup, costumes, and body changing at an ever-accelerating pace, she became a virtuoso of appearances. If you didn't like Madonna the boy toy, you might like Madonna the Catholic daughter, or Madonna the dominatrix, or Madonna as Marilyn Monroe. Always, Madonna has looked more like a film star, a Vegas showgirl, a runway model, or a Playboy pinup than a singer. During her Blonde Ambition tour, I remember marveling not at her vocal performance, but at the fact that she was singing at all amid the spectacular whirl of dance routines and costume changes.

Nowadays, Madonna has learned to sing, and even seems aware that her cult of the body is losing acolytes. MTV no longer controls the center of pop music so knowingly; it flounders from Green Day to TLC to Weezer to Snoop Doggy Dogg, all savvy video artists whose music is unable to project much beyond the cathode ray tube. With her impressive vocal skills and pretty, pretty face, Mariah Carey would seem to be an MTV artist with musical substance. On the video for "Fantasy," she plays the Beauty next to rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard's Beast, but Carey's idea of performing for the camera is to flash her teeth and tilt her head coquettishly, making me long for Madonna's daring. Carey uses her multi-octave range to Barbie-doll effect; Joplin's magnificence came not from her chops, but from her delivery.

Perhaps Carey's music seems so dull to me for the same reason that in high school I was never interested in what the cheerleaders were saying; it was shoved down our throats at pep rallies. I wanted to hear what the quiet boy with the unkempt hair played on the guitar I'd seen in his locker; maybe, like Kurt Cobain, he was about to expose the deodorized lie of teen spirit, sticking a safety pin through that period in life when suddenly you have to look a certain way to fit in. Cobain himself was an outcast in his hometown; he used to get beaten up by the bullies who thought he was queer. Like Janis and Jimi, he found in music a haven from narrow thinking (although for all of them, it proved sadly temporary).

Tribe 8 singer Lynn Breedlove once told me she thought punk rock was the musical revenge of the nerds. It certainly looks like that on MTV, when Offspring gets played next to Whitney Houston, or Hole follows TLC. Punk tries to make ugliness a virtue, while pop wants to bring beauty into people's lives. The fissure between these two battling aesthetics rumbles across Courtney Love's face, between her nose job and her purposely garish whore's makeup, as she both lampoons and wants desperately to be Miss World. Love called Hole's first album Pretty on the Inside as if to remind us that inner beauty is supposed to be what counts. Of course, like Joplin's, Love's great, tortured voice is full of the knowledge that it's not. In Hole's videos, Love seems to wrestle with the demon of the beauty myth, alternating between being seduced and being outraged. The winner has yet to be determined.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning