Rebels Wit Attitude: Subversive Rock Humorists
By Iain Ellis. New York: Soft Skull Press, December 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-1-59376-206-3, $15.95. 256 pages.
Review by Justin Patch, University of Texas, Austin
In a world of crisis, chaos, globalization and panic, it is too often the outwardly serious and grave elements of culture that capture the spotlight and imagination of academics. More often than not, the humanities are caught trying to legitimate their subjects to wider audiences by adapting catch words like “dangerous,” “weapons” and “resistance.” The topic of humor is often left to footnotes or relegated to one-off articles rather than the study of a full-length monograph, save for a long history of writings on political satire. In the field of music scholarship, this tendency is amplified. The movement to ennoble popular music has left its playful side in corner with a dunce cap while focusing on the teacher’s pets: hidden epistemologies, political economy, gender, globalization, and regional and transnational community formation. But even as music scholarship turns a blind eye and a deaf ear to humor, it continues to rear its comical head, like a Punch and Judy theater at a joust.
Enter Iain Ellis’s Rebels Wit Attitude: Subversive Rock Humorists, complete with a pun on one of the most influential rock albums of all time on the cover. Through a decade-by-decade account of key artists and genres, Ellis charges through six decades of rock and hip-hop, giving accounts of the times and providing selective case studies of artists he finds particularly compelling. Ellis makes his case that subversion and humor have been an essential element of rock music, built into its genres and forms, one of its defining characteristics. He goes on to outline the various over-generalized and leaky types of humor – wit, dumb, primal, idiotic, and subcultural, each with expansive definitions that bleed into and out of each other. He also provides his parameters, with sufficient reflexivity to acknowledge that this is simply a preliminary survey, lacking in comprehensiveness and depth. It is indeed an exploratory work, one which does not claim authority and does leave plenty of space for others to delve deeper. One glaring gap that Ellis graciously opens up to is that he is completely US-centric. He brackets all of the UK’s influential rock in an effort to contain the beast that is rock humor into 256 pages.
The objects of Ellis’s inquiry are indeed interesting and seminal to the study of popular music, at least in America. He provides short to medium studies of the likes of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Big Mama Thornton, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Bob Dylan, The Mothers and the Velvet Underground, Warren Zevon, Marilyn Manson, The Ramones, Madonna, Weird Al Yankovic, Missy Elliot, and the Modern Lovers, to name a few. He also champions the re-assessment of Wanda Jackson and a re-thinking and interpretation of the famous cookie-cutter girl-groups of the 60s like the Shangri-las. Within this mass of material, he brings up the role of humor in both defining and re-defining youth culture, gender norms, sexuality, and the music business.
Rebels Wit Attitude stands as an open portal for delving into humor in a serious and meaningful way. Because of its form as a survey, dealing mostly with surface rather than plumbing the absolute depths of one age or particular artists, and making no attempt to tie music culture into greater popular culture trends, Ellis invites others to latch on to his case studies as a starting point for more involved and focused work.
For all there is to recommend this, there are some frustrating points. There is little theorizing about how his own parameters of what constituted the applicable humor for specific ages. Rarely do case studies interact with scholarship concerning the social milieu of the decade, generation, or genre, save for topical and stylistic associations to the belligerent humor of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. Overtures are made to other bodies of scholarship, but Ellis does not overtly make connections or theorize these interactions, a stylistic choice, no doubt. He is also slightly too generous with titling music as subversive, labeling subversive anything that has a different, oppositional vision of the existing hegemony. Without any words on relational aspects of resistive or differently imaginative discourses to the cultures that birthed them, it is hard to get a sense of how these musicians and genres fit into the greater mass of popular culture, remained vibrant and relevant, and were able to be a part of the music market system (which all of them were to a greater or lesser extent). He also does not deal with the marketing of rebellion and its impact on the production of subversive humor. Although the overview format is useful, it does leave many questions unanswered, and leaves deep trenches for other brave, and tenured, scholars to plumb.
With all of its gaps and questions, Rebels still stands as an excellent first step into a relevant aspect of rock culture. As an academic book, it can serve as an alternate reader for any popular music class, as it is not music-technical at all, and covers many of the trends, artists, and genres that are common in history of rock classes. For anyone looking for a style guide to writing compelling prose about music, Ellis is definitely someone to look to; his writing, not bogged down by jargon or excessive citation, is clean and succinct.
By Iain Ellis. New York: Soft Skull Press, December 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-1-59376-206-3, $15.95. 256 pages.
Review by Justin Patch, University of Texas, Austin
In a world of crisis, chaos, globalization and panic, it is too often the outwardly serious and grave elements of culture that capture the spotlight and imagination of academics. More often than not, the humanities are caught trying to legitimate their subjects to wider audiences by adapting catch words like “dangerous,” “weapons” and “resistance.” The topic of humor is often left to footnotes or relegated to one-off articles rather than the study of a full-length monograph, save for a long history of writings on political satire. In the field of music scholarship, this tendency is amplified. The movement to ennoble popular music has left its playful side in corner with a dunce cap while focusing on the teacher’s pets: hidden epistemologies, political economy, gender, globalization, and regional and transnational community formation. But even as music scholarship turns a blind eye and a deaf ear to humor, it continues to rear its comical head, like a Punch and Judy theater at a joust.
Enter Iain Ellis’s Rebels Wit Attitude: Subversive Rock Humorists, complete with a pun on one of the most influential rock albums of all time on the cover. Through a decade-by-decade account of key artists and genres, Ellis charges through six decades of rock and hip-hop, giving accounts of the times and providing selective case studies of artists he finds particularly compelling. Ellis makes his case that subversion and humor have been an essential element of rock music, built into its genres and forms, one of its defining characteristics. He goes on to outline the various over-generalized and leaky types of humor – wit, dumb, primal, idiotic, and subcultural, each with expansive definitions that bleed into and out of each other. He also provides his parameters, with sufficient reflexivity to acknowledge that this is simply a preliminary survey, lacking in comprehensiveness and depth. It is indeed an exploratory work, one which does not claim authority and does leave plenty of space for others to delve deeper. One glaring gap that Ellis graciously opens up to is that he is completely US-centric. He brackets all of the UK’s influential rock in an effort to contain the beast that is rock humor into 256 pages.
The objects of Ellis’s inquiry are indeed interesting and seminal to the study of popular music, at least in America. He provides short to medium studies of the likes of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Big Mama Thornton, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Bob Dylan, The Mothers and the Velvet Underground, Warren Zevon, Marilyn Manson, The Ramones, Madonna, Weird Al Yankovic, Missy Elliot, and the Modern Lovers, to name a few. He also champions the re-assessment of Wanda Jackson and a re-thinking and interpretation of the famous cookie-cutter girl-groups of the 60s like the Shangri-las. Within this mass of material, he brings up the role of humor in both defining and re-defining youth culture, gender norms, sexuality, and the music business.
Rebels Wit Attitude stands as an open portal for delving into humor in a serious and meaningful way. Because of its form as a survey, dealing mostly with surface rather than plumbing the absolute depths of one age or particular artists, and making no attempt to tie music culture into greater popular culture trends, Ellis invites others to latch on to his case studies as a starting point for more involved and focused work.
For all there is to recommend this, there are some frustrating points. There is little theorizing about how his own parameters of what constituted the applicable humor for specific ages. Rarely do case studies interact with scholarship concerning the social milieu of the decade, generation, or genre, save for topical and stylistic associations to the belligerent humor of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. Overtures are made to other bodies of scholarship, but Ellis does not overtly make connections or theorize these interactions, a stylistic choice, no doubt. He is also slightly too generous with titling music as subversive, labeling subversive anything that has a different, oppositional vision of the existing hegemony. Without any words on relational aspects of resistive or differently imaginative discourses to the cultures that birthed them, it is hard to get a sense of how these musicians and genres fit into the greater mass of popular culture, remained vibrant and relevant, and were able to be a part of the music market system (which all of them were to a greater or lesser extent). He also does not deal with the marketing of rebellion and its impact on the production of subversive humor. Although the overview format is useful, it does leave many questions unanswered, and leaves deep trenches for other brave, and tenured, scholars to plumb.
With all of its gaps and questions, Rebels still stands as an excellent first step into a relevant aspect of rock culture. As an academic book, it can serve as an alternate reader for any popular music class, as it is not music-technical at all, and covers many of the trends, artists, and genres that are common in history of rock classes. For anyone looking for a style guide to writing compelling prose about music, Ellis is definitely someone to look to; his writing, not bogged down by jargon or excessive citation, is clean and succinct.
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