Old Men Can't Write About Rock and Roll

So last night I saw Tom Stoppard's new play, "Rock 'n' Roll", on Broadway. This is an essay, not a review, and contains massive spoilers. Proceed at your own risk.

First, let me declare my allegiances. I am an unabashed Stoppard acolyte: from "Rosecrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" to "The Real Thing" to "The Invention of Love" I have been not only delighted by the wit, intruiged by the intellect but also moved. I don't find him distant or cold; I find him smart and tough but also goofy. He's unsentimental in the best sense. And funny--a Clown Prince of the Intellect, and afflicted with a pun-ishing case of wordlove. So when cheap tix were on offer I cleared my schedule, grabbed Julie and went.

The show got outstanding reviews in London and was hailed by Ben Brantley in the NY Times. Frankly, I think Brantley missed or confused some of the salient points of the piece, but I might say the same thing about Stoppard.

A director I work for and I have been having something of a conversation about Stoppard. His main complaint is Stoppard's politics, which he finds very right-wing. and I don't think that "Rock 'n' Roll is going to change anyone's mind. The Marxist, Max Morrow (described by Michael Billington as "the first sympathetic Marxist I can recall in all Stoppard's work") is clearly, massively in the wrong. He continues to support the Communist Party (not the same as Marxism!) long after Stalin and the occupations of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Although he is a sympathetic character and a strong debater it is quite clear that all his political ideas are bullshit, ultimately repudiated by his colleagues and by history.

But Stoppard is no authoritarian; quite the contrary, he is a libertarian, mostly in favor or people being left alone. Jan, a Czech intellectual who grew up in England (as did Stoppard) but returned to Czechoslovakia (as Stoppard did not) argues quite forcefully that it is the band, the Plastic People of the Universe, and its fans which will do more to topple the government than the intellectual dissidents. He argues that their apathy towards the state and their desire to be left alone are a greater threat than the intellectuals' opposition, which gives the government an opponent and therefore a meaning or goal to pursue. Events, as presented in "Rock 'n' Roll," would seem to bear him out. Jan only signs one of the many petitions presented him by his friend Ferdinand once he has a) been in prison and b) Ferdinand has become a fan of the band (along, one might well point out, with Vaclav Havel).

Although this might be a radical approach in a totalitarian state (one of the best, and possibly also cheapest, lines is an interrogator saying "We're supposed to know what's going on inside people -- that's why it's the Ministry of the Interior") Stoppard fails to carry the idea through into the present day. Today disengagement or indifference is how power elites prefer the populace to be. (The Republican "Southern Strategy" was pretty clearly predicated on driving down voter turnout so their faithful, who did not constitute a true majority, would win at the polls.) So although disinterest might have been threatening to the state, apathy today is acquiescence. We are being left alone, in many respects, but the system is in fact more unequal than it has been in years, at least in the US. Which, granted, is not Stoppard's bailiwick, but not an unimportant example of "the West."

Stoppard might be classed as a libertarian for his desire for folks to be left alone to "do their thing", but I think it goes further than that. Jan, the character most like Stoppard himself, states at the end of the play that trading one system for another doesn't really mean anything. (I'm working from memory, not a text.) They all distort meaning, beginning with how they name themselves. We have to reclaim the meaning of words themselves.

Now, from a guy who extols the virtues of British democracy and freedom of the press, and who spent time in a Czech communist prison, it's a little startling to hear that changing one system for another makes no difference. I think Stoppard is saying that it's all corrupt and the problem goes deeper. This is a similar argument to the one Nader supporters made in 2000, that Bush and Gore were essentially interchangeable, and I think it's equally crap.

It is true that Communism (not the same as communism, or living in a commune) and capitalism both concentrate the power in the hands of an elite group. But Stoppard's seeming prescription of

But, as Jan might say to the craven British journalist Nigel (Stoppard's presentation of media figures is damning), what about the music?

Aye, there's the rub. And this was the occasion of a long discussion with Julie last night, on the way home from the show.

Rock 'n' roll (and let me be clear that I'm specifically referring to rock 'n' roll, and making to claims for or against any other genre or art or style) is pretty much a lizard brain experience. It picks you up and has its way with you and makes no particular stress or demand on the intellect per se. That's it's beauty, that's its glory.

I've never seen this captured in theater, either in script or performance. (No, I don't think Sam Shepard did it.) Personally, I think any live performance that isn't rock 'n' roll can't match the punch of rock 'n' roll. It can be equally powerful and move you on levels rock simply doesn't have access to, but it ain't gonna be the same.

Furthermore, there is a huge problem with relating music that was meaningful in a particular context 30 years ago. We see some of Jan's love of the music, but when he gets out of prison and his record collection has been smashed by the secret police, I was not devastated, and I really should have been. This is a flaw in the play, not a problem with the concept in general.

I think the problem with the concept in general, and the title of this piece, is that rock 'n' roll hits you either at an emotionally vulnerable stage in your development (typically adolescence, whenever one goes through that) or at an emotionally vulnerable time in your life (breakup, grief, personal transformation, what have you). And it forms and molds you in ways you may attribute to the song but also have an enormous about to do with your context and environment. Unless you re-create that context and environment (which would require being aware of it in the first place) for the audience, the songs won't be meaningful to them.

Stoppard tries somewhat to do this. There are long pieces of song played in blackout, with the album sleeve info projected onto a screen with period-appropriate typeface. This gets pretty damn tedious, partially because of the utter decontextualization of the songs (perhaps out of respect for the music, "Rock 'n' Roll" does not use music during scenes unless a character is playing a record; i.e. the music is not used in the play to push the audience's emotions) and also because one begins to suspect that they're doing it just to cover a lengthy scene transition. It ultimately did not connect me more deeply to the world of the show.

Also, because rock is so personal in the ways mentioned above, it tends to be a real blind spot for people, myself included. Julie has never forgotten that our first real fight was about rock 'n' roll, and my personal attachment to it. (Too dumb to recount in full, even if I could recall all specifics.) As such, we don't see rock as problematic, or at least we often don't see the rock we like as problematic. The end of "Rock 'n' Roll" is a prime example of this.

The irony of the Rolling Stones concert that ends the show seems completely lost on Stoppard. By the time the Stones played Czechoslovakia in 1990 they were in fact the capitalist money-making machine they commies had accused them of being. They stood for massive prices and massive profits, and were heading towards sponsored concerts. They hadn't been a threat to the social order for at least 15 years, and were well past their last record. As meaningful as the concert was to the Czech people (they performed at Havel's invitation) the Stones weren't tearing down the establishment; they were the establishment, capitalism and all.

Lenka, the free-loving Czech professor in Cambridge, claims that the personal aspects of the '60's were more powerful than the political. "We were changing the world" she says (more or less, I'm paraphrasing). "We were going to end capitalism, end all war, not just the Vietnam war." Well done, I say. "Rock 'n' roll" does pay tribute to the human spirit, but in missing the irony of what the Stones had become by 1990 I think Stoppard misses a more distressing implication of his ideas. Max Morrow's Marxist utopia is dead, and we've nothing to offer in its place except stadium-filling capitalists who, far from the Plastic People of the Universe's freedom from the desire for recognition, want nothing but fame and money. Not meaning, not brotherhood, not freedom, not social change, not even (at this point) artistic power or profundity. Just fame and money.

Max says the grief sucks the meaning out of things, the way a bomb sucks the oxygen out a room. I would say that commoditization and commercialization can have the same effect. Stoppard's script was selling for $20, the "show script" for $25. I have no idea what the difference between the scripts is, except that one is 25% more expensive and someone will pay it. Stoppard's play offers us nothing to build on, and even no recognition of the void that currently exits where our community (as distinct from marketplace) should be. And in this way it does, for me, resemble the current state of rock 'n' roll.