Serge and the Paranoids: On Literature and Popular Song

At this late date in contemporary literature, it is probably conventional wisdom that any younger writer of ambition is well aware of, even besotted with, the popular song. By whatever idiom you call it, in whatever particular subgenre, novelists and short story writers 1 of the twenty-first century are up-to-date, are current, are consonant with it, whether in the soul music that animates Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, the metal in Charles Bock's Beautiful Children, the rock and roll in Jenny Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad, in myriad other recent examples. 2 A facility with the popular song is native to the craft of fiction as currently practiced, and it would be easier for me to mention writers who are somehow not interested in contemporary popular music, than to mention those who know a lot about it. The uninitiated are that rare.

Because this synergy between the pop song and the contemporary novel is so endemic, so expectable now, it is hard to imagine a time when things were not thus, and yet it's not so long ago that they were not. As with the comic book, whose welcome integration into the field of literary fiction only dates back twenty years, or the literature of television, 3 also relatively recent, not to mention video games and digital culture, whose time for literary synergy is now, it was not so long ago that the novel, in asserting its status as high culture, was more apt to allude to the rarified precincts of classical music than to the popular song, appealing thereby to the audience's wish to appear educated, sophisticated, and upwardly mobile in its engagement with the arts.

In Remembrance of Things Past, for example, we have Vinteuil's little fragment of melody, from his violin and piano sonata, so beloved of Swann, likewise references to Debussy, Fauré, Saint-Saëns. Wagner turns up again and again in Thomas Mann. In Joyce's masterpiece of short fiction, "The Dead," we have what is admittedly a folk song, in "The Lass of Aughrim," but this folk song is given the decidedly reverential high art treatment by attendants at the Morkin's annual party, and anyway there is much discussion of opera in Joyce besides. In the American writing immediately after the Second World War there isto make the argument through absencesprecious little popular music. Saul Bellow does not write about rock and roll, John Cheever does not write about rock and roll, Vladimir Nabokov famously turned up his nose at all music. 4

While it would be hard to pinpoint a specific turning pointthe change in culture as whole that made possible the contemporary novel's love affair with specifically vernacular musicthe turning point likely dates more or less to the ascendency of the LP and the rise of the record companies that not only made possible this distribution, but which also imagined, in the process, a promotional apparatus that made recorded music ubiquitous and argued for its status. Once rock and roll and R&B and soul music and jazz had come out of the juke joints and whorehouses and churches and were being stored on those vinyl discs with the little concentric grooves, popular music became something that novelists of a respectable sort could write about. The culture as a whole liked, or at least tolerated, the pop song, and so the novelists were more than safe in addressing it.

Still, there needed to be a generation of writers who had both high art aspirations, literary chops, but who were engaged enough with the popular arts that they could write with authority about it, about all the vernacular musics, without risking their status, their publishing house support, review attention, etc. Some early examples of popular music venerationOn the Road, e.g., and its obsession with jazzdon't quite count, because the literary work in this instance was subversive enough in its early life that it did little to advance the cause of the popular song's legitimacy. I'm thinking instead of writers in the five or ten years after the high period of the Beats, who were legitimate as aesthetic troublemakers, but whose high art respectability is now unquestioned. These writers recognized that class, race, and aesthetics were implicit in any reckoning with the popular song, that these issues were essential to the American novel, and so felt free about including the popular song, or other vernacular musical idioms, because it was realistic to do so, because the music was around them, in the air, but also because they loved and cared about the music and understood its occasional silliness and its art.

I mean to catalogue here three examples of this metamorphic interval of engagement with the popular song all of which appeared in print between 1965 and 1978, 5 between, that is the British Invasion and the rise of Punk, and which in turn served, it seems to me, as a springboard for writers of the generations who followedmy own generation especiallyin terms of how to think about music and literature, and the interpenetration and intertextuality that now exists between these forms.

Proceeding chronologically, the first example that I would like to talk about is The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon's second novel, 6 is, as is well known by now, about forgery, fraudulence, and a shadow-version of the United States Postal Service brought about by a mysterious conspiracy or global counternarrative called Trystero. The heroine of the novel is named Oedipa Maas, whose gradual discovery and unfurling (to use a Pynchonian adjective) of the Trystero conspiracy, constitutes the action of the book. Along the way, Oedipa (as does the book itself) encounters a lot of music.

The first allusion to music in Lot 49 is on the very first page and it is to Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, a composition with a strange title, and with a lot of musical tricks and moments of parody up its sleeve. And perhaps this is not out of character for a novel that itself manages to call into question even the reliable truths of thermodynamics. But if this allusion to Bartok is meant to establish Pynchon's bona fides with the high art set, he double crosses almost immediately, when, at the beginning of chapter two, we find Oedipa Maas's husband, "Mucho," whistling a tune called "I Want to Kiss Your Feet," by Sick Dick and the Volkswagens. Readers of Pychon's Gravity's Rainbow will recognize, in this moment, a foreshadowing of the author's later investigation of German industries of Nazi regime, but it is perhaps also the case that Pynchon just thinks the band name here is funny, a motive that we would not be liable to encounter during the high art modernism of the era that preceded Pynchon.

Sick Dick and Volkswagens antedate the Stooges by some two years (the first Stooges recordings are from 1967), but it's hard not to see some similarities between "I Want to Kiss Your Feet," and "I Wanna Be Your Dog," recorded four years after Pynchon's novel was written. Like the Stooges, Pynchon seems to have a grasp on the eventual direction of punk rock, even as he alludes to the British invasion (Sick Dick, et al., are described as "an English group [Mucho] was fond of at that time but did not believe in").

And meanwhile the conspiracy begins. Oedipa journeys from her home in the fictional Kinneret, California, to the town of San Narciso, likewise in the Golden State, and she puts up at a motel called Echo Courts, where she soon meets the hotel manager, a "drop-out" named Miles, age of 16, with "a Beatle haircut and a lapelless, cuffless, one-button mohair suit," who surprisingly and revolutionarily breaks out into song. The novel gives us the title of this song, "Miles's Song," and runs the lyric as an extract, as poetry, "Too fat to Frug/That's what you tell me all the time . . ." 7

There is no mistaking Miles's song, and his jazz-oriented name, for aria or chanson. The Frug, let it be said, was a dance craze (the words dance and craze always need to go together in a discussion like this) from the mid-sixties, which apparently later evolved into something called the Chicken, and the song seems to have no more lofty ambition but to discuss Miles's inability to perform the dance and other gyrations pertinent to teenagers in this historical era.

It's difficult to overstate the revolution of this breaking into song. It's difficult to overstate the revolution of Pynchon's songwriting, in all of his early work, and his tendency to give free reign to these lieder, and to treat them as both comical and highly artful. A persistent rumor holds that all the songs in Pynchon have actual melodies, and that the author may himself have enough of a songwriting gift to craft his own melodies, instead of just writing words to extant tunes of the period, 8 though these don't appear in the work, or are implied without being stated outright.  

Miles turns out to be a member of yet another ersatz British-invasion band, the Paranoids. The Paranoids sing in English accents, naturally, because their manager told them they ought, and they watch British films for pointers, and they follow around the action in the first half of Lot 49 like a Greek chorus, except that there's nothing Greek about them at all. In fact, while Sick Dick and the Volkswagens have a Detroit-ish vibe, The Paranoids, as befits a novel set in California, are much more SoCal, and while there are a lot of surf references that adhere to them in the novel, they more resemble the biggest band of the mid-sixties, the one who played Rickenbackers because the Beatles did, and who appeared with the requisite mop tops on their first album, viz., the Byrds. Pynchon's narrator says that the Paranoids carried about "three electric guitars," and that is not untrue of the Byrds, in that McGuinn, Crosby, and Clark could all play guitar, as could bass player Chris Hillman. And a further description of the Paranoids sound notes the "shuddering deluge" of their guitar chords, which certainly sounds like mid-sixties Byrds.

The composition "Serenade," a group number played by the Paranoids later in chapter two is much more sophisticated than the dance-related number that Miles sings, and it has a certain Beach Boys quality. In fact, it's sort of a Trystero version of "The Warmth of the Sun," The Beach Boys's memorial to the slain JFK, and as such it serves as a nice counterbalance to the mainly comic representation of rock and roll in Lot 49, "As I lie and watch the moon/On the lonely sea,/Watch it tug the lonely tide/Like a comforter over me,/The still and faceless moon/Fills the beach tonight/With only a ghost of day/All shadow gray, and moonbeam white." 9 The moon, in the Paranoids work, is counternarrative, from a parallel system, like unto the day, but with its own trajectory and its own gravitational exertions, which is, of course, not unlike Trystero itself, with its equal and equally effective postal system and government agencies.

If Pynchon was still relatively unknown at the time he published The Crying of Lot 49, the same cannot entirely be said of the Grace Paley of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), whose first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man was very highly regarded and warmly reviewed by the likes of Philip Roth. Enormous Changes has some of the brush strokes of a novel, in that it contains a half dozen stories, including the longest in the book, about a particular character, Faith Darwin, something of a stand-in for the author herself, who also appears in Paley's earlier collection (as well as in the subsequent Later the Same Day).

By the time of Enormous Changes, Paley's rather straightforward storytelling from Little Disturbances had become noteworthy for its recursiveness, its fragmentation, its mix of genres, and its engagement with politics. All in all, Enormous Changes, written in the years of and just after the (high period of) American counterculture, reflects that epoch's disdain for artistic certainties, and its permissiveness, and the title story is no exception. In it a character named Alexandra (not Faith), whose elderly father is seriously ill, takes up, whimsically, with a free-spirited cab driver named Dennis, and eventually becomes pregnant by him. Dennis is the catalyst for the pregnancy, but is somehow destined not to participate in the child's life, because that was the time, and he was in a commune, etc.

Perhaps because Enormous Changes is so nonjudgmental about different conceptions of family and so open to drugs and radical politics and communes and the voices of counterculture, it doesn't come as much of a shock that Alexandra's lover Dennis turns out to be, after all, a songwriter, too, and a member of a band called The Lepers (again: punk rock avant la lettre!), whose instrumentation is certainly unusual: "two bass guitars, a country violin, one piccolo, and drums." To me the lineup suggests The Insect Trust, the thoroughly arty New York band that later included Robert Palmer, the noted rock critic, and at least one former member of the Holy Modal Rounders. 10 The Insect Trust, as with the Holy Modal Rounders, The Fugs, and, arguably, even The Velvet Underground, was a challenging band, a strange band, a lyrically-oriented band, and in this way we begin to understand some of the things that made New York music what it wasit was not instrumental virtuosity. The Lepers have a similar cast. They are about the words. Paley's lyrics, which are set here as poetry, just as in The Crying of Lot 49, are less loaded down with hermeneutical weight than are Pynchon's but they are frequently as funny, and just as amused by the dread earnestness of the popular song, as in, for example, Dennis's ecological ditty, unnamed here, but which seems to have a whiff of Marvin Gaye about it: "What of/the earth's ecology/you're drivin too fast/Daisy you're drivin alone/Hey Daisy cut the ignition/let the oil/back in the stone." 11

There's a little bit of the St. Mark's Poetry Project here, too, as if Dennis had heard some of Waldman/Smith/Ginsberg/Sanders at the church, 12 when he wasn't driving his cab, and knew how to ape to the demotic/colloquial solecism of those proto-punk poems.

When Alexandra, the heroine of the story, becomes pregnant by Dennis, their affair sours quickly, and Dennis, finding the Lepers too youthful, forms a more mature act, Dennis and the Fair Fields of Corn, 13 who record an album entitled For Our Son, which album also seems to include a piccolo, just like the Lepers. (These have to be the only two bands fielding a piccolo in rock and roll history.) For Our Son, insofar as it is described here, seems to have just the one song, at least in Paley's account, and I therefore allege that it one of those concept album suites, a multifary of component sections all devoted to Dennis's sense of loss about his absent child, "Will you come to see me Jack/When I'm old and very shaky?/Yes I will for you're my dad/And you've lost your last old lady/Though you traveled very far/To the highlands and the badlands/ And ripped off the family car/Still, old dad, I won't forsake you." 14 According to the narrator of "Enormous Changes," this Fair Fields of Corn song was "sung coast to coast," and was "responsible for a statistical increase in visitors to old-age homes," thus connecting, at last, Alexandra's new baby to her infirm father in some dance of the repetition compulsion of the generations.

And while Paley composed just one or two more song lyrics after "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute," she continued to include poetry in her stories, both high and low, as well a stories within stories and newspaper articles and multiple voices, in her cagey, smart, and hybridized works, and in this sense her idea of what fiction could properly include was consistent in its mutability, and in its desire to range beyond the precincts of high art.

Donald Barthelme, 15 the story goes, worked on Enormous Changes with Paley, perhaps because he lived across the street from her in New York (11th Street, in fact), and perhaps because he had a romantic affair with her. And like Paley he also wrote astoundingly various, inimitable short stories, some of the most unusual and most lyrically arresting stories of the sixties and seventies, and since every other instance of lingo, vulgate, or dialect turns up somewhere in Barthelme's work, it is not surprising that he would also turn his attention to music. There are allusions to very academic or high art music, or burlesques thereof among Barthelme's stories ("Aria," for example, means to embody the form for which it is entitled), and there are more abstract meditations, such as "The New Music," which make explicit what is implicit in all this entire account: that good writing is a kind of music itself.

But there are also Barthelme stories that deal expressly with vernacular musics, and here I'm thinking, for example, of "The King of Jazz," and "How I Write My Songs," both of them works from the later seventies.

"The King of Jazz" is just what you'd imagine, if you were given the task to predict a Barthelme story on the subject. It's a hilarious and colloquially exacting account of a certain trombone player, Hokie Mokie, crowned the king of jazz one day, only to be dethroned minutes later, by one of those "Japanese cats," Hideo Yamaguchi. And yet Hokie, relegated to a corner of the stage during Yamaguchi-led performance of "Cream," an imaginary jazz standard, manages, despite his diminished status to play something astounding, something that the narrator falls over himself to describe thus: "That sound that sounds like the cutting edge of life? That sounds like polar bears crossing Arctic ice pans? That sounds like a herd of musk ox in full flight? That sounds like male walruses diving to the bottom of the sea? That sounds like fumaroles smoking on the slops of Mt. Katmai? That sounds like the wild turkey walking through the deep, soft forest?" 16

Hard to tell, sometimes, whether Barthelme is sending up the relentless competition for cred in music circles, or the literature about jazz, which is so worthy of being sent up, but the casual reader makes a mistake if he or she does not look for the pulsations of sympathy underneath the comic veneer, too, perhaps because Barthelme apparently played drums himself, when young, and seems to have known quite a bit about great deal about idiom, and more than that, to have cared about it, even when unwilling to say so in any language that might be perceived as unnecessarily direct.

The same is true in one of the best of his later stories, "How I Write My Songs." It consists of a how-to primer on songwriting (concentrating primarily on the lyrics), by one Bill B. White, whose initial thoughts are of the superficial and hard-to-oppose variety, such as: "The important thing is to put true life into your songs," and "You have to be open to experience, to what is going on around you," and "There is no substitute for sticking to it," generalities that are so simplistic as to be laughable, and yet behind which it is not hard to find Barthelme himself, speaking in rather melancholy way about his own practice. 17

White then proceeds to anatomize a particular song in his repertoire:

In the case of "Rudelle" I was sitting at my desk one day with my pencil and yellow legal pad and I had two things that were irritating me. One was a letter from the electric company that said "The check for $75.60 sent us in payment of your bill has been returned to us by the bank unhonored, etc. etc." Most of you who have received this type of letter from time to time know how irritating this kind of communication can be as well as embarrassing. The other thing that was irritating me was that I had a piece of white thread tied tight around my middle at navel height as a reminder to keep my stomach pulled into the strengthen the abdominals while sittingthis is the price you pay for slopping down too much beer when your occupation is essentially a sit-down one! Anyhow I had these things itching me, so I decide to write a lost-my-mind song. I wrote down on my legal pad the words:

When I lost my baby

I almost lost my mine (414)

What kind of recording artist is Bill B. White, you might ask? From the slightly tone-deaf dialect of his lyrics, which Barthelme mines to great effect, it would be natural to assume that White is not African-American, and indeed the surname seems to advertise as much. He does speak to the blues further on in the story, however, and so it would be reasonable to imagine that what we have here is a white blues singer, an oxymoron in much of rock and roll history. Was Barthelme thinking of anyone in particular? I can't help but think of one of the scourges of American blues in the early seventies, namely Canned Heat, and their singer, Bob Hite. Like Canned Heat, White does not ennoble his form exactly, but like Canned Heat, he does have a perceptible and sympathetic earnestness.

Besides "Rudelle," White includes lyrics for three other compositions in "How I Write My Songs," and it is true that White's words do not increase in the department of sophistication. They include many phonemic shifters of the "da da da" and "whomp whomp" variety, these being indicators of the how the band was meant to play behind him. And having generously given us the complete lyric to one final number ("Sad Dog Blues?"–he is slightly vague about the title), White goes in for some concluding bromides, such as "The main thing is to persevere and believe in yourself." After which he lets us know that he makes his compositions for "the nation as a whole and for the world" (417).

It's hard not to feel Barthelme is tipping his hand about his own inventions, that they are made for the whole of the literary world, even when made of such homely materials. Thus: is it completely erroneous to imagine that when the narrator says "Songs are always composed of both traditional and new elements," he is saying so in part because Barthelme knows that this is what the popular song often is, recombinant, autophagic, and that literature itself, in the era after high art, is likewise composed partly of traditional elements, the history of the novel, and new elements, in this case, the history of the popular song? Is it completely erroneous to believe that the lowest, most lyrically primitive ersatz blues here is being compared to the highest literary art?

Here they are, then, three voices of if not postmodern American fiction at the very least a postwar fiction that is metafictional, self-reflexive, given to experiment, and nonetheless fashioned according to the very highest literary standards. Three voices who nonetheless find in the popular song's primitiveness and reliance upon simplicity something that is consistent with their art. There are many other examples, of course, beyond these three writers, many, many other examples, across all generic and subgeneric lines. And what is it in the popular song that appeals, to the writers of the experimental period and so thoroughly to the generation that follows, the writers who came of age in the eighties, nineties, and in the new century? It can't be just that pop songs are around us, in the air, and that a life fully lived contains them, and therefore that realism requires that we describe this ephemeral material. It must also be that literature is in part an aural phenomenon, that language is music, and so a reckoning with music is part of what literature can and must do.

And yet perhaps there's even a third reason for the engagement of contemporary literature with the popular song, and that is simply that the high-low distinction has always been arbitrary, unsturdy, given to exploitations that are decidedly undemocratic if not outright exclusionary, even politically incorrect. High art is bourgeois nonsense, to some extent. And when you include the music of the people in your novel, or in your stories, you give evidence of your resistance to bourgeois nonsense, and you restore to the literary work of your period a recognition of its total field of possibilities. And with that recognition comes a surge of energy, which is why there's a guy in the Paranoids called "Serge," and why the Paranoids blow a fuse in The Crying of Lot 49. Everything is possible in the novel when the form recognizes its total freedom. A surge of energy is possible. The novel is always an omnivorous, hybrid, mongrel container of words. It is always failing to be epic poetry, and cinema, and drama, and because of this, it is always incorporating whatever it can find, whether letters, lawsuits, dreams, datebooks, doggerel, comic books, television shows, text messages, or pop songs, in its pursuit of a description of human consciousness and psychology now, and that, it seems to me a worthy endeavor, that low, mean, complicated, paradoxical, and inconsistent endeavor, and certainly one worth singing about.

And now that classical or serious music is more prominently in exile from the contemporary novel, maybe it's time we started writing about that too.

  1. #1 The same can be said of contemporary poets.[]
  2. #2 My own not terribly good first novel, Garden State, terminally preoccupied with The Feelies and other examples of the Hoboken Sound, might even merit inclusion on a list of contemporary novels taken up with popular music.[]
  3. #3 David Foster Wallace's "Little Expressionless Animals," e.g., which at the time of publication seemed somewhat revolutionary just because it dealt affectionately with the medium.[]
  4. #4 Though Humbert Humbert, who occasionally sings to his Little Haze, does not seem to harbor the same disinclination.[]
  5. #5 A good non-fiction example of this literary brio with respect to rock and roll would be Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which is full of skepticism, but also, now and then, a wide-eyed amazement.[]
  6. #6 The work in which he later argued he had "forgotten everything I had learned (in the preface to Slow Learner)."[]
  7. #7 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 16.[]
  8. #8 But I think the kind of cultural fusion that leads literary writers to do just thatwrite lyrics for old public domain melodies, and so onis part of the kind of high art mongrelism that I'm trying to celebrate here. So when David Wallace repeats the charge that all of Emily Dickinson can be sung to "Yellow Rose of Texas," he is actually doing just what the novel generally does: it steals, repurposes, chops up, regurgitates, and delights in doing so. And thus there is a moment, in The Crying of Lot 49, when the Paranoids sing to the tune of "Adeste Fideles," and a moment in Grace Paley's "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute," when the Dennis sings to the tune of "On Top of Old Smokey."[]
  9. #9 The Crying of Lot 49, 27.[]
  10. #10 And the interesting coincidence here is that The Insect Trust once set a lyric from Thomas Pynchon's novel V., "The Eyes of a New York Woman."[]
  11. #11 Grace Paley, The Collected Stories, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 213.[]
  12. #12 Patti Smith would have just done her first reading with electric guitar.[]
  13. #13 Reminds me of the cover for the second Feelies album, The Good Earth, in which band is standing in front a cornfield.[]
  14. #14 Paley, The Collected Stories, p. 218.[]
  15. #15 And to complete the circle, let's pause to note that Donald Barthelme is one of the writers singled out by the often reticent Thomas Pynchon for praise and admiration.[]
  16. #16 Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories (New York: The Penguin Press, 2003), 352.[]
  17. #17 Sixty Stories, 413. Especially when he says: "It often helps to begin with a traditional or well-known line or lines to set a pattern for yourself. You can then write the rest of the song and, if you wish, cut off the top part, giving you an original song." This is not so far from Barthelme's own improvisational method, as I have understood it from various interviews. He began writing, and when he encountered a first sentence, he then lopped off what had come before, and began anew.[]