Tales of a Gen X Swinger

A music critic's juvenile cultural politics

Jesse Walker from the July 2001 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

To my ears, most neo-swing music, while enjoyable on its own terms, is vastly inferior to the original hot jazz, swing, and jump blues that it emulates. Few of the new musicians offer either the innovation or the craft of their forebears, and the most notable exceptions aren't mentioned in the book: If Judge has a taste for the Hot Club of Cowtown's fusion of folk, hot jazz, and western swing, or the Squirrel Nut Zippers' clever forays into '20s Americana, or Andrew Bird's dark lyrics, brilliant fiddling, and eclectic musical styles, he fails to mention it. He does make a few exaggerated swipes at rock, allowing that the Beatles were "brilliant musicians" but attacking the Velvet Underground as "insipid" and the early Rolling Stones as "a third-rate blues cover band." But Judge's chief complaints about rock are not musical but cultural: He targets the rock age for its embrace of transgression and irony (a word he consistently misuses-he seems to think it's a synonym for "smug aloofness").

I have no interest in standing up for transgression-by-numbers, nor for the self-satisfaction often found in the rock establishment. But Judge's critique seems aimed less at the typical rocker than at his younger self, a soi-disant rebel who "believed that America was a country club filled with bigoted neanderthals pushing an atavistic cultural agenda." Those days are behind him, he tells us-but I'm not so sure. This is the man, after all, who writes that America has a "toxic culture," that it is riven by "the alienation of neighbors and generations," that its children are so stupefied that their lives would be hopeless were it not for the divine intervention of a Gap ad. This seems no less categorical and elitist than the views Judge attributes to his younger incarnation.

And that brings us back to adolescence and adulthood. In Wasted, Judge tells us that he was, in his boozy days, a devoted fan of punk rock. Now he's shifted his loyalties with the fervor of a man born again--and, narcissistically, he expects all rightthinking readers to do the same. His new book's subtitle may invoke "grown-up culture," but his prose betrays him: He writes like he's going through a stage.