Is there a canon of rock music albums? How are the canonical values developed in the high arts thought by rock writers? Are there canonical values specific to rock? What are canons good for? These questions (and more) are raised by Carys Wyn Jones in her book The Rock Canon. Canonical Values in the Reception of Rock Albums, based on her Ph.D. thesis, originally entitled, Is There a Canon of Rock Music? Canonical Values, Terms and Mechanisms in the Reception of Rock Albums. In order to approach her subject matter, Wyn Jones analyses the critical reception of ten albums, all of which have made frequent appearances in lists of ‘greatest albums of all time’, as compiled in rock magazines mostly published in the United States and the United Kingdom:Footnote 1 Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, The Beatles' Revolver, The Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground & Nico, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St., Patti Smith's Horses, The Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks: Here's the Sex Pistols, and Nirvana's Nevermind.
The first chapter addresses more traditional definitions of the canon, considered as the best works and best artists in a given field. Through an examination of the canons of Western literature and Western classical music, Wyn Jones explains how canons bring order to history, through a narrative that rests on the values of progress and evolution while producing stability and stasis. She also presents some of the most important characteristics of canons and criteria of canonisation. Originality and complexity, she suggests, are highly valued qualities in canonical works. Secondary material (anything commenting on the primary work) emphasises this perceived greatness. These multiple interpretations contribute to the ‘timeless’ quality that canons display; by speaking to successive generations (and being spoken about by successive generations), canons appear as perpetually modern, and acquire what Frank Kermode has called ‘omnisignificance’. However, canons may also appear to be frozen in the past, or to be the result of hegemonic processes driven by normative institutions, such as the academy.
This first chapter clearly outlines the concepts and the main debates regarding canons. It efficiently lays the groundwork for the following chapters, which are concerned more specifically with the rock canon. I would suggest, however, that this chapter might have benefitted from examination of film studies, another discipline in which processes of canon formation have become interesting in roughly similar ways. Cinema started off as popular entertainment, but is now considered as an art form. The canons of film studies took shape slowly, requiring the emergence of auteur theory and a director-centred approach to the cinema. Exploration of this parallel case would have been useful in conceptualising the place of canons in relation to rock music which, like cinema, occupies a position somewhere between popular entertainment and art.
In chapters 2, 3 and 4, Jones discusses the canonical values articulated in the reception of rock albums. Focusing on the previously named ten albums, using various ‘greatest albums’ lists, general histories of rock and specific books about these records, she claims definitively that a rock canon is now in place. Different values and narratives emerge from all the critical discourses investigated. Right away, the album is considered as the work on which the rock canon is erected. Its cohesive unity is important; so, too, are other criteria derived from the canons of literature and classical music, such as complexity, originality, the autonomy of the artistic genius and a work's influence. Other criteria used in canonisation are specific to rock, such as subversion, the authenticity of performance, youth, nihilism and hedonism.
While her research is thorough, Jones has a tendency to treat all her sources as of equal value. Although she readily acknowledges that all venues for writing on music don't carry the same cultural weight, she does not distinguish between the various sources she invokes, and doesn't specify their contexts. For example, there are major differences between Q and NME, two magazines from the UK, in terms of their frequency of publication, circulation, history and, most importantly, styles of criticism. Arguably, these differences have an effect on how albums are received and reviewed, and hence, on how canonical values are thought and deployed.
Chapter 5 and chapter 6 are devoted to a critical inspection of the concept of rock canon. While the criticisms usually addressed to the notion of canon are also made here with respect to rock canons (such as the fact that the greatest albums seem to be recorded only by white, Western male rockers), Wyn Jones reports further criticism made on the basis of the rock ideology. For instance, how can a fixed and conservative rock canon be formed, when rock is supposed to be all about rebellion, urgency, hedonism and nihilism? Besides, the problems of critical authority have been well documented, as Wyn Jones testifies. While rock writers discuss the canon extensively, several ‘readers' polls’ get published. Who has the power to present the canon's values more effectively? Academia, as well, participates to a certain extent in the making of a rock canon. Wyn Jones raises the question: as popular music scholars stake their claims to a critical distance, to what extent are they aware of the canon formation happening within their field?
Carys Wyn Jones succeeds in bringing debates over a rock canon and its making into popular music studies. Insofar as canon formation remains an understudied and undertheorised issue within the field, this is a welcome addition.
