Write in Tune: Contemporary Music in Fiction

Erich Hertz, Jeffrey Roessner

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623561451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Contemporary popular music provides the soundtrack for a host of recent novels, but little critical attention has been paid to the intersection of these important art forms. Write in Tune addresses this gap by offering the first full-length study of the relationship between recent music and fiction. With essays from an array of international scholars, the collection focuses on how writers weave rock, punk, and jazz into their narratives, both to develop characters and themes and to investigate various fan and celebrity cultures surrounding contemporary music. Write in Tune covers major writers from America and England, including Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and Jim Crace. But it also explores how popular music culture is reflected in postcolonial, Latino, and Australian fiction. Ultimately, the book brings critical awareness to the power of music in shaping contemporary culture, and offers new perspectives on central issues of gender, race, and national identity.

Part One

Negotiating Pop Styles

1

More Than Zero

Post-Punk Ideology (and Its Rejection) in Bret Easton Ellis

Matthew Luter

More than any other literary fiction of its time, Bret Easton Ellis’s debut novel Less Than Zero (1985) revels not only in the presence of pop music in its characters’ sun-soaked lives, but also in the variety of artifacts and discourses that surround being part of a local music scene. Ellis isn’t just writing about MTV-era new wave and a particularly privileged set of young listeners here; he’s writing about Los Angeles music, and L.A. post-punk of the early 1980s at that. While at home over Christmas break from a small Northeastern college, Ellis’s main character Clay finds himself drawn back into his old friends’ lifestyle of casual sex, drug use, and pornography, and all the while, of-the-moment music and discussion of it stays prominent. Less Than Zero places great emphasis not on “rock and roll” as an idea or an expressive form in a general way, but on a localized scene, a fairly specific set of rock subgenres, and a highly present-minded set of characters from a particular cultural milieu. As a result, Ellis’s novel depicts a particular set of ideological concerns, questions them, and, via Clay’s decisions in the book’s final pages, winds up rejecting a dominant ideology of superficial, privileged self-indulgence—at least in part.

While many critics have discussed the presence of rock music in Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, most such writing about this sun-soaked novel of the privileged young has approached rock as an uncomplicated, monolithic, and destructive phenomenon. We should be unsurprised, most of the book’s earliest reviews suggest, that these infantile Los Angelenos seem callous and cold-blooded, given that they assault their ears with this dreck. Instead, I will propose here that reading Ellis’s use of post-punk and early alternative rock (alt-rock) in a more ideologically sophisticated manner—alongside the work of pop critic/historians such as Michael Azerrad and Simon Reynolds as well as sociologist of youth culture Dick Hebdige—reveals that musical allusions in Ellis’s novel are more than background noise.

Those references are also ideological signifiers, as many artists mentioned by Ellis’s characters produce work that incorporates (usually leftist) political discourse. Consequently, I argue that we cannot read these characters as naïvely apolitical—they consistently expose themselves to ideological argument, albeit through KROQ and not Nightline. For example, many have observed that the novel takes its title from an Elvis Costello song, but few have investigated the significance of the song’s antifascist lyrics. Similarly, references to the L.A. punk band X permeate the novel, including a description of the song “Los Angeles” that seems to spur the novel’s narrator to leave town in the book’s final pages. Close attention to that song, like others that these characters mention (and still others that they reject, or recall enjoying only retrospectively), will illuminate these characters’ worldview. I acknowledge that Ellis’s characters are rarely aware of just how politically nuanced this music is, but, crucially, Ellis is keenly aware of these nuances. As a result, musical references are intentionally chosen in order to reveal authorial judgments of these characters. Instead of dismissing appearances of pop music in Less Than Zero as irrelevant or beneath comment, I propose that taking seriously the embedded meanings of this deliberately catalogued music leads to a fuller understanding of just what this novel and its characters are choosing to embrace and to reject. We must not assume that a novel lacks ideological depth simply because most of its characters lack that depth.

* * *

Existing criticism of Less Than Zero has been perceptive with regard to form, but, I would argue, less so with regard to content. Both contemporary reviews of Ellis’s novel and later criticism frequently compare the book’s form to the aesthetics of quick-cut 1980s television, but they don’t necessarily mean it as a compliment. In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani refers to the book’s “fast-paced, video-like clips,”1 while an unsigned New Republic review claims that, “Reading it is like watching MTV,” pointing out the novel’s “brief, videoesque vignettes,” each “[w]ritten in the inarticulate style of a petulant suburban punk.”2 Less dismissively, in a landmark critical essay on television’s influence on 1980s fiction, Cecelia Tichi uses Less Than Zero as a prime example of a novel that values what she calls “flow” over linear narrative. Works like Ellis’s “do not begin; they simply start, as if turned on or come upon.”3 As a result, she argues, “readers are made to feel that, instead of a beginning, there is a point of entry” (Tichi, 121). Consequently, reading the famously fragmented Less Than Zero, with its sudden chapter openings and endings and abrupt entrances and exits of minor characters, bears less resemblance to the traditional realist novel than it does to that distinctly cable-era mode of TV viewing, channel surfing.

But as much as characters in Less Than Zero are depicted watching television—usually MTV—they spend even more time listening to music, discussing it, noticing who’s wearing which band’s T-shirt, and figuring out what act is playing where and when. All of this information is deeply tied to its place and time. In response, Alan Bilton contends that, as Less Than Zero has aged, it “has also become increasingly abstract” (Bilton, 201):

If you don’t recognize the logo or the label, then the signs no longer signify anything (beyond being badges of pure consumerism) floating free across the page. With each passing year, the work becomes more weightless, intangible, evacuated of meaning.4

If Bilton is right, he is correct only in a quite limited way; I would counter that his claim is true only for the reader who is uninterested in the politics of the popular. Less Than Zero can still be read fruitfully by someone who doesn’t recognize every band name in the book, an assertion to which anyone who has taught the novel to students born well after its publication can attest. But there is a cohesive and developing ideology attached to Ellis’s specific uses of musical signifiers throughout the text, and in order to fully grasp that ideological meaning, a reader must accept that those signifiers are singularly and intentionally selected by the author. In other words, what Bilton doesn’t fully acknowledge is that not all namedrops of rock bands are created equal.

Reading this novel as profoundly ideologically motivated, then, requires letting go of some rather stereotypical (and not particularly enlightening) ways of approaching rock music in literary criticism. In other words, if we approach, say, the two epigraphs of the novel—lyrics from Led Zeppelin and from X—with knowledge that, while both are rock bands, broadly speaking, the two artists represent quite different things to Ellis’s characters, then we wind up seeing cultural forces in conflict that are both more subtle and more critically revelatory than any easy contrast between “literature” and “pop,” or “rock” and “non-rock.”

For example: a footnote in Peter Freese’s article on Less Than Zero reads, “Among the numerous rock singers and bands referred to in the novel the following were identified as actually existing.”5 Granted, Freese’s essay appeared well before the early-1990s entry of so-called “alternative” music into the mainstream or the ability to track down data about any band via the web, and, he allows, “the traditional literary critic has a hard time unraveling the significance of rock lyrics” (Freese, 69). But an unperceptive comment like Freese’s highlights how this novel—and, for that matter, any number of other pop-centric texts—benefits from criticism attuned to the subtle ideological, aesthetic, and political meanings of even the most banal-seeming artifacts of youth culture. And it helps to recognize that nearly all popular culture, but youth culture in particular, moves fast: indeed, Clay describes his promo poster for Trust as advertising for “an old Elvis Costello record,” one released way back in 1981, a whole four years prior to the novel’s publication (Ellis, 11). In reading Less Than Zero well, one must be prepared to explicate these references usefully; otherwise, it becomes all too easy to make unfounded assumptions about how those characters respond to and use the music they consume.

Moreover, such assumptions lead to stereotypes regarding how damaging the music allegedly is. Freese also refers to Ellis’s quick mention of “The Earthquake Song” by the Little Girls, a (basically harmless) minor local hit by a bubble-gummy girl group, as “hilariously tasteless” and surprisingly not “the author’s outrageous invention” (Freese, 86). He also offers a catalog of song titles mentioned in the novel that imply violence, pornography, or doomed romance, but to readers who know the music well, most of his examples appear rather innocuous (Freese, 78). Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” or Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” to Ellis’s characters and to loads of nostalgic listeners alike, are just good dance tracks. Yes, the Clash’s “Somebody Got Murdered” gets name-checked, but when literary critics engage in apocalyptic hand-wringing over the content of the music that these kids seem to dig, they sometimes lose sight of the fact—not, I would hasten to add, lost on many listeners to this music—that, for instance, the Clash might actually be … you know, anti-murder. (I’d apply the same line of thinking to X’s “Sex and Dying in High Society” and “Adult Books,” also noted by name elsewhere in the text.) Moralizing critics also run the risk of sounding like the alarmist televangelists Clay describes with ridicule: “two guys, priests, preachers maybe, on the screen, forty, maybe forty-five, wearing business suits and ties, pink-tinted sunglasses, talking about Led Zeppelin records, saying that, if they’re played backwards, they ‘possess alarming passages about the devil’ ” (Ellis, 87). Freese, like so many others, gets right that Ellis mimics the aesthetic of MTV. But his take on the music of Less Than Zero is marred by its treatment of rock as a monolithic phenomenon; he offers unchecked suspicion of the surely deleterious effect of this music—at best, trashy and, at worst, immoral—on these young people, but pays little attention to why Ellis may have chosen a particular piece of music for a particular purpose.

Of course, to dismiss the importance of pop music by painting it with such a broad brush is also to ignore ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Erich Hertz and Jeffrey Roessner
• Part 1 Negotiating Pop Styles
• Part 2 Gendering Rock and Jazz
• Part 3 Sounding Race and Nation
• Part 4 Making Pop Art
• Music in Contemporary Fiction: Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright