Why the New Criterion Should Rock
Two of the greatest magazines in America, The New Criterion and Maximum Rocknroll, are each celebrating thirty years of publishing this year. While the two magazines might seem totally different, they actually have quite a bit in common. The most important is that they both claim to preach the truth -- and on that score, they are both right.
The New Criterion is the highbrow conservative monthly edited by Roger Kimball. It has a graceful modernist design with no pictures, and covers politics, museums, books, music, poetry, media and art. Typical sentence: "The law; the economy; the political prospects; changes in our intellectual habits wrought by changes in out technology; the destiny that is demography: America, the West, indeed the entire world in the early years of the twenty-first century, seems curiously unsettled."
Maximum Rocknroll is known as "the Bible of Punk." Like The New Criterion, its design has not changed in three decades. It's as if the digital revolution never happened. There are the same cheap photographs of lean and sweaty punk bands in basements around the world. There's still the amateur collage and cut-and-paste art and long interviews and articles. Sample sentence: "Something is happening in this city, and I don't mean the fucking Olympics."
Both TNC and MRR have a central point in common: that life is about more than making money and being led around by the nose to consume more and more thing you don't need. Now, to readers of The New Criterion -- not to mention editor Roger Kimball -- this will seem arrant nonsense. There is no more fulsome booster of capitalism and the free market than The New Criterion, and no bigger enemy of political correctness.
Yet the very existence of The New Criterion implies that human flourishing requires contemplation, particularly contemplation of art and beauty. It is an art magazine, after all. It's hard to imagine Mitt Romney reading TNC -- harder than it is to imagine it being read by the members of Neon Piss, a punk band championed in Maximum Rocknroll who have a song called "Look Homeward Angel."
Of the two magazine, Maximum Rocknroll is the more ideologically rigid. This is a shame, because in my heyday, the mid-1980s, punk bands were allowed some diversity. San Francisco group The Dead Kennedys and their hyper literate singer Jello Biafra spend almost as much time satirizing the insularity, hypocrisy, and intolerance of the left as mocking Ronald Reagan. I still remember their song "Do the Slag" from their album Bedtime for Democracy:
We'll slag everyone each and every night
So we can pretend that we're all right
Make those pricks feel just so small
We'll show the world that we're three feet tall
Slander their integrity
Doubt their humanity
Talk about their haircuts
Are their politics correct?
Do the slag!
Great lyrics, even if not on the level of The New Criterion's monthly verse, which is consistently some of the best in any of the small magazines that still publish poetry.
There's no doubt that younger people, particularly those in punk bands, are drawn towards more left-wing politics, but in reading the recent issues of Maximum Rocknroll, I was disappointed that there was nothing critical of Obama and modern liberalism.
And it was just pathetic that at least one band is still trading on dumb collages mocking Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In the thirty years since MRR was first published, America has indeed turned to the left, but there has also been a rise on pro-life punk rockers -- and no less a punk godfather as Johnny Ramone has been revealed to have been as right-wing as Sean Hannity.
I have long argued that rock and roll is the last vibrant form of modernism. As explained by Hilton Kramer, the great editor of The New Criterion who passed away this year, modernism was a form of 20th century art that was once shocking but then was assimilated by the middle-class, soon to became regarded by the people as simply non-controversial art. Picasso came into living rooms. The same thing happened in rock and roll, as punk-inspired bands like U2, Talking Heads and Radiohead went on to create genuine art that has been loved by the masses.
It is vibrant living art that continues to dazzle, even as novelists and painters raised on modernism attempt with difficulty to discover something new. While most art bores or flails in an attempt to shock the public, rock and roll still delivers masterpieces that both surprise and are grounded in older forms. As art, it should be covered by magazines like National Review -- and of course The New Criterion.
