Popular music has produced a number of regrettable moments and artists, as well as questionable whole eras. The era of cultural appropriation, for example, when record company executives presented you with versions of the same song by Little Richard and Pat Boone, urging decent suburban girls to choose the latter, expressed not only unfortunate values, but extremely bad taste. The auto-tune era, call it 2010-2020, was badly mistaken. But few eras were less edifying or tasteful than, let's say, 1971-1976, which last week I labeled the "degenerate era" in rock history.
Last week's story was about Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band, but that was only one flavor of rock degradation and was basically local to DC. Let's see: How about the personae and the music of Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, the New York Dolls, Parliament-Funkadelic, Iggy and the Stooges, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Donna Summer, and Elton John, all of whom were emerging in that stretch. We might consider developments in other genres: the sleaze-country of Charlie Rich, for example, or the "raunchy soul" of artists like Millie Jackson or Clarence Carter. Or even in other artforms: John Waters' film Pink Flamingos debuted in Baltimore in 1972.
By then, musical styles, political commitments, and even human personalities were disintegrating. But the era was partly redeemed by its eclecticism and self-consciousness: it knew itself to be decadent, degraded, depraved, debauched, and so on. It took pride in this. It felt that deterioration was the inevitable next cultural step. And a whole generation disintegrated right along with its music.
The Beatles croaked just before the degenerate era got going, but the Stones' Goat's Head Soup was their degenerate moment and as a way to understand the phenomenon, as Their Satanic Majesties Request was their psychedelic period. You're swapping wives with Bowie while you both snort coke and pretend to be gay: the degenerate era in a nutshell.
It's not true that all these artists were gay, and Lou Reed and David Bowie ended up married to... what do we say? biological women. Also, you may not recall this, but Elton John was closeted until 1992, for example. But playing with gender roles and cross-dressing was central to the era, as the stage shows took on a theatrical or even operatic quality. The scruffy CSNY generation, even the peace activists, tended to enact the classic gender binary, a la maybe John and Michelle Phillips. But even as the boomers repeated it, the women and non-heterosexual men found it oppressive and wondered whether their own liberation was included in the civil rights movement.
The liberation of every proclivity was promised by the artists of the degenerate era. This is its greatest accomplishment, maybe: it opened a wide culture to a variety of sexual and other identities and connected them to specific aesthetic expressions. People heard their lives sung for the first time, and danced.
The emphasis shifted from music to "fashion," or at least costuming, and everyone was on their way to Kiss. Clothing and hairstyle was a lot of the point for Elton, the Dolls, for Roxy Music, Bowie, P-Funk: the music almost became secondary to the look. And the look went anti-hippie quickly, eliminating scruffiness in favor of extremely conscious costuming, employed to construct and present specific stage personae. These personae, in turn, were the opposite of ascetic: they promised drug-addled hypersex, or something like that. In some cases, though, the sex was difficult, because you'd have to work your way through the layers of plastic clothes.
Live shows went from a gaggle of jeans-clad longhairs sensitively strumming guitars and gathering around mics to elaborate dramatis personae inhabiting elaborate stage sets. Whereas the aesthetic ideology of 1960s rock emphasized directness, sincerity, and "naturalness," that of the 1970s reveled in artificiality as it headed through glam and glitter toward disco and hair metal. One good contrast would be a picture of Crosby, Stills, and Nash (at Woodstock, maybe) and a picture of the New York Dolls. They were recording at the same time, but in different tenses: one past and one future.
And they seemed to speak to entirely different value systems. One venerated honesty, sincerity, rootedness in folk traditions, and urgent political matters. The other directly tried for maximum artificiality, role-playing, or often just strangeness or perversity drawn from or inventing some sub-culture or other, or merely expressing individual idiosyncrasies or fetishes rather than representing a crystallization of a generation.
1960s rock was an elaboration of folk music, as CSNY would suggest (but even the early blues of the Beatles and Stones fits). For a younger cohort of boomers, folk music was passé: boring, anachronistic, repetitive, exhausted. They (or perhaps we) wanted something a lot more now (as now was, then). I think of the degenerate period of rock, among other things, as the "anti-folk" period.
The decadence was palpable and in some ways it ran deep. It doesn't take long for young people's ideals to be disappointed, and those of "the 60s generation" were disappointed pointedly and rapidly. It was predictable. People may have felt, by '72 (when, for example, Nixon was re-elected in a landslide)—after the assassinations of civil rights leaders and the escalation of the Vietnam War—that the inspiring social movements with which they’d identified themselves and their music had failed, or were petering out (into the useless violence of the Weather Underground, for example). Psychedelia may have felt profound, but it also focused on internal journeys and substance abuse rather than social transformation.
Degenerate rock was an appropriate segue to what became known as "the me generation" of the 1970s. I might by then have been focused on my clothes, my sex, my dance, my pleasures (possibly partly induced by cocaine) rather than social transformations or generational essences. It doesn't take long to get from Woodstock to Studio 54. No one should quibble with a characterization of the period as “decadent.” It proclaimed itself to be. The question is whether these particular forms of decadence are a good or fun or sustainable forms of decadence.
It came in many flavors. Bryan Ferry was elegant. Bowie was protean. Elton was comical. Alice was horror-ish. Parliament was sci-fi. But costuming was equally central to each, and the music was also part of the created persona rather than being presented as the authentic voice of the people or even of some individual person, a la Dylan.
If we said it was a period of marked decline, that wouldn’t be insane. Goat's Head Soup is no Sticky Fingers, and I was never a big fan of Elton John or Lou Reed, putting it mildly. If you thought James Brown made better music than Parliament-Funkadelic, that wouldn't be shocking. Also, the decadence of the degenerate period made the neo-classical reaction of punk rock necessary or inevitable. In some ways punk in both New York and Los Angeles emerged directly from the degenerates, and of course Lou Reed and the Dolls are central influences in punk history, and acts like the Runaways and the Germs are poised between the two.
There's no getting to where we got without the degeneration. Whether getting to where we got was a good idea: perhaps not, but it's too late to fix it now.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell