An analysis of Nik Cohn’s commentary on the popular

music culture of the early 1960s

Alex Germains

1

There are several potentially useful methods and

approaches available in the attempt to analyse Nik

Cohn’s statement that ‘nineteen hundred and sixty was

probably the worst year that pop has been through’1.

Implicit in the investigation is the suggestion that a

discussion of the validity of the statement is secondary

to deciding how to go about justifying an academic

position for or against it. That being the case,

formulating methods and approaches in the construction

of an argument, regardless of one’s opinions, must be

the primary motivating factor in our research. The

academic approach must entail the utilisation of

appropriate historical, sociological, and linguistic

tools in stripping away the layers of cultural artifice

that underpin Cohn’s views. The statement must be

deconstructed, enabling the reliable definition of the

terms used within it. Essentially, it is hoped that, in

the course of research highlighting exactly what

historical methods and approaches are available to us,

the question of agreement or disagreement with the

statement will, to some extent, reveal itself when

placed in the context of objective academic discussion

and research. Since popular music studies often deals

1 Cohn (1969), p. 72

2

specifically with the content of texts, the meanings

generated by the individual, and more broadly, society,

in relation to those texts, and the study of exactly why

those meanings might be generated, an objective and

thorough appraisal of this statement in the context of

its presentation as an a priori socio-musical ‘fact’ is

highly desirable. As an initial example, we might look

at Cohn’s use of the French term ‘rue morgue’ from a

linguistic semiotic viewpoint. Why might an English

writer, writing in English, use a French term? This

question initiates a broader discussion of literary

practice in the context of the late 1960s Anglo-American

‘counterculture’. We might therefore attempt to

historically evaluate the place of a particular literary

style within the culture of the period. We can assess

the use of this style as signifier of an opposition to

the established music journalism styles prior to this

period, as evidenced by Cohn’s contemporaries, such as

Derek Johnson (at that time a member of the staff of the

‘New Musical Express’ in Britain). This approach might

lead further into a deconstruction of the counterculture

itself, and would require us to compare and contrast the

culture of which Cohn might be a part, with the

historical period that he decries. We might

subsequently gain further insight into Cohn’s views by

comparing and contrasting them with current thinking on

whether or not there exists a ‘rockist’ bias that

privileges specific subcultures, musical practices, and

3

eras, above others. This approach might lead to a

viable argument against Cohn’s views, or at least allow

us to insist that they be seen in context as part of the

culture, rather than an objective view of that culture.

These methods and approaches, then, are grounded in

specific academic disciplines: those of history,

sociology, and literary and cultural studies. It is in

stripping away the hyperbole of Cohn’s words, analysing

them within the context of the times (with reference to

current thinking) and attempting to address the

underlying factors that lead to Cohn’s views on the

years 1960-1962, that we might reliably argue any

viewpoint for or against them.

To begin with, it is essential to take a closer look at

the overall literary style that Cohn adopts. If we

compare Cohn’s style with those of his contemporaries in

1969, we see a correlation with other writers that are

generally understood to form part of the

‘counterculture’ of the era, often referred to as the

‘underground press’. There appears to be a particular

similarity with American writers of the era, such as

those working for ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine. Below, as

an example, is part of a review of the eponymous album

‘The Velvet Underground’ by Lester Bangs in ‘Rolling

Stone’, from May 17, 1969:

4

Their spiritual odyssey ranges from an early

blast of sadomasochistic self-loathing called

"I'm So Fucked Up," through the furious

nihilism of "Heroin" and the metaphysical

quest implied in the words "I'm searching for

my mainline," to this album, which combines

almost overpowering musical lyricism with

deeply yearning, compassionate lyrics to let

us all know that they are finally "Beginning

to See the Light." Can this be that same

bunch of junkie – faggot – sadomasochist –

speed-freaks who roared their anger and their

pain in storms of screaming feedback and words

spat out like strings of epithets? Yes. Yes,

it can, and this is perhaps the most important

lesson [of] the Velvet Underground: the power

of the human soul to transcend its darker

levels2.

‘The 1960s’, then, often seen through the prism of the

writings of the mid to late 1960s, is a historical

period often seen as representing the liberalisation of

society and culture in unprecedented ways. Andy Bennett

states:

If the 1950s marked the beginning of youth’s

long-term cultural investment in popular music

and its attendant styles, the counter-cultural

2 Bangs (1969), see Bibliography

5

movement of 1965 to 1970, together with the

politicized rock music that shaped many of its

central ideas, represents a similarly

significant period in post-war youth cultural

history.3

He continues by asserting that ‘the legacy of counter-

culture continues to be felt in a range of proactive

movements, many of which derive directly from the

alternative ideologies first expressed by groups and

movements associated with the counter-culture’4. The

underground press of the era, a breeding ground for the

school of ideological thought that eventually went

‘overground’ to become the mainstream of music

journalism, is arguably one of the motivating factors

for the perpetuation of this view. Roy Shuker’s

contention that the music press ‘plays a major part in

the process of selling music as an economic commodity,

while at the same time investing it with cultural

significance’5 lends credence to this view. The pre-

existing music press from the time about which Cohn

writes, and which continued throughout the sixties until

it was usurped from its position as the mainstream by

the counterculture, dealt less with these new ideas,

preferring a more succinct and seemingly objective

approach to describing the music. In order to

3 Bennett (2001), p. 254 ibid. p. 395 Shuker (2001), p. 83

6

illustrate our argument, it might therefore be

beneficial to provide contrasting material to Cohn’s,

rather than that to which it bears similarities. Below

is part of Derek Johnson’s review of ‘Last night in

soho’, as performed by ‘Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and

Tich’ from NME no. 1121, July 6 19686:

Another thumping great hit for the Dave Dee

group, and full credit to the Howard-Blaikley

team for continuing to provide the boys with

such fascinating material. Rather like a

musical Doctor Who, you never know just where

the boys are going to end up next! And on

this occasion, they journey direct from the

burning wastes of the Mexican desert to that

sleazy square mile of London's West End known

as Soho. Like "Xanadu," it's a story-in-

song, with the singer lamenting the fact that

he has been tempted from the straight and

narrow by a bunch of undesirables – and here

he is saying goodbye to his girl, before he's

carted off to clink? Exhilarating gallop-pace

beat, sweeping strings that sound like the

"1812 Overture" gone crazy, organ, a catchy

tune and spirited harmonies from the boys. A

must!

6 Johnson (1968) online

7

It is immediately apparent that there is a vastly

different approach to the discipline as practiced by

Johnson, when compared with Nik Cohn’s style during the

same period. Tim Footman, writing in ‘The Guardian’

online notes that Johnson’s writings for the NME at that

time were

crisp, clear and informative, and invariably

identified a song's tempo, for the benefit of

those who may have wanted to frug to it in a

discotheque. Unfortunately, such empirical

descriptive skills weren't really up to the

complexities of psychedelia and prog rock:

punters weren't going to buy a waxing by the

Incredible String Band because it had a "toe-

tapping shuffle beat". It was time to get a

bit more subjective, and the golden age of the

NME began, embodied first by Charles Shaar

Murray, Nick Kent and Ian Macdonald7

With these views in mind, it becomes easier to

comprehend the perceived generational differences

represented in these polarised literary styles. Derek

Johnson represented a kind of journalism that eventually

came to be seen as out of step with the perceived

ideologies that underpinned the counterculture. Whilst

his reviews were perfectly adequate in terms of their

7 Footman (2007) see bibliography

8

informativeness, his literary style might have been seen

by the counterculture - and consequently, with the rise

of these anti-establishment views in the cultures of

Britain and America - to display a different view of the

world from that of the musical and cultural groups that

seemingly dominated the times. Furthermore, the

arguable lack of presence of the work of Derek Johnson

in the standardised popular music history of the last

forty years seems to shore up the view that, since his

style is unrepresentative of the orthodox music

journalism canon as evinced by the above-mentioned

writers, he is to some extent ‘airbrushed’ out of the

narrative of post-1960s music history. ‘Beat Music’,

the book Johnson wrote in 1969, appears to be

unavailable in print, whilst on the ‘online library of

rock writing’8, ‘Rock’s Backpages’9, there are no

articles written by Johnson that are available for

perusal. In a further comparison of Johnson’s work with

that of Keith Altham, who, in an interview with ‘The

Animals’ from NME’s summer special 1966 (available to

read on Rock’s Backpages), displays a style that seems

to occupy a similar space to Johnson, we can perhaps

sense a similar separation from the increasingly

subjective style displayed by writers that perceived

themselves, and have come to be perceived by many

others, as being of the subculture as opposed to those

writing about it:8 no author specified, online9 online, see Bibliography

9

Following the exertion of having got out

of bed and driven about London in his

Mustang, Eric will return home around six

o'clock and jump back into bed for some

sleep, especially if there is a gig to be

played that evening. If there is no

booking he usually gets up about 8 o'clock

and goes down to the Ship pub in Wardour

Street.10

Altham continues: ‘The Animals are a hard-living,

hardworking group. Many of their opinions are not shared

by the majority of us, but they live their lives in an

honest, open fashion’11. The above examples support the

contention that Nik Cohn’s style bears closer

similarities to those of the American countercultural

literary school than that of many British Journalists of

the era. It seems that the youth cultures of the late

1950s and beyond responded to the radicalisation of

music journalism much as they did to the music itself.

Perhaps this reason alone goes some way to explaining

the privilege afforded to the ‘rockist’ canon in the

following forty years. The works of Derek Johnson and

Keith Altham are far from the only examples of what

might be termed a more idiosyncratically British form of

music journalism. It is also generally understood that 10 Altham (1966), online11 ibid.

10

they and their peers were, in truth, part of an

ideologically different society than the emerging 1960s

youth culture. That culture’s ideology, it seemed, was

rooted to some extent in attempting to redefine society

through the abandonment of established artistic

practices. The ideology manifested itself most publicly

through the growth of ‘beat music’ and the groups and

individuals that performed it. In particular, the

approach to lyric writing of Bob Dylan established him,

in the eyes of the counterculture itself at least, as

one of America’s greatest poets, and with the rise of

the literary branch of this culture through the genesis

of the underground press, both in America and Britain,

these views established themselves, during the course of

the 1960s, as the new mainstream. Roy Shuker notes that

the New Journalism ‘set out to move journalism beyond

simple factual reporting’12. This process was

represented by the founding of nationwide

countercultural publications such as ‘Creem’ and

‘Rolling Stone’ in America, and ‘Oz’ and ‘International

Times’ in Britain13. Dylan’s links to the older

generation of ‘beat poets’, and more specifically their

validation of him as a literary force, have been well

documented. As Sean Wilentz writes in ‘The New Yorker’,

‘Dylan’s involvement with the writings of Kerouac,

12 Shuker (2001), p. 8413 founded 1969 (Creem), 1967 (Rolling Stone, Oz), 1966 (International Times) respectively, see Bibliography

11

Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the rest of the Beat generation

is nearly as essential to Dylan’s biography as his

immersion in rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and then

Woody Guthrie’14. To establish more rigorously the link

between the growing subjective literary style of mid to

late 1960s popular music criticism and that of the ‘beat

generation’, it is beneficial to look further into the

ethos that underpins the latter. In his critical

biography of William Burroughs, ‘The Algebra of Need’15,

Eric Mottram states that ‘Burroughs understands the need

to make better maps of the total territory in which we

find ourselves and the limits of the linear artifacts of

language in the twentieth century’16. He adds:

‘Burroughs’ “inner space” appears as a space and time of

psychic areas and political obsessions which need

dislocation and demolition, and their replacement by

information rather than psychopathic impotence.’17 It is

immediately apparent that the obsessions that fuelled

Burroughs might have subsequently inspired writers such

as Nik Cohn, Lester Bangs, and Jann Wenner in their

attempt to represent their reality, that of a growing

group of like-minded musicians, writers, and artists

whose philosophies were similar in their wish to

refashion society through their artform. In fact, in

abandoning the conventions of the then mainstream music

14 Wilentz (2010) online15 Mottram (1977)16 ibid. p. 1317 ibid. p. 14

12

criticism displayed by Derek Johnson et al, Cohn, Bangs

and other writers of the new mainstream ally themselves

with the similarly new rock ‘royalty’, that breed of

mainly male, mainly white musicians whose apparent

experimentalism with the conventions of popular music

was given initial validation by the subjective and

postmodern reorganisation of language displayed in the

writings that documented it. In doing so through this

literary style, the new rock journalists, themselves

mainly white males, became artists themselves, or at

least appeared to. This confident and vibrant

expression of opinion about a subject – music – and the

culture that complemented it, coupled with the

interaction, participation, and approbation of

‘groundbreaking’ artistic literary giants such as

Burroughs, Ginsberg, Brion Gysin and Tom Wolfe, might

have reassured the rock stars of the day that the new

breed of music journalist was actually capable of

communicating the ideas within their music to the

readers of those writings about the music.

Consequently, Nik Cohn’s use of the term ‘Rue Morgue’

might start to make sense in this context. The

reference is to the work of Edgar Allen Poe, whose short

story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’18 gives Cohn a

descriptive yet strangely mystifying title for the

chapter. There is something romantic about the use of

the French language, of course, and that may be the only

18 1841, see bibliography

13

reason Cohn has used it. However, Poe, as observed by

Kent Ljungquist, was one of a group of nineteenth

century American writers that ‘demonstrated that poetic

or artistic creation and the critical function could

complement one another’19. This idea alone provides a

succinct description of the late 1960s music

journalistic style. Furthermore, it is arguable that

Poe’s work influenced William Burroughs, as documented

by John Tresch, who asserts that Burroughs’ cut and

paste style recalled ‘the link between typesetting and

cryptography in Poe’20. Significantly, Cohn uses a

knowing, perhaps even postmodern literary reference,

since the ‘Rue Morgue’ exists only within the pages of

Poe’s short story. According to the Merriam-Webster

dictionary, the literal meaning of the word ‘morgue’ is

both ‘a collection of reference works and files of

reference material in a newspaper or news periodical

office’ and ‘a place where the bodies of dead persons

are kept temporarily pending identification or release

for burial or autopsy’21. Therefore, Cohn’s audience is

required to have knowledge of both the French language,

as well as the proto-modernist literature of nineteenth

century America. It is as though Cohn expects that the

reader will be aware of these references, implicitly

suggesting that the readership of his work is well

versed in the kind of countercultural, anti-

19 (2002), p. 820 (2002), p. 12721 online, see bibliography

14

establishment literature of which one should be aware in

the course of educating oneself in the ‘right’ way. The

implication is that, if we understand the reference,

then we are both pop-culture literate (in reading Cohn’s

work in the first place), and also aware of works of art

that are deemed relevant to an understanding of the

1960s counterculture. All of this signification and

connotation implies that the truly ‘hip’ rock music

consumer is more intelligent, learned, and discerning

than someone who might have only a superficial interest

in pop music as documented by the likes of Derek Johnson

et al.

In conclusion, it is possible to argue that the

dominance of ‘New Journalism’22 in the years following

on from the mid to late 1960s is a significant factor

in any belief in the validity of Nik Cohn’s statement.

Seen through the distorting prism of the cultural

hegemony of the current music industry, of which the

music press is after all an important part, the

statement would appear to be incontrovertible.

However, it has been argued here that this dominance is

rather moot in the context of an overall view of the

quality, or lack thereof, in the popular music of the

period about which Cohn writes. It must be noted that,

significantly, there has been no mention here of the

actual music of 1960-1962. What has been attempted

22 Shuker (2001), p. 84

15

instead is an explanation of how attitudes towards the

music of that period have come to be accepted as fact,

rather than heavily ideologically biased opinion. In

fact, for many people, this period might actually be

remembered as at least as good, if not better (but most

importantly, no more or less good) in terms of many

aspects of culture and society, depending on the

experiences of the individual. That these opinions are

not widely subscribed to is a testament to the

ideological power wielded by the majority of the music

and culture industries in the period since the ‘new

journalism’ style became the norm. Roy Shuker offers a

direct explanation for this, in his assertion that ‘in

relation to the music, critics perform an influential

role as gatekeepers of taste and arbiters of cultural

history, and are an adjunct to the record companies’

marketing of their products’23. Furthermore, in

Shuker’s eyes, the fact that ‘the music press has

received surprisingly little attention in the academic

popular music studies’24 is evidence that the current

mainstream view of popular music history ‘makes

considerable use of the music press as a source, while

largely ignoring its role in the process of marketing

and cultural legitimation’25. Essentially, the

privilege afforded to music - and in turn writings

about music – of the mid to late 1960s, ought to be

23 Shuker (2001), p. 8624 ibid.25 ibid.

16

viewed more as an opinion rather than a fact. It is

therefore arguable that the literary potency of the

style adopted by the counterculture, and most

subsequent writers about music in the following forty

years, is a testament only to the vibrancy of the

writings, rather than a validating force applied to the

opinions expressed by those who wrote them. As a

result, we must now begin to assess the role of the

‘New Journalism’ in tandem with all other writings about

the music industry, rather than as the objective site

of factual critique that they purport to be.

Bibliography

17

Bennett, A. (2001) Cultures of Popular Music, Buckingham: Open

University Press

Cohn, N. (1969) Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, London:

Granada

Ljungquist, Kent J. (2002) ‘The Poet as Critic’ in Kevin

J. Hayes’ (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Mottram, E. (1977) William Burroughs – The Algebra of Need,

London: Marion Boyars

Shuker, R. (2001) Understanding Popular Music, London:

Routledge

Tresch, J. (2002) ‘Extra! Extra! Poe invents Science

Fiction!’ in Kevin J. Hayes’ (ed.) The Cambridge Companion

to Edgar Allan Poe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

18

Internet sources

Altham, K. (1966) ‘Animals: Sure, We're Really Animals!’

from ‘NME Summer Special 1966’ on Rock’s Backpages

[accessed 30 December 2010]

http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?

ArticleID=10317

Bangs, L. (1969) ‘The Velvet Underground’ Album Review

from Rolling Stone (online) [Accessed 29 December 2010]

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/the-

velvet-underground-19690517

Footman, T. (2007) ‘Hands off Morley’, in Comment is Free,

from guardian.co.uk (online), 14 October 2007 [accessed

30 December 2010]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/oct/14/

handsoffmorley

No Author listed, International Times archive (online)

[accessed 30 December 2010)

19

http://www.internationaltimes.it/

No Author listed, from Creem magazine (online) [accessed

30 December 2010]

http://www.creemmagazine.com/_site/Pages/About.html

No Author listed, from Pooter’s Psychedelic Shack, displaying

date of publication of Oz magazine (online), February

1967 [Accessed 28 December 2010]

http://www.pooterland.com/index2/literature/oz/oz.html

No Author listed, from Wussu.com displaying date of

publication of Oz magazine (online), February 1967

[Accessed 28 December 2010]

http://www.wussu.com/zines/oz01_04.htm

No Author listed, from the website of Jann Wenner

(online) [Accessed 30 December 2010]

http://www.jannswenner.com/Biography/

No Author listed, Merriam-Webster Dictionary (online),

[Accessed 30 December 2010]

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/morgue

Wilentz, S. (2010) ‘Penetrating Aether: The Beat

Generation and Allen Ginsberg’s America’ from The New

Yorker (online), August 16 2010 [accessed 27 December

2010]

20

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/08/

sean-wilentz-bob-dylan-in-america.html

21