I was recently introduced to a specific series of YouTube videos by someone on Twitter (my mind slipped on who, I apologize) that introduced me to this channel of a reader talking about the differences between the original editions of the Hardy Boys books and the latter reprints that began in the late 1950s, barely even three decades from the time the original books were published in the 1920s.
This is quite interesting, because of what the Hardy Boys actually were and what they became known as being are two radically different things. The original editions beginning to fall into the public domain is going to make those differences more well known because they will be the ones more readily available for the first time in nearly 100 years. Dover books, for instance, has already begun re-releasing the originals, and the differences are sometimes very jarring.
I've said before that the industry post-1940 is incredibly different than the one before it, and what they ended up doing to things like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew might be the clearest example of this change. It would be like if publishers thought Treasure Island and Kidnapped! needed to be updated for modern standards to the point that the original intent is twisted and re-written for the suits in charge. Chances are, if you grew up with these books in the latter half of the 20th century, you never read the original versions of these books. In other words, you never actually read the original editions. And sometimes the originals are entirely different books.
It is strange that the anti-censorship crowd never brings this up, do they? It appears that censorship is only a problem if you do not contain "modern day sensibilities" in its pages.
To give you an example of what I mean, watch the video above. I can summarize the overall point, but I think the differences are more fascinating when they're outright spelled out for you. Essentially, if you read the 1950s re-writes and not the originals, you've never actually read the Hardy Boys. Amazing, isn't it?
The original Hardy Boys series began in 1926 and about 20 of the first 24 books (possibly 21 out of 26, it gets murky) were written by author Leslie McFarlane. He wrote the manuscripts while Edward Stratemeyer published and edited the original run of nine books and gave the general outline. After Stratemeyer died in 1930, his daughters Edna and Harriet were given control of his syndicate and gave the outlines to McFarlane instead.
Aside from a few books written by John Button in release cracks, the series appeared to be going well for over a decade. McFarlane's series was doing very well and making a good chunk of change, and even the syndicate did well by also putting out Nancy Drew not long after the Hardy Boys' initial success. Things went as they should.
All seemed to go business as usual, for a while. For a product of the 20th century it is amazing that it didn't rock the boat too hard. At least, on the surface, nothing appeared to change all that much. But things were bubbling under that wonderfully illustrated surface.
Then, like a lot of things in the literary world, things really seemed to change when the 1940s hit, a not too uncommon era in discussions around these parts. It was is if something was pumped into the drinking water back then.
But I digress. The Hardy Boys book series was not immune to the 20th century's god of progress and unending, and pointless, change. It held out for a good while, but Harriet Stratemeyer, someone who should have known better, would begin the process herself.
Taken from hardyboysonline.net
When it seemed to really shift was in 1942 when Edna married and left complete control to Harriet. Starting with The Flickering Torch Mystery (the eventual revised version of this is an entirely different book, it should be mentioned) she more or less seized control over all operations. Book 24, The Short-Wave Mystery from 1945 ended up being the last book McFarlane would write (again, it is contested if he wrote book 26), and the series would have revolving door of writers (including Harriet herself) until the original run completed with 58 books in 1979.
Now, nothing is out of the ordinary with any of this. Plenty of series went on forever, long after the original creative team departed, so there is nothing too bizarre here. The 20th century, after all, did this all the time.
However, there is a big difference between how Perry Rhodan is being written now, and what happened to the Hardy Boys. You can still buy the original edition of Perry Rhodan--for nearly half a century you could not buy the original Hardy Boys books unless you lucked out on finding an original copy or a rare limited edition release from the early 1990s. You simply could not read the original versions.
You see, starting in 1959, after Book 38, The Mystery at Devil's Paw, released, Harriet went on a quest to re-write the original 38 books to bring them up to "modern" standards and bring them in line with the new brand and cut down hard on page count. This is why most people who talk about old Hardy Boys tend to specify "the original 38" over what came later. She essentially revised them all into a whole different series.
If you want to know a more detailed version of what changed, I suggest checking out the above channel because the proprietor of it has decided to read the original and revised versions and point out just what has been altered in the revising process. It's actually quite surprising how much has been tweaked, to the point that the Hardy Boys' squeaky clean image they became known for is the opposite of what they were originally intended to be.
Taken from hardyboysonline.net
You see, McFarlane wrote the Hardy Boys in the era of pulp. This meant close calls with danger, antagonistic authority figures, intense (but not explicit) language and prose, character-based comedy, and high adventure. The intent was to give kids the same sort of exciting stories their parents were reading in the pulps, just with characters more around their ages.
The revisions that began in 1959, in contrast, appeared to be designed to remove the male energy out of them, and turn the cast into bland cypher characters moving through outlined plots. Essentially, the plots were (sometimes) generally kept, but McFarlane's influence, and his contemporaries' as well, were stripped out and the shell left behind. It's a very strange process, but that's what was done, and seemed to be done specifically strip out the pulp influence that powered the series. It also changed the setting, euphemisms, and cultural landmarks to a vague "late 50s/early 60s milieu" that continued until the line's end. In other words, it turned into a brand. It was no longer about characters going through the stories.
It wasn't just the Hardy Boys, either. Nancy Drew began in 1930, and Mildred Wirt Benson wrote almost all of the original 30 books (Walter Karig wrote 3, a hodgepodge of others wrote 4) from 1930-1953. It continued on mostly under Harriet Stratemeyer's pen, but then in 1959, it also began the revision process that combed through the original 34 books to do the same thing they did to the Hardy Boys. The revisions stopped when they reached the bulk of books Harriet herself wrote, since she took over writing duties from Book 33, The Witch Tree Symbol, until the line's original end in 1979 with Book 56, The Thirteenth Pearl. In other words, the revisions more or less stopped the moment she took over the series. Like with the Hardy Boys, there is a good chance you've never read the original Nancy Drew, either. Mildred Wirt Benson's influence was scrubbed out of the series she basically built, much like Leslie McFarlane with the Hardy Boys.
Needless to say, when Nancy Drew goes public domain, just like the Hardy Boys has started to, it is those original versions that will become ubiquitous again, and that's definitely a good thing. This will be the first time in half a century that they will become more widely available than the revisions and therefore will replace them as the true versions in readers' eyes. As they should, because they are the true versions.
Let's be honest, by the time the public domain catches up to the revisions, it will be much too late for them to matter. Nobody is going to really be paying attention by the time that 38 Hardy Boys and 34 Nancy Drew books are easily accessible and widely available to readers. By that time, the originals will have reclaimed their position as the source material for the characters.
At some point you have to ask: what is the purpose of the book you are writing? What is the intent of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew? You can say it is to make money, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong, but it has to have a point beyond that. Is it about enforcing cultural values on the youth? What does it then say that the 20th century is the first time in history we have deliberately altered our books (not just in verbiage or contested translations, but outright purposeful revisionism) to erase who we were? What kind of future can you build if you cannot accept your past?
We are seeing the result of that sort of thinking all the time now. It leads to nothing but self-destruction and self-hatred. Unless you accept the past for what it is, you are doomed to live in its shadow, and we are seeing many such examples of such a thing today.
So what does all this mean? What exactly can we learn from this whole situation?
Mainly that revisionism is not as easy as scraping away the soul of someone else's work and replacing it with your own. Eventually the truth comes out and you can see just how everything truly is. As it is with the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and the same as it will be as more pulp era material becomes widely available again for all.
We might have missed out on a lot, but we always have ways of learning and adapting even when deceived. What is important is that we keep digging. There is plenty of buried treasure out there. All we have to do is never stopping searching for it.
That's all I've got this week! In case you didn't see the update on the Gemini Man Kickstarter, the last story is out at the editor and the cover for the omnibus has been commissioned. We're near the end, and I couldn't be more excited. It's been quite the year.
Also I have other news to announce, but I think I'll wait a bit longer. There's still quite a lot going on in the background.
Anyway, have a good weekend, and I'll see you next time!
Nostalgia for the past in this pit we call the present has more or less reached a ridiculous place that it should never have reached. It's gotten to such cartoonish levels our ancestors could never have predicted. We will pine for anything. One glance at the above image should tell you exactly what I'm referring to. We spout our undying love for institutions that helped destroy the things we love, seemingly oblivious to the truth of it.
Anyone with any fond memories of pre-90s pop culture knows that Blockbuster deserves no sympathy or love, never mind nostalgic remembrance. However, everything created before 2001 is given extensive attention due to the role (no matter how small) they had in better days than the ones we are currently living in. It is understandable, even if it has become a crutch for many.
However, there are things that don't quite deserve your pleasant memories or warm feelings, or at least the product or establishment itself doesn't. Nostalgia for events around those things will always be genuine, but that doesn't change the fact that the source of all those pleasant memories might be corrupt. In the case of Blockbuster, it was a tool used by Hollywood to more or less destroy an industry of competition and created the climate we live in.
Blockbuster was supported by the major movie studios to forcibly wrestle the home video format from the hands of mom and pop stores and make sure that only their product was left on the shelves. Essentially, Blockbuster killed independent filmmaking as a career aspiration by leaving filmmakers with no distribution while at the same time only offering customers a bland, corporate, safe McDonalds image of the rental industry to wash away the fact that they were made to control your tastes and funnel your interests. It's a lot like OldPub, AAA gaming, and the dead modern music industry. And just like their eventual deaths, Blockbuster's death a decade ago was a good thing--too bad it was just to put Netflix in its place and deal critical blows to physical media and customer ownership rights. Make no mistake--this is where they wanted the industry to go.
Blockbuster might be dead but Netflix is the new weapon for Hollywood to corral tastes into one place, even though it is nowhere near as prominent as it once was, and after it dies something else will come up. That's just the nature of the beast. None of that means Blockbuster wasn't complicit in an industry's destruction, however.
However, even now if you look up the history of video stores online you will find endless articles and videos talking solely about Blockbuster, the soothing memories surrounding it, and how it ruled the roost, but nothing about what it was like before they came around. Perhaps you are too young to remember, but there was a whole better world around before they charged in to wreck the house and burn it down. The rental industry was a much different beast before Blockbuster, and it was much more interesting on top of it.
The fact is that the video rental store wasn't around for very long in the grand scheme of things, but the brief window when it was allowed to live was quite the time. This is why it is a shame that is being wallpapered over with corporate-endorsed nostalgia instead.
I recently watched a documentary named VHS Massacre which aimed to talk about the death of physical media in relation to the death of video stores. The documentary makers interviewed a bunch of people involved in the independent scene from the time, as well as newer creators today (or at the time of the documentary) to discuss the changes. They talk about the bigger studios and what exactly changed in the industry since the 1980s when VHS and the possibility of owning physical copies of movies became a reality for the first time ever.
There were already a few similar documentaries about that era, but none that really tried to focus on the stores themselves or their impact on independents and the big studios, never mind on physical media and ownership. Most were more interested on quirky personalities and niches, and not so much the bigger picture. This documentary has a few faults of its own, but the more ambitious scope tends to make it more interesting than the others, and less self-involved.
As long as a version of home video products existed there have been rental shops to stock them, but they only began to pop up the late 1970s in North America. Even then they weren't that affordable. Studios would license their films out in order to let stores rent them out to patrons, and the industry ballooned out from there. Considering the cost of tapes in that time period (they only really became affordable to outright buy in the 1990s), rental stores were the best ways to watch movies in the comfort of your own home and not have to break the bank.
Because cable was still not a factor in the television landscape, and wouldn't be for years (Now that I think about it: cable's influence didn't last very long either, did it?) movies were the go-to form of disposable entertainment of the 1980s. It's hard to deny it when you see just what the b-movie landscape was at the time even compared to big budget movies. If you wanted cheap and quick entertainment the best place to be was a rental store. Friday nights at the video store was just as busy as the cinema. Soon enough, with the emergence of Nintendo and Sega into the video game console market, video games followed by the late '80s to give the stores even more product to rent out. These companies made deals with the mom and pop stores in order to supply the shelves, and with all the content, there were no shortage of options.
However, this also meant that since every store was its own entity that meant they could also carry their own library of products. Every single rental store had its own lineup of moves and games based on whatever the owner chose to stock. This meant that if you had more than one rental store in your town (and by the mid-90s, even before Blockbuster's explosion over the entire world, everyone had more than one) you could theoretically find vastly different products by going to the different stores around town. Some kids even made a game of it by riding their bikes all over town and looking for that copy of Mortal Kombat on the Genesis that hadn't been rented out yet. Limited copies also meant that grabbing the last copy left and inviting the guys over was a common occurrence.
In other words, the rental shop was a community thing. The above documentary taps into this aspect a bit, though not as much as it should. When it comes to most video store or VHS aficionados, the focus always tends to be more on the nostalgia and certain obscure cliques--not so much on how it affected the local populace and their community.
The Documentary's Cover
This is my biggest issue with most Gen Y nostalgia pieces. They tend to focus more on how it affected them personally as opposed to how much of an impact it had on the wider world and their community. It's always shallow self-love. Life is about more than you, and it's nice to be reminded of that.
As an example, I'm reminded of a documentary on the life of John Hughes made over a decade ago. This was made before he died. This documentary focused more on how the four young filmmakers were influenced by The Breakfast Club and teen movies. The main "plot" centered on them driving around trying to find John Hughes and . . . offer him a slice of pizza. There was nothing in this picture about his friendship with John Candy, any interviews with people close to him, his un-produced screenplays, or the influences that led him to both come into filmmaking and what caused him to retire from the industry when he did. Instead, it was mostly about how the hosts related to the movies and how it shaped who they were.
There is a reason I have forgotten its title and why no one ever speaks of it.
Thankfully, VHS Massacre doesn't really do that (As mentioned earlier, it was the reason I chose to watch this one over several other similar documentaries), though it does touch more on the format of VHS itself other others. This isn't a bad thing. The VHS format played a much bigger part in pop culture than you might think. More than just creating a form to be nostalgic for, the cheap medium allowed quicker distribution, more content on the tape, and bigger and striking boxart, to deliver a product for the widest variety of customers possible. In essence, this is why VHS outlasted both Beta and Laserdisc despite both formats offering more on a quality level. It seized control of the format wars by offering more with less.
We've already discussed through The Pulp Mindset and the growth of digital distribution that the garden variety customer cares more about the art itself than they care about the delivery mechanism or bells and whistles surrounding it. They just want the art for the best available price. DVDs eventually replaced VHS because the form trumped the old one in every way AND offered a cheap price. In music, Cassettes to CDs was the same sort of transition. It's also why it has taken Blu-Ray so long to catch up to DVD and overtake. There just isn't that much of a jump a there was from VHS, and customers don't see much of a reason to make the leap. They aren't wrong, either.
A big subject of the documentary is the supposed death of physical media and the rise of digital. Since this was filmed around 2012-14 there are a few things that have aged poorly in the subject (physical sales of DVD and Blu-Rays are still about the same, streaming is king despite Netflix's downward spiral from the top of the mountain, and customers have been proven to buy when the product is worth the cost and pirate when they do not) however the bigger point is that there will always be some way for the customer to receive the art they want, even when conglomerates tied to big Hollywood studios interfere to devalue the product and experience for everyone else. Art finds a way, in other words.
The bonus to having local rental stores run and stocked by those in the community was that they could carry anything they wanted and interact with those around them. When Blockbuster came in, they were boosted by Hollywood and didn't have to pay as much for their supply, which meant they could order more than the locals at no additional cost. However, this meant they only carried what the studios wanted them to carry. This quarantined smaller studios and independent filmmakers to the shelves of local shops, and when they were run out of business so to did their shelf space vanish. Blockbuster essentially usurped an entire industry and pushed out the little guys for Hollywood's sake. No longer was renting a community experience both for patrons and local artists, it was now the equivalent of walking into McDonalds instead of the local burger joint. You're basically paying money to corporations to lose local industry for lesser product.
This is why I get puzzled at the nostalgia Blockbuster gives certain folks. Everything they offered was a sterile, corporate imitation of what your local shops were offering for years before they were killed off by this monster. They were never the good guys, and in fact harmed the very industry they worked in. There's nothing worthy of being nostalgic over.
If you think the constant comparison between Blockbuster and McDonalds is too much then you might want to see what drove Blockbuster's growth.
From wikipedia:
"In 1987, the company won a court case against Nintendo, which paved the way for video game rental. Also that year, Waste Management co-founder Wayne Huizenga, who originally had reservations about entering the video rental industry, agreed to acquire several Blockbuster stores. At that point the number of stores counted 19, and attracted Huizenga's associate John Melk's attention due to its efficiency, family-friendly image and business model, and convinced Huizenga to have a look at it. Huizenga and Melk utilized techniques from their waste business and Ray Kroc's model of expansion to rapidly expand Blockbuster, and soon they were opening a new store every 24 hours. They took over many of the existing Blockbuster franchise stores as well, and Huizenga even spent much of the late 1980s acquiring several of Blockbuster's rivals, including Major Video.
"In 1990, Blockbuster bought mid-Atlantic rival Erol's which had more than 250 stores. In 1992, Blockbuster acquired the Sound Warehouse and Music Plus music retail chains and created Blockbuster Music. In October 1993, Blockbuster took a controlling interest in Spelling Entertainment Group, a media company run by television producer Aaron Spelling. Blockbuster purchased Super Club Retail Entertainment Corp. on November 22, 1993 from Philips Electronics, N.V. for 5.2 million shares of Blockbuster stock. This brought approximately 270 Record Bar, Tracks, Turtles and Rhythm and Views music stores and approximately 160 video retail superstores into the corporation. It also owned 35% of Republic Pictures; that company merged with Spelling in April 1994."
Very quickly Blockbuster destroyed the competition and became a monopoly, almost overnight. By the end of the 1990s they were the only game in town. Throughout the back half of the 1990s until its closure in 2010, for a bit over a decade, Blockbuster controlled the entire rental industry, and not because they offered the best service or product, but because they forced their way in and made sure no one else could compete with them.
As a result they ended up changing the makeup of the film industry, and shaping customer attitudes and expectations. It became about the Cult of the New over quality. Big budget blockbusters over solid filmmaking. Flash and sizzle over craft and content. Of course they would want this change--they wanted to make money off their partners' new films. You don't get as much off of classics or independents, do you?
In a way, Blockbuster contributed to the current pop culture obsession of novelty over quality. Constant supply of new blockbusters while shoveling the old ones out for pennies devalued their own medium. They certainly helped foster the Cult of the New that still exists today.
"Blockbuster stores followed a strategy of emphasizing access to the most popular new releases, obtaining early access and stocking many copies of the new-release titles, with a relatively smaller depth of selection than traditional independent video stores. Much of the shelf space in the stores was devoted to popular titles that were placed relatively sparsely on the shelves with the entire front cover visible, so customers could browse casually and quickly, rather than having a more diverse selection with fewer copies of each title. Blockbuster sometimes contracted with studios to obtain earlier access to new titles than other companies could achieve. Examples of such contracts were those in which Blockbuster became the exclusive rental chain for new releases from the World Wrestling Federation (now known as WWE), Paramount, DreamWorks, Universal Studios, The Weinstein Company, Miramax, Lionsgate, Disney, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Sony, Image Entertainment, Warner Bros., New Line Cinema and Allumination FilmWorks. As one commentator complained, "Blockbuster was once an unstoppable giant whose franchises swept across the country putting mom and pop video stores out of business left and right by offering a larger selection of new releases, pricing them at a lower point due to the volume they worked in... Gone were the fragmented, independently owned shops that were often unorganized treasure troves of VHS discoveries. In their place were walls of new releases: hundreds of copies of a small handful of films. Everyone watching the same thing, everyone developing the same limited set of expectations... They put focus entirely on what was new rather than on discovering film history ...""
And now they're dead, where they belong.
So you can tell why nostalgia for this company is strange and completely unwarranted. They damaged a much more healthy industry and medium so they could make a few more bucks. If anything, what they destroyed is what should be what we are talking about instead. Blockbuster deserved the fate that befell it, but what they demolished didn't.
A Whole Different Experience
Netflix coming in to wipe Blockbuster out was a good bit of karmic justice, but as the VHS Massacre documentary mentions through several of the interviewers, Netflix is the Blockbuster of streaming. Bigwigs with Hollywood ties pretending to be for the smaller guys, until they seize control and kick them out, run the whole show. Troma, for instance, only got on Netflix through alternate dealings around the executives at the company. Netflix itself didn't do much of anything to try and court them or get their movies out on the service, and why should they when they get deals from the giant studios? It's all for Hollywood, not the customer.
The one bright spot is that with the rise of alternate forms of streaming and video hosting sites that these smaller creators now have an outlet to entertain audiences again without being blocked. This more decentralized approach allows creators more reach than they ever had even in the mom and pop shops run by the locals. It might not solve the problem of loss of community, which is a bigger issue unto itself, but this is a better solution than allowing those who destroyed an industry get more credit and attention they do not deserve.
Especially now with Hollywood cratering extra hard due to the pandemic, there are less and less customers willing to give the bigger studios the time of day. The best time ever for the independent scene to strike is now while Hollywood is flailing. Without the big dogs to get in the way the field is wide open again and anyone can put out anything again. Times have changed yet again, only this time Hollywood is the one suffering, for once.
So why be nostalgic for things that existed to destroy that sort of experience you crave? It's counter-productive, and it's goofy.
There are many things I don't have nostalgia for that I understand the appeal of, such as VHS. I was there for the format. It was clunky, unreliable, and offered far less than DVD did, but they also contained great box art, had good ease of use, and were rather sturdy. They offer something different than what exists now, even if that something doesn't offer me anything personally. Nostalgia for that sort of thing makes sense.
But Blockbuster is not anything to be mourned. Just like when OldPub finally crashes and burns, it was an institution that harmed the very industry it operated in. You might have good memories attached to those locations or to the packaging used, but the chain itself does not deserve your love or support. It is gone, it is not coming back, and that is a very good thing for everyone involved. (On the other hand, if you want some nostalgia for the more exciting and socially good local mom and pop stores you can find some over here.)
Better things are coming in its place. Independents are still around, audiences are still around, and both still want exciting new stories. The medium might change, but the stories themselves won't. We still desire beauty and truth.
Vultures will always exist, but so will creativity and fresh ideas and approaches to art. Things change, but they also always stay the same.
In the end, I would recommend the VHS Massacre documentary for a watch. It isn't perfect and meanders a bit in its scope, but it does offer enough to give the subject its due and the interviews are all very interesting. This whole VHS era isn't an one that gets enough proper focus so it is good to see it when it happens. The movie is available to rent on youtube, if you are so inclined, which goes to show just where the industry is heading.
Netflix will not be around a decade from now, but movies will. Art goes on regardless of the changes we make to help or hinder it. The suits can't always stand in the way, though they may try.
The medium doesn't matter as much as the message, and the message is clearer than ever before. The audience wants good stories: so start making them! At the end of the day that's all we can really do, and it's enough for us to do what we can. Just don't let nostalgic memories of dead enemies get in the way of future success.
We've got more important things to do: we've got to create!
"Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes."
~ G.K. Chesterton
There are two cultish groups in the modern world, both of which contribute to why things are as muddied and confused as they are in the wider culture. I'm not referring to those that prefer to live in their own world at the expense of the one the rest of us live in. These are the secular religious who gain their entire identity from the entertainment they consume. A consequence of being placed in front of a screen and left alone for your formative years, I suppose.
The first is the pop cult of grown children who put their personality, livelihood, and faith, in cheap plastic at the expense of any higher existence. We've covered this type a hundred times, and many other writers have discussed this more succinctly than I. Constructing your identity around a brand or product is demeaning, and disgusting. It's what someone does when they have no idea how to grow up so instead get their morals from the consensus of a tiny group out of joint with tradition or the wider society. Yes, it is a cult.
But that's not what we will be taking a look at today.
The other group is slightly different. This is centered on a gaggle of people who take one piece of one subculture and run with it at the expense of the remainder, chasing out all the impure. These individuals are so selfish and with such a narrow tunnel vision that they cannot see outside of their bubble or understand that their freak, off-center view of the world is anything but normal. Everything is about them, as opposed to conforming to a small murder of cultists.
Not only to they not understand that they are a minority opinion with fringe ideas, but they believe that their strange off-center obsession should be foisted on the larger world. To do this these obsessives sneak into industries under the guise of being allies until they get into a position of power. Once they get said power, they begin to reshape the subculture in their image. Want to know why no medium even slightly resembles what it was even 15 years ago? This group is why.
Once upon a time these people were called poseurs. They don't love things for what they are, they obsess over what these things could be if the right person were given control of them. That right person is, of course, the poseur in question. Their strange hobby will change the world, and only they can see it.
Nowhere is this attitude more prevalent then in the history of music journalism, specifically the Rock world.
For those that don't know what Rock music is, it started as a genre of playing sped up Blues music for teenagers to dance to over 60 years ago. It was a simplistic musical style of three chord (sometimes four) music made of corny love ballads and silly adventure stories meant to entertain the listener while making them want to dance. It was a nutty past-time created for kids and teenagers. That's where it began, as a fun, exuberant musical style.
Gone too young
But then something changed. The music began to get popular and the dollar signs began to flash in the eyes of every record executive, manager, and poseur, in Christendom. The first two have plenty of pieces written about the screw-jobs they initiated, but the latter rarely has. I wrote one post, but that's about all that exists on this topic. It is as if everyone forgot these people were real, and a problem for every subculture since they began. They didn't just go away one day! They still exist. This is because they successfully came in through the backdoor and infiltrated industries. The music industry is the perfect example of this poseur victory. They are the music industry now.
Back in the 1950s, poseurs saw a genre they could co-opt for their own ends, and they did. It took time, but they pushed their way in based on the clueless knowledge of the art from their parent's generation and the uncaring shrugs of politicians of their own. They took culture while everyone else was arguing over policies and the like. They twisted Rock music into a sad mockery of what it began as, before putting the bullet in it themselves and abandoning the genre for rap, bubblegum, and whatever electronic scene is big this week. Now Rock is dead, and in the process of being forgotten.
This all came from abandoning the music's core ambition, and its original goal of entertaining first.
Here is something that wasn't a controversial statement in the 1950s, but is now. Poseurs worked hard to subvert this truism. It is controversial, despite being factual on a level that everyone knows but won't ever say.
So here it goes.
Rock music is for kids.
Teenagers, specifically. It's juvenile at its core, and was always meant to be such as a counterpoint to the more serious Blues. There's nothing wrong with that, but self-conscious adults never wanted to admit they enjoyed silly, corny music. This is why to this day most Baby Boomers still sneer over music made before the four mop tops and are convinced their childish, overproduced self-important three chord songs are better than the previous decade's childish, under-produced goofy three chord songs. A juvenile reaction for lovers of a juvenile genre.
There was a period where rock was meant to be fun, and not up its own rear. The poseurs made sure to bury that era and throw a tarp over it. But that was a long time ago now, and the roots have since been purged from serious discussion over the form.
This is what a Rock song was.
However, around the time Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper, died in that plane crash and Rock was thought to be dead, poseurs saw their opportunity. This was their chance to reconstruct the genre in their image. They could make it about grownup stuff! And that's just what they set about doing.
A new form of critic arose in the ashes of The Day The Music Died, determined to convince the world that Rock n' Roll music could be "adult" and "grown up" and simply needed to shed its identity for credibility from . . . some sort of group. I'm not sure who. Perhaps Sam Lundwell or Phil Fish can tell you. What is important is that the mouth-breathers have their hobby or interests destroyed instead and what remains being a hollow and gutted form of what came before. This is why it stopped being called the more apt "Rock n' Roll" title for the more serious "Rock" moniker. The "Roll" part suggested fun, and that was a no-no.
It's a familiar story, and you might have even heard it yourself. The fact of the matter is that "serious" Rock music by "serious" people was a meme created by the music press who existed to shape the genre for proper consumption. What actually sold back in the day was actually far different than what the journalists pushed on the populace. They used their pull to make sure only the "correct" music would get the majority of the coverage on radio and the like.
Recently I had a browse of a site for bad Rolling Stone reviews and was reminded as to just how bad the magazine was, even at its so-called peak. It was just as awful as I remember. You can find the site here. The quotes in this post can all be found there.
Click these quote images to read them as the blog's formatting messes them up. I apologize, but they couldn't be read otherwise and if I copy-pasted this post would be far too long. One click to open the image is a better solution for everyone involved.
This is Rolling Stone magazine, the source of credible music criticism . . . for some reason.
That was about the infamous Wedding Album that John Lennon put out after he broke from the Beatles. One of Lennon's many self-indulgent turkeys that the press gloss over to this day. Wenner's expert criticism relied on making sure the artists he liked were over-hyped and pushed extensively while those he didn't were tossed in the trash. And to a Baby Boomer, John Lennon was a media-approved genius and god.
Was the album any good?
That doesn't matter. It never did.
For an example at how much cred Rolling Stone had even at its formation, you can find it all over this site. They were never unbiased or focused on criticism above all else. They were about selling you a lifestyle of "cool" over corny. It was about shaping identity.
And this is supposed to be the most trustworthy music magazine there is. It should be mentioned that Rolling Stone's problems did not end with Jann Wenner. He merely set the stage for the magazine that would warp Rock n' Roll for years to come.
You will also notice above how childish these people who obsess about pop music "growing up" are. How are these sorts mature enough to decide what "growing up" means? But no one questioned it back then.
Now I will give you a bigger picture as to just what was going on.
Here is an article that sheds some light on it. From critic Robert Christgau, written in the 1970s, where he admits just how much of what is labeled "serious" and "grown up" was manufactured by rock journalists with biased tastes. He is one of the cabal of rock journalists from back in the day who shaped modern music criticism.
He unironically wrote this piece for Rolling Stone called: Yes, There Is a Rock-Critic Establishment (But Is That Bad for Rock?) and the article makes no bones about that assertion that there is a cabal of influencers. No one seemed to notice or care at the time, though. Nowadays I'm not so sure anyone would brag so openly about their subversion, but I digress.
Choice quote:
"Since I am one source of the persistent rumor that Bruce Springsteen is the first rock star in history ever to be propelled into prominence by print information, I feel obliged to qualify it. For one thing, he's probably not the first--possible precedents include Bette Midler (but does she count as rock?), David Bowie (but just how far did we push him?), and (I hate to bring this up) Bob Dylan. Much more important, even a recording artist who is as ideal a critic's hero as Springsteen is depends ultimately on audible media. Although that usually means radio, it doesn't always--the Monkees and the Partridge Family were launched by television shows, while Grand Funk Railroad and ZZ Top built record-biz fortunes from the concert circuit."
You might think he's lying or exaggerating to take credit here, but he's not. Music critics had the power and the connections to pull strings.
Simply look up the reviews on the review site for any of the artists Christgau listed in the quote above. Aside from Bowie who had mixed reception at the time with every new release (this is a man who scraped his way up, critics or not) the reviews for The Monkees and Partridge Family-style groups like The Carpenters are vicious and sneering, only now looked back on by postmodern ironic winking for enjoyment. To this day these groups are an undeserved punchline by serious rock cultists. At the same time hard working road bands such as Grand Funk Railroad and ZZ Top have always been hated by the establishment despite having no pretensions about what they were. But they weren't serious enough to be taken seriously.
Then there is the whole very suspicious and shady dealings in Laurel Canyon in the totally-not-manufactured 1960s hippie movement that involve far too much rabbit hole digging to cover here. The connections formed by these shady happenings in the 1960s changed the musical landscape far more than any of the actual music did. It was about greasing the right palms and massaging the right egos with the right connections. Any semblance of what Rock n' Roll actually began as was washed out by self-important weirdos who can't enjoy anything lighthearted without a heavy layer of irony. It's their cocoon of protection for their self-serious image.
Nonetheless, there has been an influence on the dead end state of pop music that goes beyond any sort of meritocracy and even a bit beyond payola from questionable sources.
You're dealing with True Believers Who Know Better now. The same set of poseurs responsible for destroying every art medium in the 20th century have appointed themselves custodians of culture. They are everywhere, and they are many.
These critics worked hard to make sure you liked the correct things. Very little of what has "endured" is due to cream floating to the top, but by payola and true believer scenesters jury-rigging the process and sliding into positions to make sure the correct things were to be played and supported. Do you think those radio stations were entirely honest about what audiences requested? Why would they need to do that?
If you doubt me then tell me when the last time classic rock radio played a song by The Carpenters or The Big Bopper. They sure weren't doing it in the 1990s.
Another quote:
"Yet I read on, as much from inclination as from duty, and find that a fair portion of what is bad, like some strains of "bad" rock and roll, has the sloppy appeal of all open, democratic phenomena. We hope that what is good is open and democratic in the best way, culling the art (and the craft) (and the fun) from a masscult form that, except during its flash of status in the late '60s, has always been assumed drecky until proven otherwise. Among the best of us, the numerous contradictions of this task have been a subject of discussion and analysis for years. Chris Welles reports gleefully that the lines between "counterculture" and "Establishment" connect rather than separate, and that rock critics strive to retain their fannish fervor, as if we were barely aware of these conundrums. But in fact they have long since become working assumptions, by now passed off in asides or implied in an ironic tone that Welles fails ever to identify: rock critics are disinclined to bore their readers just to make sure media critics get the point."
No comment needed.
He goes on:
"Yet it seems to me that there is a story here, and what's more a story with an unpleasant edge to it. I'm part of the story myself, but not so close to its center that I don't find it disturbing sometimes. Perhaps Welles missed it because he was so entranced by his discovery of the obvious--although Newsweek, which called its treatment "Making of a Rock Star" but never quite explained how he was made, missed it too, and so did Henry Edwards, who could have figured it out if he'd followed his best instincts, which are those of a gossip columnist. For not only is Springsteen a rare instance of a rock musician who owes much of his stardom to print support. Not only does he embody critical standards that no one but Langdon Winner has tried to define with any precision. He also represents the first victory of a brand-new grouping of five journalists who for want of a more felicitous term I have to label the rock-critic establishment."
If you hammer a nail in enough it eventually has to reach the other side, especially if you make sure to limit the available nails and spare boards. Nonetheless, there it is. The establishment true believers who are going to tell you what should be popular or not shoved their noses in the tent and muscled their way inside. It's easy to do if you have a limited pool of what to listen to and what is accessible, and have the right backers, I suppose.
Perhaps this is why no one aside from Baby Boomers has listened to Bruce Springsteen since 1987. They have gotten other options since then, and the cream no longer floats. That is, if it was ever cream to begin with.
He continues:
"The fannishness of rock criticism, which when it works evokes and analyzes good times simultaneously, has less to do with the paucity of solid Springsteen analysis than does its journalistic context--when a star is born you begin with a lot of star-is-born stories. But in the absence of a counter-analysis let me point out some underlying contradictions. The stock explanation of why successful media professionals like Landau and Marsh and Nelson (not so much Rockwell, whose enthusiasm is more purely musical) identify so intensely with an idealized youth rebel like Springsteen is that they want to preserve their own youth, but this is stupid. Say rather that they want to preserve their rebellion. Like most people with a rock and roll jones, these are natural fighters, but they are also adults who live comfortably in the Bloomingdale belt; in some sense, they have won. Springsteen is a fighter, too; he has always played a winningly articulate kind of loser, and now he is rich as well as smart. And so my colleagues both thrill to a fellow winner and identify with his loser rebel persona, forgetting in the rock and roll moment how much the winner in them shares with what the fighter was fighting against."
This is becoming a pattern in the arts, isn't it? Declaring victory over purging normal thought from a medium is a strange way to go about it. But this happens every single time.
As for the "rebellious" nature of Rock n' Roll . . . there isn't any. It's all media hype and sloganeering. The genre was never about rebellion.
I defy you to find a 1950s rock song that has anything even slightly rebellious to it. And no, silly comedy songs about cats and cars don't count. Wanting a date is not rebellious. Serenading a woman is not rebellious. Yes, Elvis Presley swung his hips when he danced, because he was on television and standing still gives the audience nothing to look at. That isn't rebellion, and it's about time we grow up and stop pretending this crafted image is anything other than Baby Boomer self-aggrandizement. The genre is about having fun.
But that's too embarrassing!
Music critics trying to relive their pathetic, rebellious youth is why they had to dig to find meaning in goofy three chord songs and demand their dancing monkeys make material they could rub in Mom and Dad's faces.
And when they didn't get it? Well, Rolling Stone knew what to do.
Just make sure the Good Word is spread! Honesty is secondary to the revolution.
Journalistic credibility was not Rolling Stone's strong suit:
Don't insult the modern prophets! Shut up and consume, kid. All for the glorious Utopian future to come. And these critics brought you there. Hoist those golden statues, plebeians!
When these very mature individuals didn't get their way, they could be just as much a crybaby as the one Mom and Dad sent to their room without dinner years before.
"If you don't let me go to the dance, I'll kill myself! I hate you Mom and Dad!"
This is the sort of person who seized control of an industry. But songs about cats and cars are seen as too juvenile for them.
It's hard to imagine any of this is real sometimes, but there it is.
The finale of Christgau's article:
"I said this story had an unpleasant edge, and that's it. I wrote it because I figured someone who knew whereof he spoke had better put his two cents in, and I put it harshly to make my point. In fact, things ain't so bleak. The rock-criticism establishment has nurtured artists much thought than Springsteen--Randy Newman, Lou Reed, Patti Smith. Moreover, Springsteen's own sentimentality is much preferable to that of the Eagles-style post-folk easy-listening so favored by FM deejays and opposed by us. Compared to The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, which preceded it, Born to Run sacrifices breadth for focus, spontaneity for power, humanistic narrative for expressionistic statement. But even if this is a false step, as some feel, it is not over the brink. For each album enriches the other; the limitations of each encompass an aesthetic stance consciously exploited, rather than defining a stylistic trap.
"And now things could go either way. Springsteen could formalize down into yet another maudlin trials-of-a-rock-star opus. Or he could reach out and combine humanism and concentration, adding a little of his new media hip for perspective. That's conceivable, and it would really be something. And Landau and Marsh and Rockwell and all the others would have made it possible. Not bad for an establishment, if you ask us."
Thank you, Mr. Christgau for taking the reins and telling us what we lessers should be listening to. I'm happy to learn God descended from Graceland to give you and your pretentious pals authority over what good music is and isn't, and what should be played on the radio. It must have been tough "nurturing" those artists and building their careers for them. It's just a sad thing that none of them have any influence left in the industry, and will have none by the time your generation is gone.
If Springsteen even has any influence left in music it flamed out way back in the 1980s. And the others he listed? Much the same. Now we are left with no more Rock music, good or bad. It's all corporate-approved Clear Channel trash. You critics helped that come about, too! Don't forget to take credit for the state of music today.
Your "rebellious" spirit led to billion dollar corporations owning the stupid music industry from what once used to be about a few guys in a bar singing to shift workers about cars and girls. Give yourself a round of applause!
But we're giving journalists too much credit! They had many successes, however, we can't give them credit for their achievements without also pointing out their failures. It s only fair.
You see, despite how "progressive" and "forward-thinking" these self-important critics are, they are still prone to get it wrong . . . most of the time.
Okay, almost all of the time.
I should also point out that these critics have missed the boat on every single rock genre since the Beatles, and colossally at that. These experts in criticism have never once understood or clicked with a genre, as if they had to be given a cheat sheet to understand what they were about. Here are some examples below of their genius:
Note: While Lester Bangs revised his opinion on the band, Rolling Stone did not. They trashed them in their music guides up until the '00s when Metal began to be seen as cool by hipsters and self-serious scene kids. Rolling Stone missed the entire boat when it came to Metal and landed directly in the bay.
There are other bad examples:
This David Bowie produced album more or less started Post-Punk and inspired countless bands from U2 to Joy Division. Ian Curtis even listened to this album on the day he killed himself. Urban legend was that Mass Production was playing on his turntable when his body was found. This indicates that there might be something more to this album, and something inspiring at that.
Amazing that mature, grownup expert critics could entirely miss any of this. But they are the experts so shut up, pleb.
On one of the first punk albums:
This is about the first Dictators album, but it is not the only punk band they trashed. Richard Hell, The Damned, Television, Wire, The Jam, Devo, The Saints, Jonathan Richman, Suicide, Blondie . . . they didn't understand any of them or what their music was. All they saw was "rough", "sloppy", and "silly", just like the 1950s music they dismiss and need to bury all traces of. You can see the reviews for yourself.
It turns out Boomer critics were far too self-serious to understand the point of Punk was literally to be the opposite of what they championed. But I guess that's Gen X in a nutshell.
But they were just as hard on goofy entertainment-oriented bands that weren't rambunctious or rowdy!
On the third album of one of the most unique bands of the 1970s:
And on a brilliant songwriter ignored by the press for writing silly songs:
Stiff-necked to a fault:
And the topper:
As can be seen, they ran wild with this attitude of self-serous fun haters for a very long time. Every Punk and Metal album is disregarded as trash because they weren't "mature" or "grown up" enough for the clique. Hard Rock, Blues, and Boogie bands were all but ignored or tossed in the trash as redundant and not having enough important to "say", as well. This sounds all too familiar, does it not? This behavior only makes sense if you understand they were working for an agenda and not to inform the customer about their interest.
What these critics wanted were "thoughtful" pieces and "adult" subject matter from music established on goofiness. It was completely backwards. They needed to be thought of as respectable above all else. No, Rock n' Roll was not founded on rebellion, drugs, or sex, despite what their overreacting parents thought or the self-serious Boomers taught themselves and their kids to believe. It was founded on being silly, entertaining the audience, and escapism. What the musicians did in their spare time is not reflected in the music of the 1950s and early '60s. It's simply not there, because it didn't exist. It's a complete fabrication used as a marketing device.
And those mature artists the magazines pushed? Surely they were exceptional people that lived up to their name and the fawning the press gave them over the hardworking blue collar bar bands? After all, if they were so important as to redefine an entire genre and landscape they must be moral paragons and worthy of you bowing to them.
Well, no. In fact, it was the opposite.
I'm at a loss as to how broken, moral hedonists are supposed to help guide the life of the common man trying to do his best. This slop was pushed over songs of imagination and lighthearted fun. Of course, this is if you believed any of that was for the listener's benefit. It very obviously was not, as established above.
The fact is that it only led music down a thin road to nowhere that had to be bailed out several times by outsiders from punks to metalheads to blues and garage revivalists, many of whom were initially hated by the press until they could backpedal and claim they were always on their side to begin with. Music critics were never on their side, they just wanted to be at the forefront of the revolution. It's not about music, and it never was.
Destroy, build, destroy. The process repeated all the way up until the confused postmodern wailings of Kurt Cobain trying to make art out of saying Verse, Chorus, Verse and lamenting that there is no originality left. You have to be important, not good.
As critic cabal member and future Springsteen acolyte Jon Landau said about being one of the chosen few:
So you become this guy
All this from goofy teenager music about holding hands and dancing. You hated joy so much you let your own hubris crush your soul to become a peddler of corporate product.
The result of all these games from adult children? A fractured, and hollowed out genre.
"Thought to be strictly for teenagers", indeed. I want you to look at early concert footage of the Beatles and tell me how many adults you see at their shows. Find me any evidence of an adult in the 1960s that took the British Invasion as anything other than annoying fad. Show me movies that portray Rock n' Roll as anything other than music for silly kids.
You can't do it.
Sorry, but even then, it was kid music. That never changed just because you change chords around or add distortion to it. The song remains the same. The Beatles were marketed to kids. They always were.
None of this is bad, either. But it needs to be accepted. The reason the genre is up its own rear and a joke today is because of the inability to accept that truth. You're not part of a revolution and you're not going to change the world. You're writing simplistic music. Why isn't that enough for you?
Trying to whitewash that lighthearted segment of your genre has left you with the self-serious/hyper-ironic dichotomy that has strangled any creativity out of it. No one has any fun anymore, and critics love it so much they still give every album they review a 4.4/10 or lower anyway. What a lovely existence or self-serious misery.
Remember, rock music was built on songs like this:
And now we have people bashing those who play music like this:
Do you not see the issue? The early example is what rock started as. The latter is no different near 30 years removed and yet is dumped on and deliberately ignored by supposed "critics" of said genre as if it is outdated. This despite it being closer to the origin of the genre than a James Taylor type. These are both silly, fluffy songs meant to make you move. This is what Rock n' Roll is. This is its legacy, its tradition, and what it started as.
And the critics hate it.
Critics hate what the music is at its core, and need to change it to suit their image of it instead. In other words, they detest what the genre is and what it stands for.
This is why pop music is dead. More than "changing trends" or other options for listeners or whatever excuse you want to give it. The industry wanted their hyper-serious crybaby garbage to be what rock music was about at the expense of what built said genre to begin with. Now they have it, and it's as irrelevant as ever.
This is because they never liked the music to begin with: they liked that one piece of it they cherished above everything else. In the process of pushing and shoving their views they ended up crushing the life and vitality of a genre that could have made it much longer and gone to more places than it did. We will never know what could have been, and the cultists are the reason why.
And now these critics move on to testosterone-free underground indie rock obsessed with sniffing Thom Yorke's used socks from 1998, and the four hundredth gangsta rap crap factory that hasn't changed one iota since the mid-90s.
Rock n' Roll isn't allowed to stay what it began as, but these crap genres that have remained static longer than it ever has gets a pass for their stagnant state. There is no consistency with this group. This is why no one should take these critics seriously. They aren't serious; they're fetishists. And they have helped warp an entire musical genre into a walking corpse of a joke.
These aren't experts, they never were. These are self-important hedonists with a thesaurus looking for a religion replacement, telling you why you require meaning in a genre founded on songs called Johnny B. Goode and Twenty Flight Rock. Why should you be having fun after a hard day of work when your entertainment can make you think instead? Demand more by having less fun.
Sure you could go to Church or read an author like Dostoevsky instead, but that requires actual thinking and effort. Why seek out knowledge when you can have the nihilism pumped directly into your head through catchy candy corn instead? Intellectualism at work!
Truly the position of a deep thinker with complex thoughts. No wonder so many of these artists kill themselves or fall into drug comas all the time. They must have important lessons to impart on the filthy peasants. Anything to avoid the stinging truth that they made their parent's criticism about them right after all. You made the music into the corrupting force they believed it to be. Now, that is a sad realization. All that rebellion just to prove Mom and Dad were right. Maybe the last 60 years of Boomer cultural upheaval should be reexamined. It's going to be hilarious when all that is erased.
But I'm getting off-topic.
Yes, you can have pop music with thought put into it. Smart pop music exists, usually by those with a sense of humor. You can also have overwritten pompous garbage, too. But neither are the goal of the genre in question. You are not a literary author, you are an entertainer. Rock n' Roll is about entertainment above all else.
Rock n' Roll is a showman's genre: it's meant to entertain, and to lift. It's far more than the post-Nirvana whining sludge it has been stuck in for the last twenty years. It used to be much more to far more people than it is now.
And that's why it had to go.
It's also why it's not coming back. This is what they wanted to begin with. Now you have a lifeless genre for uptight, smug urbanites and greasy, antisocial geeks with nothing in-between for the common man. Take it in and savor it. It's dead, Jim.
So before Rolling Stone goes out of print and is forgotten to the mists of time and history like it deserves to be, let us instead celebrate the good times we had, and the good times still yet to come. We can't go back to the past, but we can learn from its mistakes.
Keep looking up, above the muck and the miserable. There is always hope for a better day ahead.
I'm bringing back the fun in my own way. Check out seven stories of monsters, magic, and mobsters, in the dark city. Superheroes and noir are all over this one. There's nothing quite like it!
"People change," she said. "Oh, no they don't. Look at me. I've never changed. It's like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you'll still read Brighton. That's human nature."
This post is very different from the usual blog fare, mostly because I just came back from a trip and that I'm getting my daily word count whipped back into shape. It's going good! So for now I wanted to talk about a book I read recently, slightly different from the usual pulp material I go over here. However it's not as different as you might think. This is about Graham Greene's Brighton Rock from 1938.
For those not in the know, Graham Greene was one of the most well known writers of the 20th century. He wrote many books, plays, and scripts for film noir, including the legendary movie The Third Man which is regarded as a classic. He wrote from the 1930s up to the 80s before his death in the early 90s. So he doesn't need any introduction here.
What probably isn't well known is that he was also a Catholic, though admittedly not a very good one, particularly later in life. His depression certainly didn't help, but neither did cheating on his wife throughout his life on top of it. He would later call himself a Catholic agnostic, and if you read his works you would understand the philosophical battles are what he is about, whether in his pulp thrillers or his literary output. He was a man of contradictions. But one book bridged that gap of extremes admirably and that book is the subject of this post, 1938's Brighton Rock.
It might be a surprise to readers of this blog, but I do like literary fiction. But I enjoy a very specific kind of literary fiction: ones that deal with the eternal and the knife edge between life and death. It's the same as a pulp tale of white hat versus black hat except the sides are above the players who scrambling to understand which they belong to. It's a different angle, but one that never gets old.
This is why I've greatly enjoyed Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Shusaku Endo's Silence, and Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. They are all tales of good and evil and deal with bigger themes beyond the usual literary fiction trope of nothing happening while things go on. They are about what matters, just as pulp stories are.
Of course, I also like tales of two-fisted action and clear stakes to entertain the reader as well as the above. To me, these two sides of the fiction coin are pretty similar. They both offer the same thing: praising the good and rejecting the evil, and understanding the distinction between the two, even though they do it in different ways.
Brighton Rock is a sequel to the writer's earlier thriller A Gun For Sale, but only tangentially. An event that occurred in that book is the reason the main character is in the position he is in by the this story's start. You don't need to read it to understand this one, but it is to be mentioned.
The story stars a seventeen year old gangster named Pinkie Brown who has just seized control of his gang. At the book's start he is hunting down a man named Charles Hale who betrayed them. Charles meets a woman named Ida Arnold who he connects with, but the two soon separate and Charles is killed by Pinkie afterwards. The report on Charles' death seems strange to Ida so she begins investigating on a lark and an intuition and ends up badgering Pinkie throughout the story even without any evidence about his guilt or knowledge about his person. At the same time Pinkie courts a young waitress named Rose in an attempt to marry her so she can't testify against him since she unknowingly can bust his alibi. The three and their motivations clash throughout the story. As the novel goes on everything begins to unravel until the truth wins out at the end. Everyone gets what they wanted, in a way.
What makes this story work are the characters. They are a extremely different from each other, but vital for the story to go the way it does.
Pinkie is the main character, and he is a villain, through and through. He has no warmth in his heart, no humor, no love, and deliberately chooses to be that way. He wants to be damned. There are several points of the book where small acts of grace such as a friend turning up alive who was thought to be dead are outright rejected by Pinkie who lashes out in vicious ways. He is given chance after chance and rejects them all.
His obsession with being a man informed by a dead gangster causes him to routinely champion the wrong things, from turning on potential allies to threatening those who have nothing to offer him to rejecting offers that would aid him. By the end of the book his soul is stretched so thin that there is little left beyond a husk of what was once a smart young man who could be so much more, but refuses to be.
Greene only ever calls Pinkie "the Boy" throughout the narration and only uses "Pinkie" when being spoken to in dialogue to emphasize the state of his mind. Pinkie has rejected humanity for his own private version of success, and has no chance to become anything more than a mere child. This is despite his countless chances to do so.
The other main character is Rose, who could be seen as the real counterpart to Pinkie. She loves him, not for any schoolgirl reason, but because she thinks she is damned and therefore perfect for him. They are a match, and if they were smarter about it they could work, but they aren't and they don't. Rose knows this, but refuses to admit it. There is no hope for them, but at least they can burn together. Or so she believes.
You see, both Pinkie and Rose are Catholics, but Pinkie only believes in Hell and damnation as an inevitability and can't even picture a Heaven or mercy in the slightest. Rose believes in both but can''t see herself being redeemed and thinks she's destined for Hell. She goes to Mass and he hasn't gone in forever, and they both believe it's all true. His religion is a shell of the real thing morphed to suit his crafted personality, and hers is a young girl's misunderstanding of the nature of Hell and salvation.
This difference in their outlook is what makes Rose more sympathetic as the frail girl struggling to get by. By the end of the story we learn why she thought she should be damned and why her misguided thoughts had very nearly given her that wish. At the same time she vows to start anew with hope for the future with a new understanding of how the world is. Perhaps anyone can be saved, if they want it. In my opinion, she is the real protagonist of the story. She is only held back by her naivety of the way things are.
Finally, there is Ida Arnold. She is supposed to be the "detective" character, but she isn't really. Ida is a hedonist, to put it bluntly. She is just about every New Age, chubby, middle-aged, cat lady, secularist, stereotype you can think of. She's a know-it-all, loose, loud, and surprisingly clueless. If Pinkie wasn't in this story she would be the most unlikable character--and there are gangsters in this work. Ida is only interesting for how Greene uses her as a place of unexpected grace and deliverance in the plot over the others in it. Otherwise her obliviousness around younger characters can get irritating.
She knows right is right, and wrong is wrong, even though she is very much a hedonist who makes bad decision in her own life, but she doesn't know why of everything and can't even explain it. She lectures Rose for being naive, even though she is far more naive than she is despite the age difference. For instance, a big gangster threatens Pinkie sends men after his guys and viciously attacks them, but Ida doesn't know this and thinks the gangster is an upstanding and right man. Despite this she can nail when someone isn't acting right or is hiding something from her. This is more or less Ida's character. She is frequently right, but not for the reasons she think she is and can miss the forest for the trees. She doesn't even understand it herself.
Ida ends up in the right place at the right time seemingly at random, through her connections and goofy larks. This puts her in places she wouldn't otherwise have any reason to be. It's her boisterous and warm personality that contrasts with Pinkie's cold one that leads her to push back against him even though they don't know each other at all. By the end of the story the preceding events begin to rub off on her and leads her to making the first good decision for her own life she made the entire story. Perhaps she actually has grown through the events.
These three are almost as direct opposites of each other as can be, but they all drive the plot perfectly. The triumvirate of clashing ideals is what makes the story interesting beyond the scam plotline. Whenever one of the three is on page you will pay attention as they all have much charisma around them that makes you want to see what they will do next. I was also partial to the charactersof the gangsters such as Spicer, Dallow, and Cubit, who all represent sides of Pinkie he simply doesn't have, and yet are all he has left.
Greene contrasts the beauty and ugliness of the (then) modern world through the eyes of both religious and secular and how they are both two sides of a certain denarius. What might be ugly or beautiful for another might only look that way because the full picture isn't being seen. The wrong thing is glorified over and over by characters in this novel while the right thing is avoided as a vampire dodges the sun. This never turns out well for those involved. The moral order of the universe is held up, as it should in all good fiction.
Brighton Rock is about the importance of grace and the acceptance of reality, both religious and secular. It is about growth. Those who deny reality are doomed to destruction as their souls shrivel to nothing as they attempt to escape into themselves. You can't change, or grow, as long as you refuse to accept Truth. At the end you either pick a side or you will be thrown into one, and it won't always be the better option.
It's a short book, as it should be, clocking in a good bit under 300 pages, and very little space is wasted with flowery prose. This isn't a book that would come out of Oldpub today, and it isn't just because of length.
The prose is lean and sharp like a pulp novel, though the action is not on the surface. Everything ripples under the water. However, there is a giant knife fight between gangsters that explodes out of nowhere in the middle of the book which is terrifying, and yet leads to one beautiful moment of grace that seals the fates of our characters. It's a perfect scene that leads to another perfect scene. The action in litfic is always about the consequences of decisions, and the battle between God and Satan as the ultimate white and black hat is where the real action sits in this piece.
Once you see Brighton Rock as what it is: a spiritual battle between mortal sin and repentance, it is engrossing all the way until the final moments. As far as litfic goes, this was pretty much my ideal example. It surpassed my expectations despite reading about its reputation for so long.
I can't convince you to give this a try if you don't enjoy film noir, spiritual battles, or litfic, but I can recommend it wholeheartedly all the same. There isn't really any other book out there like this, not even by Greene.
But I enjoyed this one immensely and will stand by it as a work worth reading. Brighton Rock is not like anything else you will read today, especially from the dinosaur publishing world.
If this is your sort of thing be sure to seek it out.
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