Originally published in Let It Rock, May 1973

I feel uneasy, confronting Landau. If a rock critic is a parasite, what is the critic of a rock critic? Landau is a rock critic pure and simple. He subtitles his book A Rock And Roll Journal, but it’s essentially a collection of past reviews, mostly of records, mostly from Rolling Stone and The Phoenix.

There’s not much new information here, no history, no reporting, no sociology. Nor is Landau a stylist. Nothing to read for its own sake, no flashy prose. Landau is earnest, clumsy, cautious. I enjoy reading him in Rolling Stone, but I’m unsure of the long-term significance of his criticism. Does it still matter what Landau thought of the Grateful Dead’s performance in the Boston Music Hall in April 1971? Is it still interesting to know his immediate response to each Dylan album? Are there any non-converts who’d still be moved by his sermons on Van Morrison or Otis Redding?

Landau’s reviews, revisited, seem distant and unexciting, dead. Music grows new meanings in new times, criticism doesn’t. If It’s Too Late to Stop Now (great title) is interesting, it’s not for what Landau says, explicitly, about particular records but for what he reveals, implicitly, about his own critical ideology. This revelation could only have been made by collecting his work into a single volume, and so maybe the book is worthwhile—but still that question: is a rock critic’s ideology worth studying?

In most cases I’d have doubts, but Landau has genuine claims to importance. He may not be the best (?) rock critic around but he is the most influential—if not on the tastes and attitudes of the average record buyer, certainly on the tastes and attitudes of the average rock writer. Partly this is a result of his position as record editor of Rolling Stone, but mostly it’s because he has pioneered the approach to music that other rock critics find most suited to their self-conscious seriousness. Rock writing is a recent profession and has had a tough time justifying itself; Landau, more than anyone else, writes as if what he’s saying is significant. My first response to this book was irritation at the stodgy predictability of Landau’s tastes—Dylan and the Band as the most significant American figures, the Rolling Stones as England’s most important group, Van Morrison as the male singer-songwriter, Joni Mitchell as the female. But it was Landau who helped forge this critical consensus. Even his most important innovation—the serious critical analysis of black pop (Motown and soul)—now seems commonplace. It’s because Landau is the Representative Rock Critic, 1968-1972 (his English equivalent is Richard Williams), that his book is worth reading: it reveals the assumptions that lie behind rock criticism in general.

Any critical judgment of rock must rest on the answers given (usually implied, not stated) to three questions: What sort of thing is the object being judged? What sort of relationship does the audience/listener/critic have with this object? What is the political/social significance of this relationship? It’s Too Late to Stop Now provides (reading between the lines) Landau’s answers. He suggests that rock is not an art form though rock musicians are artists; that the rock audience is a community but one bound together only by a series of personal relationships between the artist and each listener; and that rock culture is politically significant but only via its individual effects.

Landau is very firm that rock isn’t an art form. Rock is “wild, primitive, direct”; “unpretentious, hard, simple body music. Nobody had to tell you to get up and dance.” Rock is mass music; it needs no special knowledge, training, or skill to dig it, and it is this which distinguishes it from formal art. Rock is not “reflective or profound”; “rock music has to be body music before it can be head music.”

Fine and dandy except that Landau simultaneously does claim special knowledge and skills (as a critic), does make distinctions and judgments. Rock as a form may not be art, but within it different qualities of expressiveness can be analyzed as artists. For Landau, Paul Simon is “an artist who has done his work: to reveal the truth”; Elvis is “an artist, an American artist”; the Band, like all auteurs, struggle to express “a world view and a personal vision”; Valerie Simpson “expresses something transcendent”; Otis Redding’s music “is a primitive music which doesn’t pretend to be art, but is art just the same.” What concerns Landau is the use an artist makes of the primitive rock form to express a “truth.” He pays detailed attention to the means of rock—points up the niceties of arrangements and production and performance—but his central critical task is the clarification and interpretation of the artist’s message (which is usually carried lyrically). Good rock equals “true” expression and “truth” is indicated by the artist’s skill in using rock means to convey honest and intense feeling.

Landau on Joni Mitchell’s Blue:

“Joni’s new music is as strong an instance of genuine personal expression as white rock has produced lately. Almost without exception the lyrics read like genuine fragments from her own pursuits and adventures; nothing is disguised, nothing held back, and yet in the course of revealing herself, the lyrics are shaped and sculpted so that we never feel that her feelings are being artlessly forced upon us. Instead, she tells her story through music in a way that makes our participation and concern inevitable…” (p.103).

The tension for Landau’s rock artists is not between individual self-expression and the pressures of commerce, but between individual self-expression and the limitations of the rock form. The great rock artist is the one who stretches and redefines rock, who makes it carry his unique message. Audiences ought to react with awe and respect—too often they don’t. Landau reserves his bitterest criticism for audiences who refuse their creative responsibility, demanding effortless entertainment, turning Janis Joplin into a star sitting at the feet of the Grateful Dead, passive. Like most critics, Landau hates hippies; people should work to get the message. The process may be painful but what rock at its best offers is a new awareness of self for the audience as well as for the artist.

Landau argues that such self-consciousness must precede any political or social consciousness. The rock audience, rock culture, is bound together by feelings and emotions. The shared experiences that lead to political commitment and action are shared individual experiences. This is true even for such a deliberately political album as Sly’s There’s a Riot Going On: “The riot going on is nothing less than the turmoil in one man’s soul.”

Landau has turned his original formulation upside down: rock music must be body music before it can be head music, but rock culture must be head culture before it can be body culture—change your head and then change the world. Neat.

It’s Too Late to Stop Now is an impressive attempt to resolve the contradictions that face every rock critic: rock as mass music vs. the critic as a privileged listener (hence “not art but artists”); rock culture as “revolutionary” vs. the rock industry (including Rolling Stone) as capitalist (hence “change your head, not society”).
But Landau’s resolution is mystifying; he merely disguises and obscures the contradictions. They still won’t go away.

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