Is pop music a trick, a revenge against the banality of daily life?
Novelist Jonathan Lethem writes about his dance moves, his record
collection and his obsession with the Fifth Beatle

The Guardian

When I dance these days, I don’t bend my knees as much as I used to. My
knee-bends are more kabuki indications - don’t blink or you’ll miss them.
The dancing I do now enciphers in shorthand the drops and knee-bends of my
20s - these were moves that, once I’d learned them, I drove into the
ground. When I climb too many stairs, my knees remind me of old
dancefloors in clubs in Berkeley and Oakland and San Francisco.

Other ghosts rustle in my dancing these days, muscle-quotes of ironised
glam-kicks, Elvis Costello intentional-awkward heel-scoots and skids, a
kind of sideways bunny-hop and mechanical stop and restart that reminds me
of both the B-52s and a certain beer-swollen wooden-plank dormitory
living-room floor in Vermont.

When I got to college I was already a dancer. In my freshman year of high
school I seized that role for myself, first, and definitively, at a
Manhattan loft party full of hip adults to which my father had brought me
and my new girlfriend, my first girlfriend. When the dancefloor filled,
not to be outdone by my father’s friends, I began impulsively showing off
in the midst of the dancers. An image is still fresh in my mind of the
shaven-headed black man in a dashiki whose technique I glommed, or tried
to: he bent at the waist, snapped his fingers and shook his bright dome as
if in a self-amused trance. His obliviousness to our regard was what I
wanted for myself, was what I wished to hijack on behalf of my own craven
pursuit of regard. I began immediately shaking my head, not yet capable of
observing the finer details, how his head-shaking must surely have been
driven by less ostentatious but completely authoritative movements through
his feet and hips, zones I’d yet to learn to activate. But my ears were
open, I wasn’t deaf to the music, I know I was in the kind of bodily
rapture-in-sound where all real dancing begins. Alas, I was trying to lead
my dance with my head, like trying to play a song’s bass line on a pair of
cymbals, or a triangle. Somehow I made this my trademark - no one
intervened to advise me otherwise - and so I built my dancing body from
the head-shake downward, like a Cheshire cat begun at the grin.

At grown-up parties in Brooklyn hippie communes, I gradually worked out my
dancing on this basis, to the soundtrack of the Rolling Stones and Marvin
Gaye and the first Devo record, which I smuggled in and was allowed to
play sometimes, earning in the process a nickname: the Headman. As the
Headman I became the mascot dancer of a band in my high school, three
brothers and a bass player who called themselves Miller, Miller, Miller
and Sloane. Their hit song, “Funky Family”, a Jackson-5-ish A-side, was
probably the song to which the Headman laboriously discovered his body - I
danced to it at high-school parties and alone in my room, wearing out
several copies of the Miller brothers’ parents-financed 45.

The height of my dancing - the apogee, as I like to think of it - came in
a club called Berkeley Square, in 1990 or 91. It was a day I’d spent free
of my retail job, a day I’d spent at home discovering some new level of
what my words could do - at the time I was writing a novel called As She
Climbed Across the Table, a book I associate with my learning to take
command of my sentences, to make them dance the way I wanted them to. In
the evening, I went out dancing with some friends. In the middle of a
strenuous sequence of songs, Prince’s “Kiss” came on, and in letting that
song take me over, course through my body like a drug, with my dancing
perhaps perfectly poised between savvy intention and callow frenzy, I
found myself pretty sure that I was dancing just about as well as anyone
ever had. In fact, I had the thought at that moment that there might be my
equal at sentence-writing roaming the earth, somewhere, and that the same
could be said of my dancing, but that there was no one alive who could
both write and dance the way I had that day. And I’m still almost
convinced of it, I am.

The terms “jazz” and “rock’n'roll”, as a great man once pointed out, are
only blues musicians’ slang for fucking. The whole history of pop, the
half-century or more of intricate delirium, is, in other words, a joke
about fucking, but for me it is a joke I grew up inside, a joke that was
also a daydream, a shaggy-dog story, a surreal fable like Alice in
Wonderland, a world I wanted to climb inside and flesh out with my own
yearning. In other words, it’s a bloody miracle I didn’t turn out to be a
rock critic. I’m still not entirely sure how I evaded the honour.
When I was younger, it was hard for me to keep the future and the past
from collapsing - I used to mix up astronauts and dinosaurs, for instance.
It was hard for me, too, thanks to the bohemian demi-monde in which I
dwelled, the milieu of my parents and their friends, all of them with
their astonishingly valuable and mistreated record collections, to
believe, for instance, that Bob Dylan and the Beatles were not about 50 or
100 years old, as canonical as F Scott Fitzgerald or Walt Whitman, as
revered as Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln. The first time I learned
there were human beings still alive - some of them my aunts and uncles -
who still thought of rock’n'roll as “that noise”, I laughed, feeling a
kind of slap-happy disbelief. I was pretty sure everybody, for instance,
knew that Paul wasn’t “really” dead, but knew that some people had
believed so for a while. And the quest for the identity of the “Fifth
Beatle”, which seemed to me an allegory of authenticity and collective
identity as deep as a zen koan, represented an attempt to understand the
world I’d been born into. The Fifth Beatle in particular haunted me like a
ghost of crime, a Ross MacDonald investigation, where the façade of a life
in the present peels away to expose the wild truths of the past, the
impostures - some of them brave, some shameful - on which our contemporary
reality was founded.

Who was “Murray the K”? What was payola? Do you mean to tell me that
someone had to be paid to play rock’n'roll on the radio, that something
unfair occurred, that the music has bought its way into our hearts? The
idea of payola was in itself easy to conflate with the idea of “the hook”,
or the “irresistible hit record”, or “Beatlemania”, the sense that pop was
a kind of trick, a perverse revenge against the banality of daily life
dreamed up collectively by 10 or 15 delta bluesmen and a million or 100
million screaming 14-year-old girls. Maybe if a killer hook was like a
bullet or a drug or a virus, we all lived in a world permanently drugged
or psychedelically sick with fever, or dead and dreaming, like characters
in a Philip K Dick novel.

If so, I was grateful to live on the drugged, feverish or dead side of the
historical trauma. On the side of conspiracy theories stood Sutcliffe,
Best, Epstein, Voorman, Preston - this sequence of suspects who were also
victims, seeming to indict the magic circle of four heroes of some
wrongdoing or at least misrepresentation. But these “Fifth Beatles” also
seemed to confirm the four in their status as iconic survivors - probably
no one else deserved to be a Beatle, that might be the answer. And Bob
Dylan, as Jimi Hendrix apparently knew, was your grandmother - full of
gravelly authority and punitive conscience, nowhere near as fun, but
titanically arresting - he was your grandmother in a wolf’s costume, for
certain.

But soon enough I, too, was engaged in a kind of game of reverent
scepticism, a weird pursuit of exposing the flimsiness of the cartoon
world I loved, as if testing its authority. I remember the day I learned
Ringo’s drumming was “bad”. So bad Paul had done some of it for him.
Then - I recall it as if it was the very next thing I learned, like
geometry leading to algebra - I read somewhere the beautiful thought that
Ringo’s role was to be our surrogate in the band, the Beatle who was also
a fan of the Beatles, in awe of the “real ones” from the nearest possible
proximity. So maybe there was no Fifth Beatle, maybe there wasn’t even a
fourth! It was somehow inevitable to note next that George was given a
free ride in the other songwriters’ wake (yet you also could sense he was
stunted or thwarted or cheated).

John explained bitterly that he wrote the hook to “Taxman”, George’s
“best” song, just as Ray Davies was quick to note he helped his brother
with “Death of a Clown”, Dave Davies’s greatest hit. So the sham notion of
a “democracy of talent” within these great groups, with its analogous
utopian implications for collective action, could dissolve into sour
cynicism: the presiding genius probably could have done just as well with
any other supporting cast. Or, paradoxically, the reverse: the urge to
pronounce the solo careers so thin and cheesy that the magic was proven to
be in the lucky conjunction of a bunch of ordinary blokes, raised
temporarily above their station as much by history and our love as by any
personal agency; if the Beatles didn’t exist we’d have had to invent them,
and perhaps we did. Maybe the search for the Fifth Beatle was always
destined to end, like the list of Time magazine’s Person of the Year, with
the conclusion that the Fifth Beatle is YOU. For evidence, one only needs
to listen to The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. Here was music to ride
like a froth of sea foam atop a tsunami wave of adulation and yearning
for, well, itself. What were little-girl-screams if not the essential
heart of the Beatles’ true sound, the human voice in a karaoke track
consisting of the band itself? Getting by with a little help from my
friends indeed.

Our urge to expose the trick is bound up in our mad love at being tricked,
a kind of revenge of the seduced, and simultaneously a projection of our
knowing selves into the space between the singer and the song. Jim
Morrison and Michael Stipe, unmusical jesters, posturing poets,
charlatans - yet imagine their bands shorn of them and you’re left with
forgettable garage-rock outfits, nobody Chuck Berry couldn’t hustle up in
time to play a quick gig and then steal back out of town. In fact, I
watched the Chuck Berry documentary Hail! Hail! Rock’n'Roll! again
recently and was struck by it as a kind of masochistic orgy of
deconstruction, a taunt to the audience’s regard for this so-called art
form. Here’s Keith Richards, hastening to expose the Rolling Stones as
nothing but an accretion of Chuck Berry licks, and here’s the man himself,
so unimpressed by what his followers have wrought that he can’t even seem
to pay full attention. The film is constructed as a detective story, a
series of clues leading to Johnnie Johnson, the piano player whose chords
Berry transposed to create his great hooks, so that all of rock’n'roll is
revealed as inconsequential at its birth, a handful of copped stride-piano
flourishes. Berry presents a nihilistic face, utterly destructive of his
own legend, and by the time of the climactic concert, the hapless and
poignant Julian Lennon is brought out for our inspection as a good enough
John-substitute - “He looks and sounds just like his father,” Berry
asserts, and we’re horrified to find ourselves in agreement. Then Robert
Cray is celebrated by Berry as looking just like him - like Chuck Berry.
As these ersatz figures are paraded, we’re pretty sure the film has
confirmed the triple collapse of the Beatles, Stones and Berry, at least,
and as the depressingly complacent middle-aged audience confirms, there’s
nothing left to do but party.

As the men who play on stage with him will hasten to explain to you, James
Brown is, sadly, not a musician. His devoted and long-suffering players,
all of whom revere their boss as a creator and star beyond all comparison,
have confessed how they always sniggered into their sleeves during his
agonising and agonised organ solos. Here was the Godfather of Soul, the
unmistakable pioneer of our whole rhythm-scape, derided as a kind of fake
by his own collaborators, a half-assed Beethoven propped up by his
orchestra.

In this role, weirdly, Brown’s greatness is actually confirmed, since the
notion of him as a kind of charlatan-presider over music he could never
play himself exactly describes his role as bridge between the clown-jazz
figures of Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway and the hip-hop musicians whose
world he brought into being, as the scatting, grunting foreground presence
against a landscape of sonic astonishments. The showman whose exhortations
and shouts of surprise at the virtuosity of the soloists mark him as an MC
or DJ who inserted himself into the band, a figure of pure will and
egotism. He’d better be able to dance like a demon to dare to take that
half-vicarious role in our steads - dance, or else scream, or suffer, or
make us suffer, or even better, all of the above. This is where the figure
of the punk from hell, the Iggy Pop or Sid Vicious whose authority derives
from his ineptitude, spontaneity, embarrassment and pain, can weirdly seem
an allegory for the whole history of pop itself - these three chords,
these cheesy riffs, this off-key singing, this doggerel poetry, all of it,
somehow, a bluesman’s or jazz-man’s joke taken way too seriously.
A real music would have some modesty, and we’d have a proper reverence for
its history, a proper sense of its distance from ourselves. Our pop life,
then, is maybe the collapse of musical expertise into raw expression - the
collapse of singing into screaming, even when it’s only the possibility of
screaming, or the audience’s screaming, or the guitar’s.

This, too, is why our pop life seems at every possible turn surrounded by
the gestures of the pretender, the charlatan, those who dwell in the ocean
of the vicarious in which these tender artefacts, these hit records and
the stars who make them, swim: the child stars and karaoke stars and
American Idols, whose degraded and ludicrous projection guiltily thrills
us, the lip-synchers and air guitarists and mirror stars, the singers of
those off-key Studio One covers of Motown songs, transcribed from the
radio with the lyrics wrong, the one-shot bands, the garage bands, the
party bands that luck into a contract. Even, dare I say it, those of us
who stand here because we’ve kidded ourselves that our dancing or our
writing, or both, makes us something like rock stars, somehow fit to slip
into Wonderland - we Fifth Beatles, we happy fakes. We try to cover our
embarrassment at how much we believe. For this whole story really is a
naked egalitarian dream, isn’t it?