‘Blues & Chaos,’ ‘Heroes and Villains’

A good critic’s jobisn’t to tell you how to spend your money by deciding which movies to watch,music to purchase or books to read. If critics are worth considering at all,it’s because they are able to cast our world in a new light, causing us toconsider the value and meaning of cultural figures and the artifacts and ideasthey produce.

Two new books by a pairof articulate, intelligent critics do just that, informing and provoking useven when they fail to persuade us that their opinion is correct. Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing ofRobert Palmer (Scribner) collects a trove of essays written for Rolling Stone and TheNew YorkTimes along with liner notes for CDcollections before Palmer’s death in 1997. David Hajdu’s Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture(Da Capo) is broader in scope but, like Palmer’s book, focuses primarily onrecording artists.

Although Palmer was amusician and producer in addition to a deadline-driven writer and Hajdu hasenjoyed a more mandarin professional life as an author and journalism professorat Columbia,their interests and perspectives are compatible. Both critics negotiated thecollapse of distinctions between high and low culture. Both loved theirsubjects and set standards that are defensible, even when wrong. Writing withvivid clarity, Palmer and Hajdu were erudite yet eager to communicate,eschewing the trash of much pop-culture writing and the wooly presumptions ofacademic culture theorists.

Both ranged widely forthe topics collected in the new books. Palmer and Hajdu wrote about blues andjazz, 20th-century avant-garde classical music, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley andElvis Costello. Both had an understanding of the larger context in which rockmusic flourished. If either worked from the sort of unified theory ofeverything beloved in some precincts of academia, they kept it to themselves.The reality they reflected upon is too large and diverse to be contained by anyone theory. Perhaps Hajdu is in pursuit of beauty where Palmer soughttranscendence, but on one level this might amount to the same thing.

Differences between themare hard to measure, especially given Palmer’s death at the dawn of the digitalage. One supposes Palmer was more the populista little more Mississippiand a bit less Manhattanthan Hajdu. It strikes me that Hajdu is less than entirely enamored of one ofthe most important rock bands of the ’00s, the White Stripes, describing themin Heroes and Villains as apostmodern pastiche of ’60s blues-rock. One suspects that Palmer would havebeen Jack White’s biggest fan.