The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made.

• Author: Weisberg, Jacob

Everything you never wanted to know about rock and roll.

The moment you begin to analyze rock, you lay yourself open to the charge of taking something that's supposed to be fun way too seriously. Whether it's Allan Bloom linking Mick Jagger's Dionysian revel to the decline of Western civilization in The Closing of the American Mind, or Greil Marcus applying Theodor Adorno to the Sex Pistols in Lipstick Traces, critics who dissect pop tunes too fervently always seem to miss not only the point but the pleasures. Nothing is less appropriate to the unselfconsciousness of America's great cultural innovation than the high dudgeon it inspires in certain of its academic hangers-on. Lighten up, you want to say. It's only rock and roll.

In books on Bruce Springsteen and The Who, as well in his writings in Rolling Stone and elsewhere, Dave Marsh has been as guilty as anyone of this failure to let it be. A critic's critic, he bears a special re- sponsibility for the vapid, pretentious tone that has infected rock reviewers at alternative papers and music magazines around the country. Whenever some trendy bore asserts that a new rap song is a "definitive and infectious cry, of pain from the viscera of Reagan's promised land," he is mouthing the frothy rock-cant developed by the likes of Dave Marsh.

Marsh himself remains pop's master obscurantist. His new book* offers some gems of inscrutable prose: Marvin Gaye's version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" distills 400 years of paranoia and talking drum gossip into 3 minutes and 15 seconds of anguished soul-searching." Led Zepplin's Whole Lotta Love," "becomes an essence of grunge, a ragged, nasty projection of male hormonal anguish, that's as dangerous if it's feigned as it is if it's real." When he listens to The Wind," a 1954 single by some band called Nolan Strong and the Diablos, Marsh hears "the wimp-perfection of mid-eighties Michael Jackson" and feels "spooked and confirmed." The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1,001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, is a massive compendium of such piffle-in excelsis, as the author himself might have it. Rarely do these "pseudy" adjectival phrases convey much more than a sense of "I like this a lot."

Part of what's funny about Marsh's book is the surgical precision of the rankings that accompany this quackery. Pop culture always seems to inspire list-making (So what are your 10 greatest movies of 1989, Gene?), but Marsh has managed to produce a self-parody of the whole...