ABSTRACT
The sheen of sophistication amounts to the kiss of death in pop music, and the impulse to overturn conventional categories of taste and tact governs the methodology at work in the instinctual narrative of popular music history. All its proponents advocate the upending of the propositions of the intellect and the unwrapping of all the impulses that take over when the energies customarily kept under wraps take off. Formal complexity and demonstrable originality take a back seat to recycling and rearticulation, as the novelty of a particular riff or rhythm matters less than the ultimate audience acceptance of the material. Offering Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Lester Bangs, Nik Cohn and George Melly among its examples, this chapter explains how the instinctual narrative disdains all pretenses to sophistication and elevates whatever the critical establishment condemns as trash.
