#39 - Pyramid Scheme
Russell J. Reising wrote an intriguing review of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Experience Music Project a few years ago: "The Secret Stories of Rock and Roll: Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Seattle's Experience Music Project," American Quarterly 53, 3 (September 2001). He argued that EMP outshined the Rockhall as a museum devoted to the difficult, perhaps impossible, task of representing rock's vernacular power in a canonized, official form.
More on EMP in a moment, but after a visit to the Rockhall this summer, I have a slightly different take: the Rockhall is a beautiful failure because, perversely, in its absurd effort to institutionalize rock, it hints at rock's subversive energies.
The Rockhall is corporate. As you climb up the ramps in I. M. Pei's glass pyramid, you eventually reach boardroom views of Lake Erie. But the meat of the museum is in the basement, fittingly. There, we get a tour of rock's webs of connections and links, cracklings and rumblings, but they are buried deep in the core of American consumer capitalism. True, you have to empty your wallet to get access to them, but then, rock has always partly been about access denied or gained at a price.
The other place where rock's energies lurk is at the top of the Rockhall, in the attic, another site in the corporate pyramid where rock festers and grows. Here, in a small room, another exhibition is housed. When I was there, the dresses of the Supremes were on display -- sparkling and haunted.
The museum also exhibits rock's death wish: we get a relic of the plane in which Otis Redding crashed and died, as well as the accident report from Madison, Wisconsin, for instance. Various other weird, dark obsessions and fetishes lurk among the corporate celebration of rock.
EMP, by contrast, captures another dimension, another level, of rock. It presents the participatory spheres of rock life: the spaces not of passive spectatorship, but of involved scene-making.
Instead of an imperial pyramid, the building is a Frank Gehry blob: purple and whimsical, next to a carnival ground and the Space Needle in downtown Seattle, with a space-age train shooting through its two bulbous wings. With the EMP, we get a playful amoeba instead of Pei's hierarchical Cleveland tomb.
Of course, EMP is also firmly within American consumer capitalism, funded by Paul Allen's Microsoft millions. It also costs a wallet-full to enter. But at EMP, technologically-guided, one can create a dance track, make a video, view the 'zines and vernacular artwork of rock and roll. There is a participatory nature to the place. Experiencing music here is about engaging in creativity, doing something, making something. It's not anti-consumerist, but it represents a different approach to life within the commercial music-sphere.
As Reisling noticed in his article, what's interesting is the contrast between the Rockhall and EMP, two institutions that represent and embody different aspects, approaches, levels, modes of rock music culture.
17 December 2004