Ask Greil: June 9, 2026

Protest music, Rod Stewart, Lester Bangs, and so-called Classic Rock

The June edition of Real Life Rock Top 10 will be posted later in the month.

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Dear Greil: I have two 17-year-old students working on a podcast, trying to understand what “Classic Rock” is. Is it “white-guy music?” Is it just marketing? Is it just rock and roll? Who decides what is and isn’t?

Do you think it’s a style of music? Something else?

As GenZers, they don’t really listen to the radio, so these names don’t have much to do with radio stations for them . . . Anyway, I wonder if you would just reject the question as uselessly semantic or if you think it’s worth thinking about.

Thanks for considering. —PAT WALSH

Classic Rock is what you said: Marketing and White-Guy Music. It’s a strategic concept meant to enforce a narrow worldview and shrink an historical episode into a segment of radio programming that could compete in a fragmenting commercial landscape where Top 40—which is to say a radio republic where most people, as being exposed to and with access to the same music, could make their choices and argue about them with other people, speaking a pop lingua franca—was being replaced by an ever-more diced-and-sliced formatting of AOR, Easy Listening, Heavy Metal, R&B, Disco, and on and on in a radio landscape where people were presumed to have nothing in common and nothing to say to each other, which was also an argument about the United States, and then the world, as such. Classic Rock was invented to sell a concept to people of (mostly) a certain age to reinforce an identity that could be further mined to segment commercial choices of all sorts: in other words, if you could profile the sort of person who wanted to hear the Rolling Stones’ “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (But I Like It)” you could also—and this is before algorithms—commercially profile them in terms of residence, shopping, car ownership, and so on. To rationalize this, that meant even further segmenting, leading to such perfectly predictable phenomena as the Classic Rock Weekend programmed for Classic Rock Stations all over the country across a certain weekend where something like two or three hundred informational segments, on, for example (I will never forget this), “Stevie Nick’s Writing” (yes, I know it’s “Nicks,” someone entered it in error or didn’t know), and out of all the programmed elements, featured three on black musicians, all of whom were Jimi Hendrix.

Rock ’n’ roll as a concept and a fact, as history and practice, as lived experience and legacy, actually did exist and continues to do so. It found its first and most natural home with the invention of Top 40 radio, which in hundreds of local variations across the United States functioned as a forum, a lottery, a madhouse, and an elementary school. Thus, in a early edition of Rolling Stone, editor Jann Wenner could take up the question of the best American rock ’n’ roll band and range widely before settling on Booker T. and the M.G.s, a mixed race quartet that had its own hits and also functioned as the house band for the Stax-Volt labels in Memphis, and everybody one might presume to be reading the paper could be presumed to understand what he was talking about.

Daphne Brooks recently published, as editor, a more than 500 page book of essays, interviews, and interjections on the legacies of David Bowie and Prince. If your 17-year-old students, or anyone else, want to get a sense of what rock ’n’ roll was, what it, as a form and and idea with its own all-world brain, always wanted to be—the Platonic form that has been realized over and over and has been instantly recognized for what it is, as in the exclamation, on hearing say, __________, “That is rock ’n’ roll,” or even “Is that rock ’n’ roll?”—I’d suggest they start with them—Bowie, whose first record came out in 1967, and Prince, whose first record came out in 1978, and who both died in 2016—and then go backwards and forwards, and see what they find. Or they could look into my The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs—which could have as easily been written, by me or anybody else, including perhaps, someday, your students, about any different ten songs—and see where that takes them. And listen to echoes of what the critic and later singer Richard Meltzer once yelled in my ear at a party in Robert Christgau’s apartment sometime in the 1970s, when it seemed everybody was arguing about this band and that genre, “DON’T THEY REALIZE? IT’S ALL ROCK ’N’ ROLL!” by which he meant—what I’ve spent my life fooling around with.

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Hi Greil, I hope yours has been a swift recovery. Good thoughts are with you.

The 1965 Bob Dylan concert in Berkeley . . . with the woman directing her son to “listen to the words” during “Chimes of Freedom” . . . I thought she’d said this during “Gates of Eden”? Did she say this twice to her son during that show? Poor kid must have felt like he was at school instead of a concert.

A good portion of your May 2026 Real Life Rock column touched on the topic of protest songs. Amongst today’s troubadours attempting to document these weird times are Jesse Welles and Carsie Blanton. I was wondering if either of them have made their way across your radar.

Although he strikes me as a much less interesting version of Phil Ochs, Jesse Welles has gained some recent prominence with Grammy Award nominations, appearances on late night talk shows such as Colbert, and a duet with Joan Baez that (sort of) went viral. I’d like to like him and his songs, but I don’t. His frumpy vagabond persona feels like a tired schtick, and his topical songs leave me cold, as though he ran a list of topics, grievances, and headlines through an AI program . . . and out came a batch of unmemorable songs. I can’t imagine anything he’s written thus far will be remembered in a year or two.

Carsie Blanton is a bit more interesting and a bit more stirring. A couple of her recent songs, “The Price of Eggs” and “Everything Is Great,” led me to delve into her past albums. I like her . . . she’s got a spunk to her that’s has me taking notice, bringing to mind a cat that has its claws extended. Her songs sound as though they’re penned by someone who’s got the glint of the guillotine in her eye. A month after first hearing her, I still go back to listen again. And while that’s not exactly the same as a song lasting through the ages, it’s a start.

And while I’m not so sure any singer or song could begin to convey what it’s like to turn on the new these days, I will say that “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Black Boys on Mopeds,” and “Helpless” have been getting a lot of plays lately.

Thank you for this column (as well as the Real Life Rock column) . . . both are a balm for these troubled times. —BILLY INNES

To me these are both variations on the glories of smug. The video for “The Price of Eggs” adds truckloads of cringe.

There’s real death in “Black Boys on Mopeds” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (and think about what Bob Dylan did in that song, beyond the construction, the execution, the contribution to a then-developing conversation: he ensured that a certain person condemned to obscurity would be remembered for generations after her, that her name, in someone else’s words, would live in infamy). It cost something to make these two songs and sing them, and that cost is passed on to the listener. What is the price of eggs in that song? Nothing.

As for “Helpless”? As in Neil Young? As in the National Lampoon radio spot “The last half hour of No Neil Young Music was brought to you by . . .”?

Sorry if I’m in a bad mood today. Protest songs will do that to me. I appreciate what you say about my column. And as for “Gates of Eden” rather than “Chimes of Freedom”? Could be. It was precisely 61 years ago. I’ll never forget the incident, even if the exact parameters shift with the necessities of making an argument.

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1. I’d like to extend my prior question on books to read about the Civil War to books and other media on the ’60s Civil Rights Movement. After that I promise I won’t ask for more such recommendations here unless I have a relatable reason I can articulate. I’m aware of your admiration for Taylor Branch’s work but for now that’s all.

2. I don’t doubt you dislike the title of Richard F. Thomas’s recently revised book on Bob Dylan, but what do you make of his premise on which the book is based? —BEN MERLISS

I haven’t read many of the countless and I’m sure often essential memoirs of participants in the Civil Rights movement. One exception is Casey Hayden on the SNCC “beloved community,” in the January 1995 edition of the journal Witness, for its sense of almost Shaker-like isolation within the greater society within where the micro-society tried to exist and illuminate. There’s a sense of sardonic and pained defiance of historical dismissals of naivete that has always stayed with me. You can find it on Amazon. I would.

I haven’t read the Richard Thomas book. I was once at a conference where he began a talk on Dylan, and I knew within a minute that I’d be asleep in five so I went to listen to someone else.

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I guess you’ve seen Rod Stewart’s interaction with King Charles—“ratbag” was pretty good but what struck me was the distancing: “well done with the Americans,” as if for Stewart Donald Trump has replaced Sam Cooke as the country’s avatar.

Have you travelled abroad during what I suppose we have to call the Trump Era?

I’m a Canadian living and working in South Korea, where Lee’s presentation of the golden crown to Trump was met with a national grinding of teeth, and at the suggestion of some Korean friends I’m for the first time in my life considering wearing a Canadian flag pin when I go out in public. You know, just in case.

Do you think most Americans understand just how unpopular Trump has made them? Do they care? —STEVE O’NEILL

I haven’t had any querulous let alone hostile encounters in France, Italy, or Argentina during this cursed period—the places outside the US I’ve been during this time. It’s pretty much confined to “How can you live with that idiot?”—and it’s often blind and self-satisfied: when I was in Argentina last year they already had their own Trump in Javier Milei. It’s nothing compared to the hostility we felt in France during the Vietnam War—with the French conveniently forgetting they’d started the conflict the US took over after they turned and ran. (Never mind what was going on in Algeria and with Algerians in Paris in the same period.) So hats off to Rod as always. Why don’t people recognize that “Every Picture Tells a Story” will do as a proof not only of what a song can do but what it’s for?

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Dear Greil, Just wondered if you read Bob Spitz’s Stones biography.yet.

Also, have you heard Morrissey’s tribute to Lester Bangs on his latest CD? Best line: “This nerd hangs on your word.” —CRAIG ZELLER

I haven’t read the Bob Spitz book and never will. For two reasons: based on his Dylan biography, which I did read and did my best to convince other people not to, he’s a prurient hack from the Albert Goldman Famous Writers School, and because—especially with their hideously puffed up and embarrassingly fake last two albums—I neither need nor want to know 1,000 more pages about whoever the Rolling Stones were or are and where they’ve been and God forbid where they’re going. I’ve read and for that matter reviewed a lot of memorable books about the Rolling Stones, from Stanley Booth on the 1969 American tour and far more—it travels under different titles—to Rich Cohen’s 2017 The Sun, the Moon, and the Rolling Stones, which is alive on the page, opens doors with the right word and closes them too, and short.

Bob Seger spent a long time trying to write a song he wanted to call “Lester Knew.” He never could. I’ve always liked hearing Lester’s name in R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank’s 2018 Public Theater play How to Be a Rock Critic caught the person I knew (and it’s so sharp and witty it’d work if it were about a fictional character). But I found the Morrissey tribute unbearable—I couldn’t listen to it all the way through. And I think Lester would have felt the same. It’s that smooth, weighted tone of voice, a voice that can find and treasure grandiosity in a laundry list—go back and read Lester’s 1969 review of It’s a Beautiful Day and see if you can see any distance between that music and this song. I mean, it unmade my day. Like Bob Spitz’s writing, it made me feel unclean. So now I’m going to go walk my dog in the rain.