Buckingham, McVie gave us Rumours worth spreading
By Shaun Cullen
February 22, 2005 in Voices
I moved west this past year. Not very far west, but west enough to
get me thinking West. Ever hear of Frederick Jackson Turner? In
1893, he delivered a speech out here on the Midway during the
World's Columbian Exhibition on "The Significance of the Frontier in
Amerikan [sic] History." His thesis on the role of the frontier, the
Amerikan's unrelenting drive toward the West, structured much
academic and popular thought on Amerikan consciousness in the
century just past. As songwriter Phil Ochs put it: "The world began
in Eden and ended in Los Angeles." He should have said Hanoi.

Some ears listen to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours and all they hear is
cocaine and divorce. Placed at the end of Turner's frontier
narrative, I hear the sound of 20th-century history imploding. And
cocaine. And divorce. Along the Tet Offensive event horizon of "Gold
Dust Woman," I hear Amerikan culture's solipsistic reflection of its
eminence frozen cryogenically in commodity form and its reification.
Never Mind the Bollocks was only eight months away. John Lydon's
last stand at Winterland, 10.

Of course, this is only one way of listening to this album, and one
way of looking at history. It's probably bad historiography at that,
but it's a fun game for me to play with Rumours. Rumours needs
playing with, because there's clearly something special about an
album this gray from front to back spinning so much gold. Why did
this album, as dark as the blackest vinyl, sell more of said vinyl
than any album prior, and why does it occupy so many record
collections only to be disavowed?

Perhaps the answer is that Rumours is by turns rock's most
optimistic and most cynical album, and, in that role, it is perhaps
too perfect. Consider "Don't Stop" and "Go Your Own Way," a chimera
that constitutes an inscrutable magnum of "love music," even more
shocking given the phantasmagoric commercial heights to which it
ascended. Although most people don't believe it until they hear the
Mac's follow-up album, Tusk, Lindsay Buckingham was the only true
heir to the Brian Wilson/Phil Spector crown of studio perfection in
the 1970s. Yet his sunshine pop was like aftershave through a Brita
filter, and you realize there was Syd Barrett in it all along while
Brian Wilson was heroin-catatonic in the pool house.

On my favorite track, "You Make Loving Fun," Buckingham teamed with
Christine McVie—my vote for most underrated songwriter of the '70s—
to produce a post-Vietnam track hermetically sealed against Irony.
It's the last bastion of electric piano, windchimes, and girl-boy
harmonies before the fall. I hear the frontier in this track as I do
in all of Rumours, and it is the frontier of '60s sunshine ambushed
by the cocaine-savage enemy within.

Rumours's greatness lies in the fact that, in spite of this
struggle, it still ends up somewhere in the middle of the cultural
field. Nevertheless, hipsters ignore it, because they dwell in an
aesthetic realm that really only cares for the fringes. Rumours
embodies rock's final frontier and if one truly hopes to find Truth
in Beauty on her sojourn from Napalm Death to Chingy, she must stop
and listen to the sticky sweet background radiation—the Bacharachs,
Carpenters, and Fleetwood Macs—that hold a musical universe of such
diversity together. Paired with the Pistols, Fleetwood Mac
constitutes the Brahmic essence of popular music and thus the money
system itself. Your parents own it; why shouldn't you?
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