In the prologue to his first collection of essays, The Dyer’s Hand (1962), W.H. Auden explains why criticism is inescapably personal:

Though the pleasure which works of art give us must not be confused with other pleasures that we enjoy, it is related to all of them simply by being our pleasure and not someone else’s. All the judgments, aesthetic or moral, that we pass, however objective we try to make them, are in part a rationalization and in part a corrective discipline of our subjective wishes.

Therefore, Auden insists, as a matter of professional honesty critics should detail their “dream of Eden”—their notion, say, of a perfect day—up front so that readers will be able to judge their judgments. To that end he proposes a short questionnaire that would provide “the kind of information I should like to have myself when reading other critics,” including their preferred “Sources of Public Information” and “Public Entertainments”—in his case, respectively, “Gossip. Technical and learned periodicals but no newspapers” and “Religious Processions, Brass Bands, Opera, Classical Ballet. No movies, radio or television.” The implication is: Don’t trust critics who judge things that they have no feeling for or that are not important to them. (In Auden’s case this seems to include most forms of popular culture.) The best criticism offers a vision of the world, not only as it is but as it could be, and an invitation to share in it.

For instance, in 1968, when Ned Rorem argued in these pages for the excellence of the Beatles, the provocation was to take them seriously within a rarefied intellectual milieu, as part of the “high/low” collapse that characterized the avant-garde historically and the triumph of Pop Art in that decade:

Since pop tunes, as once performed by such singers as Billie Holiday and the Big Bands…are heard not only in nightclubs and theaters but in recitals and concerts, and since those tunes are as good as—if not better than—most ‘serious’ songs being composed today, the best cover-all term is simply song. The only sub-categories are good and bad.¹

Rorem marshals his formidable knowledge of music theory (“the minute harmonic shift on the words ‘wave of her hand,’ as surprising, yet as satisfyingly right as that in a Monteverdi madrigal like ‘A un giro sol’”), and yet, as he wryly argues for the technical brilliance undergirding the Fab Four’s unbridled verve, they end up mattering to him in the same way they mattered to millions of people then and ever since: “The Beatles are good even though everyone knows they’re good…. Our need for them is neither sociological nor new, but artistic and old, specifically a renewal, a renewal of pleasure.”

It’s no accident that Rorem arrives at this life-affirming principle in writing about pop songs. Pop is our great arena of pleasure; it is all about the swooning intensity of crushes and kisses and lust in every conceivable permutation, along with the tears and broken hearts. Perhaps that is why pop music penetrates our emotional life so thoroughly, giving voice to our collective feelings at birthdays, at weddings, at funerals, and when we dance, communally or at home alone. We play songs of erotic infatuation and fathomless heartache while walking, driving, and riding the subway, but we also hear them in bars, bookstores, and the dentist’s office; they become an ambient score to daily activities, fusing our memories into a seam of public and private experience. As Ellen Willis, the first pop music critic for The New Yorker, wrote in the liner notes to Lou Reed’s compilation Rock n’ Roll Diary, 1967–1980, “For those of us who are always confronting our own history through rock and roll, this album is more than the summation of one artist’s career; it is the spiritual record of a decade in the life.”

In 1976 Jonathan Sage was twenty-three and living in his hometown of London after graduating from Cambridge. He was studying to become a lawyer but was looking for an escape. Sensing the heat lightning of what would become punk music, he quit the law, started a fanzine called London’s Outrage, and by the next spring was chronicling the scene under the name Jon Savage in the national music newspaper Sounds, beginning with a short write-up on the Sex Pistols, a group of boys slightly younger than him but already legends beginning to implode:

The Pistols have become symbols—us against them—the songs anthems, inviolate from criticism. Just to see them is enough—it’s a bonus that they played a good set.

So ultimately, the environment was totally controlled in favour of the Pistols—no risks. I admire the media manipulation, but feel the sour taste of patronage and the exploitation of base brutality instincts. It’s too easy. The eventual problem may be—who cares?

They’re being overtaken. Fast.

Two months later, on June 7, 1977, he was on the Thames aboard a boat festooned with banners announcing the Sex Pistols’ acidic new single “God Save the Queen,” timed to Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee; the band played furiously on deck as police vessels swarmed:

Now all adrenalin is flat out—do it do it do it now now now NOW. Suddenly in “I Wanna Be Me” they get inspired and take off: “No Fun” screamed out as the police boats move in for the kill is one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll moments EVER. I mean EVER. (Think about that.)

Throughout the late 1970s Savage dispatched slangy firsthand accounts of early gigs and releases by some of the legendary bands of the era (the Clash, Cabaret Voltaire, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Joy Division) as well as publishing ideas-driven interviews with everyone from Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle to David Thomas of Pere Ubu—a solid path for a young writer accruing credibility while stockpiling invaluable primary sources. This early writing, which was typical of the golden years of rock and pop criticism from Lester Bangs and others, comes off more as the necessity of working within a highly stylized scene than as a natural inclination, and before long that first-person voice slips away. In conducting interviews Savage is sensitive to the point of self-effacement; it’s easy to understand how he moved so seamlessly inside such a volatile milieu. By the time he began publishing in the new hyper-cool monthly The Face in 1980, he was poised to become one of the preeminent music and culture writers of his generation.

Savage’s only collection of criticism, Time Travel:From the Sex Pistols to Nirvana: Pop, Media and Sexuality, 1977–96 (1997), spans the twenty years he spent tracking early punk to its avatar in grunge, parallel gangs of disaffected teens empowered by music to tear everything down. His sympathetic profile of Nirvana and his interview with Kurt Cobain—a roving, confessional, late-night talk in a NYC hotel room—became cult texts after Cobain’s death by suicide less than a year later in 1994 at age twenty-seven. Having thought deeply about the contradictions of rebellion and success, anarchy and capitalism, Savage was attuned to the impossibility of the band’s situation:

Nirvana should have been on top of the world but instead they freaked out. Part of the problem had to do with the culture from which they came, which had celebrated the outsider—“Loser,” read an early Sub Pop T-shirt slogan—and which was fiercely anti-major label, pro-independent. One of Nirvana’s first acts on joining Geffen Records was to print a T-shirt which read “Flower-sniffin’ kitty-pettin’ baby-kissin’ corporate rock whores.”

He saw that there was no way out but still hoped they’d find one.

The fascination of reading a critic’s work over time and then again in a collection is seeing the ideas gather steam in accumulated observations until they burst forth in new arguments, sometimes much later. Critics learn by working out their thoughts in dialogue with a public, testing the balance between their natural gifts and limitations, which eventually results in a unique voice with its own delights, preoccupations, and worldview. Often that work involves defining what the object of criticism is: a song, an album, an artist’s life, an image, a persona, a book, a jacket, a film, a political protest, a social moment. In Savage’s writing there is surprisingly little actual description of music; instead he is increasingly concerned with the complex relations within a band and between the band and its audience. By the time he set out to write his authoritative England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond (1991), the book must have appeared to him as his own personal Excalibur waiting in the stone of the recent past, all his aesthetic sensibilities and philosophical questions, not to mention his life experiences, lodged there for him alone.

Focusing on the Sex Pistols’ explosive rise and fall, he picks up the story in 1971 but narrates most closely, almost month by month, the period from 1975 to 1979, as they became the figureheads of a youth insurgency against postwar British life:

The inevitable condemnations of Punk reflected its contradictory desires and its stupidities, but they were couched in terms so biased and based on an implicit definition of social acceptability that was so restrictive, that it was easy to reject them. If you did so, the whole thing collapsed like a pack of cards. If you were a Punk, you suddenly found yourself a scapegoat, an outsider. This realization—part delicious, part terrifying—radicalized a small but significant part of a generation.

It is precisely because of this embattled euphoria, at the intersection of alienation and belonging, that punk has proliferated in various forms around the world—improbably? paradoxically?—for the past half-century.

Central to the Sex Pistols’ story was their mesmeric, impressive, yet strangely unappealing manager, Malcolm McLaren, who was routinely described in the press as the Faginesque (with all the antisemitism that implies) mastermind of that gang of street boys ten years his junior. He and his then romantic and creative partner, Vivienne Westwood, were a visionary couple who seemed preternaturally attuned to the workings of the expanding media industry. There was also the charismatic front man, John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, at personal and artistic cross-purposes with the rest of the band. Even as the Sex Pistols turned against one another, they sporadically united against McLaren’s machinations as he leveraged multiple contracts and major labels to a fevered pitch of publicity, committing the group to appearances, tours, and movie projects with little regard for their mental or financial—not to mention artistic—well-being. In Savage’s hands the tale becomes Shakespearean, a cut-up history, comedy, and—with the 1978 murder of Nancy Spungen, the girlfriend of the Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious, and then the overdose of Vicious himself in 1979—utter tragedy.

England’s Dreaming includes italicized excerpts from Savage’s diaries (some stretches of which appeared in his articles for Sounds), but a great strength of the book is that it is not a memoir. These passages reflect public, not private experience, and Savage as a character hardly appears; while the writing conveys deep tenderness for all involved, it retains the distance necessary to try to see clearly, especially when accounts and circumstances seem to be adding up differently for different people. Savage’s narrative, crisp, limpid, and quick-moving, combines the feeling of the moment with the vantage of hindsight. He effortlessly incorporates political and social histories while encompassing formal analyses of T-shirts and slogans as much as concerts and records:

McLaren and Westwood had researched the history of postwar youth subcultures in their various shops at 430 King’s Road, but for the Sex Pistols they had thrown up all these styles—Ted, Mod, Zoot, Rocker, Skinhead—into the air and collaged them together with rips, safety-pins and sexual provocations. As these styles began to unravel within popular culture, pop’s linear time was shattered forever: there would be no more unified “movements,” but tribes, as pop time became forever multiple, Postmodern.

Over the next twenty years Savage brought out a number of doorstop-size histories, opening the implications of England’s Dreaming in several directions. First he coedited the mammoth anthology The Faber Book of Pop (1995, with the playwright and novelist Hanif Kureishi), which rescues reviews, fan letters, screeds, profiles, interviews from otherwise ephemeral fanzines, and obscure or inaccessible music papers, along with excerpts from novels and memoirs, from 1942 up to 1994. It remains a fascinating time capsule of the moment in culture just before the dawn of social media.

More than a decade passed before the appearance of Savage’s sprawling Teenage: The Creation of Youth (2007), which sought the foundations of youth culture beyond the conventional narrative of American and British postwar prosperity and the birth of the “teen” as a consumer force, tracing its roots from Romanticism to the Jazz Age as it was enabled by the historical shifts of industrialization across Europe and the US. This was continued by 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded (2015), which fleshed out the major forces of postwar style and music, going through a full year of releases from the most mainstream dreck to its countercultural underbelly, everything from SSgt. Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets” to the Velvet Underground and Nico’s “Venus in Furs,” essentially setting the stage for the events of England’s Dreaming.

In 1982 Savage interviewed Marc Almond, the singer of Soft Cell, whose swooning synth pop version of “Tainted Love” had been a huge hit, and he asked about the fetish imagery in the band’s onstage personas, the sexual ambiguity of its lyrics, and Almond’s discomfort at being alternately cast as a heartthrob and castigated as a “poof” in the media. There is a sense of solidarity. Savage then asks directly, “Are you gay?” Almond replies with everything but yes:

I’m…experimental. I don’t think…I’m not…OK, so I’m not into politics or making stands, you know, right? I’ve had girlfriends—permanent girlfriends—and maybe other things as well. And that’s what I’m saying because if I start saying I am I am, then I’m making stands…and also, living in Leeds, in a place like that you don’t go and make stands like that if you want to go on living there….

Do you see what I mean? It’s not that I’m chickening out, and saying I refuse to…do you understand?

Savage says that he does: “It’s just a shame…I do think that our society’s attitude towards sex in general is disgusting, as opposed to its attitude towards violence, say, and could do with some re-education.” The conversation moves on to the constraints placed on artists’ freedom by their management and by a fickle and potentially conservative audience. Almond did not “officially” come out until 1987. The interview is painful in retrospect but does not feel exploitative in the manner of tabloid gotchas. Perhaps this delicate balance of revealing and concealing is due to what Savage does not say—that he, too, is gay.

This fact partly accounts for his writing’s sustained attention to outsiderness, rebellion, and the layered signifiers of sexuality, especially the kind of flamboyance that parades in plain sight, signaling simultaneously in different directions to distinct sensibilities. For instance, his first article for The Face in 1980 was “David Bowie: The Gender Bender.” Two years later, these ideas were further developed in “Androgyny: Confused Chromosomes and Camp Followers” in which he surveyed the slick stars of the new wave and insisted that

there is something, as usual, going on behind pop’s latest penchant for dressing sideways: what it is, is nothing less than a restatement of popular music’s power, however oblique, to inform and comment upon the relationship between the dominant—what we are told to feel—and the subconscious—what many of us are actually feeling—at the same time as it shifts units.

This is not a straightforward proposition, intermingled as it is with marketing and mass media, and he continued, “Pop’s attitude to sex, as to other things, is contradictory and confused: part knowing, part deliberately innocent, part libertarian, part repressive.”

The essay is an embryonic thesis statement for Savage’s most recent and most ambitious book, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture from the Margins to the Mainstream. In its brief introduction, the only section in the first person, Savage writes that although his punk scene offered liberation from conformity, “homosexuality in general was rarely discussed”:

When I went to San Francisco in early autumn 1978, I interviewed the pioneering synth punk group the Screamers, two of whose three members were gay. We talked about technology and the souring of punk rock, but about our mutual homosexuality, not a word…. I wish we had all been more open then, but that wasn’t the time, for me at least.

The book’s premise is so basic that it’s almost axiomatic: pop is about pleasure and youth and freedom, which means it has always dealt explicitly with sex, sexuality, and gender expression. The implicit provocation, in the scope of his previous work, is setting up the emergence of the teen and the queer as twinned identities, a coeval evolution of social, political, and consumer categories.

Starting with Little Richard, the incandescent genius of what would become rock and roll who used his music to proselytize alternately gay sexand Jesus Christ (as described in his hilarious, deeply conflicted, recently reissued “authorized” biography by Charles White),² Savage bounces between the UK and the US, primarily London and New York (with detours to San Francisco and Los Angeles), through about twenty-five years of popular culture, encompassing the rise of the gay rights movement, glam rock to disco, and ends with the transcendent falsetto of Sylvester in 1979, just before the onset of the AIDS epidemic.³The Secret Public charts its path at intervals—1955, 1961, 1967, 1973, and 1978—around a handful of emblematic figures: James Dean, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, and Janis Joplin, to name a few, already subjects of myriad biographies, documentaries, memoirs, biopics, and reams of scholarly studies and popular accounts. Similarly, mountains of historical and theoretical work that has been done on LGBTQ rights in that period—studies of the legal and political path to decriminalization of sodomy and obscenity, the Stonewall Riots, Harvey Milk, etc.—get condensed and recounted. Devotees of any one of these subjects will find little new information here. Unique, however, is the way Savage synthesizes and sets up connections across this panorama, using his eye for details from his half-century of interviews, his acute attention to ephemera, and his feel for the nuance of costume and the more transient elements of style.

Savage’s strength is an expansive interdisciplinarity: his ability to read a magazine cover, a brocaded coat, and a performance on a television special in light of one another. Take his discussion of Maureen Duffy’s The Microcosm (1966),a novel based on interviews with denizens of the Gateways, the lesbian bar in London frequented by Dusty Springfield, herself a habitué of the scene. Duffy’s book captures the finely wrought realities of queer women at a particular historical moment, their dreams and desires, and the external and internalized prejudice they were trying to sort out together as they danced to pop music in a dim room that was a space of liberty, however transient or circumscribed. Savage’s analysis lends dimension to Springfield’s conflicted experience of her sexuality, her public persona, the “open secret” within the industry of her relationship with her live-in girlfriend, and her ambivalent “coming out” to the Evening Standard in 1970: “I know that I’m as perfectly capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy. More and more people feel that way and I don’t see why I shouldn’t.” The sophistication of The Secret Public is that the aperture is widened beyond the biographies of various pop stars, and it is alive to the way their work was grasped by nascent queer communities, so that the phenomenon of a diva like Grace Jones is understood as the product of an adamantly queer subculture regardless of her personal romantic life.

Savage’s early observation of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood surely influenced the book’s important leitmotif: that many people behind the scenes—the ones who were making the clothes, shooting the photographs, writing the copy, and editing the magazines—were homosexual, infusing the sound and image of the most heterosexual heartthrobs with queer allure. This is true even in less obvious cases, like the early impresarios Joe Meek and Larry Parnes, the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, and the Who’s Kit Lambert, as well as the more flagrant ones like Robert Stigwood, the mastermind behind the disco sensations the Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever, who propelled music that had undeniably originated in the Black and brown gay subcultures into the white, straight mainstream. Savage’s achievement is to simply lay out these many facts, leaving their implications glinting on the surface like the best pop music. (In that spirit, I’ll note that both W.H. Auden and Ned Rorem were also gay, and as in Savage’s narrative, there is some tantalizing sense that that has something to do with their defense of pleasure.)

Important critics are often identified with a specific artist or moment, as though it were tailor-made for them to wrestle with publicly, while their underlying questions are reflected in and complicated by their subject rather than answered. There’s a certain symbiosis and chance that is somehow beyond choice. That’s partly shared historical circumstance: critics often have special insight into the work of their own generation, as well as slightly different vantages on the half-generation on either side of them, and perhaps for this reason, as much as his own inherent interests, Savage has wisely stayed with the period and culture that formed him, leaving younger critics to grapple with subsequent waves of pop music in the twenty-first century.

Still, there is always room for rethinking. In The Secret Public the material of England’s Dreaming is returned to and reframed, this time using the gay filmmaker Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978) as a counterpoint to the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen.” The movie cuts across impressionistic episodes, with Queen Elizabeth I magically transposed to the punk demimonde of 1970s London and cameos by Adam Ant, Jayne County, Siouxsie Sioux, and others. It provoked hostility from all sides: “Jubilee was both accurate and ambivalent. A complex, contradictory film, it was hardly designed to appeal to the punk audience that it simultaneously parodied and celebrated.” Savage argues that punk was enabled by its experimentation with taboo sexual expression, yet it was also bound by its stunted adolescent male sexuality and hostile to its queerness, thereby arriving at a paradox: “Punk began to express a kind of puritanism.” Jarman’s film captures that impasse.

Savage recognized his driving critical concerns early: first with the punk scene of his own youth, and again with his interrogation of how his own queerness was cultivated by his experience of pop. The Secret Public provides a backdrop for the interviewer’s own predicament as well as the pop star’s in that stuttering moment with Marc Almond in 1982: “I’m…experimental. I don’t think…I’m not…” He concludes the introduction to The Secret Public by saying that

the real play of pop was that it had the ability to liberate everyone: not just gay men, lesbians and trans people, but young heterosexual men and women who didn’t accept the standard definitions offered, indeed imposed, by the dominant culture. It wasn’t just about freedom for gay people; it was about freedom for all.

In recent interviews, and in reflections over the years, Savage returns to that ecstasy of first hearing Velvet Underground records as a seventeen-year-old, which inexplicably set the course of his life and work: “Without the Velvet Underground I would never have: visited New York; read Delmore Schwartz; heard LaMonte Young and Terry Riley; perhaps even become a writer.”

Maybe for this reason Lou Reed holds a singular place in The Secret Public, at the crossroads of the Warhol scene, the shiny shapeshifting of Bowie (who coproduced Reed’s album Transformer), and the grittier punk scene in New York and London:

Born and raised on Long Island, Reed in particular fitted into the transgressive atmosphere of the Factory. He was inspired by the outcast writers of the 1950s and early ’60s: William Burroughs, James Purdy, Hubert Selby and John Rechy, who were describing, often in terse, demotic prose, a recognisable, empirical reality—drug addiction, male prostitution and transvestite and gay life, at a time when all were illegal and completely marginalised and despised. Reed’s project was to match these unflinching aesthetics to the pop lyric.

For example, Reed’s famous track “Walk on the Wild Side” gives exquisitely compressed biographies of the trans superstars of Warhol’s Factory, beginning with Holly Woodlawn: “Holly came from Miami FLA/hitchhiked her way across the USA/plucked her eyebrows on the way,/shaved her legs and then he was a she.” Queer audiences saw themselves and one another in this record, and a way of being together was organized around its existence. Savage notes that the reviewer for Gay News identified another song from Transformer, “Make Up,” as “the best Gay Lib song I have heard.”

The musician Ezra Furman’s book on Transformer is evidence of the ongoing relevance of this pop album from fifty years ago. “Lou Reed is my favorite gay icon,” she writes. “Calling him that is a bit of an awkward fit, since he got married three times (to women) and can be heard on one of his live albums saying, ‘I’d rather have cancer than be a faggot.’”⁴ A trans person herself, Furman argues that it is precisely these ambiguities and contradictions that make it vital queer art: “It turns out to be an album about total freedom, a rejection of all terms and categories, a declaration of independence from anything and everything you thought you had to say about it.” Like The Secret Public, her study could only be the work of a true fan, someone who saw something in an artwork that saved her, that offered a future, of wresting intense pleasure out of dull pain.

Lou Reed died in 2013. Today you can drop the needle on Transformer or press play on whatever format you want, and it’s all still there, exactly the way it was in 1972. The song “Perfect Day” starts by listing the simple delights you might enjoy with a lover—drinking sangria in the park, seeing a movie, going home together—an icy song of smoldering feeling. Reed’s voice is close to the mic, low and flat and spoken conspiratorially right into your ear above the simple piano and restrained drums, until Mick Ronson’s strings swell with the chorus; the voice opens up, expands, and echoes as though into a landscape: “Oh it’s such a perfect day/I’m glad I spent it with you.” Crushing, that feeling, so beautiful it’s sad because life is fleeting and emotions are fickle and people are more complex than is good for us—and you know exactly what he means; it is mapped onto your own experience, in your heart. “Perfect Day” ends repeating what could be a threat or a promise: “You’re going to reap just what you sow. You’re going to reap just what you sow.” It’s haunting, and it might as well be a statement about the operations of criticism, or our relationships with works of art, or pop culture, or life itself—you’re going to reap just what you sow.