Are You Experienced?

National Review Online, August 27, 2000

© Andrew Stuttaford

"Turn left on Mercer and drive for a few blocks. What you are looking for is the blob at the bottom of the Space Needle." My friend Steve may not be an architect, but he knows a blob when he sees one. A few years ago Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen asked Frank Gehry, the creator of the Guggenheim's extraordinary Bilbao extension, to build him a "swoopy" building for Seattle's new rock 'n' roll museum. What he got was a blob. It sits, shining in its multicolored aluminum skin, a crushed jelly-mold duomo. Its campanile, the Space Needle, is all Jetsons geometry, the product of a time when we thought the 21st century would be straight lines, monorails, and Mission Control order. Now that we are arriving there, we believe in a crumpled, curvier, softer future, more Barbarella than Bauhaus, an age, it seems, when gee-whiz museums feature not atom science, but Atomic Rooster.

As blobs go it's impressive, but I'm not sure that Mr. Gehry's new building is quite as innovative as Paul Allen might have hoped. In the aftermath of Bilbao, the Seattle museum looks suspiciously like a retread, a scrunched-up re-run of the earlier Spanish triumph. Maybe this is only justice, as the idea of a rock 'n' roll museum is not exactly novel either. As miffed folk in Ohio will be pointing out, they've had one in Cleveland for a few years now. Its architect, I. M. Pei, was also associated with a dramatic extension to an existing museum, in his case a pyramid at the Louvre. Mr. Pei's construction is meant to be reminiscent of a turntable, Frank Gehry's is said to be inspired by one of Jimi Hendrix's smashed guitars. The two also share something else much more significant: the problem that rock music is a difficult subject for a museum.

Rock music, any music, is about the moment, the moment that may become a memory. It's that rush as an old familiar riff slides out of the speaker, or the dawning excitement one minute, two minutes into a song, when you realize that this new band is very, very good. And it's nostalgia too. There's a sweet pleasure in listening to those tunes that take you back to your first kiss (Rod Stewart, I'm afraid), university days, a trip abroad, or even that one glorious, delirious night in a Tennessee bar. It's the memories, the associations, and, of course, the sheer joy of the music itself that count. Anything else, like the packaging we used to have on CDs, is just so much clutter. Sure, as VH1's current programming shows, the story of rock 'n' roll can be interesting, but its artifacts, unfortunately, are not. Be warned: The Seattle museum has 80,000. It's the Hard Rock Cafe, but with less emphasis on the cheeseburgers.

There are guitars, hundreds of them, some in pieces (thanks, Jimi!), but most are intact, battered, shiny, painted, Gibson, Fender, and Les Paul, the guitars of the famous, the guitars of the obscure. Near the entrance, there is even a sculptured cascade of guitars. Silent, all these instruments are dull, lifeless totems. Like the stuffed animals in our more depressing natural-history museums, there's not a lot of point to them. It's the same way with the museum's prize architectural exhibit, preserved like the Temple of Dendur in New York's Met, the wooden arch that once led to Moe's Mo' Roc' n Cafe (Seattle, 1994-97) or the tatty finery of bygone rock stars (Janis's feather boa, Heart's sort-of-medieval gowns). I mean, who cares? Only the posters and handbills, visual art of a sort, are really still worth a look, miniature reflections of their respective eras: simple text from the plain Jane 1950s, Haight-Ashbury rococo, the angry sub-Constructivism of punk.

Luckily, however, you get more for your $19.95 than this. Sensing, perhaps, that these exhibits might not quite make it into the Tate, Mr. Allen and his team seem hesitant about calling their blob a museum. No, formally, it is an "experience," the "Experience Music Project" (EMP). The name, of course, is a tribute to Jimi Hendrix, a Seattle native and an idol of the software billionaire's, but it also reflects the fact that this display is (probably inevitably, in a project funded by the new economy) "interactive." Now, when I was a boy an "interactive" (not that we used the word) museum exhibit meant pressing some button on a dingy control panel. A number of bulbs would light up, and you would know just a little bit more about the circulation of the blood or the habitats of some dreary animal. Or you wouldn't. Normally several of the bulbs were out, and to your surprise you would discover that no corpuscle ever reached the foot or that the rabbit was extinct.

We have moved on. The EMP features a "sound lab" which "invites your inner musician to come out and play." We all have one, apparently. My inner musician joined the crowd pounding the "Jam-O-Drum" (it generates rhythms and colors) a few times and made a fool of itself on some machine designed to show that any idiot can play the first few chords of Louie, Louie within a few minutes. Not this idiot, apparently.

The inner egomaniac, meanwhile, could be tempted by "On Stage," a high-tech version of the air guitar you used to play (admit it). The visitor is taken to perform in a virtual arena "complete with smoke, hot lights and screaming fans." The instruments are programmed so that even an novice can "play," and "play" the novices did. Those standing in the real and very long line outside could watch their virtual show on closed- circuit TV.

Then there's MEG, the "Museum Exhibit Guide," an extraordinary upgrade of the battered cassette players that are most galleries' "audio tour." MEG is a device that looks a little like a tricorder from the old Star Trek. Point it at many of the exhibits and a menu will pop up, offering much, much more detailed information, often in the shape of oral history and, crucially, snatches of song. It does its best to bring those dead guitars, and the EMP, to life. Rock 'n' roll nerds can even bookmark areas of particular fascination and, using the ticket I.D. number, download yet more material onto their PCs when they get home to their darkened bedrooms.

Technologically, it's spectacular. It's also spectacularly stupid.

All these megabytes to research Megadeth? Conservatives will, correctly, see the EMP as yet more evidence of a dumbed-down society, but they should get some comfort from the fact that in its vaguely new-agey way, the EMP is a squeaky-clean, family-values sort of place. Much of the interior may be rough and unfinished — an attempt, we're told, to recreate the feel of a rock venue — but it fails. This is the rock in Norman Rockwell. There's no spilled beer, vomit, or smell of reefer. It's "smoke-free." Parents and children wander round together, bland in their khaki shorts and pale polos, checking out the B*tthole Surfers' memorabilia together. The heart of the building, its "gathering place [and] personification," a cavernous space, 85 feet tall at its highest, is even described as a church, the "Sky Church." (Well, I did say new-agey.) EMP is also patriotic — British music hardly rates a mention. Those Beatles will never catch on.

Ultimately, EMP is absurd, of course, a ludicrous allocation of $240 million, but so what? There's no need to worry about that. It was Paul Allen's money, his to spend how he wanted, a great, glorious self-indulgence, his reward to himself for entrepreneurial success. And yes, his museum may be a poor tribute to rock 'n' roll, but as an advertisement for the wild energy of the free market, it's right up there, right at the top of the charts.