For a Rock Aesthetic “It is quite pathetic to read essay by Wilfred Mellers, Ned Rorem or Tony Palmer concerned with comparing the Lennon-McCartney songbook to Schubert or Poulenc, as if work in the genre of ‘song’ could have any aesthetic value in the midth-20th century, and as if such a conception has any place in the rock aesthetic, even for Lennon an McCartney themselves.”: Marxist criticism of pop aesthetics from the early 1970s. Hardcore stuff, I must warn you, though the intellectual end of the readership may find some stuff to ponder here even as they shake their heads at the inflexibility of it all. V. rude to, and quite accurate about, Nik Cohn.