What Is It All For?
Friends, I have been looking at my pile over there, the rack full of plastic and vinyl and contemplating again. I have approximately 1050 titles over there, averaging 45 minutes a piece... that's 47250 minutes [787.5 hrs, give or take] of music. To hear every one of my albums end to end I would need JUST UNDER 33 days. If I did it like a job and just dedicated myself to it 8 hours a day, I would need just over 98 days [19.69 weeks considering a 5 day work week]. I'd like to know how much it weighs, but that would be too much math for one day...
Anyway, what is it all for? Am I just hoarding these pieces of plastic the way other people keep matchbooks and momentos? How much of this can I do without? What am I holding on to to keep for the one day I make a tape [and those days may be coming to an end; I am contemplating a DVD player for the truck as my faceplate just lost the spring for the EJECT button... but it's been a tough old player ever since they tried to yank it out two July's ago...] and need Ted Nugen't Wango Tango or Ric Ocasek's Pink Flag Joe or drivin 'n' cryin's Scared But Smarter? The stuff I love is all ready burnt into the synapses of my brain... I can truly 'hear' Television's Marquee Moon and Superchunk's The Animal Has Left It's Shell and the 'Mats' Bastards of Young in my head.
What is it for? Why am I holding onto all this? I think about Michael who's hauled racks and racks of records all over the country, probably now more and more piles of CDs, but he keeps the old vinyl there... is it just a nostalgia of the fun of bringing home a recortd and popping it on for the first time? Discovering things like Public Animal #9 on Alice Cooper's Schools Out [sorry if that reference touches a nerve Michael, I know it still hurts...] or Bring It On Home on Led Zeppelin II or a Johnny Winter or Rory Gallagher record, Ron Wood's I've Got My Own Album to Do, things you'd NEVER hear on the radio?
I know when I'd find something new I'd try to buy or tape everything I could get my hands on so I could know the artist's work, which has lead to some disappointments like Rory Gallagher's catalog after Against the Grain or The Who By Numbers or Hot Tuna's Hoppkorv. Still, considering the amount of hours logged trying to find the next song to blow my socks off, the amount of just total SHIT I have found is surprisingly low.
Am I just at the point again where I am ready to trade it in again? Am I ready to see what I can really live without? Have I reached a saturation point with my heroes where I don't need ALL the Stones albums, all the Pat Metheny, all the ... well I don't know. You fill in the blanks. Can I drop 200 albums and 50 Cds and not feel anything? Well, I can drop them and feel the pain some later day when I go looking for Ron Wood 1234 for a song or Brian Setzer's The Knife Feels Like Justice...
Am I just going crazy?
I jump on my beloved Michael for being the 'elitist completist' for buying every album by every band he likes and getting every collection for he has like the Stones' Satisfaction on five different CDs, not counting all the live ones. I am trying to avoid that trap. I bought a great Heart collection, do I still need Dog and Butterfly just for Cook With Fire or Mistral Wind? Do I need both Golden Smogs when I only listen to one? Do I need the Goo Goo Dolls last one? [Well, it wasn't BAD...] Am I just hitting a wall?
Sunday, November 14, 2004
From My Friend Amy:
I know I'm picking an argument here, Chaz, but Christ... I gotta say it:
I don't necessarily agree with his taste in music, but I agree with the point he's making 100%.
The Rap Against RockismBy KELEFA SANNEH
New York TimesOctober 31, 2004
BAD news travels fast, and an embarrassing video travels even faster. By last Sunday morning, one of the Internet's most popular downloads was the hours-old 60-second .wmv file of Ashlee Simpson on "Saturday Night Live." As she and her band stood onstage, her own prerecorded vocals - from the wrong song - came blaring through the speakers, and it was too late to start mouthing the words. So she performed a now-infamous little jig, then skulked offstage, while the band (were a few members smirking?) played on. One of 2004's most popular new stars had been exposed as. ...
As what, exactly? The online verdict came fast and harsh, the way online verdicts usually do. A typical post on her Web site bore the headline, "Ashlee you are a no talent fraud!" After that night, everyone knew that Jessica Simpson's telegenic sister was no rock 'n' roll hero - she wasn't even a rock 'n' roll also-ran. She was merely a lip-synching pop star.
Music critics have a word for this kind of verdict, this knee-jerk backlash against producer-powered idols who didn't spend years touring dive bars. Not a very elegant word, but a useful one. The word is rockism, and among the small but extraordinarily pesky group of people who obsess over this stuff, rockism is a word meant to start fights. The rockism debate began in earnest in the early 1980's, but over the past few years it has heated up, and today, in certain impassioned circles, there is simply nothing worse than a rockist.
A rockist isn't just someone who loves rock 'n' roll, who goes on and on about Bruce Springsteen, who champions ragged-voiced singer-songwriters no one has ever heard of. A rockist is someone who reduces rock 'n' roll to a caricature, then uses that caricature as a weapon. Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.
Over the past decades, these tendencies have congealed into an ugly sort of common sense. Rock bands record classic albums, while pop stars create "guilty pleasure" singles. It's supposed to be self-evident: U2's entire oeuvre deserves respectful consideration, while a spookily seductive song by an R&B singer named Tweet can only be, in the smug words of a recent VH1 special, "awesomely bad."
Like rock 'n' roll itself, rockism is full of contradictions: it could mean loving the Strokes (a scruffy guitar band!) or hating them (image-conscious poseurs!) or ignoring them entirely (since everyone knows that music isn't as good as it used to be). But it almost certainly means disdaining not just Ms. Simpson but also Christina Aguilera and Usher and most of the rest of them, grousing about a pop landscape dominated by big-budget spectacles and high-concept photo shoots, reminiscing about a time when the charts were packed with people who had something to say, and meant it, even if that time never actually existed. If this sounds like you, then take a long look in the mirror: you might be a rockist.
Countless critics assail pop stars for not being rock 'n' roll enough, without stopping to wonder why that should be everybody's goal. Or they reward them disproportionately for making rock 'n' roll gestures. Writing in The Chicago Sun-Times this summer, Jim DeRogatis grudgingly praised Ms. Lavigne as "a teen-pop phenom that discerning adult rock fans can actually admire without feeling (too) guilty," partly because Ms. Lavigne "plays a passable rhythm guitar" and "has a hand in writing" her songs.
Rockism isn't unrelated to older, more familiar prejudices - that's part of why it's so powerful, and so worth arguing about. The pop star, the disco diva, the lip-syncher, the "awesomely bad" hit maker: could it really be a coincidence that rockist complaints often pit straight white men against the rest of the world? Like the anti-disco backlash of 25 years ago, the current rockist consensus seems to reflect not just an idea of how music should be made but also an idea about who should be making it.
If you're interested in - O.K., mildly obsessed with - rockism, you can find traces of it just about everywhere. Notice how those tributes to "Women Who Rock" sneakily transform "rock" from a genre to a verb to a catch-all term of praise. Ever wonder why OutKast and the Roots and Mos Def and the Beastie Boys get taken so much more seriously than other rappers? Maybe because rockist critics love it when hip-hop acts impersonate rock 'n' roll bands. (A recent Rolling Stone review praised the Beastie Boys for scruffily resisting "the gold-plated phooey currently passing for gangsta.")
From punk-rock rags to handsomely illustrated journals, rockism permeates the way we think about music. This summer, the literary zine The Believer published a music issue devoted to almost nothing but indie-rock. Two weeks ago, in The New York Times Book Review, Sarah Vowell approvingly recalled Nirvana's rise: "a group with loud guitars and louder drums knocking the whimpering Mariah Carey off the top of the charts." Why did the changing of the guard sound so much like a sexual assault? And when did we all agree that Nirvana's neo-punk was more respectable than Ms. Carey's neo-disco?
Rockism is imperial: it claims the entire musical world as its own. Rock 'n' roll is the unmarked section in the record store, a vague pop-music category that swallows all the others. If you write about music, you're presumed to be a rock critic. There's a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for doo-wop groups and folk singers and disco queens and even rappers - just so long as they, y'know, rock.
Rockism just won't go away. The rockism debate began when British bands questioned whether the search for raw, guitar-driven authenticity wasn't part of rock 'n' roll's problem, instead of its solution; some new-wave bands emphasized synthesizers and drum machines and makeup and hairspray, instead. "Rockist" became for them a term of abuse, and the anti-rockists embraced the inclusive possibilities of a once-derided term: pop. Americans found other terms, but "rockist" seems the best way to describe the ugly anti-disco backlash of the late 1970's, which culminated in a full-blown anti-disco rally and the burning of thousands of disco records at Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1979: the Boston Tea Party of rockism.
That was a quarter of a century and many genres ago. By the 1990's, the American musical landscape was no longer a battleground between Nirvana and Mariah (if indeed it ever was); it was a fractured, hyper-vivid fantasy of teen-pop stars and R&B pillow-talkers and arena-filling country singers and, above all, rappers. Rock 'n' roll was just one more genre alongside the rest.
Yet many critics failed to notice. Rock 'n' roll doesn't rule the world anymore, but lots of writers still act as if it does. The rules, even today, are: concentrate on making albums, not singles; portray yourself as a rebellious individualist, not an industry pro; give listeners the uncomfortable truth, instead of pandering to their tastes. Overnight celebrities, one-hit-wonders and lip-synchers, step aside.
And just as the anti-disco partisans of a quarter-century ago railed against a bewildering new pop order (partly because disco was so closely associated with black culture and gay culture), current critics rail against a world hopelessly corrupted by hip-hop excess. Since before Sean Combs became Puff Daddy, we've been hearing that mainstream hip-hop was too flashy, too crass, too violent, too ridiculous, unlike those hard-working rock 'n' roll stars we used to have. (This, of course, is one of the most pernicious things about rockism: it finds a way to make rock 'n' roll seem boring.)
Much of the most energetic resistance to rockism can be found online, in blogs and on critic-infested sites like ilovemusic.com, where debates about rockism have become so common that the term itself is something of a running joke. When the editors of a blog called Rockcritics Daily noted that rockism was "all the rage again," they posted dozens of contradictory citations, proving that no one really agrees on what the term means. (By the time you read this article, a slew of indignant refutations and addenda will probably be available online.)
But as more than one online ranter has discovered, it's easier to complain about rockism than it is to get rid of it. You literally can't fight rockism, because the language of righteous struggle is the language of rockism itself. You can argue that the shape-shifting feminist hip-pop of Ms. Aguilera is every bit as radical as the punk rock of the 1970's (and it is), but then you haven't challenged any of the old rockist questions (starting with: Who's more radical?), you've just scribbled in some new answers.
The challenge isn't merely to replace the old list of Great Rock Albums with a new list of Great Pop Songs - although that would, at the very least, be a nice change of pace. It's to find a way to think about a fluid musical world where it's impossible to separate classics from guilty pleasures. The challenge is to acknowledge that music videos and reality shows and glamorous layouts can be as interesting - and as influential - as an old-fashioned album.
In the end, the problem with rockism isn't that it's wrong: all critics are wrong sometimes, and some critics (now doesn't seem like the right time to name names) are wrong almost all the time. The problem with rockism is that it seems increasingly far removed from the way most people actually listen to music.
Are you really pondering the phony distinction between "great art" and a "guilty pleasure" when you're humming along to the radio? In an era when listeners routinely - and fearlessly - pick music by putting a 40-gig iPod on shuffle, surely we have more interesting things to worry about than that someone might be lip-synching on "Saturday Night Live" or that some rappers gild their phooey. Good critics are good listeners, and the problem with rockism is that it gets in the way of listening. If you're waiting for some song that conjures up soul or honesty or grit or rebellion, you might miss out on Ciara's ecstatic electro-pop, or Alan Jackson's sly country ballads, or Lloyd Banks's felonious purr.
Rockism makes it hard to hear the glorious, incoherent, corporate-financed, audience-tested mess that passes for popular music these days. To glorify only performers who write their own songs and play their own guitars is to ignore the marketplace that helps create the music we hear in the first place, with its checkbook-chasing superproducers, its audience-obsessed executives and its cred-hungry performers. To obsess over old-fashioned stand-alone geniuses is to forget that lots of the most memorable music is created despite multimillion-dollar deals and spur-of-the-moment collaborations and murky commercial forces. In fact, a lot of great music is created because of those things. And let's stop pretending that serious rock songs will last forever, as if anything could, and that shiny pop songs are inherently disposable, as if that were necessarily a bad thing. Van Morrison's "Into the Music" was released the same year as the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight"; which do you hear more often?
That doesn't mean we should stop arguing about Ms. Simpson, or even that we should stop sharing the 60-second clip that may just be this year's best music video. But it does mean we should stop taking it for granted that music isn't as good as it used to be, and it means we should stop being shocked that the rock rules of the 1970's are no longer the law of the land. No doubt our current obsessions and comparisons will come to seem hopelessly blinkered as popular music mutates some more - listeners and critics alike can't do much more than struggle to keep up. But let's stop trying to hammer young stars into old categories. We have lots of new music to choose from - we deserve some new prejudices, too.
MY REPLY:
Let me first say this: Ashley Simpson IS a no talent fraud. But no one in this day and age cares that she can't reproduce live what you can punch in [i.e. edit] kline by line in the studio. She is eye candy with marginal talent and it doesn't matter as long as she looks good and reproduces the dance of her video. Same as Britney, Jessica Simpson, Christina, et al. It's all about The Show.
Having said that, POP stars [be it Michael Jackson, the Archies, Bay City Rollers, 1910 Fruitgum Company...] do not REQUIRE any credability. All you need is a nicew smile, a catchy hook and a half alaive producer to keep you yarbling on key. Think David Cassidy. Or Sean Cassidy. Or Leif Garret.
Don't kid yourself. You and I both have guilty pleasures. I like some of the Bee Gees pre-Saturday Night Fever singles, especially Jive Talkin' and Lights of Broadway and How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?... I LOVE HAll and Oates hits album... I still like Faster Pussycat's first two albums... Were the Cars Pop or Serious Music?... How about all those great Steve Miller Band singles [including the overplayed Joker, smoker, midnight toker... it's a good song just overplayed!] or Paul McCartney and Wings of the 70s? Part of that comes from growing up with AM Top 40 wher you'd get Jive Talkin' followed by Why Can't We Be Friends followed by Listen What the Man Said followed by Earth Wind and Fire's Serpantine Fire and the Commodore's Brick House then Hall/Oates' Rich Girl then ... you get the idea. How about David Bowie's Fame?
There has always been a division between Pop and 'serious music,' although in rock and roll that line becase blurred about the time of the Beatles' Rubber Soul. Come on, early albums by Charles Mingus or Miles Davis or Charlie Parker or How Much Is That Doggie in the Window? But I blame the split in rock and roll on the rise of the previously unknown 'Rock Critic,' the guy who tells you that Jefferson Airplane or the Doors or the Fugs or MC5 are 'cool' and the Stooges and Velvet Underground and Count Five and Frank Zappa are 'shit.'
I am sure critics of today remain the same 'couldn't get a date in high school' uncool losers 'we' were back in the 60s and 70s, frustrated with our inability to write the great novel depicting the search for the heart of the American dream or play guitar. 'We' champion sweaty unshaven hard drinking/living souls doing what 'we' wish that 'we' could do.
Of course there are those who take 'the High Road' looking at rock and roll as art and championing Sgt Pepper's over the much more interesting Revolver and trashing [in the words of Jeff Bebee of Stillwater ala Almost Famous] 'breaking up Cream, trashing every album Led Zeppelin ever did,' and calling Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan fantastic even at their worst. [Don't believe it? Check out the Rolling Stone review of Bob Dylan's Self Portrait or Jann Wenner's rebuttal to a bad review of one of Bob's late 70s albums, Slow Train Coming I think. But Jann also loved Art Garfunkel, too.]
I understand everyone doesn't want to 'Rock.' It's old hat, cliche, tired and dead and no fun anymore. Plus if you rap, you can wear lots of gold, call women bitches and you don't have to be able to hold a note or play guitar. Avril Levigne isn't rock, but really neither is Sheryl Crow.Though Sheryl is closer than Avril. Is Kid Rock pop? By definition, it's popular...
The Rockists are the purists of today. Remeber that jazz/blues purists in England hated the Rolling Stones for mixing in Chuck Berry with the blues. People said that Sinatra and the crooners were 'a passing fad.' We miss turning on the radio and hearing real songs played by real people with real instruments. I don't dig Jimmy Eat World, but I'd rather hear that than ANYTHING with some sub-woofer destroying boom-doom fake ass beat. Welll... maybe. Rock 'n' Roll or 'Rock' doesn't rule the world anymore. Just as there's a cable channel for every taste, there's a pigeon hole for every offshoot of music that could intrest someone. Baby boomers hold onto their Motown, Beatles, etc the way their parents held on to Mitch Miller, Sinatra and Perry Como and moaned about the 'junk kids are listening to today.' I include myself as one of those people with my 70s dominated music collective.
As for the current 'backing track' questions, all I can say is this: When the Beatles felt THEY couldn't reproduce their records for a live audience, they quit touring. The Stones take keyboard players and horns and backup singers on the road. Manic perfectioninst Lindsey Buckingham and the once mighty Fleetwood Mac too AT LEAST two other guitar players, a keyboard player, a second drummer and a couple of backup singers to fill out their sound. I realize this is an expensive option for a 'band' or a singer on a first or second tour. But instead of trying to reproduce the record in person, make a statement and do what you can live. Speed up, slow down, do acpaellas and make your show interesting, not just recreating the look from your video. When bands like U2 started using sequencers and drum tracks [ala Bad from Wide Awake in America] and the Cars using 8 programmed keyboads on the Heartbeat City tour, it was all over. You lose room to improvise or make mistakes and removed the 'human element' from the show. I've seen some good shows: Springsteen, Queen, Aerosmith that were about energy, the band feeding off an audience's energy and pulling out the unexpected, like Aerosmith doing One Way Street or Rats in the Cellar.
I guess then we also have to blame the audiences of today. These kids grew up with MTV speed cut videos and Playstation and they have the attention span of a gnat so you have to keep moving and grooving and flashing lights and shit to keep their minds from wandering. It's not about MUSIC to them, it's about ENTERTAINMENT.
I sound like a 'Band-Aid,' but I fell in love with all these silly little songs that bring back memories for me. I hear Queen's We WIll Rock You or Ted Nugent's Dog Eat Dog or Steve Miller's Jungle Love and I think of Saturday afternoons spent at Big Wheel Skateland with my friend Mark. I hear Fame or Borwnsville Station doing Smokin' in the Boys Room and I think of driving north from West Virginia to see my grandparents in Pennsylvania. Stupid shit like that. I never went to see some blonde dancing around in her underwear trying to recreate a video... well, not a concert anyway.
Anyway, all I can say about lip synching is remember Milli Vanilli. One day your recording will get stuck or speed up to sound like Mickey Mouse and you'll be roasted on the internet as a no talent fraud. If Ashley had made a joke or something and started over, this would be nothing. What was her band playing during this time? Didn't they have guitars and drums, too? Were they actually playing or was this an American Bandstand/Hard Day's Night performance with no cords plugged into the guitars for them, too? My point would be, backing/sweetening track, maybe; total fraud on an audience, fuck you.
I'm a rockist and I stand proud of it. But for the record, Springsteen, Mellencamp, James Taylor, you're washed up, go home. And U2's output since Achtung Baby [except Lemon and Stay (Faraway, So Close) from Zooropa] is shit. Oh, their new album was stolen and posted on the internet... does anybody REALLY give a fuck or is it a publicity stunt?
Man I see it now, Poison and Motley Crueand the Fixx and Berlin and U2 [who never really quit but should have] and all these 80s bands reuniting and hitting the nostalgia circuit... please, my fellow 80s high school graduates, don't be like your parents and buy into this shit. You have the CDs, going to a club of small areana and standing up for three hours is just going to make your feet hurt.
That's all I got....
I know I'm picking an argument here, Chaz, but Christ... I gotta say it:
I don't necessarily agree with his taste in music, but I agree with the point he's making 100%.
The Rap Against RockismBy KELEFA SANNEH
New York TimesOctober 31, 2004
BAD news travels fast, and an embarrassing video travels even faster. By last Sunday morning, one of the Internet's most popular downloads was the hours-old 60-second .wmv file of Ashlee Simpson on "Saturday Night Live." As she and her band stood onstage, her own prerecorded vocals - from the wrong song - came blaring through the speakers, and it was too late to start mouthing the words. So she performed a now-infamous little jig, then skulked offstage, while the band (were a few members smirking?) played on. One of 2004's most popular new stars had been exposed as. ...
As what, exactly? The online verdict came fast and harsh, the way online verdicts usually do. A typical post on her Web site bore the headline, "Ashlee you are a no talent fraud!" After that night, everyone knew that Jessica Simpson's telegenic sister was no rock 'n' roll hero - she wasn't even a rock 'n' roll also-ran. She was merely a lip-synching pop star.
Music critics have a word for this kind of verdict, this knee-jerk backlash against producer-powered idols who didn't spend years touring dive bars. Not a very elegant word, but a useful one. The word is rockism, and among the small but extraordinarily pesky group of people who obsess over this stuff, rockism is a word meant to start fights. The rockism debate began in earnest in the early 1980's, but over the past few years it has heated up, and today, in certain impassioned circles, there is simply nothing worse than a rockist.
A rockist isn't just someone who loves rock 'n' roll, who goes on and on about Bruce Springsteen, who champions ragged-voiced singer-songwriters no one has ever heard of. A rockist is someone who reduces rock 'n' roll to a caricature, then uses that caricature as a weapon. Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.
Over the past decades, these tendencies have congealed into an ugly sort of common sense. Rock bands record classic albums, while pop stars create "guilty pleasure" singles. It's supposed to be self-evident: U2's entire oeuvre deserves respectful consideration, while a spookily seductive song by an R&B singer named Tweet can only be, in the smug words of a recent VH1 special, "awesomely bad."
Like rock 'n' roll itself, rockism is full of contradictions: it could mean loving the Strokes (a scruffy guitar band!) or hating them (image-conscious poseurs!) or ignoring them entirely (since everyone knows that music isn't as good as it used to be). But it almost certainly means disdaining not just Ms. Simpson but also Christina Aguilera and Usher and most of the rest of them, grousing about a pop landscape dominated by big-budget spectacles and high-concept photo shoots, reminiscing about a time when the charts were packed with people who had something to say, and meant it, even if that time never actually existed. If this sounds like you, then take a long look in the mirror: you might be a rockist.
Countless critics assail pop stars for not being rock 'n' roll enough, without stopping to wonder why that should be everybody's goal. Or they reward them disproportionately for making rock 'n' roll gestures. Writing in The Chicago Sun-Times this summer, Jim DeRogatis grudgingly praised Ms. Lavigne as "a teen-pop phenom that discerning adult rock fans can actually admire without feeling (too) guilty," partly because Ms. Lavigne "plays a passable rhythm guitar" and "has a hand in writing" her songs.
Rockism isn't unrelated to older, more familiar prejudices - that's part of why it's so powerful, and so worth arguing about. The pop star, the disco diva, the lip-syncher, the "awesomely bad" hit maker: could it really be a coincidence that rockist complaints often pit straight white men against the rest of the world? Like the anti-disco backlash of 25 years ago, the current rockist consensus seems to reflect not just an idea of how music should be made but also an idea about who should be making it.
If you're interested in - O.K., mildly obsessed with - rockism, you can find traces of it just about everywhere. Notice how those tributes to "Women Who Rock" sneakily transform "rock" from a genre to a verb to a catch-all term of praise. Ever wonder why OutKast and the Roots and Mos Def and the Beastie Boys get taken so much more seriously than other rappers? Maybe because rockist critics love it when hip-hop acts impersonate rock 'n' roll bands. (A recent Rolling Stone review praised the Beastie Boys for scruffily resisting "the gold-plated phooey currently passing for gangsta.")
From punk-rock rags to handsomely illustrated journals, rockism permeates the way we think about music. This summer, the literary zine The Believer published a music issue devoted to almost nothing but indie-rock. Two weeks ago, in The New York Times Book Review, Sarah Vowell approvingly recalled Nirvana's rise: "a group with loud guitars and louder drums knocking the whimpering Mariah Carey off the top of the charts." Why did the changing of the guard sound so much like a sexual assault? And when did we all agree that Nirvana's neo-punk was more respectable than Ms. Carey's neo-disco?
Rockism is imperial: it claims the entire musical world as its own. Rock 'n' roll is the unmarked section in the record store, a vague pop-music category that swallows all the others. If you write about music, you're presumed to be a rock critic. There's a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for doo-wop groups and folk singers and disco queens and even rappers - just so long as they, y'know, rock.
Rockism just won't go away. The rockism debate began when British bands questioned whether the search for raw, guitar-driven authenticity wasn't part of rock 'n' roll's problem, instead of its solution; some new-wave bands emphasized synthesizers and drum machines and makeup and hairspray, instead. "Rockist" became for them a term of abuse, and the anti-rockists embraced the inclusive possibilities of a once-derided term: pop. Americans found other terms, but "rockist" seems the best way to describe the ugly anti-disco backlash of the late 1970's, which culminated in a full-blown anti-disco rally and the burning of thousands of disco records at Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1979: the Boston Tea Party of rockism.
That was a quarter of a century and many genres ago. By the 1990's, the American musical landscape was no longer a battleground between Nirvana and Mariah (if indeed it ever was); it was a fractured, hyper-vivid fantasy of teen-pop stars and R&B pillow-talkers and arena-filling country singers and, above all, rappers. Rock 'n' roll was just one more genre alongside the rest.
Yet many critics failed to notice. Rock 'n' roll doesn't rule the world anymore, but lots of writers still act as if it does. The rules, even today, are: concentrate on making albums, not singles; portray yourself as a rebellious individualist, not an industry pro; give listeners the uncomfortable truth, instead of pandering to their tastes. Overnight celebrities, one-hit-wonders and lip-synchers, step aside.
And just as the anti-disco partisans of a quarter-century ago railed against a bewildering new pop order (partly because disco was so closely associated with black culture and gay culture), current critics rail against a world hopelessly corrupted by hip-hop excess. Since before Sean Combs became Puff Daddy, we've been hearing that mainstream hip-hop was too flashy, too crass, too violent, too ridiculous, unlike those hard-working rock 'n' roll stars we used to have. (This, of course, is one of the most pernicious things about rockism: it finds a way to make rock 'n' roll seem boring.)
Much of the most energetic resistance to rockism can be found online, in blogs and on critic-infested sites like ilovemusic.com, where debates about rockism have become so common that the term itself is something of a running joke. When the editors of a blog called Rockcritics Daily noted that rockism was "all the rage again," they posted dozens of contradictory citations, proving that no one really agrees on what the term means. (By the time you read this article, a slew of indignant refutations and addenda will probably be available online.)
But as more than one online ranter has discovered, it's easier to complain about rockism than it is to get rid of it. You literally can't fight rockism, because the language of righteous struggle is the language of rockism itself. You can argue that the shape-shifting feminist hip-pop of Ms. Aguilera is every bit as radical as the punk rock of the 1970's (and it is), but then you haven't challenged any of the old rockist questions (starting with: Who's more radical?), you've just scribbled in some new answers.
The challenge isn't merely to replace the old list of Great Rock Albums with a new list of Great Pop Songs - although that would, at the very least, be a nice change of pace. It's to find a way to think about a fluid musical world where it's impossible to separate classics from guilty pleasures. The challenge is to acknowledge that music videos and reality shows and glamorous layouts can be as interesting - and as influential - as an old-fashioned album.
In the end, the problem with rockism isn't that it's wrong: all critics are wrong sometimes, and some critics (now doesn't seem like the right time to name names) are wrong almost all the time. The problem with rockism is that it seems increasingly far removed from the way most people actually listen to music.
Are you really pondering the phony distinction between "great art" and a "guilty pleasure" when you're humming along to the radio? In an era when listeners routinely - and fearlessly - pick music by putting a 40-gig iPod on shuffle, surely we have more interesting things to worry about than that someone might be lip-synching on "Saturday Night Live" or that some rappers gild their phooey. Good critics are good listeners, and the problem with rockism is that it gets in the way of listening. If you're waiting for some song that conjures up soul or honesty or grit or rebellion, you might miss out on Ciara's ecstatic electro-pop, or Alan Jackson's sly country ballads, or Lloyd Banks's felonious purr.
Rockism makes it hard to hear the glorious, incoherent, corporate-financed, audience-tested mess that passes for popular music these days. To glorify only performers who write their own songs and play their own guitars is to ignore the marketplace that helps create the music we hear in the first place, with its checkbook-chasing superproducers, its audience-obsessed executives and its cred-hungry performers. To obsess over old-fashioned stand-alone geniuses is to forget that lots of the most memorable music is created despite multimillion-dollar deals and spur-of-the-moment collaborations and murky commercial forces. In fact, a lot of great music is created because of those things. And let's stop pretending that serious rock songs will last forever, as if anything could, and that shiny pop songs are inherently disposable, as if that were necessarily a bad thing. Van Morrison's "Into the Music" was released the same year as the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight"; which do you hear more often?
That doesn't mean we should stop arguing about Ms. Simpson, or even that we should stop sharing the 60-second clip that may just be this year's best music video. But it does mean we should stop taking it for granted that music isn't as good as it used to be, and it means we should stop being shocked that the rock rules of the 1970's are no longer the law of the land. No doubt our current obsessions and comparisons will come to seem hopelessly blinkered as popular music mutates some more - listeners and critics alike can't do much more than struggle to keep up. But let's stop trying to hammer young stars into old categories. We have lots of new music to choose from - we deserve some new prejudices, too.
MY REPLY:
Let me first say this: Ashley Simpson IS a no talent fraud. But no one in this day and age cares that she can't reproduce live what you can punch in [i.e. edit] kline by line in the studio. She is eye candy with marginal talent and it doesn't matter as long as she looks good and reproduces the dance of her video. Same as Britney, Jessica Simpson, Christina, et al. It's all about The Show.
Having said that, POP stars [be it Michael Jackson, the Archies, Bay City Rollers, 1910 Fruitgum Company...] do not REQUIRE any credability. All you need is a nicew smile, a catchy hook and a half alaive producer to keep you yarbling on key. Think David Cassidy. Or Sean Cassidy. Or Leif Garret.
Don't kid yourself. You and I both have guilty pleasures. I like some of the Bee Gees pre-Saturday Night Fever singles, especially Jive Talkin' and Lights of Broadway and How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?... I LOVE HAll and Oates hits album... I still like Faster Pussycat's first two albums... Were the Cars Pop or Serious Music?... How about all those great Steve Miller Band singles [including the overplayed Joker, smoker, midnight toker... it's a good song just overplayed!] or Paul McCartney and Wings of the 70s? Part of that comes from growing up with AM Top 40 wher you'd get Jive Talkin' followed by Why Can't We Be Friends followed by Listen What the Man Said followed by Earth Wind and Fire's Serpantine Fire and the Commodore's Brick House then Hall/Oates' Rich Girl then ... you get the idea. How about David Bowie's Fame?
There has always been a division between Pop and 'serious music,' although in rock and roll that line becase blurred about the time of the Beatles' Rubber Soul. Come on, early albums by Charles Mingus or Miles Davis or Charlie Parker or How Much Is That Doggie in the Window? But I blame the split in rock and roll on the rise of the previously unknown 'Rock Critic,' the guy who tells you that Jefferson Airplane or the Doors or the Fugs or MC5 are 'cool' and the Stooges and Velvet Underground and Count Five and Frank Zappa are 'shit.'
I am sure critics of today remain the same 'couldn't get a date in high school' uncool losers 'we' were back in the 60s and 70s, frustrated with our inability to write the great novel depicting the search for the heart of the American dream or play guitar. 'We' champion sweaty unshaven hard drinking/living souls doing what 'we' wish that 'we' could do.
Of course there are those who take 'the High Road' looking at rock and roll as art and championing Sgt Pepper's over the much more interesting Revolver and trashing [in the words of Jeff Bebee of Stillwater ala Almost Famous] 'breaking up Cream, trashing every album Led Zeppelin ever did,' and calling Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan fantastic even at their worst. [Don't believe it? Check out the Rolling Stone review of Bob Dylan's Self Portrait or Jann Wenner's rebuttal to a bad review of one of Bob's late 70s albums, Slow Train Coming I think. But Jann also loved Art Garfunkel, too.]
I understand everyone doesn't want to 'Rock.' It's old hat, cliche, tired and dead and no fun anymore. Plus if you rap, you can wear lots of gold, call women bitches and you don't have to be able to hold a note or play guitar. Avril Levigne isn't rock, but really neither is Sheryl Crow.Though Sheryl is closer than Avril. Is Kid Rock pop? By definition, it's popular...
The Rockists are the purists of today. Remeber that jazz/blues purists in England hated the Rolling Stones for mixing in Chuck Berry with the blues. People said that Sinatra and the crooners were 'a passing fad.' We miss turning on the radio and hearing real songs played by real people with real instruments. I don't dig Jimmy Eat World, but I'd rather hear that than ANYTHING with some sub-woofer destroying boom-doom fake ass beat. Welll... maybe. Rock 'n' Roll or 'Rock' doesn't rule the world anymore. Just as there's a cable channel for every taste, there's a pigeon hole for every offshoot of music that could intrest someone. Baby boomers hold onto their Motown, Beatles, etc the way their parents held on to Mitch Miller, Sinatra and Perry Como and moaned about the 'junk kids are listening to today.' I include myself as one of those people with my 70s dominated music collective.
As for the current 'backing track' questions, all I can say is this: When the Beatles felt THEY couldn't reproduce their records for a live audience, they quit touring. The Stones take keyboard players and horns and backup singers on the road. Manic perfectioninst Lindsey Buckingham and the once mighty Fleetwood Mac too AT LEAST two other guitar players, a keyboard player, a second drummer and a couple of backup singers to fill out their sound. I realize this is an expensive option for a 'band' or a singer on a first or second tour. But instead of trying to reproduce the record in person, make a statement and do what you can live. Speed up, slow down, do acpaellas and make your show interesting, not just recreating the look from your video. When bands like U2 started using sequencers and drum tracks [ala Bad from Wide Awake in America] and the Cars using 8 programmed keyboads on the Heartbeat City tour, it was all over. You lose room to improvise or make mistakes and removed the 'human element' from the show. I've seen some good shows: Springsteen, Queen, Aerosmith that were about energy, the band feeding off an audience's energy and pulling out the unexpected, like Aerosmith doing One Way Street or Rats in the Cellar.
I guess then we also have to blame the audiences of today. These kids grew up with MTV speed cut videos and Playstation and they have the attention span of a gnat so you have to keep moving and grooving and flashing lights and shit to keep their minds from wandering. It's not about MUSIC to them, it's about ENTERTAINMENT.
I sound like a 'Band-Aid,' but I fell in love with all these silly little songs that bring back memories for me. I hear Queen's We WIll Rock You or Ted Nugent's Dog Eat Dog or Steve Miller's Jungle Love and I think of Saturday afternoons spent at Big Wheel Skateland with my friend Mark. I hear Fame or Borwnsville Station doing Smokin' in the Boys Room and I think of driving north from West Virginia to see my grandparents in Pennsylvania. Stupid shit like that. I never went to see some blonde dancing around in her underwear trying to recreate a video... well, not a concert anyway.
Anyway, all I can say about lip synching is remember Milli Vanilli. One day your recording will get stuck or speed up to sound like Mickey Mouse and you'll be roasted on the internet as a no talent fraud. If Ashley had made a joke or something and started over, this would be nothing. What was her band playing during this time? Didn't they have guitars and drums, too? Were they actually playing or was this an American Bandstand/Hard Day's Night performance with no cords plugged into the guitars for them, too? My point would be, backing/sweetening track, maybe; total fraud on an audience, fuck you.
I'm a rockist and I stand proud of it. But for the record, Springsteen, Mellencamp, James Taylor, you're washed up, go home. And U2's output since Achtung Baby [except Lemon and Stay (Faraway, So Close) from Zooropa] is shit. Oh, their new album was stolen and posted on the internet... does anybody REALLY give a fuck or is it a publicity stunt?
Man I see it now, Poison and Motley Crueand the Fixx and Berlin and U2 [who never really quit but should have] and all these 80s bands reuniting and hitting the nostalgia circuit... please, my fellow 80s high school graduates, don't be like your parents and buy into this shit. You have the CDs, going to a club of small areana and standing up for three hours is just going to make your feet hurt.
That's all I got....
Sunday, November 07, 2004
More Thoughts About ARTISTIC INTEGRITY
so I am driving to work Saturday morning and one of the local radio stations, in one of there 'We're Going to Play Songs NOT in Our Usual 250 Song Rotation Weekend' and they throw on Graham Nash's Chicago. You know, Graham talking about the big gathering of 1968: "Won't you please come to Chicago/ Or else join the other side/ We can change the world/ Rearrange the world/ It's dying/ If you believe in justice / And if you believe in freedom/ Let a mna live his own life/ Rules and regulations, who needs them?/ Throw them out the door..."
My first though was How Anarchistic for 1968! Then my second thought was Thank God they'll never use that in a commercial.
How can Jefferson Airplane/Paul Kantner & Marty Balin allow Volunteers to be used for a fucking wireless phone commercial? "Gotta revolution" was not written about some new PRODUCT! It was expressing a [radical] political belief! Do the songwriters need a shot of cash THAT BAD? I realize the re-re mastered [yes, the THIRD issue of these albums in 10 years, this time with bonus tracks, all of which appeared on the box set all ready] Jefferson Airplane albums aren't flying off the shelves, and half of the Jefferson Starship catalog remains unavailable on CD.. probably with good reason. Earth, Spitfire, Wind of Change and all of the Starshit/"We Built This City"; all mediocre AT BEST. [Who was worse in the late 80s, Starshit or Heart? Had to be Starshit, Heart still has credibilty and dignity...]
How can write a song like Volunteers or We Can Be Together or Chicago or Revolution about your deep misguided feeling of frustration and anarchy [Hey, Jim Morrison was right, sort of; "They got the guns but we got the numbers" (Five to One).. of course, he thought that equalled victory, but how many people without guns are going to stand up to napalm and M16s?] and thirty years later let it be used for a fucking cell phone or a shoe commercial?
I am glad John Lennon isn't here to see this shit. Can you Imagine [couldn't resist] the words he's have for his fellow artists? "You fuckin losers, you sell outs, you just let your souls be bought and sold, you fucking cowards. Are you trying to sell some records or just fattening your wallet on a fucking nostalgia trip?"
Note to Everyone
Friends, when you look at yourselves, don't be shallow; see yourselves for the uniqueness that is YOU. See what you have and what you are, not what you don't have and are not.
so I am driving to work Saturday morning and one of the local radio stations, in one of there 'We're Going to Play Songs NOT in Our Usual 250 Song Rotation Weekend' and they throw on Graham Nash's Chicago. You know, Graham talking about the big gathering of 1968: "Won't you please come to Chicago/ Or else join the other side/ We can change the world/ Rearrange the world/ It's dying/ If you believe in justice / And if you believe in freedom/ Let a mna live his own life/ Rules and regulations, who needs them?/ Throw them out the door..."
My first though was How Anarchistic for 1968! Then my second thought was Thank God they'll never use that in a commercial.
How can Jefferson Airplane/Paul Kantner & Marty Balin allow Volunteers to be used for a fucking wireless phone commercial? "Gotta revolution" was not written about some new PRODUCT! It was expressing a [radical] political belief! Do the songwriters need a shot of cash THAT BAD? I realize the re-re mastered [yes, the THIRD issue of these albums in 10 years, this time with bonus tracks, all of which appeared on the box set all ready] Jefferson Airplane albums aren't flying off the shelves, and half of the Jefferson Starship catalog remains unavailable on CD.. probably with good reason. Earth, Spitfire, Wind of Change and all of the Starshit/"We Built This City"; all mediocre AT BEST. [Who was worse in the late 80s, Starshit or Heart? Had to be Starshit, Heart still has credibilty and dignity...]
How can write a song like Volunteers or We Can Be Together or Chicago or Revolution about your deep misguided feeling of frustration and anarchy [Hey, Jim Morrison was right, sort of; "They got the guns but we got the numbers" (Five to One).. of course, he thought that equalled victory, but how many people without guns are going to stand up to napalm and M16s?] and thirty years later let it be used for a fucking cell phone or a shoe commercial?
I am glad John Lennon isn't here to see this shit. Can you Imagine [couldn't resist] the words he's have for his fellow artists? "You fuckin losers, you sell outs, you just let your souls be bought and sold, you fucking cowards. Are you trying to sell some records or just fattening your wallet on a fucking nostalgia trip?"
Note to Everyone
Friends, when you look at yourselves, don't be shallow; see yourselves for the uniqueness that is YOU. See what you have and what you are, not what you don't have and are not.