if i was competing in the olympics my event would be
discus
[cough]
too many good and suggestive ideas, tangents, i'm dizzy with discourse
grabbing a handhold in the maelstrom...
Tim F said:
they reveal to us that <i>rock intensity</i> and <i>rockist legitimacy</i> are two different things - the greatness of both is not at all reliant on conforming to some <i>essential</i> quality which of rock music. A more telling example is gabba, which, while conforming to Simon's masculine/masochist dichotomy, defiantly flies in the face of every other rockist principle imaginable; it simply <i>cannot</i> be assessed according to rockist principles in any meaningful way. .
well i suppose you could that rock intensity IS rockist legimitacy according to my own personal definition of (neo-)rockism except i wouldn't use the word legitimacy as that puts us in the category of Law, whereas i'd rather emphasize not the dogma side of rock-as-religion but the testifying, evangelical, fervor side of it ie. not Thou Shalt Not but more "mine ears hath seen the Glory"
also would say that this "intensity" while most associated with rock as genre isn't owned by it exclusively by any means, and this intensity preceded rock (you'd find it in jazz, in stravinsky, in beethoven, in all kinds of musics all across the world)... perhaps it is simply the Dionysian (sorry Mark) power of music itself
my favorite critic when i was growing up was Barney Hoskyns in the NME in the early 80s, it was in his reviews that i first read the word "dionysian" and he referenced Nietzche's Birth of Tragedy -- on the one hand he was a rockist in the sense of defending rock music and guitars at a time when New Pop and Morleyism was in the ascendant (so barney would celebrate Birthday Party, the stooges, Black Flag, Echo & The Bunnymen, meat puppets, husker du... ). But he was also anti-rockist in so far as he would praise Donna Summer, new york synthfunk and postdisco tracks, Associates, old soul (especially ballads), the Smiths, a huge array of stuff... he was searching for a certain set of experiences or sensations from music but finding them in all kinds of different places... at the same time his specific defence of guitar rock at that point was both an interestingly maverick against-the-grain thing to do and prescient, in so far as rock did come back. and especially during the mid-to-late 80s it was something worth defending as it was both vital and desperately marginalized, so in hoskyns-esque mode i would celebrate husker du circa 86 and imagine the Return of Rock. which actually happened w/ nirvana.
Gabba -- well i was going to use that precise example in the opposite way to you Tim! seems like nothing could be more rockist than gabba (undergroundist; masculinist; corny over the top shock horror effects; aggression-masochism; noise, 'can you handle the punishment' aesthetic; fascist undercurrents; warrior male tribalism, etc etc )
*****
Rockism in the narrow sense of "they must write their own songs to be authentic" is of course a load of bunkum, but who actually believes this? Idiots, and in fact it's always been idiots who believe that. Greil Marcus, you might say, would be an archetypal rockist, in the sense of trying to transpose high cultural values onto the assessment of pop music. Actually i was surprised to find in his earliest writings (in It Will Stand, an essay collection he edited out of berkely at the end of the Sixties) a celebration of rock in terms of energy pretty similar to my own (annoyingly so: preempted again!). And in fact if you look at Stranded, his list at the back of the best recordings in rock'n'pop history, it's got loads of soul records and things that were produced along the Motown model (separation of singer, songwriter, producer etc), he was also a great celebrant of that phase of early 70s soul like 'papa's got a rolling stone'. Perhaps you could say that the rockist tendency would be to gradually cease being able to recognise the Motown equivalent of today.... he does have a Donna Summer record in his list, though, however it's not the "correct" one (I feel Love) it's "hot stuff" (ie. the more raunchy, rock'n'roll Summer hit, the least Euro and disco one!).
The split in approaches to music seems to loosely correspond to the difference between cinema and literature. Pop music (and in actually fact most rock music too) demands an approach that recognises it as a collective endeavour (singers being like actors, songwriters like scriptwriters, producer as director, engineer as cinematographer etc). There is a small subset of rock activity that can be treated as surrogate-literature (singer-songwriter type stuff, although even then there are often producers, session players etc involved, although generally the production tends to not draw attention to itself), in other words critics can act like all the meaning originates from a single figure auteur. HOWEVER i would say just as you can be auteurist about cinema, so you can be auteurist about pop music, and justifiably--and in fact most pop-ists whatever their professions tend to go into the mode, talking about certain producers.
(of course modern pop is like cinema is another sense: an audio-visual experience, the video director and stylists as important as the producer, songdoctor, engineer etc)
in a certain sense electronic music with its profusion of single-person artists has allowed for a return of auteurism.... and in other senses electronic music has been the inheritor of rock's seriousness, progressivism etc
>Pop music (and in actually fact most rock music too) demands an approach that recognises it as a >collective endeavour
not gone mad and started quoting myself, wanted to pick up on this because Joe Carducci -- while in certain senses being arch-rockist in his anti-pop, anti-synth, anti-programmed rhythm, homophobia etc--opens up the possibility of a non-rockist [in your sense of rockist] appreciation of rock, by actually talking about stuff virtually no rock critics talk about ie. the rhythm section, the energy-dynamics (and psycho-dynamics) of the band as collectivity... he argues that songwriting is not the core of rock, which is a fantastic move... also his mid-section Narcorockcriticacy (sp?) is a massive rant about the US rock critic establishment and their Left-liberal biasis that is crammed with ammunition to be used in the Anti-Rockist cause
