Definition of Rockism

[Buick6]

Hmm.... everyone else in the thread seems to be defining rockism as being about the listeners/critics, not about the music.

the music is the message , the rest sorts itself out ultimately.

 

[Melchior]

the music is the message , the rest sorts itself out ultimately.

So you don't bring anything to the table when it coems to appreciating music? No preconcieved notions or understandings?

Respectfully, that's bullshit.

 

[Woebot]

1. A mode of auteurism limited to a discussion of those who 'actually' play and sing on the record; the privileging of the singer-songwriter mode. (So, sexist, racist, heterosexist).

2. The privileging of a notion of 'authenticity', typically identified with 'playing live'. Songs have to be thought of as organic, spontaneous expressions of an uncorrupted, really present subjectivity.

(strokes chin)

Classically this is precisely correct. I'd almost forgotten about all this. The myth of the guitar itself is central to it all too i suppose, as an equivalent to the "Paintbrush/Pencil -vs- Photoshop" dialectic.

What I'm not sure any more is if those "classical" qualifications of Rockism are actually even remotely applicable to anything these days. It seems as though they're a hangover, historically speaking, from "Folk music". Folk music here in the sense of The Carter Family/Woody Guthrie/Pete Seeger.

You could date the foundation of this mapping of Folk values onto the body of rock as, possibly Bob Dylan's gig at Leicester on the "Dont Look Now" tour of 1965 when some audience members rushed the stage and pinned Bob to the floor. "Enough of this Metal-Machine-Music-Madness" they scream. Ironic that Dylan turned back to Folk Proper with The Basement Tapes and pretty much represents pure Rockism to most people (shrugs).

That these Folk values are projected onto Rock has been pretty much scrambled by Dance music post-Bambaata which has become Folk music. The singer-songwriter mode? Surely someone like John Foxx (OK Mark trolling a bit here ) or even the Blake Baxter tracks on UR, even The Horrorist or Missy are the new true singer/songwriters, auteurs whose aura and identity we invest so much in.

I wonder if people take the same values to Rock concerts as they used to anyway? Probably maybe, but I suspect within the NME-world (horror) people actually expect to hear EXACTLY what they heard on the record, which is of course Anti-Rockist. They want a facsimilie, a near digital copy. Even something as loaded and seemingly quintessentially Rockist as Brian Wilson performing "Smile" is more complicated than that.

The true Rockist appreciation of the live experience is surely incarnate in the "Dick Picks" recordings of every single Grateful Dead live show. Every show "uniquely" showcasing the genius of the band.

Strange to reflect, finally, that the guitar itself has (at least to my ears) finally become destigmatised, when even its use by Mouse on Mars/Seefeel/Main back in the day left me pretty non-plussed.

 

[Woebot]

Rock n' roll and it's ejaculative offshoots, ideologically in it's most distilled and absolute form, is about personal freedom.

I do hear what you're saying, but it's only when I'm drunk enough that I really get there.

I couldn't imagine living with the idea 24/7, it seems sort of corny?

 

[hamarplazt]

Layman terms: music that shakes the fucken floorboards when you hear it live, vibtrates you in yr bones and makes you wanna fuck.

It could be a neo-Detroit punk band, crankin' ACCADACCA, a booty shaking bling, a Drum n' bass 'woarw bassline' or a 4-stomping house track.

The idea that Detroit punk and drum'n'bass somehow incarnate the same essence is a brilliant example of rockism getting it wrong. Rock'n'roll is human in essence, amplifying your self, rave is machine music, dissolving your self. This is also why rave is great, and rock'n'roll isn't.

 

[Grievous Angel]

Yeah, Mark on top form, albeit with a palimpsest of 1984. Been too busy moving to catch up with blissblogger's latest moves on this theme but if he's managed to negate Mark's almost canonical crit position I'll be impressed. As to the "discourse" post -- some heavy weed doing the rounds in New York ... and not long til Solstice!

 

[blissblogger]

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fooled ya!

Back with my 'sensible' hat on

i agree with Huffafc

I agree with Soundslike1981

I agree with Woebot

I agree with Buick6 (who poses as anti-intellectual but immediately outs himself with "neo-C86 pomo mass mediocratising" and indeed "ejaculative offshoots"--luvvit luvvit)

Kpunk agrees with me but doesn't realise it (yeah yeah all that stuff, authenticity/fuzztone/beards/auteurism, totally true, but those battles were won ages ago, believers in that crap are a vanishing, defeated tribe, surely)

i disagree with Kpunk about singer-songwriters and pity--john martyn, joni mitchell, roy harper, tim buckley, let's not discount the power of the minstrel to tug the heart and stir the imagination

I strongly disagree with Hamarplazt

The idea that Detroit punk and drum'n'bass somehow incarnate the same essence is a brilliant example of rockism getting it wrong. Rock'n'roll is human in essence, amplifying your self, rave is machine music, dissolving your self. This is also why rave is great, and rock'n'roll isn't.

if you think rock has only ever been about ego and self-aggrandisement they you've got a very restricted sense of rock

Detroit punk is very poor example because The Stooges are riddled with machinic imagery, Iggy is all about the point at which self-aggrandisement becomes self-annihiliation becomes a kind of swarming collectivity (he was constantly smashing the barrier between the stage and the audience). Hence the lyric in "1970"--"we've been separated for too long". In Stooges, and much rock there is an impulse that goes beyond the use of machines as phallic props and becomes a pure worship of dynamic forces, a desire to become KINETIC ENERGY. Think of 'raw power' which is about this intransitive pure energy that is impersonal ("raw power is a-laughing at you and me"), he sings, then "can you feeeeeeeel it?" like a pre-echo of Todd Terry! Talking later about this period when he was (over)loaded with the artificial energy of drugs--speed, acid, quaaludes-- Iggy said: 'I just got caught up in that, and any thoughts--I think they just got suppressed. Rather than become a person singing about subjects, I sort of sublimated the person and I became, if you will, a human electronic tool creating this sort of buzzing, throbbing music
which was at the time very timely, but isn't now.' But it sure fucking became timely again. Rave fulfils the immanent or perhaps i mean latent techno-pagan/electrical-mystical potential in rock, discarding the humanistic detritus still clinging to the rock band. But i think at heart Rock has always been ultimately about energy-worship. Radio as an electricial circuit you plug yourself into.

that's why i feel what Buick the Pseudo-Antiintellectual says, because, there is a rockin' essence running through music that crosses genre lines.... just the fact that the word "rock" recurs in hip hop and rave as a praise word, a buzz word --- "rock the joint", "let's rock", "rock the beat"--shows a continuum of affect.

"Rock" means a certain kind of visceral impact, a certain blend of aggression and masochism (in metal or rap do you identify with the aggressor or the target? Both!). Also a desire to be rocked, shaken in your body and your worldview.

it is not the only thing popular music has to offer by any means but it's a core thing

To Buick's point about freedom... the problem for rock (and possibly what prompted the anti-rockist d***** in the first place) was that this "wild energy" was accomodated possibly as early as the mid-70s... that exuberance, once threatening in itself, was utterly corralled... ... you see its pantomime half-life twitching on MTV... or onstage at metal concerts... Punk tried to make the exuberance malevolent and self-destructive in order to renew it, give it a fresh lease of life.... that too became pantomimed

Anti-rockism tries to walk away from that recuperated freedom, as a lost cause...

but the question remains: what is it walking towards...

 

[hamarplazt]

if you think rock has only ever been about ego and self-aggrandisement they you've got a very restricted sense of rock

It isn't the only thing it's about, but it's at the heart of it.

My starting point is this: Why do I love 'ardcore, acid, gabber, jungle, breakcore, etc., but not punk, garage rock, rock'n'roll, metal, etc, if all these genres is about the same thing? Obviously, there's some of the same elements present, but why use exactly these elements to decide the musical relationship? To me, it have made just as much sense to look at the similarities between prog and rave, because I like prog so much more than punk and metal. However, to think that this means that the "essence" then is prog, is exactly making the same mistake. Rave contain some things that are in prog, and some that are in garage punk, but this is something not realized if you allready have decided what you want the music to be - like, say, "the new rock'n'roll". Then, obviously, you're likely only to hear the elements supporting that view.

I'm interested in seeing what similarities there are between the stuff I like, and I do like rock to some degree because of the same "energy worship" and visceral impact that also is in rave. But the differences eventually mean that I don't love rock like I do rave, and that I can't see it as being about the same thing. The way energy is being worshipped is very different.

There's a lot of rock that use some kind of machinic imagery, but that doesn't make it machine music. Its music that makes you feel like a human with the power of a machine, but that power is still used to your own human ends, not against them. Rock empower you, rave overpower you. I'm not saying that there wasn't some rock that somehow wanted to make overpowering machine music, but they never could, because they're still playing and composing like humans.

Rave fulfils the immanent or perhaps i mean latent techno-pagan/electrical-mystical potential in rock, discarding the humanistic detritus still clinging to the rock band. But i think at heart Rock has always been ultimately about energy-worship.

Why do you think that? I'd agree that there was a potential in rock, but that goal was only reachable by machines, which is exactly why many rockers find all kinds of techno so dreadfull - this is stuff that no human can play, you have to surrender to the machines to make it.

 

[blissblogger]

if you allready have decided what you want the music to be - like, say, "the new rock'n'roll". Then, obviously, you're likely only to hear the elements supporting that view.

this is a good point, but the fact is when you run through the history of rave, from marshall jefferson saying when he was making sleezy d 'i'm losing control' that he was thinking about black sabbath and such, or that acid house got named acid cos it reminded them of acid rock, or joey beltram also being into sabbath and led zep, or the riff-based nature of techno, up to certain things by basement jaxx, or... just too many examples really.... there's much more if a continuum, more connections and parallels, than people like to acknowledge....

Its music that makes you feel like a human with the power of a machine, but that power is still used to your own human ends, not against them. Rock empower you, rave overpower you.
.

that is a really good distinction. except that i think there's almost as much an overpowering/surrender to sound thing going on in rock, and nearly as much as power complex/i control the machines thing going on in techno -- A guy called gerald told me he felt like a god when he manipulated his machines..

there is also a sense in which a really good rock band IS a machine, a rhythmic engine

the meeting point between rock and techno is motorik i think -- beach boys>>kraftwerk>>cybotron/model 500 ... music of transit... speed worship... thrust but also impact

but as much as neu! or can whoever could be identified as motorik in excelsis you'd have to acknowledge that canned heat's 'on the road again' or doors' 'la woman' or steppenwolf 'born to be wild' are motorik

that goal was only reachable by machines, which is exactly why many rockers find all kinds of techno so dreadfull - this is stuff that no human can play, you have to surrender to the machines to make it.

i dunno, it's a "sexy' way to look at things in these depersonalized terms but i honestly think it's a mystification, in the end it's human perceptions and decisions that determine which machine noises get used and how they're structured... most techno is nothing like one of those eno-esque generative systems (which need a human being to set up in the first place anyway)

but obviously it's a radical move, technorave's intensification of the sonic through depersonalisation/defacialisation... i'd say it's a strategy of intensification though, and it far from abolished auteurism (techno bodz are obsessive spotters of producer's signatures, surely)

 

[hamarplazt]

this is a good point, but the fact is when you run through the history of rave, from marshall jefferson saying when he was making sleezy d 'i'm losing control' that he was thinking about black sabbath and such, or that acid house got named acid cos it reminded them of acid rock, or joey beltram also being into sabbath and led zep, or the riff-based nature of techno, up to certain things by basement jaxx, or... just too many examples really.... there's much more if a continuum, more connections and parallels, than people like to acknowledge....

Well, just because you're "into" or even inspired by something doesn't mean you're directly expanding on it. They wanted to use an element they liked in rock, and by doing so, something new happened, because that element change character when played by machines. Anyway, far more people got into electronics through Jean Michel Jarre than people like to acknowleedge. The silly, catchy elements of his hits are all over rave. My point still is that music is one big continuum, and yes, there's rock<>rave connections, but also all other sorts of connections, and rockists tend to look at the connections they like the most. What's so frustratingly messy about music is, that someone you really dig is most likely inspered by all sorts of unlikely things that you don't dig at all.

except that i think there's almost as much an overpowering/surrender to sound thing going on in rock, and nearly as much as power complex/i control the machines thing going on in techno -- A guy called gerald told me he felt like a god when he manipulated his machines..

But unlike rock, the way the techno producers feel about his "playing" have no direct influence on the final output. As for the surrendering-to-sound in rock, this have allways seemed to me to be about feeling alive, intensity-through-pain, where rave is about becoming void. Rock=heaven & hell, rave=nirvana. Of course, we're very much down to gut feelings here, this is how I directly (and indirectly) experience it.

the meeting point between rock and techno is motorik i think -- beach boys>>kraftwerk>>cybotron/model 500 ... music of transit... speed worship... thrust but also impact

The motorik-as-proto-techno have allways seemed to me as a rather lazy comparison, far too obvious. Trying to sound like a machine doesn't make you one. It can have some other, fascinating effects, but in the end it's more like a novelty-thing, like using machines to make "real" music, undistinguishable from something played by acoustic instruments. Something different happens when machines are playing, whether through a sequencer or a loop - something with the precision makes a lone breakbeat or 909 pattern fascinating, even those so simple and minimal that they would be deadly dull were they played by a live drummer. This is mystification to me.

To me, all this isn't about depersonalisation at all, not about that machines should be self generative or anythig like that. On the contrary, I'm much more into the recognizeable producers than the scenius one hit wonders. It's about machines opening up a path unobtainable until then, it's about machine precision, about them being able to play much more complicated, or faster, and still much more precise than any human. That's where prog come into it. All this, that no rock band can ever assimilate, is the essence of techno/rave.

 

[soundslike1981]

All of this debate tells me that "rockism" is indeed a little more loaded than "liking rock above all other forms of music" (unless that alone is assumed to be innately racist/wrongheaded/pejorative in some other sense).

To me, liking something more than other things is no problem--nor is it even innately pitiable (though I wouldn't want to listen that way). It's enforcing ones (limited) opinion that is problematic, which is (I gather) the presumed "ism" to rockism--it's a form of critical narrative that has apparently crippled (popular? critical? hipster?) understanding of music. I remain unconvinced that this army of rockists exists; or that anyone is enforcing rockist values on popular listening habits.

For the sake of argument I'll agree that rock music has often been associated with cultural imperialism, dogmatic anti-eclecticism, racism, sexism, and angry-white-man-ism (though I don't see the need to enter "authenticity" into the mix). It has been, in some ways, the music of the privileged power class, even if its origins (and, I would argue, farther expanses) were something else. So my question is this: is there any way to like/listen to "rock music" that isn't innately "rockist" (racist/sexist/homophobic/etc.)? Is there a baby in the bathwater, or is the whole thing toxic?

I ask because, quite honestly, *some* of the debate in favour of anti-rockism or at least the descriptions of rockism/rockists seems to be little more than flipping the purported roles--in other words, the argument doesn't always seem to be that reflexively favouring any one music/set of musical values above all others is a bad thing, but rather that favouring rock music/values (whatever those may be--nothing much like what I've thought them to be in my musical appreciation, apparently) is innately bad. Trading one ostensibly narrow musical philosophy/aesthetic/ethic for another does very little good--it reminds me of Mary Daly-style feminism, which essentially maintains the problems of gender through simply flipping the prescribed roles.

I mistrust any philosophy which cannot at some level separate functional, even artistic artefacts from the shortcomings of their artisans (ie "modernists" who reject all architectural tradition---and fairly successfully set about physically destroying its expressions---because people who built buildings before 1940 were involved in some rather deplorable activities). I'm not saying anti-rockism fits this attitude, and clearly we're not facing This Heat record burnings. But if I'm not totally errant in picking up a whiff of this stance, then I think it's something to be mindful of. How frequently have absolutists suceeding in really improving (materially or spiritually) upon that which they reject? Is it not reasonable to seek a third way, one which recognises and even champions the successes of "rock music" without deifying the guitar or marginalising . . . whatever sort of alternative is favoured by anti-rockists (on which I'm still unclear)? Or are we locked in a dichotomy, forced to chose sides?

In all of this, I don't think I'm so much advocating "rock music" as much as I'm being wary of what feels a bit absolutist (in the "other" direction from rock). I lack a conscious interest in most of the mythology of rock, and I'm instantly bored by Rock God-isms (or slacker anti-Rock God ironic indie poses). I'm as likely to listen to Ravel or Toumani Diabate or Joni Mitchell or Skip James or Giorgio or Terry Riley as the Velvet Underground or the Minutemen. But they're alll, quintessentially, just music to me, as pseudo-intellectual as I'm capable of being about it all when it suits me. Am I to mistrust that gut feeling, and force myself to listen exclusively to 'ardcore, jungle, acid house, techno, drill instead, to cleanse my soul if its six-stringed sins?

 

[soundslike1981]

Why do you think that? I'd agree that there was a potential in rock, but that goal was only reachable by machines, which is exactly why many rockers find all kinds of techno so dreadfull - this is stuff that no human can play, you have to surrender to the machines to make it.

This sounds awfully like the techno-utopianism of Le Corbusier et al. I'm no luddite--I love a lot of electronic music--but the vigour with which you reject "human" and embrace "machines" seems a bit anachronistic. Haven't we learned the lesson of technologism? It's not that the machines will destroy us, per se, so much as it's an inevitable fact that somewhere, a human is pushing the button so we'd better own up to the fact we will always be human and make something good of the mix.

It's good and well to say you prefer non-human music (which to me is a bit of a fantasy) to music that sounds like dirty imperfect humans made it. But why do you feel the need to impose that preference, or to belittle other preferences as though you had some moral higher ground behind your aesthetic preferences? Seems awfully rockist to me ; ) Or perhaps ravist?

 

[Melchior]

My starting point is this: Why do I love 'ardcore, acid, gabber, jungle, breakcore, etc., but not punk, garage rock, rock'n'roll, metal, etc, if all these genres is about the same thing? Obviously, there's some of the same elements present, but why use exactly these elements to decide the musical relationship?

I think that this really does come down to aethetics as much as anything else. There's nothing wrong with that of course. And the reason to sue aethetics to distinguish between them is because that is where your personal point of departure begins.

For me, part of the appeal of the rock music I like (although I never thought of it as rock music) was the feeling of being subsummed in the mob during a live experience. I quite specifically remember the first time I felt this conciously. I loved the similar, althoguh subtly different, feelings I got from my early experiences in the electronic music realm.

I'd agree that there was a potential in rock, but that goal was only reachable by machines, which is exactly why many rockers find all kinds of techno so dreadfull - this is stuff that no human can play, you have to surrender to the machines to make it.

Surely punk's emphasis on music that anyone can play is the flip side of the same coin? Which is why, or at least one of the reasons, so many ex-punks were interested in early rave? A lot of the apeal of machine amde music is that ANYONE can make it, esentially. This isn't true of course, but it does seem more democratic at it's heart. In DnB, this is becoming less relevent as people become more and more obsessed with technical wizardry in production, but in grime I think it definitely is still a factor.

 

[huffafc]

Two interconnected points here…

I’ve always thought that rock music is actually electronic (or at least highly technological) music in an important (and depersonalizing) sense. Rock’s entire existence, and the ways of listening it has created are dependent upon the recording medium. Not excluding the fact that classical music still exists, there is a transformation of the concept of ‘musician’ that occurs in the early 20th century from musician as writer to musician as one who is recorded. Rock music is one of the most important attempts to embrace the possibilities opened up by this transformation.

What occurs right at the very beginning is the creation of a larger-than-life but actually very depersonalized (that is inhuman or supra-human) celebrity (Elvis, Little Richard), and the obfuscation of the process by which their music is created. Not to claim that no 50’s rock musicians were involved in the creation of their own music, but how and to what extent they were involved becomes much more difficult to determine with the emergence of professional songwriters, complex studio techniques, studio musicians etc. It’s the old story of pop culture and inauthenticity: performer as icon blazing in front of a shadowed creative process. Perhaps some electronic dance music embraced a kind of depersonalized facelessness that was distinct from the depersonalized but hyper-visible face of the rock performer. But neither can lay claim to being simply more depersonalized. Sometimes the appearance of the performer acting as auteur can be just as distancing as the disappearance of both performer and auteur.

If we follow the definition that rockism is something like a privileging of the voice and a direct connection to expression then perhaps rockism, despite its name, is actually seeking to reclaim a certain kind of relationship to the performer that was lost at rock’s very inception (of course, if you believe Derrida this loss occurs at the very inception period, but I’m just trying to make a point here).

And if this is what a rockist is, then I agree k-punk, that it would be a mistake to dismiss the prevalence of these attitudes. Look at the debate on another dissensus thread about the ‘real skill’ (i.e. authenticity) of grime dj’s, consider the idea that only rappers that can freestyle are ‘real,’ the examples go on and on. Attempts to recapture a lost transparency in the relationship between the performer, the work performed, and the listener, again and again and again. Look at American Idol for god sakes, how rockist can you get? Let’s take a bunch of people and determine how much ‘real skill’ they have at singing, ‘live’ don’t forget, in order to determine who should rightfully be a pop star. It’s rockism eating itself.

So, I would argue that there are many ways of considering the value of music, still prevalent now, that in certain ways‘privilege the voice,’ privilege authenticity, and that real political and artistic problems arise in these instances. Problems that do need to be elaborated, perhaps on another thread.

But I’m still suspect about the ‘rockist’ term so dominating these questions, I think its genre specific connotations, although helpful often derail the debate. It diverts us towards rhetorical questions like: Is it wrong to have a favorite kind of music? Is the whole history of rock music really racist?

Moreover, the rockist inevitably conjures the anti-rockist, who I agree soundslike1981, is often understood as not much more than a flipping of the rockist terms. As a result, the rockist/anti-rockist debate becomes like the modernism/post-modernism debate. The modernism/post-modernism debate was extremely important but has since become a huge red herring. Bascically because post-modernism had problems rethinking, rather than simply reversing, the arguments of modernism. By looking closely at what issues have come under the heading of the rockist/anti-rockist debate, like the privileging of the voice, perhaps we can escape that. And by arguing about certain modes of valuing music, rather than the value of an entire genre of music, perhaps we can move from rhetorical questions to questions that demand a response.

 

[Buick6]

Innaresting points being brought up, and Ok, 'im an ionnerlectyul, you can't fool me, BUT I didn't study philosophy or humantities, and all these blogs about 'bodies without organs' and Lacan and Derrida and post-modernist-structualism is completely Chinese to me, so in that context I'm rather non-intellectual...

OK, some more hopefully illuminating points to add to the disco:

1. I notice how much 'techno' music now is trying to become 'rock'. For rave and whatever's anto-rockist stance, most of the 'BIG' club anthems now are using sythesised or real guitars, mash-ups pinching nirvana and White Stripes riffs etc...This poses a serious challenge, rebuttal and core dichotomy to the 'anti rockist' stances out there....

2. ROCK: essentially is an American invention and 'product'. I think the best and funniest 'intellectualisation' of this concept/culture/product is in Neal Stephenson's novel 'snowcrash', where he describes a deflated, post-capitalist America, where the the few thing American's do well in this knackered industrial society is 'weapons, computers, movies and ROCK'. It's their 'thing' like Oscar Wilde or Skiffle is a 'British' thing. BUT what I feel the core problem or paradox with the intellectual or even psychological analysis of ROCK is that it's POWER represents possibly the ultimate CORPORATE manifestation of culture. Juggernauts like THE ROLLING STONES, KISS, AEROSMITH, COLDPLAY, U2, BOWIE are trademark brands worth millions in their own right. The term 'rock star' is used as a pronoun to describe everthing from politicians, sports stars, fucken even scientists and lawyers - it's like some 'label of credibility' to justify the most conservative, banal coprorate mono-culture that dominates society.

Getting back to the US/UK/empirical cultural ROCK 'battle' it's innaresting to note that despite ROCk coming from the US of A, some of the greatest ROCK bands that somehow did away with the nationalism of it all were British - from the Yardbirds, Stones, LedZep, Small Faces, Who, Queen, Status Quo it wasn't until UK punk which was more overtly nationalistic c/f with the US which was more 'personal' or 'romantic' that the demarcation line were redrawn, done away with of course by METAL (Judas Preist, Motorhead, Maiden etc..) and then ratified by what is supposed to be the most 'socialist' of pop- forms C86 and the Smiths, which spawned off a whole nationlistic UK-ROCK fetish that continues to this day. (I have another theory that MORRISSEY truly is the BRITISH ELVIS (or Michael Jackson even)...

3. It's all rock n' roll to me: The name itself implies a hybrid bastardized form from the outset. It 'twas 'the Band' who articulated the 'rock n roll' hybrid in 'the Last waltz' movie, but in it's simplest it relates to a BEAT. 'Gtr/drums/bass rock n roll is still played to it's chugga-chugga from Li' richard to Ramones to Turbo Negro. Likewise apply to disco/house/techno - disco was a beat over funk, then rock bands did it like KISS to the Stones to whatever. House never denied that reality, everything gets dumped in there from gospel to funk to, jazz to heaven forbid ROCK. The NYC producers of the 90s like MAW and Roger Sanchez and Armand Van Helden were always reconfiguring rock and pop and jazz to make house, what I believe one of the most substantially radical and modern ROOTS or 'standard' popular music forms of the modern era since at least reggae or punk.

4. Meandering on a riff.: And so dance music died in the arse, a rebel form ultimatelyt overtaken by the same corporatised forces and it's own sheer 'popularity' that pummeled ROCK into a joke that it became in the mid-late 90s. Innaresting to note that the revivalists were variations on a riff: my two Bobs:

THE WHITE STRIPES : I never really 'liked' them. Basically the Pixies meets Brit-rock meets the Blooze. But injected the 'female' eros via the 'rhythm', finally exploding the 'masculine' form of rock without anyone really noticing the effect, waving flags, or compromising itself to the 'identites' that critics so like to compartmentalise rock into. I'm not a fan, but I sorta get and respect the impact of their shtick on the 'kids' who prolly understand or at least fell it more than me.

RHYTHM & SOUND : motoronic techno pursits rediscover Studio 1 Jamaica and rediscover the expansive techniques that New Yawk art-rockers lost via their 'enigma' (namely: When Sonic Youth dropped their cyptic-politique in favour of 'neo-hippy grunge family values', claiming their lyrics were all 'irony' and getting 'hip' producers to refine their expansive sound into dated, noisy dreck that became a regressive and predicatable 'formula' read: hi-low jam outs, jangle moments and Kim Gordon's incredible musical ineptitude masqurading as 'radical agit-prop' until you listen to it 6 months later) by digging into the roots - even championing it via the Wackies Reissues - and squeezing the dumbness out of dubness to remind us all of what beautiful maximalism or minimaism.

10-4

B6

 

[huffafc]

Buick6 I completely agree with rock being hybrid, and dance music being referential to rock, and the general point that there is no clear way to completely separate out what is rock from what's not.

I also agree with the implication that this makes criticism of rock music as rockist essentially unfair.

This is why I have some problems with the term, and also why I think if the term rockist is used you have to be careful about what you mean. But I do think that there are valid criticisms that have been made, not of rock music as a genre (if anyone can even claim to pin down what rock as a genre is), but of a certain way of listening to music more generally that many people have identified as rockist. Specifically, the 'rockist' process of dismissing or elevating music on the basis of some myth of authenticity.

 

[Melchior]

This is why I have some problems with the term, and also why I think if the term rockist is used you have to be careful about what you mean. But I do think that there are valid criticisms that have been made, not of rock music as a genre (if anyone can even claim to pin down what rock as a genre is), but of a certain way of listening to music more generally that many people have identified as rockist. Specifically, the 'rockist' process of dismissing or elevating music on the basis of some myth of authenticity.

Surely this is the point that some people are missing: that just because some people espouse rock as being something, doesn't mean that it IS. The critique of rockism is a critique of the privileging of certain values. It's not a critique of rock music per se.

So there's no need to get defensive unless you actually are privileging those vlaues (ie. a sense of 'authenticity' and credibilty etc).

This is why people were accusing each other of being rockist in the MIA debate - because they were criticising MIA not because her music was shit, but because she was striking a pose that they were unsure she could realistically lay claim to. Regardless, it certainly didn't have anything to do with her music being rock and roll or not.

This may be a problem with the term of course. People automatically assume you are criticising rock music if you use it, as opposed to criticising an attitude that is derived from the way some people approach rock music. But it is the term in common currency, so that's why it continues to be used.

 

[Buick6]

Most rockheads would say the definition is:

'Two electric guitars, bass, drums'

And there was also the credo:

'no synthesizers were used on this album'.

 

[Melchior]

That's a definition of rock. Not a definition of rockism.

Regardless, there's plenty of music that's rock that uses synths. So it's not even a very good definition of rock.

 

[k-punk]

I don't understand why Simon wants to rehabilitate the term 'rockism'. Whatever he says, his account of rock itself is NOT rockist. (So he agrees with Tim and me, heh heh). And if the battles 'have been won', then why line up on the side that has lost? (btw it really is not only a dwindling band who hold to rockist tenets - those attitudes are endemic amongst white teenagers here still). Yes, popism has to be hammered; but not by rockism, because, as Mark Sinker rightly said, popism is rockism, and the only legitimate position is anti-rockism.