-John Fogerty
Less Talk, Less Rock
Today the AV club ran an astute – if overdue – article by Stephen Hyde about how Rock is no longer an appropriate catch-all term for popular music. The article itself is worth checking out, but the basic gist is that since Rock is an inadequate signifier since its place atop the charts has been taken over mostly by hip hop artists. The same can be said for pop: the radio station I used to help run, WOBC, lumps all tonal music into the pop category when it doesn’t fall into another genre. I actually like that, since its connotations are pretty nil. Rock is a different case, however, since the term itself implies a kind of benightedness when it’s bandied about as frequently as the AV Club thinks.
One of my old bands played at a singles bar in Hamtramck, MI. There were smoke machines, lasers, and neon signs in the shape of planets. When we got there, we were greeted by someone in a brand-new leather jacket – soundguy, owner, bartender, it wasn’t really clear – and he asked us if we were “ready to rock.” I think I actually told him “no” – our band had an accordion, two horns, a drummer with a small kit and me playing bass. It seemed like an inappropriate thing to ask. On par with asking bands to play “Freebird.” The ultimate cliché.
As a genre, Rock is a dinosaur in the making. Bands that rest on the Rock signifier are becoming fewer and farther between because there’s more stuff out there to use as a basis to pattern your sound. The bands that can be called Rock acts came up when there wasn’t the cornucopia of pop music to choose from.
“Four out of the top five road warriors were rock acts, but all of them—The Rolling Stones, U2, Bruce Springsteen, and Elton John—are old enough to be Adele’s parents (or grandparents). The youngest of the top touring rock groups, Bon Jovi, is still primarily known as an ’80s band geared toward big-haired housewives who name their vibrators ‘Richie.’”
A natural extension of that is how Rock has taken on the role of an honorific. You have the Rock and Roll hall of fame[*], which recognizes the accomplishments of musicians across genres and claims them as its own. The gamut runs from Run DMC to Neil Diamond to Genesis and back. It’s hard to dispute many of these artists claims to enshrinement (though there are glaring omissions), but it seems procrustean to lump them all together under the Rock umbrella. Unfortunately, that thought process has become endemic, e.g.:
“GQ’s ‘Gods Of Rock’ cover from November, where hip-hop’s two biggest contemporary stars, Eminem and Lil Wayne, appear next to the living embodiment of rock’s indefatigable spirit, Keith Richards. Once upon a time, purists would’ve flipped over Eminem and Lil Wayne being ‘legitimized’ with the ‘gods of rock’ tag (whatever ‘gods of rock’ is supposed to mean). Today, the photo seems wrong for a different set of reasons. Imagine Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry standing next to Glenn Miller under the headline ‘Gods Of Swing,’ and you get the idea.”
It was bound to happen that Rock became the property of the masses, and lost its volatile edge. That it started as a counterculture and now is the culture to counter is no accident: it happens, given time. Herbert Marcuse addresses this transformation quite nicely:
“This liquidation of two dimensional culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of the ‘cultural values,’ but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale.”
Essentially, it’s the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” ethic magnified and reversed. Rock (and music more generally) has a begrudging relationship to commodity, so to stay in business musicians find themselves beholden to commercial demands. The flip side, where Marcuse comes in, is equally important: the subversive quality of Rock music is what made it cool, and that’s what the mainstream picked up on. Of course, once mainstream music absorbed and regurgitated pop music, it’s no longer subversive.
That’s easy to remember whenever someone talks about Rock in the abstract, or talks about Rocking Out, Being Ready To Rock (though I’m still OK with Rocking the Mic, Rocking the Bells, etc., since all of those seem a little more pointed). It’s happened with damn near every other subversive music, too: look at punk’s appropriation into high fashion, later into commodity. Even Hip Hop can’t escape One-Dimensionalization.
Back to the gorilla in the phonebooth: I don’t mean people should be careful when talking about Rock, per se. This isn’t an overtly politically charged subject (though it’s not without its political implications), nor is it that important in the grand scheme of things. Bands can and will call themselves whatever the hell they want, and critics can and will do the same. But if you want to talk about music, you can do better than just calling it Rock. More likely than not, you’d be selling the sound and spirit short.
[*] When my folks were in for my college graduation, my Dad insisted that we take a trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He reasoned that I’d been living in Ohio for five years, and that I hadn’t been to Cleveland’s only tourist trap was criminal. I don’t remember many specifics – a surprising amount of cars that belonged to stars, and other memorabilia. The one thing that sticks out was hearing a middle school band playing “Seven Nation Army” in the atrium. That was the nail in the coffin for me: Rock music had had the mickey slowly torn out of it to the point of being middle school band (fan)fare.
