Does Rockism Exist?

I almost made a comp tracklisting for the other thread with stuff like Aphex Twin's "Boy/Girl Song", M.I.A.'s "Galang", Jay-Z's "99 Problems' etc. all of which I lovel.

I'm 37.

In my mind, I'm always using the term for non-music attitudes too. I don't think a song or album (or any "text") can be simply labeled "Rockist". It's definitely an interpretation of the text (as Tim was saying). It's also often a categorizational act on the part of the person is "Rockistly" thinking about music or culture.

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5xpost or "narrow-mindedness", yes.

"or maybe not just closed-minded, but overly literal, orthodox, conservative, etc. Inclined to reinforce exist boundaries."

Yes exactly; where we might disagree is on which attitudes are "inclined to reinforce existing boundaries". The idea that the media's portrayal of, say, Outkast might be contested on the grounds that by supporting Outkast they're certainly not reinforcing existing boundaries. However, supporting Outkast on the grounds that Andre 3000 is a polystylistic maverick in the style of Hendrix and Prince who transcends the crassly commercial, derivative world of most hip hop does tend to reinforce at least a few boundaries - between auteurs and pretenders, between individuals and facsimiles, between the values of specific styles of music and "higher purpose" values against which all styles of music can be judged.

To some extent the use of binaries in music criticism will always lead to backdoor criticism (indeed even a straight reversal of the usual authentic/unnutritious divide can end up being an odd form of rockism) as the binary model is always ultimately a way of distinguishing between honourable candidates and imposters.

The more I think about it, it would seem that the primary victims of rockism even in the past have always been the major guitar rock artists of the day, going back to Rolling Stone's hate for Led Zeppelin.

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I apologize for this lumping-together by the way. I should have maybe said Afrobeat or juju or just said King Sunny Ade.

That is a bit revisionist. Disco was pretty consistently reviled (or at least not taken seriously) by establishment critics throughout the 70s. The usual rockist critiques of monotony, frivolity and unclear origins/authorship are directly related to "homophobia and reassertion of masochism".

can we get this straw man list to 100?

xpost: Yes, I know that's what rockism is supposed to be.

I think that rock still has the grip on the "grand narrative" as it is structured by all of this accepted wisdom percolating through books, newspapers, magazines, conversations etc, and it's a grand narrative which seeks to *include* hip hop and dance and etc. while still tracing back to Elvis or The Beatles or the Sex Pistols etc. as a foundation. By contrast hip hop or dance magazines (themselves rife with rockism) don't tend to attempt such an ambitious project, and their "grand narratives" where they exist are more strictly circumscribed, fringed by an awareness that they can't take centrality for granted. A good example of that is the opening self-justifications in Reynolds' Generation Ecstasy. I'm sure that in the past and perhaps even today discussions of rock might be or have been prefaced with a self-justification wrt the importance and validity of rock notwithstanding the dominance of classical music or jazz (this is I think mark s's point about rockism, it's very much a "sins of the father" type of affair) but it's not really very common now.

Well, I have read several stories of them winning the hearts and minds of a bunch of influential hip hop/R&B producers at least :-)

Tim: Right, I can see what you're saying.

It is extremely hard for rock acts to cross over to the hip-hop audience. Not to say impossible.

So Sundar, you're saying that maybe one of the extra planks of the rockist view is a committment to a certain kind of scale- that "big" bands fail the rockist authenticity test simply because of their very popularity and mass spectacle status?

first album/first show/basement rehearsal = "real" rock
big sales/big shows/crossover = fake

So if some African American critic dislikes "Toxic" because Britney is exploiting genres invented by black people to make herself money from it, then he is a rockist? :-)

Haha Geir, you would make the "reverse-rockism" claim!

Although the adherence to the ideal of authenticity, while certainly challenged of late (I actually think The Matrix had a big hand in this)

Now you know how I feel about The Matrix or rather the benighted star of same, but I'm interested in seeing how you would tease this out. And what of the not-surprising but not-ignorable-regardless response that said film/state of mind becomes its own orthodoxy? I'm not much of one for authenticity either, I just want something to be good, but it seems the implicit danger of taking what you state outside of yourself is that you start potentially imposing your own view on a more universal level.

I believe this movie is an example of a new acceptance of definition from without, of the (subjective) sense of a de-centered subject. It is the most populist example of a direct challenge to the dominance of Cartesian notions of apparent being and apparent reality which include authenticity, authorship, origin myths etc (and by extension then, rockism). I could go on, but I think it would be veering way OT.

Now you know how I feel about The Matrix or rather the benighted star of same.

My only feeling is that he doesn't annoy me as much as he does some people. I'm actually fascinated by others' revulsion for him, and I fear that your critique of the film (which again I remember saying you refuse to see) is deeply colored by yours.

(Acutally, Beach Boys probably an interesting band to discuss w/r/t rockism: early stuff "just silly pop," but Pet Sounds vaunted by the crit-establishment because it "aims higher," it's "more personal," it showcases B. Wilson as "auteur," etc.) (As far as I know, Dahl likes it all.)

I do know most of the story! That's not the issue for me. Feeling the film holds a prominent role in terms of a challenge to concepts of authenticity -- if anything this strikes me as the same thing which informs/afflicts so much of Star Wars criticism regarding a somewhat ex post facto, evanescent importance, except substitute Derrida or Chomsky (if you like, other examples can be found) for Jung and Campbell. It becomes a reference point but I don't think it necessarily shifts the goalposts so much as slots into something already there. I think where we differ is that you imply (though I could be reading this incorrectly) that concepts of authenticity were being challenged all the more by the films when I'd think the existence of the films themselves was just a natural progression from what had come before.

I actually find the story of whichever Wachowski is completing the sex change to be more fascinating than the idea of the movies, though, and of course there's challenges to notions of authenticity right there with what (s)he is doing.

Ned, I've always assumed that culture is always already dynamically being created and creating itself. However, I feel that The Matrix is a special case where difficult academic concepts were sucessfully translated directly into populist terms, thereby accelerating the discourse. "Welcome to the desert of the real..." etc.

Though I would have to assume that the burly greasy rockists would kick the milquetoast popists' scrawny little asses up and down the football field.

I'm trying to decide if that's a good thing or not. I guess it is.

That said, when you get "everyday people" talking about concepts straight from Baudrillard, and considering their own subjectivity in new ways (through identification with the Neo character - something which I don't think is possible for you), then I feel that a major shift has occurred.

Depends on yr perspective, no?

xpost: Right, that's part of why I think its use here is so questionable.

WORD UP!

I think it's a little more complex than just that. I think "rockism" might be a bit of a misnomer even for the classic form of the prejudice. It seems that it comes from what was privileged by the counterculture - but this wasn't always really rock per se, at least as it came to be defined, I don't think. 'Great artists' like Dylan or Van Morrison or Neil Young were among the most privileged in this view it seems - and in part, because of the 'authenticity' of folk or blues or country roots and because of the oppositional politics with which they were identified. So in the 70s a stadium star like Springsteen would be celebrated, partly for his aesthetics but also because he was a left-leaning working-class voice with a lyrics-heavy post-Dylan singer-songwriter sensibility and folk roots. A stadium band like Queen would however be critically reviled because they were merely decadent showboats, with roots deriving maybe more from the aristocratic European classical tradition rather than from authentic American sources. Significantly, non-rock artists like Bob Marley or Robert Johnson or Johnny Cash would also be favoured in this view to a rock band like Queen. (And I'm not saying that there's anything necessarily wrong with this taste - these are all great artists.) I'm just saying that the values associated with "rockism" aren't necessarily the values of rock as it has ever been actually practised.

Of course, there was another crasser sort of rockism from this era, the rockism of classic rock radio and your guitar teacher, which might actually deserve the name - where Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Rush and Metallica and Eddie Van Halen are privileged artists because they're real musicians who have mastered their real instruments etc and Boston and Journey and AC/DC and Bryan Adams are also (maybe lesser but still fun) artists but country and disco and anything that's not on rock radio (except maybe Jimmy Page's favourite blues acts) doesn't matter because it's 'gay' or whatever. It just seems that this view in its simplest form, which I'm sure still has its adherents, is so overtly ignorant that we're not even really taking it seriously enough to talk about it when we talk about "rockism".

Actually, making this separation was wrong.

Nah, it ain't revisionist at all - check any pazz and jop poll from the late '70s. Disco definitely did scored way better among critics than Journey/Frampton/Styx/Foreigner/etc AOR stuff (though still not nearly as well as it should have, obviously.)

1. Ian Dury & the Blockheads: "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick"/"Reasons to Be Cheerful, Pt. 3" (Stiff/Epic) 29 *
2. M: "Pop Musik" (Sire) 26
3. Donna Summer: "Hot Stuff" (Casablanca) 22 *
4. Sister Sledge: "We Are Family"/"He's the Greatest Dancer" (Cotillion) 20 *
The Pretenders: "Stop Your Sobbing"/"The Wait" (Real import) 20
6. Fleetwood Mac: "Tusk" (Warner Bros.) 17
The Knack: "My Sharona" (Captiol) 17
8. Blondie: "Dreaming" (Chrysalis) 16
9. The Brains: "Money Changes Everything" (Gray Matter) 15
The Flying Lizards: "Money" (Virgin) 15
The Specials: "Gangsters" (2 Tone import) 13
12. Michael Jackson: "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" (Epic) 12
The Pretenders: "Kid" (Kid import) 12
The Records: "Starry Eyes" (Virgin) 12
Talking Heads: "Life During Wartime" (Sire) 12
16. Lester Bangs: "Let It Blurt" (Spy) 11 **
Chic: "Good Times" (Atlantic) 11
Dave Edmunds: "Girls Talk" (Swan Song) 11
Funkadelic: "(Not Just) Knee Deep" (Warner Bros.) 11
Peaches & Herb: "Reunited" (Polydor) 11
Donna Summer: "Bad Girls" (Casablanca) 11
22. Gang of Four: "At Home He's a Tourist"/"It's Her Factory" (EMI import) 10
Robin Lane & the Chartbusters: "Why Do You Tell Lies"/"When Things Go Wrong" (Deli Platters EP) 10
Nick Lowe: "Cruel to Be Kind" (Columbia) 10
McFadden & Whitehead: "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now" (Philadelphia International) 10 *
Sugarhill Gang: "Rapper's Delight" (Sugarhill) 10 ***

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Note the absence of, for instance, "Dirty White Boy" by Foreigner and "What a Fool Believes" by the Doobie Brothers and "Heartache Tonight" by the Eagles and "Babe" by Styx and "Flirtin With Disaster" by Molly Hatchet and "The Logical Song" by Supertramp and, er, "Old Time Rock and Roll" by Bob Seger, Spencer. And Time, NY Times, and Rolling Stone critics definitely voted in this poll, by the way.

16. Lester Bangs: "Let It Blurt" (Spy) 11 **

Carry on.

(that really is an amazing list ... the P&J writers even liked "Tusk" at the time!)

It's also interesting how non-white and non-male (or rather non-heterosexual male and/or female) audiences similarly privilege the same things. Nowadays I always think of how so many women talk about how much they love "live" and "real" music, and usually really conservative garage rock and/or post-punk.