defend the indefensible: rockism

Is innovation another word for heartlessness?

I would say, yes. We cannot turn the face of the future into a heart.

STRONGO SMASH

July 20, 2003

Editor's note: This column contains lyrics that could be offensive. But the Free Press thinks they're important to understand the columnist's view.

So I went to the Eminem concert in a football stadium last week and here's one good thing I can say about it right off the bat: There were no long guitar solos. That was good. There were also no musicians. That was bad.

Eminem arrived in a Hummer that came up through the floor of the stadium. That was good. He jumped out and began rapping. That was good. Most of the lyrics were angry, mean, profane, sexist or just plain filthy. That was bad. But I couldn't understand too much because the bass was booming like a belching Cyclops. That was good.

Did I say bass? Yes. Bass. But there was no bass player. There were records, played over the giant speakers, to which Eminem performed. Singing along with records used to be considered bad. Now it's considered good. Which I think is bad.

There was one song -- is it really a song if it's a rap? -- and it was done by one of the many co-rappers Eminem had with him, and in this song, I swear I am not making this up, the only two words I could understand were "child support."

Did I mention it was sold out?

Some 45,000 came to that show, rivaling anything Bruce Springsteen or the Rolling Stones could draw. And they have instruments!

Here's another thing I heard:

"WHASSUP, DETROIT?"
It is what it is

At last count, I heard it 279 times. "WHASSUP, DETROIT?" I heard it from Eminem, from 50 Cent, from Obie Trice. (Forget lyrics. The most inventive part of rap is the names.)

"WHASSUP, DETROIT?"

Now, being hopelessly square -- but willing to learn -- I always had taken "whassup?" to be a form of greeting, sort of like, "How's things?" or "What's your sign?"

So the first time they yelled "WHASSUP, DETROIT?" I yelled back "whoo!" The second time, same thing. Third time, a little less.

By the 127th WHASSUP, I was WHAS-OUT. I mean, how many times would you yell, "I'm fine, thank you"?

But at least I understood those words. Most of the others were too loud or distorted. I did catch this from an Eminem anthem:

I am, whatever you say I am, if I wasn't, then why would I say I am?

It's hard to argue with that logic, although I think I first read it in "The Cat in the Hat." Still, I would rather have a packed stadium singing that than another verse to which everyone -- including countless junior high school-aged kids -- was urged by Eminem to sing along:

Don't f--- With Shady, Cause Shady Will f----' kill you.

People sang this and waved their arms and smiled, as if we were all singing "Kumbaya."
He's no Rocky Balboa

Oh, well. It had energy and it's good to see 45,000 at a downtown event. Still, if you asked me to sum up the Eminem football stadium concert, I would say it was mostly about people kidding themselves.

Because Eminem grew up in the Detroit area, he was hailed as "hometown." This meant the same people who would vilify another rapper who sang about killing his girlfriend instead cheered him like a war hero.

And parents who normally bridle their kids let them go because they saw the movie "Eight Mile" in which Eminem turns himself into Rocky, and they said, "Oh, see, he's different," never bothering to listen to an actual Eminem CD that would make them throw up.

There is also something odd about a guy who screams about being trashy and blue collar and anti-establishment, but lives in a 22,000-square-foot mansion. You can only get so angry at your butler, you know?

On the way out of the show, I passed a man playing a harmonica and collecting money. He wasn't particularly good, but then, to cite a famous rapper, "He is, whatever I say he is." And given what I had just heard, I say he's Mozart.

Contact MITCH ALBOM at 313-223-4581 or albom@freepress.com.

punk killed punk. rock killed punk.

we all killed punk.

punk killed yr. idols.

american idol killed punk.

america killed idols.

eric idle killed python.

whitesnake killed rock.

etc.

http://thepoorman.net/wp-images/images/jackieharvey.jpg

I agree tho that any discussion of rockism has to start with how it works and what it's for.

Anti-rockism, in contrast, seems to imagine that it is somehow possible to achieve a non-ideological, "all gates open" relationship with a whole wide world of sound; a total translucence of self in which all biases, predispositions, inclinations, etc are dissolved. But even if this were possible, why would this be good? Isn't all criticism (and, at the non-verbalised level, all passion too) coming from a position? From a self that is both social and embodied. Isn't criticism by its nature always engaged, visceral, partisan, its "for" usually containing an implicit "against"? Judgement likewise is always on the basis of some kind of principles--aesthetic, political, ethical, etc etc. Anti-rockism, pursuing its negations to the limit, would open up a vast universe of un-principled prattle.

This might help, or it might not, but here's a parallel situation from a non-musical context:

Liberal: It's a basic human right for anyone to wear whatever they like.
French government: When in France, do as the French do! We are the French Republic, people gave their lives so we could have a secular humanist state. So when you go to a French school, don't wear religious garb like a headscarf. We forbid it.
Liberal: That's reactionary! You should adopt a more neutral stance!
French government: But your stance isn't neutral, by defending the "right" to wear a veil to school you're defending the "right" of repressive fundamentalists to tell women what to do! You have to make a choice between two apparently "neutral" human rights, the right to wear what you want, and the right not to wear what someone else tells you to wear. Maybe those are not neutral after all, and neither are you. So why not stop talking about universal rights, especially when they conflict, and just say, like us, "this is what we believe". It's actually a more modest stance than your claim that human rights (even, apparently, conflicting ones) are universal.

I think Ned Raggett, in his own Stylus article on the subject, falls into the same trap as the liberal in our example: despite trying to maintain neutrality (the article mostly says "people have the right to be rockists, it doesn't make you a bad person") he failed to prevent himself taking sides, and ended up seeming to endorse the less liberal of two positions. If this stance is "productive" of anything, it's the dismantling of a rhetorical device which helps each of us locate his or her own inner musical conservative, and challenge him to become, not neutral, but a musical radical. Which brings us back to the question we were asking of Simon: is listening to a lot of different types of music noncommittal, or very committed indeed?

And video killed the radio star. Next question?

I profusely apologize that you're not me.

Your outer one's worse.

Also Momus, I'm thinking that an anti-rockist or non-rockist does not necessarily need to be an active or committed listener. For example, my random acts of anti-rockism may only serve to defend another's tastes even if I do not share them.

no.

Not to be snarky and flippant.

I don't like the "no more rockism threads" because I still think there is something important to be discussed. Too bad that they almost always end up repeating themselves and being very redundent.

Why else, then, would I be calling for NO MORE ROCKISM threads? I agree that it's an interesting subject, but it always runs aground, regardless of your particular stance.

Simon asked me on the Dissensus pop thread why I would bother writing about music if I didn't believe in the truth value of what I was writing. Thing is, I do believe in the truth value of what I'm writing, but it's not as simple as eg. liking/disliking something, searching for the most convenient and familiar critical trope and then assuming that one explains the other (I'm not saying this is what Simon does, but it's the standard move which constitutes rockism's boringness).

For me the critic's job is always to strive to understand better the effect and operation of music, but their explanations are necessarily going to fall short of achieving this to some extent; the more lazy the explanation, the greater the falling short. The best way to combat this is to maintain a stance of creative suspicion towards the explanatory power of standard critical tropes, not because they're wrong, but because they can always be improved upon, expanded upon, complicated, augmented etc. to better reflect what's actually going on.

As such anti-rockism for me is about taking responsibility for your own engagement with music, not pretending that it is legitimated by some outside universal law but actually arguing passionately from the position of your engagement. Any subordination of the actuality of your engagement to the convenience of a common explanatory argument is effectively a pretence, a false position.

(and before people accuse me of pushing bourgeois individualist consumer values, the "your own engagement" here can refer to the engagement of an entire community, but I would still expect the same standards of sincerity).

ie. scenius might be acceptable to rockism in some circumstances, but not in the case of gabba!

Like my piece itself! Oh wait.

*exit pursued by a Momus*

My argument being that those dubbed rockists often claim they hold a claim on authentic, genuine feeling as expressed in music; and those who hold an anti-rockist stance claim that this claim for authenticity is a poise, and therefore inauthentic.

Yeah. Was reading his latest blog stuff. Pretty much just waiting for him to carve "4 Real" into his arm at this point.

The claim that 'authenticity doesn't matter' is a (quite strong) stance on the question of authenticity. It isn't an evenhanded, pluralist stance at all. It's quite absolute.

I'm not sure how questioning people's attachments to concepts of authenticity in music is any more an "attack on their authenticity as a human being, as expressed in tehir musical taste" than assuming people are mindless sheep who cannot distinguish between real and fake.

I'm not following - explain again?

The first position is the anti-rockist position on rockists. The second is the rockist position on non-rockists. To hold to rockist values wrt authenticity is to impliedly dismiss the taste & the perception of the person who does not share those values: by listening to inauthentic music, the latter evidently cannot distinguish between the authentic and the inauthentic within music, and thus they are being tricked by the music, or advertising or etc. into finding meaning in an illusion (hence "mindless sheep").

To then complain that the anti-rockist position on authenticity is really personally threatening or destabilising seems to me an over-reaction.

The anti-rockist and the rockist are cut of the same cloth, in that they are both dogmatists, albeit dogmatists at opposed polarities. Each claims the other side is not seeing reality clearly, ie, they are stuck in an illusion - an illusion conastituted by their benighted misunderstanding of what authenticity actually is.

The anti rockist claims that the rockist is suffering under the illusion that there is an authentic stance.

The rockist claims that the anti-rockist is suffering under the illusion that authenticity is unimportant.

Both sides claim to understand what authenticity truly is.

Please correct my understanding if I have got it wrong.

(Anyway, the entire debate became boring and counter-productive two years ago, let alone now. The musical universe can't be reduced to two aesthetic approaches!)

i guess it's not cult-stud coz there's so little culture discussed?

also obv. partially informed by encountering so many critics who are great but with infuriating politics, e.g. Norman Cantor whose "inventing the middle ages" i just finished and it was at times magnificent but then careened off on this bloomian closing of the american mind shtick somehow linking this to a dislike for the welfare state.

Tim/Sterling/whoever can correct me if I'm misstating something, but I figured since they're not in the mood to repeat stuff on other threads and I'm on dial-up (and therefore unable to search the archives for a similar thread) I'd just answer. And to answer yr second thread about being repetitive - I think trying to jump in the debate is a good idea, but do some reading up on rockism in the archives. Tim has posted a great deal on this sort of thing already.

there was a "game" that i among others usta play a while back where we'd validate (well) "pop" choices by rockist criteria or v/v. it was absolutely contrarian fun. but i'd like to think it highlighted interesting ways to hear music too, or pointed to new ways. like e.g. if the popartist themselves doesn't have this absolute artistic control over the artifact coz it's "manufactured" by The Matrix or whoever, then well, why not look at what The Matrix does? In doing so you could say that it's "accepting rockist logic" in some sense coz hey it's still looking for auterist control in a way, but it's also just handy for understanding the music better. which is also what chuck might say about looking at disco like rock or pop like folk or etc. so ok reynolds has a point there about this being an aftershadow of the "rockist impulse" except notmoreso than rilly how any sociological approach is an aftershadow of society or how criticism is an "aftershadow" of the art in question or to be rilly goofy about it how art is an aftershadow of art too.

(which all in a way does resolve to an individualist stance and thinking about what i just wrote about k-punk prior, i wonder if there's any grounds to accept the way he just shoves the label "bourgeois" on it at all, or if that isn't just the substitution of a hysteric suppression of social dissonance in place of an authentic resolution of the root character of that dissonance -- i.e. a synthetic rather than organic [and hence unsustainable] reconciliation of the actual and practical character of modern artistic production with a theory of how modern society *should* be.)

i.e. the moment we go from "what timbo does is THIS" to "timbo is good BECUZ he does this."

i link this in my mind to when you stop complaining about books that don't tell you what you want to hear and start complaining about books that don't tell you what they're trying to tell you.

this just made me think of the animated sequences in "the wall".

I think I do make statements like the latter though.

With something like auteurism, I think it's a critical approach that still retains some level of merit but it's dependent on how it's used.

Rockism tends, I think, to use concepts like "the auteur" as if they were states that music and musicians fall into and which then designate something about the inherent quality of the music - ie. Timbaland is good because he is an auteur. Popism does this about "pop", which is why it's rockist about pop.

Whereas I think the idea of an artist being an auteur is more interesting as a strategy that may succeed (in resulting in good music) or fail: arguably Timbaland's best music and his worst music can be seen as being the result of his intermittent auteurist impulses.

By the same token, auteurism as critical tool is likewise not "correct" or "incorrect", but a critical strategy which may or may not result in good criticism. But a general rule that I would state here is that the more a critical tool is "taken for granted", the less it is likely that the resulting criticism will be particularly insightful. Anti-rockism for me then is mainly about not taking things for granted.

Sometimes I think Bloom had a really good model for thinking about art, only not in terms of artists overcoming the influence of other artists - rather, it's the critic who "wrestles" with the art in order to explain it conceptually, to capture in thought what the music achieves in effect and feeling and intensity. In this sort of contest I would have thought coming up with new critical tactics was effective battle planning; relying solely from musty old concepts from rockism's canon doesn't seem like a particularly good strategy.

(again, this is why I don't think Simon R is a rockist)

There was some dismissive discussion of auteurism on the neverending '80s Film Poll thread that struck me as especially silly in light of the essential auteurist position of everyone involved in the thread. I guess it just seems silly -- and doctrinaire, in a Cultural Revolution way -- to throw away useful tools of critique and analysis just because some subset of practitioners have mistaken the tools for the thing they build.

xpost: Yeah, what Tim said.

Thanks. (Some days that is all I'm doing, but thanks anyway!) I'm awfully thin-skinned and wimped out of following Dissensus when all this stuff started - that said it was a post by Reynolds a few months ago that started me thinking about all this again, when he said that the problem w/anti-rockism is that rockism works. He was talking about it in terms of an aesthetic filter, which I don't care a lot about - listening to music is actually really easy, you don't honestly need much of a master narrative to guide yr tastes! It's not some promethean struggle to find value! In the right mood I can enjoy almost anything, which is I guess baffling to some but liking (& talking about) music isn't just about the amazing peak passionate experiences any more than being married is just about the sometimes incredible sex. Writing about music for me is about being honest about how I actually use and enjoy and react to music in my life. It's quite a boring life so there's not necessarily going to be a lot of big adversarial moments. And I don't think I'm a very good writer yet either. Anyway I digress: the point is that Reynolds got me thinking about what this constellation of attitudes we've called 'rockism' is actually good for and the answer is - loads! It's hugely important and valuable both to a lot of fans and to the business side of things, and any attempt to unpick it needs to recognise that.

-- deej..

Thanks deej. Much clearer now.

I am interested in what makes an authentic voice. Whether it's in love, commercial enterprises, whatever the field of human interaction, I don't want to be led down the garden path by a sweet talking so-and-so who's got their own interests at heart, and wants to ride roughshod over mine. It couldn't be simpler: detection of authenticity is basic to human survival.

So: authenticity, and my capacity to detect it, is directly related to my future happiness. This is why authenticity is important. It's not so important that I find a formula of words that persuades you that my argument is correct, although that would be nice. What is more important is that, if you're bullshitting me, I need to detect the cues from your voice, your argument, your music, whatever it is you're using to sucker me, so that I don't follow you in a direction that is at odds with reality and my capacity to work within the real. Are you saying that is not possible? I am skeptical, on the basis of my own experience.

With experience, and awareness, and a desire to learn from body language and inflections of speech you may be able to detect a bullshitter. This isn't arrant speculation, but basic training for baggage handlers, among many others, for whom such things really do matter.

Is there any point in continuing? Only if you agree- if you don't, good luck to you, and may fate protect you from door-to-door salesmen.

I like this and relate to it, but I would also say that you are writing about how the music works--not in the sort of functionalist way that Tim Finney does, but in terms of really quite trad stuff about how this vocal and lyric work together, or how this riff in the fade-out is the whole point of the song, or this way of attacking a song was something new in music, or whatever. At least, that's what happens on Popular, which is really great and which you need to stop slacking on.

Whereas what I pretty much get with Reynolds for as long as I can remember is this attempt to transmute the passion of his listening experience. At least with the stuff he likes: It's all hyperbolic description, like someone shouting in your ear, THIS IS REALLY FUCKING AMAZING, IT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND, THE REVOLUTION STARTS HERE. And then that will be garnished with a lot of (in my opinion rather dated) class analysis (we can't just talk in terms of working/middle/upper class anymore, as if it was 1934) to justify it. And the problem with that approach is, 50% of the time the passion is not transmuted. I can't tell you how many times I've read some Reynolds rave, moved heaven and earth to find the tune, and then been like, is that it then? What's all the fuss about? We've named a new subgenre after a microscopic evolution in drum programming? (However: To be fair, the other 50% of the time he has come through.)

It's like, during that debate on Dissensus, he was saying, well, for me it starts with the experience, and I've found certain things are proven to work aesthetically over time, and then I build from there. And I thought, well, for you they work aesthetically, but isn't it a bit presumptuous to think you can take those preferences and work your way to an analysis that has all the trappings of objectivity?

(Not that I'm trying to set you two against each other, you're not really opposites at all.)

this whole lester and meltzer the emo-boys finding ways to say "ROCK" in evah-lounder and more intricate tones myth seems fairly manufactured from thin air to me.

now marcus is neither bangs nor meltzer, but as i recall even the foax who agreed on bangs and meltzer seemed to disagree on marcus being "Rockist" (this was a discussion on fbruno's blog, i think?)

I'm still interested in this idea of rockism as a filter. Tom says that listening to and enjoying almost any kind of music is easy. And sure, it can be, if you have the time and inclination to do so. But both Ned and Erick in their Stylus articles I think touched on the pragmatic applications of rockism, whereby it's much easier to navigate the thousands of records put out each year if you know, a priori, that Britney Spears is worthless. In many ways, I feel like the values that the rockist holds -- authenticity, e.g. -- are, at their root, simply justifications for an unwillingness or inability to engage with everything. (Which, to be honest, is something that the anti-rockist can be just as guilty of: by automatically dismissing Ryan Adams, you have more time to focus on downloading Jacques LuCont mixes.)

(do these discussions of rockism remind anyone of dfw's gags about addiction in infinite jest?)

My secret music tip is that you can replace 'time and inclination' with 'alcohol'.

*hic*

Explain, please. I've been in too many "DFW's right, television is an ADDITICTION!" discussions recently not to let this pass...

xxpost

David Thomson's defense of Meryl Streep as "the great pretender," and his comparison to Brando, seems worth quoting here:

"...the way of acting that came from Stanislavsky and which is most identified with the Actors' Studio, the teaching of Lee Strasberg and the Method, is to assert that the actor and the role become as one. Thus, the actor finds the part in his or her own emotional sense memory, and may find it very difficult to step out of the character after a day's work or when the production is over. The alleged authenticity or sincerity of this approach was hailed as a new and uniquely American way of acting - and a weapon in despising the cultivated pretending of the English style. It also tended to indulge and prolong the neurotic condition of immature personalities who had become actors.

"Marlon Brando was a very great actor, but his unhappiness diverted him from the art and craft of pretending. He came to hate its dishonesty and feel ruined by his own art. And even at his peak, I would suggest that Brando fell short of Streep's detailed observation of life. Instead, he offered his self. To see On the Waterfront today is not easy if you feel bound to think that this Terry Malloy is really a battered, brain-damaged ex-boxer as opposed to an immature personality revelling in the pose and the attendant self-indulgence. For showing off in pretence is not the same as being absorbed by it. In On the Waterfront we are always watching Brando (made up to seem damaged); in Sophie's Choice we are riveted by this pale, delicate, Polish woman and the inner damage done to her."

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/features/story.jsp?story=637074

Aging Puncture readers should note the Elisabeth Vincentelli sidebar!

The same would apply to any other drug I guess.

Pete that quote is fascinating. I was thinking about this w.r.t Scott Walker after reading Marcello's excellent comments on the latest Popular entry - "pretending" is a good word for what a lot of pop performances do, creating a space where the listener can insert themselves, join in the pretence, sing along in a way that's more difficult (or creepier or more problematic) if the performance seems more authentic and 'lived'. I think the songs I can empathise with most - or enjoy empathising with most - are the ones where the question of 'authenticity' seems either unresolvable or irrelevant.

Very OTM. Alcohol (+ the right company sometimes) can help turn off unnecessary musical prejudices.

that's all.

Again, it's not filters per se that I take issue with, but the oppressive predictability of certain filters. And this applies primarily to people who write about music: I just don't understand the point of holding yourself out as a musical critic if you're going to be so lazy. I enjoy engaging with the aesthetic positions of people with prejudices, but I like to think that those prejudices could potentially be more interesting or unusual (and thus help me to think about things in different ways) than the usual rockist tactics.

I think this is demonstrated on ILM with someone like Vahid, who has a very strongly defended set of critical filters for listening to dance music which he sometimes describes as "rockist" but don't easily map onto the term as such. What Vahid seeks to emphasise within dance music is, for me, rather shadowy and elusive; but that is primarily because he is coming from a position and applying a set of values rather different from my own. The problem of translation becomes both the challenge and the value of reading him online - it makes me strain to think about music differently.

One thing that rockism in the broadest sense does is to attempt to create chains of critical equivalence: you can like different types of music as long as yr understanding of that enjoyment is expressed within the terms of certain critical tropes, such that what is really being enjoyed beneath the "superficial" differences b/w Louis Armstrong and Bob Dylan are some vague sense of artistry, authenticy, meaning, realness etc.

This is useful in forming alliances in favour of a certain concept like artistry, but I think it goes out of its way to ignore the fact that these concepts, these hidden values, are only discernible insofar as they are expressed by the music, they are a creation of the music and all that goes with it (video clips, live performances, CD booklets, interviews etc.) rather than something which fills up the otherwise empty music like a spirit fills a body.

And as music will - sonically, socially, lyrically etc. - tend towards difference, the creation of perceived values expressed by the music are also going to tend towards difference. This doesn't mean that chains of equivalence are imposssible, but I think that they have to be sensitive to this creation process, to the problems of translation that arise when you have two particularities that seem to express the same "universal" value. The how and why of the presence of the universal in the particular is an important question.

Moronically!

Delete!

"I just don't understand the point of holding yourself out as a musical critic if you're going to be so lazy."

For the image. The scenesters right now deploy musical recondition as the medium par excellence both to bond and exclude those who don't get the codes.