Rockism lives, Part 43

Given that every article in Rolling Stone talks about passion, I am sure this one must have too.

he really dresses like that

I think he meant electric guitar solos.

"It's almost a cyclical thing -- as music ages, it can become cool again," says Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis, who covers the Traveling Wilburys' "Handle With Care" on her new solo album, Rabbit Fur Coat. But Lewis also sees a simpler reason for the trend: "It's called classic rock for a reason -- it's classic. It's just really great music."

Hardly. I quoted Van Zandt to show how moronic his logic is. Hip-hop, hard rock, pop = instant pleasure; classic rock = lasting pleasure.

(xpost)

This whole article is hysterical for so many reasons.

THAT'S WHAT THE KIDS WANT TO HEAR, THOUGH, GEORGIE!

Guitar sales are strong and have been moving up, particularly on the really cheap end. Slave labor guitars made in China/Indonesia/Vietnam are the movers. You see a lot of them in Wal-Mart and even now in BestBuy, where they sell pieces branded as Gibson (actually, look close at the box, they're Gibson-Baldwin) cheezo/dilettante-market copies of the Les Paul and the SG. So you can get a guitar for less than $100 for the First Act and under instruments, and get a "Gibson" piece of crap for about twice that.

Theoretically, every kid can easily afford a guitar or two and put his band on Myspace. Often it looks like they do.

Doesn't he have the only rock 'n' roll radio show in the country? Never have heard it but I read that a lot, particularly when people who couldn't give their records away are being profiled as to where they're getting airplay or special consideration.

Anyway, here's a slave labor market seventy dollar plywood Strat some guy professes to be crazy over. I don't believe him.

http://www.musicyo.com/news/cheap.asp

and Van Zandt is the go-to guy for such quotes. as for Jenny Lewis, I know very little about her…does she say dopey shit like this alot?

I have no idea. But I thought it was called "classic rock" because that was a term coined by radio programmers for a specific broadcasting format.

The point is, Jann Wenner needs everyone to know that HIS GENERATION WAS THE BESTEST EVAH!!!! Its virtues and its attendant culture are undying and immutable…

Awesomely bad, yes, that's true. If people who don't know how to play play guitar, that's all right, but it's a lot easier to make a good recording of playing badly, with a guitar that's not such a rock bottom slave labor piece. If you're going to put your worst foot forward, use the right tools. Put another, really shitty guitars can make even shitty players not want to pick up the instrument.

Jann Wenner needs everyone to know that HIS GENERATION WAS THE BESTEST EVAH!!!!
Hey, Jann...Have a nice mugful of STFU, you hippie burnout bastard. Why don't you go and bicker with Tom Brokaw about who the greatest generation is, eh?

- polyphonic (polyphonic@hotmail.com), February 13th, 2006.

The big deal is that these kids who are only listening to Pink Floyd are missing out on the Velvet Underground, Ramones and Stooges as well as old-school funk and bubble-gum pop, and contemporary pop and rap and more. They've convinced themselves that a radio marketing tool ("classic rock") is a way to define what should be listened to. As for Jenny, she has been touting Laura Nyro who is not exactly a classic-rock mainstay, but otherwise hasn't she mostly been giving interviews where she just touts the music her mom played.

Also, upon further review, I have a strange desire to buy cheap guitars if only to feed the "slave labor" meme.

Theoretically, every kid can easily afford a guitar or two and put his band on Myspace. Often it looks like they do.

-- George the Animal Steele (george_the_animal_steele...), February 13th, 2006.

It often sounds like it as well.
-- Ned Raggett (ne...), February 13th, 2006.

my POV is that the anti-rockism 'movement" is the epitome of moronic Oprah-esque me-too!-ism... But someone explain to me how the above conversation is not rockist, rockist fucking rockist. Or was I not paying attention when another round of irony came and went?

Amazingly enough, an even more rockist comment. appealing to others for explanation.

No but are electric guitar solos are really soaring

The humorlessness of the rockism/popism debate is fucking tedious.

Guitar sales last year: up 25%
Turntable sales last year: non-existent (literally)
Average guitar lesson students per month in 2004: 22
Average guitar lesson students per month in 2005: 65
Best selling sheet music book in 2005: Creedence fucking Clearwater Revival

Don't kill the messenger.

Also, I fear that you may need a hug.

I have said it before and say it again -- a classic rock phase is a great thing to have and a better thing to leave. Mine ran from when I was 16 to 17 or so -- heard a lot of good music while also realizing it wasn't the *only* good music out there. And so I moved on, and I suspect many others will come to the same conclusion.

You mean someone just like every 40 year old hipster with a blog last year?

Now, read some customer reviews of slave labor guitars. Careful, you read too many, you'll start to believe some of them, and you'll buy one, too. It almost happened to me and I already have two Gibsons.

http://www.harmony-central.com/Guitar/Data4/SX/

I STILL stand by 100 dollar guitars being awesome.

Slave labor guitar fan in unconcscious let-them-eat-fish-paste-and-rice
so children can have goods their parents would pay a more socially reasonable amount for if they had to non-shocker.

I liked this joke more when I said it earlier in the thread.

Wait, rockists are missing out on the Velvet Underground, Ramones, and Stooges? I thought those were rockist-approved bands.

I admittedly know absolutely nothing about Jenny Lewis and her musical taste, I've only heard her new album, which is nice a bland, Laura Cantrell sort of way. But where do you get off saying that Jenny Lewis has "convinced [herself] that a radio marketing tool ('classic rock') is a way to define what should be listened to"? She is at fault for using common parlance (however constricting it might be) to describe a kind of music that she likes? Are we expecting our rock stars to be the keepers of rock terminology now? Anyway, she could very well like each and every one of the genres that you listed (bubblegum pop, old school funk, etc.) and even consider them classic in their own right. She might even really like the new Kelly Clarkson single.

I only come up with a good one about twice a month so I'm protective of 'em.

Although that is utter bullshit, ("only rich kids have dedication!") I'll give you a pat on the back and let you dream a little dream.

By the way, the expense of the instruments in general is what is producing these shitty myspace rock bands (a good majority of which are upper middle class kids with expensive, AWFUL sounding modern mesa boogie amps and Les Pauls and not a hint of creativity).

I used to have a pretty junky cheap electric guitar. I bought it used for not too much more than a hundred bucks. I've never had a good electric guitar. To me, the difference in quality would probably be more noticeable with an acoustic. Certainly there's a world of difference between a good acoustic and a cheap, crappy one. I've never played one of these cheap Asian imported guitars though, so I don't really know how playable they are. I don't think the sound difference would probably be too noticeable if you're just going to run it through some cheap distortion pedal and an inexpensive amp though.

I had a guitar made by Teisco. It was rebranded as a Kent in the US and was aimed as a knock-off Les Paul Black Beauty. It was a step up from a plywood Kay which was my first guitar. It was significantly more expensive in '70 or '71 -- at leat 180, might have been as much as 200 -- than the new slave labor guitars. Very solid instrument with an indestructible finish.

"expensive guitars are better" is a capitalist construct designed to keep the dough flowing in.

You are a sworn brother in filching.

I mean, ask someone with that opinion why it is like that and you'd get answers like:

- They rock more
- They were more inventive and influential
- They were more rebellious
- Parents used to hate them more than they hated Pink Floyd

All of it extremely rockist reasoning.

Just about every biography I have read about old country starts, folk musicians, and garage rockers begins with the kids getting the cheap guitar at Woolworth's or some other little drug store. Weren't those cheap guitars back in the day?

What parents knew about the Velvet Underground?

Jenny Lewis being apathetic about modern country is a weird thing to mention in a thread about rockism because modern country (a) involves songwriting, (b) involves guitars and other "real instruments", (c) is white. Granted that the material is new vs. old and "an ephemeral pleasure" rather than "a canonical work", but hardly comparable to SVZ's delightful "disco sucks" routine, especially since disco is "gay", "black", "mainstream", "dance music", "electronic", "pop", "ephemeral", and every other thing that the anti-rockist means to defend.

(Again, I don't know anything about Jenny Lewis, I just get tired of every person who likes old rock music getting thrown under the rockist bus just because they don't go out of their way to listen to (or enjoy) every genre/period under the sun.)

They were cheap but not by today's standards of cheap which are an entire different order of magnitude cheap. There were Japanese companies plus a large number of American companies who did down market beginner guitars. As mentioned with my Kent, which was a Teisco instrument, by dollar standards, while cheap, they were still more expensive than the slave labor instruments. Teiscos became collectibles, so did a lot of the down market instruments. The Sears-sold Silvertone is a noticeable example. A Silvertone is even modelled on my Variax, mostly because Jimmy Page used one very visibly. Eventually Japan's post war standard of living and overhead rather quickly priced it out of what was then considered the cheapo end of the market.

First Acts, SX's, the Gibson-Baldwin's in BestBuy and 70 dollar Kramers are never going to be collectible. One difference between the old cheap guitars and the slave labor guitars, is that you could always go into the store and play them before buying. The Gibson-Baldwin's are sold in boxes, so are the First Acts. Buy the guitar like a toaster, if it's really shit, so poorly set up it frets out, what are you going to do? And now there's the phenomenon of buying the really cheap instrument sight unseen on the Internet. I prefer to play guitars prior to buying and feel that's a sensible attitude. The only company that did sell a lot sight unseen was Carvin and they did it with with high end instruments priced moderately to expensively, depending on your custom-requested options. And they never specialized in plywood instruments.

To oppose rockism does not, in any sense, equate with "disliking rock music." One could listen to nothing but Eurotrance and still be a rockist, if one had a list of The Ten Eurotrance Albums Everyone Should Hear Before Stating Any Opinions About Music. And yes by the way this theoretical example is an invitation.

I await pictures of the Apollonia 6)

Wait, occasionally you could find guitars that were unplayable orders of cheap. My friend Al had something in the early-70's I can't even remember the name of. If you tried to play it, it hurt your hands and squealed without mercy. So he never played it. It sat in its case and fulfilled the basic truth of the statement, "I have an electric guitar."

Anyway, as for Jenny Lewis, dude:

a) She's quoted in the article.
b) She just made a trad-country album.
c) She is saying that she likes the old stuff, not this mass-produced, slick, modern stuff.

I don't think our strawman rockist is exactly listening to a lot of Toby Keith.

I've seen it happen, man.

What I find more interesting is where Sabbath is percieve in all of this. When I was young, the rock station would play "Paranoid" at like 3AM. And that was it. I remember Zeppelin (amongst others) being the gateway to Sabbath for me whereas for kids today, Sabbath is the gateway.

Even if this is all because of obnoxious Sharron and Ozzy's goofball extracurricular activities, I still can't help but feel it's a good thing.

has there been a significant rebound in classic rock's popularity? it seems possible - satellite radio's definitely had an impact on commercial radio, generally for the better, and most especially on rock format stations, and apparently there are top 40 stations in america playing rock songs although this is tied into rock is back which is tied into rock leaning towards popist principles to the extent they exist. i'd imagine dling has had an impact here too (as it has everywhere else) - no need to rely on older brother's rockhandmedowns or finding presence in the cutout bin, a kid can have sizeable zep or stones or floyd (or faust or gentle giant or monks or collins kids or this heat, which is the significant shift in dling - when i was a kid these were records odds are you heard about long before you got to actually hear them) collections in a couple of hours.

thinking 'rock' and 'rockism' have shared fortunes or bloodlines is the 'vince foster wuz murdered' of ilm - a lingering idiocy you're suprised anyone pays much heed too.

As Mike Dixn says above, rockism isn't about duration but about realness. A rockist believes that some music is more real than other music. A popist disagrees. This argument is essentially Plato vs. Aristotle, which has been going on for thousands of years of course.

http://www.vmunix.com/mark/blog/wp-content/guitar_hero3.jpg

agreed, although to say "I side with Plato!" or "I side with Aristotle!" is to announce that one's missed the point of either Plato or Aristotle, and of both

There isn't some yawning gap between $99 plywood guitars and $3000 PRS's. You know this of course, but it helps to ignore it if you want to construct some pointless bullshit argument, doesn't it.

This is getting VERY tedious now. This is not like the Sufragettes or Rosa Parks striking a blow against a dominant hegemony that enslves or demeans huge swathes of social groups. It's not social justice.

Or is it?

Why are people still getting bent out of shape about rockism or perceived rockism? Haven't we moved on to other things?
There are also a few traditional country sounding songs on the Jenny Lewis album.

Iow. ILM'ers dismissing white guys with guitars because they are white guys with guitars is indeed very rockist. :)

Not neccessarily, but the moment you dismiss something because it either doesn't rock or isn't inventive (doesn't "change history"), then you reasoning is rockist.

OTM. I think we're done here.

So you think half sound like Pink Floyd, the Eagles or Led Zep?

-- Momus (nic...), February 15th, 2006

Really, the rockism/authenticity thing isn't a Plato vs Aristotle dispute, I don't think. It's really a romanticism (for which authenticity is key) vs. the Enlightenment (for which universality is key) dispute.

Nice try, but not even close.

Sterling's post is great, though.

So many jpeg options, so little time