Douglas Wolk, clearheaded, on rockism

It could be that, it could also be the opposite.

I'd like to know--having read Christgau but not having paid much attention to the British music scene in the '80s, actually--what people think is the musical event that really triggered the anti-rockist thing? Was it disco? To my way of thinking, disco is such a good example of how rockism deforms one's perception of what music does, since the subject matter is usually so frankly concerned with hedonism, and "nothing happens" in the music like it does in rock (usually no guitar solos, lotsa lotsa repetition, "gay" themes, "divas" singing, and so forth.

It does seem to me, too, that the last few years have seen a real and noble attempt to get past that whole perspective of seeing everything pre-rock as a leadup to it--I'm thinking of the renewed interest in stuff from the very early years of the century that weren't exactly blues, or jazz, or ragtime...and for me, once I started thinking about what Bert Williams was all about, for example, things began to get a lot clearer. But I never bought the rockist line, since I was always way more into frankly "unreal" pop music and r&b/soul/funk/disco leading into whatever you want to call Autechre or, to take an example of something I love lately, the Soft PInk Truth...groove-based music being the basic vocabulary of that music, I'd say. In other words, it *always* seemed to me that James Brown was a really fruitful tree and the Beatles were a nice sorta dead end, not that I really want to put it that baldly, just attempting to make some kind of distinction and place my own taste in this discussion/historical continuum.

Anyway, yeah, I know this has been done to death but it seems like we need to keep goin'...

At a particular point in time, though, I might just be interested in asserting my preference of one song over the other, and not interested in going into a full musicological analysis of the Raspberries song. Can it not be a given in this instance that:

1) Saying that the Raspberries song is better "because there's more to it" does not necessarily reflect a bias on my part toward complex things in general, and ...

2) That I am actually implying in my statement that the more simplistic majesty of the Rubinoos song (which I like, and which I do think has a simplistic majesty) isn't as great as the more complex majesty of the Raspberries song?

But when you state it as you did above, it implies just the opposite! If you said "the intricate passage in song a) is more effective than the way song b) employs a more minimal effect" its fine. But if you say "its better because it is more complex" that implies that you mean "complexity" (if such a thing can be defined) is inherently better than "simplicity" (ditto) and the idea of this "inherent" heirarchy is what rockism is about.

A personal point I've suddenly realized which...*might* apply here, a bit. I have not for a long while, and possibly never (but I could easily be wrong), seen music as biographical expression from its creator(s). The 'soul' of said individuals -- whether SAW or Dave Pearce of FSA sitting in his room somewhere -- does not convey itself per se through the music; alternately what meaning I might glean or read into the songs is generally insular or seen through my own specific lens. (I don't hear a death wish in Ian Curtis's lyrics, instead I sense a yearning for connection -- life, if anything; likewise what I hear in Timbaland's work at its best is a staggered shock that turns into motion -- his innermost being, I don't know about and wouldn't expect to.)

Douglas, as Spencer and others have elaborated, is right to focus in on the language used to describe the event. I find it interesting that to me there is no debate in my brain about the 'honesty' of a particular approach, I assume I am far from alone here (and I assume I am not necessarily operating with a uniform philosophy either). At the same time I am less concerned about an artistic expression of honesty in a truth/lie context, I am deeply concerned with celebrated artistic *connections* of...I don't know, head-rush, scramble, shock, being moved and moving. Perhaps it *is* honesty, but honesty separated from the moral requirement or describing factor, more internalized in a 'great, that works!'/'yugh, how boring' fashion...

Hmm...rambling here, I'm losing my point a bit. I think what I am trying to say is that there is a way that the internalized language of rockcrit -- what Tom is noting, in a way, with his question about an anti-rockist critical language -- can function away from the rockist normative, that it can at least mean something on a personal level even if (or because of its nature) as a crutch. That *maybe*...maybe...the reexpression/revision of terminology, as it crackles under expected pressure from a host of continuing new influences and conceptions in life in general, will yet become, not necessarily anti-rockist as such, but...different. Differing. And that to plan it is too much but to watch it happening and to ride the possibilities could be freeing.

Hm, still a ramble. Hopefully there's a point in there.

who still sez this and is taken seriously by anybody anywhere pleeze?

"Writing in The Chicago Sun-Times this summer, Jim DeRogatis grudgingly praised Ms. Lavigne as "a teen-pop phenom that discerning adult rock fans can actually admire without feeling (too) guilty," partly because Ms. Lavigne "plays a passable rhythm guitar" and "has a hand in writing" her songs." -- K. Sanneh

I imagine some writers (sometimes even myself) have trouble reconciling or expressing love for career longevity with the innately temporal and almost by definition trendy nature of pop. Will people be listening to Britney is 20 years? Does it matter if they do or don'? I suppose it's equally interested whether she's completely forgotten or revered in 2025.

Hold on here Josh, this is circular logic. You're essentially claiming Dylan is important because he is important, which is somewhat glib. Also, comparing Patton's far more obscure work in terms of how it was recorded, released, and received with the far more immediate and easy access to Dylan -- major label contracts, high profile media appearances, etc. near the start of his recording career and after, in otherwards the fact that 'millions' could actually *hear* and encounter his work as opposed to Patton -- is an utter apples/oranges situation.

Well, xpost a bit, but still.

However, I think there's something important about rockism that isn't discussed explicitly here, and that's the idea that there are opposite (if not equal, at least in terms of the number of times I've read articles about it) ideas in every other intellectual/social group. I remember once at ILM, mark s once described rockism as "moralist", as opposed to materialist. I agree with him: rockism is an example of using one set of morals as a baseline that we can judge all other ideologies. Wolk does talk about baselines in this article, and even brings up racism, which is a good parallel - but doesn't really note that the exact same thing can happen for pop or any other kind of music. I'd assume just see the word rockism vanish, and replace it with moralism.

i wrote about this (badly) elsewhere, but the people tagged with the new dylan tag were never signifiers of massive cultural import. they were all "pale" imitations of dylan. steve forbert? prince was never called the new dylan. neither were public enemy. they both had just as much right to be if you are basing the (admittedly stupid) designation on *POW* impact. thus, rockism. i guess. i'm not a rockism expert.

The tricky thing is that one can have a "whig" perspective, but still produce really good history, in terms of actual narrative of events and research, assuming that the "whig" elements are read out of some of the broader claims. So the norms of what constitutes valid argument, inference, and proof, allow historians to have discourse despite perhaps even having *competing* whig perspectivees.

Whig history is bad for the past coz it doesn't let you recover what was really going on (i.e. seeing the early who through the lens of "finding their way" to the "mature" sound of "who's next") and is bad for the present coz it attaches a fixity and permanence to the "hero" of yr. story, often rooted in some transcendental being-ness of some aspect of it as "demonstrated" thru yr. narrative itself.

This is where a rich constructionist theoretical toolkit comes in, and why i'm starting to heart pickering and other practice theorists in the history of science/sociology of knowledge. but the beauty of the discussions in history is that the shift to "objectivity" came with ranke and the development of history as a "science" in the first place, so there's an established basis of grounded "what really happened" or "who rides whom and how" to appeal to in the course of particular debates, rather than as great a tangle over notions of constructionism themselves. so partially, if someone sez you're a bit "presentist" or there's a "whig" element in yr. outlook, it can be debated in the concrete rather than hackles immediately going up. meanwhile, unfortunately, rock-crit discourse is so grounded in the primacy of individual experience that these discussions can degenerate far more quickly. which is not to dispute great first-person based crit, but rather to point out the (and "logocentrism" works great here) assumption of unmediated expression on the part of the *writer* if not the artist.

When I try to think of "anti-rockist criticism" I end up coming up with theories that basically justify either how I write about music or where I'd like to go with my writing, which is probably a covertly rockist move insofar as rockism is partly about pretending that what feels right/good, be it how and what I decide to write or the transitory effect of a piece of music, is the productive of a universally applicable truth. Nonetheless I'll try to talk about it anyway below.

Such instances of my ongoing rockism involve a delegation of responsibility for my opinions and actions insofar as they posit a disembodied third party as adjudicator and arbiter of these disputes, even if that arbiter is simply the "truth" itself, or rather just "what this music means even when I am not in the room". This is why statements like "no one will listen to this in twenty years time" remain the ultimate rockist move I think - the value of a given piece of music is decided not by the speaker, not by the listener, not by anyone either person knows, but by a hypothetical population who have yet to come into existence. As if the further removed the moment and forum of justice is from one's personal experience of music the more legislative weight it's given.

One of the great things about ILM obv is that the nature of its instant responsiveness tends to work against this: my opinions are not tested for their objective truth value by some future population of music fans, but will instead be weighed and assessed by the next poster on the thread according to their own tastes and experiences. The inability of ILM to ever agree on a group or artist we all unequivocally like or dislike doesn't negate the possibility of truth, but it undermines a certain way of thinking about truth in relation to music.

There's a certain performative contradiction in anti-rockism, which is that pretty much all music criticism implies a certain truth value, a conviction that what is being said needs to be said for the sake of others, and that's a big part of its effectiveness - I'm not about to start attaching subjectivist caveats to every proclamation I make. But I think what we're really doing is not trying to open up people's eyes to the "truth" of the situation (ie. objectively Britney Spears' "Born To Make You Happy" is the best song ever and I'm the only one thus far to realise it) so much as communicate a private experience to others in the hope that it recreates itself for them - truth as infectious rather than universal. What is it work is perhaps some sort of quasi-moral conviction that our enjoyment is worth sharing, that if we can maximise someone else's enjoyment by infecting them with a bit of our own, we should.

Rockism, working on a basis of some universal truth that exists within the music, seeks to repress the accidents, deviations and idiosyncracies of individual experience, in favour of identifying some irreducible core of meaning that should remain stable for all listeners. In truth this "irreducible core" is more hegemonic than objective/universal, the sum total of endlessly reiterated received wisdom in relation to a piece of music (or music generally) and thus usually just about the least interesting thing that anyone can say or read (this is where Deleuze's gripes about people lazily attaching affects to concepts and assuming the link between them is self-evident and eternal become relevant).

Anti-rockism should therefore conversely maintain a level of fidelity to the at times totally contingent specificity of experience, because it is the very contingency of the experience which is also the truth of the experience as such, and it is what makes it valuable: a certain music writer (critic, fan, whatever) comes to a certain piece of music at a certain moment in a certain context and with a certain amount of prior experience and/or set of expectations: their engagement with the music and insight into it thus has the potential to be unique, but once it happens this experience and insight is something which they can (if they write well enough) pass on to others.

Ironic that arch-rockists Manic Street Preachers sum it up in one of their album titles, "This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours"...

...Sterling's post makes an interesting x-post! And it's not surprising that we come back to "is individual experience the ultimate or only ground" which was the same issue that the dissensus pop thread hinged on for ages and still does to some extent. The history comparison is a good and compelling one I think (though I know v. little about the debates you mention Sterling) but what I always get stumped by is how you go about saying "what really happened" in relation to music unless object you're asking it in relation to is your own experience. What really happened for whom?

What rockists don
t get is that rock IS artiface--it glowies and reaches its finest registers when plying the finest in thought-out fakery. Historically, artiface is one of the things that remove it from the blues, very old R&B and other sources.

The few cases of 'authentic' rockist greatness are usally the resuly of simply not having enough money to produce some grade-A artiface, something like Raw Power.

To me, it's just another dregs-of-the-60s idea.

On the other hand, there's artiface and there's artiface. When reviewers start treating B Spears with the seriousness they might better spend on Bjork or Aqua, how do they differ from trying to legitimize dull corporate fancy?

So I guess my dividing line re: artiface is--Is this the product of a zany person or a craven combine--and how should that effect my relationship with it?

Anyway, for me, "Go All the Way" trumps everything by Radiohead in terms of self-honesty and integrity-in-intent.

I'd rather hear Cher than Chan.

What most people utterly don't get about first wave punk was that it was defined by artiface, hence the tolerance of Bowie.

And so on.

Yes Chuck, but you have to first explain to some people that any music can be judged in terms other than rock before you can then get them to accept that it might be possible to judge rock in terms of disco.

One of the things that makes the current country/rap crossover interesting is the fact that presumably the two styles relate to eachother (when they do relate to eachother) in ways that largely bypass rock's terms of reference. Whereas a lot of the time rock journalism tends to assess musical developments in non-rock genres according to how much they reflect or deviate from rock tropes.

parallel with rockism here seems obv.

p.s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history

p.p.s. w/r/t "what really happened" i think if we look at how history is practiced we see there isn't the one history of say, the seven years war, anymore, but rather a recognition that certain aspects are being discussed, certain analytic units brought into focus and others left aside, etc. "all writing is an act of exclusion." so there isn't any *one* "what really happened" story, but there are methods to distinguish something that really happened from something that evidently *didn't*. TS: a "usable past" vs. "using the past."

xp

my worries about music criticism sort of transcend this rockism problem, i think. i think there are lots of ways music criticism can and do surmount rockism (whatever it means) that still don't address what i see to be some problems with (or, to put it more ecumenically, things lacking in) criticism.

Yeah there's definitely not one set of rock terms! And generally rockism's rock terms are pretty dubious in terms of judging rock too, or at least most types of it. And you're right to note that the bad stuff about rockism doesn't originally stem from rock.

All these things are part of the point Mark S made really well and succintly when (and I hope i don't get him wrong in paraphrasing) he said that rockism is anti-rock insofar as rock was originally less rockist than most of the other music being made at the time; "rockist" values were adopted by rock discourse out of insecurity vis a vis those other styles of music (interestingly this is an example of how rockism and anti-rockism have twin opposing flight-from-Eden narratives: rockism tends to tell the story of styles starting off authentic and then losing their way in artifice, whereas anti-rockism tends to tell the story of styles becoming bogged down by the weight of demands for authenticity being placed upon them).

I see this as being quite connected also to Frank Kogan's position: Frank once said (can't remember if it was to me or here generally) that his entire approach to music generally and rock specifically was very much shaped by his experience of rock when he was growing up when (and now I'm actually putting words into his mouth as I have to retrospectively reconstruct the point he was making) it was diametrically opposed to the er PBSized rock of rock discourse. And I wonder if there isn't a lot of common ground between Frank on rock and Mark on punk.

(Both are of course free to come on here and explain how I've misunderstood them)

Anyway, I like songwriting a lot, but I think as I get older I admire the audacity or even wrong-headedness of someone who says fuck songs and all that, I want to *play a certain way*. Which maybe relates to what Chuck says about thinking about rock in disco terms--why not? For me, it can only be healthy to discount the, I guess, prime rockist tenet that "good songwriting" and so forth is the most important thing. There's so much stuff I like just because I like the way it's done, not because I think the songs are great or anything like that. I think it's gotta be healthy to think this way, and for me, it's a way out of "rockist" strictures. I'm a big fan of Charles Keil's "Music Grooves," which talks about all this far better than I. I am sure I am stating the obvious, but it does seem to me that part of "rockism" has to do with the primacy of the record-as-object, and a consequent devaluing of live performance.

I do have a problem with "normative" when you're talking about music of the '60s, too. When I hear the Beatles or the Stones or the Left Banke, just to pick three names, I hear " '60s," but I hear it just as much in Elis Regina, Gilberto Gil, or some African music from the decade I've been listening to lately. Or in Howard Tate or James Brown or Eddie Floyd. So what '60s are we talking about?

"why would hip-hop critics who demand that the music be "real" and serious and not plastic and frivolous not be at least as rockist as rock guys who enjoy music because "it rocks"

As far as the semantics of the term go, I have problems with these statements. Does most of the muddle surrounding the term originate from the fact that "rockism" is being used to refer to things other than a bias in favor of rock music? With the hip-hop critics mentioned in the quote above, can we not just say that we feel that they may be biased about music needing to have strong meaning? "Rockism" needs to be far more firmly established in the lexicon as a universal if it's going to be used to refer to particular types of bias in general.

"judging metal or country or blues on *disco* terms"--I'd love to see more of this, actually--in some sense it's the same category of "mistake," but it's at least a fresh one, you know? Except I'm not even sure what disco terms would be: I don't know of a body of writing/thinking about disco that's as engaging as the rock equivalent (and if someone can point me at something that proves me wrong, please do, pref. contemporary with early disco and not in academic-ese).

I think there's a particular flavor of authenticity-so-called that gets invoked for rock considerably more than for other stuff; there has to be a better name for it. Hip-hop critics demanding that hip-hop be "real" and serious is a problem of its own, but it's not rockism.

Otherwise I'm gonna have to think about a lot of the points you've raised.

A couple of points I should've probably made clearer in the original piece:

*"Rockism," if it's going to be useful at all, has to be SPECIFIC and LIMITED in its meaning. I tried to come up with the narrowest meaning I could (and the way it's being used in this discussion it's still sliding all over the place).

*Rock is not rockist (so e.g. "Raw Power" isn't rockist). Loving rock is not rockist. Rockism emerges in the way people address stuff other than rock.

*Rockism is not responsible for everything that's wrong with popular music or popular music criticism.

x-post

Yes.

>i'd be pretty bored unless you went into some detail about how those things (i mean, music) actually functioned and what it meant for them to "rock."<

As well you should be. And I have--many, many, many, many times.

x-post

This has probably been said before on ILM, but it almost seems a foregone conclusion that popular music criticism should not be rock-centric, given the dominance of non-rock musics on the chart, the graying of the rock audience, etc. I'm not convinced this development represents any advancement in how we think about music, just a change that reflects changing musical values in society at-large.

Because all this change happens so quickly, you still have rock critics who judge things on classical values, rock critics who judge everything on rock values, and even a few critics, I imagine, who still don't see any good in most pop music.

This has probably been said before on ILM, but it almost seems a foregone conclusion that popular music criticism should not be rock-centric, given the dominance of non-rock musics on the chart, the graying of the rock audience, etc

The twist here is, at least since punk, rock criticism has not defended the music of the charts, it has been much more likely to criticize the music of the charts.

Douglas, I liked your piece and I find your additional remarks upthread helpful- but when you say "loving rock is not rockist" I assume that you are saying "loving rock is not *necessarily* rockist"; and your statement "rockism emerges when people address stuff other than rock"- I think I follow you if you mean "rockism shows up when people use certain kinds of rhetoric to repudiate non-rock genres"- but it does also seem to me that there can also be "rockism" in the way that one celebrates what one loves about rock music. Agree? Disagree?

also, what about actual songs whose content is itself "rockist"- i.e. to me Turbonegro's "Rock Against Ass" and Bob Seger's "I like that old fashioned Rock and Roll" tune are not just rock songs, they *are* "rockist songs" (and I know it's corny to say that but still . . .)

to Geir- thank you for your comments- everytime I start to think that "rockism is a straw man, nobody really holds such snobby views about other genres" you helpfully remind me that it's not a straw man after all.