Douglas Wolk, clearheaded, on rockism

This also explains my musique-concrete note from above.

And I probably shouldn't address Gier's note as it seemed dissmisive, but my point is, I don't feel the need to "judge" rock music. I am a black music fan that found rock later in life, and at times, I struggle to understand it.

There's plenty of rock I enjoy, and when a rockist tells me it's crap, I just concede that I'm enjoying some crap.

"This Strokes album is fun; good melodies."

"The Strokes are fake."

[still listens to Strokes, alongside The Fall, etc.]

But when a rockist tells me my Disco (et al) is crap, I know they're wrong...but they are in the majority.

This is why I applaud Douglas's attempt.

(I went to the first meeting of a class about recordings & cultural ghosts a couple of years ago; its syllabus talked about Johnson being "one of the earliest Delta bluesmen." Um, no; he'd be more useful for myth-making purposes if he were, but no.)

From Dylan Hicks, as quoted here: http://www.citypages.com/databank/26/1265/article13016.asp?page=3

Of course the great black artists have a somewhat easier time getting played on the Current, if by "great" you mean the dead ones. They play Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Sam Cooke, Billie Holiday, Howlin' Wolf, Leadbelly, Aretha Franklin (technically living)--all brilliant, and all exemplars of the worst kind of tokenism on a station that routinely ignores contemporary African American artists. Often the black ancients will set up a tune by a later white artist who was profoundly influenced by black styles--so Louis Armstrong might lead into Tom Waits, or Howlin' Wolf might give way to Nick Cave. All of this jibes with two tenets held dear, if rarely spoken, by hip white people: One, black music died at some point in the mid-'70s, but the old stuff sure is fun to dance or make out to. Two, black music's main contribution is to generate ideas that more "cerebral" and arty white performers can then pilfer.

The discussion re: rockism could head in this direction; identifying strains of rockist thought that cause the canon to be formed the way it is (beatles on top, london calling is the best album of the late 70s, etc.)

Then: from http://cantstopwontstop.blogspot.com/2004/12/robert-johnson-rockism-and-hip-hop.html
Where Jeff C. quotes Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta

The neo-ethnic movement was nourished by a spate of LP reissues that for the first time made it possible to find hillbilly and country blues recordings in white, middle-class, urban stores. The bible was Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music...Smith was specifically interested in the oldest and most-rural sounding styles, and set a pattern for any future folk-blues reissue projects by intentionally avoiding any artist who seemed consciously modern or commercial...

Far from balancing this taste, the other record collectors tended to be even more conservative. Much as they loved the music, they were driven by the same mania for rarity that drives collectors of old stamps or coins, and many turned up their noses at Jefferson or the Carters, since those records were common. (Ed. note: Like Rick James, bitch!) To such men, the perfect blues artist was someone like Son House or Skip James, an unrecognized genius whose 78s had sold so badly that at most one or two copies survived. Since the collectors were the only people with access to the original records or any broad knowledge of the field, they functioned to a great extent as gatekeepers of the past and had a profound influence on what the broader audience heard. (Ed. note: Like Freestyle Fellowship or Bun B, bitch!) By emphasizing obscurity as a virtue unto itself, they essentially turned the hierarchy of blues-stardom upside-down: The more records an artist had sold in 1928, the less he or she was valued in 1958.

I firmly believe that in the same way record collectors affected the way we think of "the blues," critics affect the way we think about music history. And this is why I think anti-rockism is so neccessary.

I agree with this except that it's not quite the same thing as I'm saying. Which is that the critical values generally assumed in a discussion of Clapton in the 60s/70s did not come into being with rock music. They were a pretty seamless continuation of a long tradition of how, for want of a better term, "folk-art" had been discussed since the nineteenth century. You can include pretty much anything with any of the characteristics of folk-art, from Robert Frost to Woody Guthrie to Charles Mingus, in that category.

To understand this you can't lose sight of what these critics, consciously or otherwise, were struggling against: the establishment view that pop/rock was meaningless froth and to treat is as if it were serious art was risible. It was a fight for critical respectability and they used the tools that would do the job. No point in pretending that The Rolling Stones could compete with Prokofiev in terms of formal complexity or musical sophistication. So you focus on authenticity of feeling, (alleged) lack of artifice, a tradition fed by the folk-art of the alienated and dispossessed, the need for an art that ariculated of the feelings of the politically disaffected and so on. Of course I agree that the particular folk-artists chosen for sanctification as part of the tradition were selected because they were a good sonic fit with rock; yes, people who listened Muddy Waters because they'd heard he was an influence on The Rolling Stones heard proto-rock music; but that isn't the same thing as saying critical values derived in the 60's and 70's were being used to judge art from the past. At the level of "what we like" it was a two-way street between the present and the past. At the level of "how we justify what we like" it was pretty much one-way.

Which is a bad thing because pop deserves to be treated as just as much serious art as classical music is.
-- Geir Hongro (geirhon...), May 10th, 2005.

Um, 'unpick' doesn't mean 'abolish', and nor does 'undermine the (existing or previous) alliance between pop and serious art/critical respectability' mean 'never treat pop seriously as art'. The recent thread about pop music on Dissensus also seemed to make this assumption about anti-rockism/popism - that it's about being anti-critical, and in the end always resorts to "who cares, it's fun, it gives me pleasure" as a way of bailing out of arguments. This strikes me as demonstrably untrue, there's a huge body of writing that indicates that what popism if often about is thinking ever more critically about pop - in the process, taking to pieces some very entrenched assumptions about the criteria which is used to assess it.

And I think at this late date "folk art" is a really vexed concept, in this day and age after the efforts of someone like my pal Steve Calt, who wrote strenuously to take apart the assumptions of a guy like David Evans, who was looking always for some illusory "tradition" of blues in the delta. If it were truly a "tradition," then why was it that by the '60s there weren't any black musicians down there who even remembered that Patton played blues? Surely that whole attitude has a lot to do with rockism, since the only way to make that old music supposedly "palatable" to modern ears was to connect it to what was happening then?

xpost Geir, I listen to lots and lots of music that isn't "danceable," I listen to tons of late-19th century composers, Ravel, Debussy...and to Bartok, Stravinsky...and Webern, Berg, both of whom I'm into these days. It's great to be an American and be able to do both, you know, and it makes me proud just like Lee Greenwood to realize that someone like Miles Davis could so fruitfully combine "danceable" with the innovations of serious European composers...

In this same lineage of thought, there's a new generation out there that treats old-school Hip-Hop as that which fed modern day electronic dance music, rather than it's own artform.

I lost interest in Clapton when I was about 16, but Robert Johnson, Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Charley Patton, Skip James, etc. remain fresh to my ears.

I think this idea of a "point of entry" is an important one that shouldn't be dismissed -- it's almost always been the tool by which I've overcome my musical boundaries.

For example, I liked James Brown. Someone told me once that Fela Kuti is "The African James Brown." So I listen to it to hear some funky grooves. But I gradually realize that it's something different, that he's not "The African James Brown," but that characterization has forced me to give it enough of a listen to realize what's unique and different about Fela.

Reading this thread, my own grasp of what is or is not rockism keeps coming in and going out of focus. Regardless, some underlying themes keep flashing me back to undergrad debates over authorial intent.

actually, he came at the end, encapsulating the form. also, if it werent for folk and rock, the blues would be the dead genre it was until unburied by trolling college students and 78 collectors.

shouldn't this be "yea"?

/pedant

Rather than abandon this, I've been able to expand my horizons by expanding my definition of "musicianship" -- just writing a catchy melody takes musicianship, singing in an "unmusical" way and making it convincing takes musicianship, scratching on turntables, beat-matching, tricking the rhythm while rapping (but also rapping in a straightforward, simple, forceful way), programming interesting beats in a laptop, even making noise sound unique and interesting, etc. But I still hear things somewhat in this context -- I listen partly for the human skill in everything, whether it's the producer's skill, the turntablist's skill, the guitarist's or whatever. And I don't equate "skill" or "musicianship" with "technique," either -- a technically great guitarist can exhibit a lack of "musicianship" by just not hitting those right, sweet notes, by overplaying, etc.

Are you as dumb as you seem, or are you just pretending?

All the menuets of the 1700s are danceable, I would say.... Nothing wrong about adding a beat to an artistic piece of music, but the beat still remains far from the most important thing.

To use the elephant-in-the-room sexism analogy, patriarchy doesn't treat males as normative so much as treat Male as normative ie. man as the embodiment of a certain type of masculinity, reasoning etc. etc.

This is an important distinction because it means that not only does rockist practice end up with a fairly restrictive view of other genres, or even the rock the listener dislikes; it's also quite restictive in regards to the rock the listener likes, by insisting that the value of the music is synomyous with the value of Rock, ie. the myth of Rock.

(Under the sexism analogy, disco is a woman, bad rock is a homosexual and good rock is a solid upstanding member of the fraternity who only gets commended for his skill at golf, while his beautiful poetry is passed over with silent tolerance)

not in blues it doesn't. See the great book "Origins of the Popular Style" for more on this.

A lot of the rock "canon" isn't that much influenced by the blues though.

Robert Johnson and especially Charley Patton had a good beat, in fact that stuff is ferocious. Howlin' Wolf in 1950. It's a mode like any other mode, and you can take out improvisation from blues and it really doesn't even matter. The beat is what is important and what is the organizing principle, not some vague notion of "feeling" which we, as good post-rockists, have discarded, I should think, long long ago. I have to politely but firmly disagree with you here, man--would suggest you go back and grit your teeth and *listen* to some blues music.

This is about rhythm, but not about beat.

So, I was in a record store today and I hear a little of this guy at the counter talking to the guy who works there and they're talking about Blackfoot and April Wine and the Allman Brothers. By the time I get up to the counter, they're talking about disco and the guy is saying that Donna Summer had an okay voice, but he didn't think much of her musical direction. Then, he starts in on this thing about how the '80s were a black hole in music, but he guesses that maybe U2 and the Police and maybe a couple of others were okay and ohmigod!

Between rhythm and beat?

The beat is in the bass and drums. The stuff in the background that you can dance to. The rhythm is everywhere. All music has rhythm, while a lot of music has no beat.

this thread has taken a turn toward rockism-as-love-of-Rock, but its previously discussed twin, rockism-as-hate-of-pop, is a better hook to hang my ideas on here. Tim F's dissection (waaay) upthread of the rockist's take on the various ways a popstar comes by her lyrics is sorta telling, cos it's abt the textual element, the part of the music that's the most easily described in specific terms: these are the words that were sung.

and I think that if we're talking about critical bad habits, and rockism is then the hegemonic collection of a bunch of bad critical habits that seem to form a "natural, obvious" shape to its adherents, it all hinges on an inability to write about music as such.

i think the MORAL terms that rockism uses for its dismissal of stuff it doesn't like are masks or screens for AESTHETIC judgements it doesn't know it has made and doesn't know how to speak about. A song is cheesy or pompous or cheap or bankrupt, but the investigation of this keyb sound or that swelling arrangement or the other beat pattern or whatever goes undone, or better said, happens automatically. And this goes for the stuff it likes as well! and this is what we see the various sounds that are coded as "good," MORALLY good, automatically produce good music when they are repeated.

and this is what we see time and again: any old boring shitty band that uses anything from the sound palette and songwriting mechanics from late 60s production is hailed, etc. you know the story.

interestingly: the good/bad categorization has to be constangtly updated as history goes its merry way. timbaland is an auteur and therefore good, and so his readymade triton sounds can't be totally bad, right? and some stuff is hailed as obviously great even if their sound is disapproved of or needs to be "heard thru" ie has anyone ever tried to sound like Husker Du ever again? (ok squirrel bait, i know)

HOWEVER, i won't go as far as someone like Amateurist, even tho I am asking for music writing to spend a little more braintime on the sonics. i'm not a strict formalist "music qua music, plz" kind of guy, cos thing is the politics are contained in the sonics. the embarrassment at a glassy digital synth preset or the honest joy of an overdriven tube amp: these are the immediate reactions of a rockist, the sound-in-ear first response, and all the social political stuff of what's right and what's wrong, who's in and who's out, is happening immediately. but in bringing that response into language, only the moral/political shortcut associations come through, and the aesthetic triggers are assumed.

"i think the MORAL terms that rockism uses for its dismissal of stuff it doesn't like are masks or screens for AESTHETIC judgements it doesn't know it has made and doesn't know how to speak about."

Yes this is a big part of it. I think it was Hurting who in another thread wanted to know whether anyone who disliked Britney was automatically rockist. And the answer of course is that one is not a rockist for simply disliking Britney, but that rockism almost inevitably creeps into the language that is used to dismiss her. eg. "manufactured" as a term collapses and conflates aesthetic and moral/political criteria as if they were identical.

A commitment to teasing these threads out inevitably leads to the conundrum of strict formalism (I'd say "amateurist formalism" but I'm not certain that this is precisely the position he argues from) and whether it is "enough". Is there a political component to sound?

On dissensus Mark K-Punk claimed that certain sonics have an inherent political/transformative potential (he defined it negatively: Snow Patrol's guitar sound comprehensively lacks this potential). I am partly sympathetic to this but I think the error is to locate this potential in the sound itself as some sort of inherent universal component rather than as one side of a potential relationship. Which is to say that the transformative potential of sonics is grounded in the musical, social and psychological contexts it is inserted into and forms a relationship with.

Sound never appears outside of a relationship of mediation through these forces, so for me a better formulation than "what are these sounds doing?" or even "what are these sounds doing to me?" is "what are these sounds doing to me and what am I and my world doing to them?" But a certain level of formalism - a commitment to identifying as near as possible how the music is actually working - is definitely a large part of this.

The danger of a more rigidly musicological formalism - a desire to establish some "set terms" for identifying what's going on, say - is that it misrepresents the fluidity of these relationships, ossifies them into timeless formulas.

incidentally, the ossification of classical music's sounds was its own political contest; i'm thinking of Pope whoever who banned instrumental music and even polyphony in the 14th cent., at least from church. it makes rockism seem so paltry!

and i don't want to demonize "classical" too much... even archconservatives from that world know the political or economic reasons why romantic music sounds so different from baroque, etc (tho maybe this is a more recent development, probably the 60s along with everything else...)