Douglas Wolk, clearheaded, on rockism

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...)

(plus the bear baiting pun was hard for me resist - or is "Geir" actually pronounced differently?)

Ten years now. You don't want to know, people. You DON'T WANT TO KNOW.

The Britney point is a good one: to illustrate -- my judgment of her is that she and her collaborators -- but she is always first -- mostly fail at what she's supposed to be good at, ie creating memorable tunes that I find enjoyable and that I would want to listen to again. Manufacturing or whatever doesn't enter into it. That there can be surprise over this is understandable -- I remember one time Nicole almost had a fit when I said "...Baby One More Time" was terribly unmemorable but if something just doesn't stick with me what am I supposed to say? 'Sorry.'? -- but if someone ever said (and nobody has) that I was somehow not understanding a deep truth about music through that song or numerous others because I didn't like it, well, get bent. Thankfully there is no Wennerized script pounding that into the collective unconscious and I hope to fuck there never is. ("Oops! I Did It Again," though, that's another matter. :-) )

Sorry to bring this back in, but this author just seems off the mark in his description. This word "syncopated" gets tossed about to mean anything not "white" sounding. If the rhythm of the song itself is syncopated, then of course it will sound weird if you de-syncopate it -- you'd be changing the song. Does he mean that the rhythm is "swung" maybe? That it is sometimes phrased behind the beat? I also don't understand what he means by a "background" of rhythm -- the rhythm section? Is he only talking about blues played by a full band?

There's a thread in this: Has Nicole Ever Been Wrong?

I do find it hard to let go of some of the impulses I have to use certain Rockist sounding terms to describe Britney and other pop I don't like though. It's not about "not playing an instrument" or "not writing her own songs" -- I couldn't care less about that. It's not that I don't think she's talented, she certainly is. I really do find her melodies and lyrics dull and her production seems sort of gimmicky and pyrotechnical without really moving me. But it's also, admittedly, that I can't help but hear deep cynicism in the music -- let's do this because this is what sells.

The danger, I recognize, is that some degree of cynicism must necessarily exist in all commercial music, and the tendency is to avoid identifying it in the music we like because that music seems so "real" "true" etc. Neil Young doesn't do things for commercial reasons man, he's an artist. Right. And this seems like the rockist thing to do -- wow, Wilco is so fucking independent because they moved to another division of the same record label. So maybe in Britney I more just intuitively recognize that it's someone elses values and tastes that are being cynically pandered to, not mine.

And then someone like Jay-Z, one of my absolute favorite artists, is so openly cynical, and yet I forgive him for it -- maybe because of that.