What does it mean for a piece of music to "rock"?

And if this is one of those things that should just be understood, not explained, what function does that understanding serve?

1) I Am The Walrus, for example. I'm not the biggest Beatles fan. However, it still makes me laugh/dance.

2) Under Pressure: That yummy, distinctive bassline definitely rocks if I'm feeling swishy.

But then, if you are talking about emotional feeling, I can add Chopin, Mozart and other classical pieces, as they are wonderful to assist in taking away stress.

ANyway, "rock" is just another word like "swing" or "groove". Except it is probably better employed to denote a lineage of guys playing amplified guitars, as opposed to perhaps the traditional instrumental setups of jazz (upright bass), or soul (clean-toned guitars). It's the way the bass and drums interlock and push and pull against each other; you know, the audible rhythmic tension that all the really great bands have when a drummer and a bassist know how to listen to one another, to create that swing, to know when deviate and syncopate and when to converge back on the one.

Offa the top of my head, download

1. "The Fixer" by Humble Pie - listen to the way Greg Ridley (bass) and Jerry Shirley (drums) play with another.
2. "Poet's Justice" by Uriah Heep - listen to the way Gary Thain (bass) and Lee Kerslake (drums) interact and play against one another.
3. "Evil" by Cactus - listen to the way Tim Bogert (bass) and Carmine Appice (drums) interact and play against one another.

Listen to the way these great bassists walk up the measure, when they move on the beat, when they move off the beat; when the drummers choose to place their snare hits, when the drummers choose to place their bass hits.

I mean this is so totally fucking basic to being a listener it feels silly to spell it out.

Not sure what twee pop you're referring to; I'm a huge, and proud, TV Personalities fan, and a fan of the Pastels as well, if those qualify. But the vast majority of indie pop appeals to me not in the slightest; in fact I'm on record as suggesting that such music turns my stomach. I've never sold a record faster than the Honeybunch singles collection. I can no longer stomach Talulah Gosh, and I'm getting there with the Field Mice (who I've always been ambivalent about). My record collection contains exactly 0 records on Teenbeat, Darla, etc.

Likewise, my problem with Led Zeppelin is longstanding and has little to do with the general appeal of classic rock to me. It's a very specific thing, though I confess to also being immune to the charms of Bad Company. I like AC/DC, Def Leppard, and other such lodestones. My favorite rock band is, um, The Rolling Stones. None of these bands have, to my knowledge, been widely accused of not rocking, whatever we discover that to mean.

I appreciate your actually trying to answer the question, anyhow.]]]]

A piece of techno rocks when the parts of the track display this relationship to each other.

By the way, people in other genres who rock (a few): F. Lizst , Paco De Lucia, Ravi Shankar, Earl Scruggs, Ornette Coleman, Ivo Papasov, the Bothy Band, Celia Cruz, Fela Kuti, Diamanda Galas, Esquivel.

Quite a few industrial electronic acts from the 1976-1983 period rocked hard. In their heyday, around 'Leichenschrei' in 1982, no-one rocked harder than SPK. However, and I mean this most diffidently, I wonder if the current crop of laptop experimentalists couldn't rock just a little harder?

I am creating binary oppositions here and I DON'T CARE. Which ROCKS.

generally an amplification of the unique features of electric blues -- i associate it most strongly with norman greenbaum's "spirit in the sky".

the golden gate quartet rocks!

in partic though something like when the choir hits and sustains the harmonic dissonance just singing "spirit in the skaaaaaaay" i can't imagine a gospel choir ever doing that. the "i got a faith in jesus" part i can totally hear tho, but again not the "gonna rec-o-mend me" part poss. coz its a major-key chord-run and those just don't seem to crop up.

Hence ballads are never "hits," even when they sit atop the charts. And songs like "Slates, Slags, Etc" would be "hits" even if they only sold 12 copies.

And thus, borderline nonsensical statements such as

"'I Am the Walrus' 'rocks' harder, but 'Hey Bulldog' is a bigger 'hit'"

are made possible.

PS Y'all have heard of the Rock, Rot, or Rule [sic] thing, right?

presumably.

(1) Scott Walker is good, therefore:
(1a) he rocks.
(1b) he rocks me.

(2) Scott Walker is good, but does not rock.

(3) Scott Walker is not good, but he does rock.

(4) Scott Walker neither rocks nor is good.

(5) Scott Walker does not rock therefore he is not good.

What is Christgau's position? Is it (4) or (5)?

It's Raining Today: The Scott Walker Story (1967-1970) [Razor & Tie, 1996]
Nothing I'd read about this L.A. wannabe turned moody Brit teenthrob--going back to Nik Cohn's Rock From the
Beginning, which pegged him as "top-heavy and maudlin" in 1968--prepared me for how purely godawful he'd be.
We're talking Anthony Newley without the voice muscles, "MacArthur Park" as light-programme boilerplate, a male
Vera Lynn for late bloomers who found Paul McCartney too r&b. Go ahead, believe Nick Cave, Oasis, Foetus, and, I
cannot tell a lie, compiler Marshall Crenshaw. But I'm warning you--when I gave him the benefit of the doubt, all I got
was this lousy review. C-

this thread was motivated by chuck eddy constantly using "it rocks" or "it doesn't rock" as a critical heuristic but getting his panties in a huge twist when i asked him to explain what that means. i thought it was odd for a critic to take it as self-evident, as eddy apparently does -- it seems like a foundational aspect of his aesthetic that he doesn't or didn't care to analyze. the best he could do IIRC is to rattle off bands that do and don't rock, which is not exactly helpful. i wish i could find the thread(s) where this confrontation (?!) took place.

this particular thread never really got off the ground, really, but the question still stands. what does it mean "to rock" in a musical sense -- that is, what formal components of music generally qualify something as "rocking" in some intersubjective way?

i still think eddy is a shitty critic btw. hugs!

there was this promo cd sonic youth sent to lol college radio around the time of 'sonic nurse' which had snippets of like luigi varese & borbetomagus with thurston moore and i think some other sonic youths doing radio links between them, all along the lines of "that was xenakis, from persepolis ... definitely rocks hard"

I disagree with about 80% of xhuxk's perceptions, by the way, and love his prose and (most of his) arguments, which, I guess, is a variation on the who-cares-what-the-lyrics-really-say argument.

xpost

no, and hence my whole argument crumbles like a day-old doughnut. funny how middle age has made me so literal-minded

Since I mentioned Carducci, I should maybe add that, if some irritating troll somewhere asked me repeatedly to define what I mean when I say music “rocks,” I’d probably consider some definition like “to propel with forward motion, often though not necessarily at high velocity and volume, using a swinging, blues-derived rhythmic base, generally in a small-unit format.” But I probably wouldn’t tell that to the troll. (And of course somebody might further ask me to define words like “forward motion,” “swinging”, and “velocity,” which I may well not all be using in an absolutely technically and musicologically correct sense, and it could go on forever from there, and I’m a busy guy, so….)

well, i'm glad he's put it on the record! he never deigned to explain this when i asked!

fyi it's not "purely subjective" -- one can choose to have a hermetic personal definition but surely for the idea of "rocking" to have any social currency there needs to be some kind of (perhaps unspoken) intersubjective agreement about what it refers to!

although what aspects of musical form seem to replicate the physical concept of "forward motion" is itself an interesting question! obviously music "moves" in the sense that sound waves travel through space, but clearly no music--even styx--actually "moves" in the sense of being propelled forward in any literal sense. i'm sure some music theorists have tackled this topic at length, so maybe i should be looking in the library rather than posting to ILM.

it's telling BTW that chuck considers it "trolling" to ask what he means when he says something "rocks." that seems like the kind of basic, deceptively simple (actually quite complicated) question that rock critics should be asking themselves more often!

i mean rock criticism is so rife with received wisdom, imprecise impressionistic description, etc. that asking what we mean when we use terms like "rock," "dark," "light," "heavy," etc. etc. to refer to music seems like a very productive exercise, even though i understand some people here will always think it's literal-minded or pedantic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy IIRC

clearly no music--even styx--actually "moves" in the sense of being propelled forward in any literal sense

anticipating objections: obviously brass bands/marching bands often "move forward" literally, but that can't really be said to be a (literally speaking, non-metaphoric) inherent quality of the music.

the whole lyrics debate is one big false dichotomy, no? sometimes you care what the person is saying, sometimes you don't. some people care, others don't. what's the big deal?

i still am not sure what this thread's about

i mean i feel like i get a lot more out of e.g. mahler's kindertotenlieder if i know what the singer is singing and how the music interacts with the words. but i wouldn't care if someone else just enjoyed the music. although i'd get annoyed if (like some folks on ILM who will remain nameless) they decided to make it their "project" to tell me that the words don't matter.

i still am not sure what this thread's about
― Neanderthal, Friday, August 5, 2011 5:41 PM (45 seconds ago) Bookmark

it's about what it means when people say something rocks.

These sound like Jack Black quotes from School of Rock.

incidentally I was just quoting the house music monologue and replacing "house" with "rock"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NSn5RfxoXs

imo music that "rocks" tends to a) sound like someone broke a sweat playing it or b) like you'll break a sweat if you move to it in the way that it inspires you to, but not necessarily dancing.

i judge how much music "rocks" by counting how many people I challenged to a fight while the song was playing

Don't know if there are any musicological studies on the question, but honestly, I'm not sure that it merits it. Tend to think that Chuck's off-the-cuff definition is actually pretty adequate. (Wouldn't include an emphasis on swinging, though. Rock can swing but doesn't have to.)

it may not mean a thing but can still rock

Well, like "School Days" swings but "Johnny B. Goode" does not.

dude, amateurist, if you can't figure this shit out in 8 years maybe its time to get another aggravating hobby.

what do you mean? are you satisfied with the definition chuck gave? i'm not.

every time i criticize or mock chuck eddy i get more vitriol than if i had just made the same points w/o mentioning eddy, so obviously a lot of folks here have got his back. which is fine.

in other words i grant the chuck eddy-baiting part is aggravating if you don't share my antipathy to his writing but if the other questions about music are "aggravating," well i dunno sorry. i guess we think about music differently. i still think you are awesome.

also dude scott i'm guessing you have some concerns and interests that you had 8 yrs ago no? even if baiting chuck eddy and wondering what a definition of "rocking" might look like aren't among them.

Well, why is the definition unsatisfying?

it doesn't rock

i already explained why. it begs the question of what "forward motion" might mean in musical terms!

Chuck's words were "to propel with forward motion." "To propel" is, I think, key. And, again, I don't find this, as at least part of the definition, to be vague or inadequate.

This is like asking what makes pizza " delicious"

lol i cant believe amt is still carrying this beef around with him. i remember the great what-is-rock wars of 03 - heres the thing, if you're so interested in chuck's definition of it, just read his shit for a while and it becomes easy to anticipate what he will find to be 'rockin' after a while

tbh i can count on one hand the number of rock critics who i think dont deserve to be thrown on a giant barge and floated out to the middle of the arctic ocean where they'll have to kill and skin each other to create mounds of blubber they can survive off of, and chuck's one of them

TamTam will u marry me?

rock is its own reward

read his shit

This is like asking what makes pizza " delicious"

― fappin' duke (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, August 5, 2011 11:47 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

how so?

does tetzuki akiyama rock?

lol tam tam shill

some irritating troll somewhere

^^ missed amateurist display name opportunity

MUSIC CRITCS ARE THE ART OF PRETEND FORGETFULLNESS

Cootie Williams on swing: "Define it? I'd rather tackle Einstein's theory!" Holding one man's feet to the fire on what it means to rock seems sort of obsessive. Probably the best you can ask of a non-musician is to give examples, and he's been more than accommodating.

tbh chuck's writing style and circular logic drive me nuts a lot of the time and i kind of enjoy amt's archnemesis thing w/ him but this "rock" debate is just pointless

actually i don't care what chuck's opinion on this topic is. he was just the impetus to ask the question. i don't think he takes the concept for granted any more than anyone else, really.

sorry for being so grumpy these past few days! i've been stressed IRL.

I would be pretty stressed too if I didn't even know what rock was

Rock is cowbell

Rock is tin he spaces between the beats

Rock is a ham hock in your milkshake.

Not precisely, but Marcus has made more or less the same point: "If the artist made a record intending to convince all right-thinking people to send money to the I.R.A., but the record is in Swedish and nobody can know that, it's sort of pointless to discuss the guy's intentions. What you really have to discuss is what is it like to hear a record in Swedish, and does it have a good beat?"

I like the idea that no one could conceivably understand a song that was written in Swedish.

actually it's just an english-language record running backward

This is like asking what makes pizza " delicious"

― fappin' duke (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, August 5, 2011 11:47 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is that because the answer is obvious and/or because the question isn't worth asking?

b/c the simplest answer is that pizza is delicious because it is sweet and salty and fatty. but a lot of foods are those things, and chances are we wouldn't find all of them delicious. i guess i find some questions interesting that other people don't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvABt2uXRzY

if you gotta ask, you'll never know.

rot

styx rocks

ranking ac/dc songs that say 'rock' in them