Douglas Wolk, clearheaded, on rockism

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.

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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.

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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.

-- Drew Daniel (mces...), May 7th, 2005.

A strawman, hardly. But a dying breed.

Geir: calling criticism of popular music "rock criticism" is _exactly_ an example of rockism!

Proponents of a nonrockist criticism have to face the fact that rockism is enormously powerful as a way of defining oneself and ones taste, of separating oneself ideologically and morally from other people who don't like music so much*. Other fandoms - comics, film, TV, videogames, sci-fi, beanie babies, scrapbooking, etc - almost certainly have "rockism"s of their own, though whether these are successful or not within the fandoms surely varies.** I wonder actually whether the acceptability of a fandom within society is proportionate to how successfully it manages to create and sustain an equivalent of "rockism"!

*(This is the crux of a lot of things. I buy a lot of music. My neighbour buys little. He seems entertained and satisfied by what he buys, though. So there must be something more that I get out of music which explains - to me, to him - why I buy so much more of it, otherwise I'm nothing but a glutton. And that something more must be located in the music that I buy and that people like him don't, otherwise I'm nothing but a sucker. So maybe the definition of "rockism" I'm looking for is something like religious apologies.)

**(I actually think Douglas' super-reader piece has MORE to do with how I understand "rockism" than his r-word piece!)

i suppose i can see chuck's point that the latter position *can* also be rockist - eg, a kind of separate-but-equal treatment; but i can't necessarily how you would carry out his exercise of judging a metal song by disco terms convincingly, without being rockist (albeit from a position of disco hegemony). or just unsufferably clever.

but i'm missing something, too, because ultimately i would hope that anti-rockism (a term i hate, but popism isn't quite right) would amount to more than a simple "it's all good" liberal relativism.

i think the example i'm looking for, actually, is chuck's piece from around election time 2004 where he talked about some right-wing country (?) act, praising its artistry at the same time he admitted his discomfort with its ideology. can someone post a link to that piece? sorry for my crap memory.

Douglas, it seems to me that is a problem with the way rockism is being discussed, rather than a problem with a comprehensive definition. What do you think of my definition as stated above (and slightly edited): rockism is an argument regarding music that is based on fallacies that subordinate the experience of actually hearing the music to expecations that music fit into some specific mold.

I should add to this - every rockist is a new orthodoxy, because rockism can be entirely different from person to person; there is no "defining" rockism.

Anyway, the so-called "rockists" are the only ones who are able to argue against fans of jazz or classical music when they say that rock music is "just commerse and entertainment".

Or rather, the so-called rockists are the only ones who could find something there worth arguing over. Definition of "entertainment" needs to be unpacked, etc etc, as does assumption that aesthetic gratification can exist at all outside of a system of exchange.

What needs to be unpacked above all is what it is that makes us (as a modern audience, generally) so devoutly wish to ascribe that sort of purity to our pleasures. Any ideas, foax?

hurting, i have to disagree there. i'm guessing the proportions between types A and B in your example are about the same as, say, hood-wearing klan members and casual racists, or on the other side, committed activists and casual progressives. in other words (lest a perhaps over-provocative image obscure my point), people of both inclinations toward commitment can develop vastly different kinds of musical values, which will determine their assumptions about what music should do.

haha ignorance is bliss eh?

Hooray! (I mean, this is the crux of my own radical subjectivism re: music, which argues for its own particular moral stance -- inasmuch as there is one -- by basically saying "What you listen to does not define how good or bad a person you are" -- and thus tries to fight against the rockism/racism equations drawn in some (not all) cases. That said, I'm NOT saying simply 'it's all good,' rather 'I think this is REALLY FREAKING GOOD/BAD/whatever and that you disagree is fine and all, but I'm not changing my mind because of it.')

Then you don't need the "rockist" term, as this kind of cultural "snobbery" is existant in all kinds of "higher culture".

Well taking this back to the whole question of logocentrism, arguably there's something in the way we actively think/talk about/write about music that forms with knowledge of language and everything attendant. I didn't recall pondering all that went into Free to Be You and Me when I was wearing down the vinyl when I was six (or the Popeye album I had when I was four or whatever), I just...liked it. Coolness, honesty, etc. didn't apply because I don't think I had *any* conception of how that *could* apply to what I listened to/enjoyed/etc.

Of course it is, Geir. I believe that the term "rockist" exists as it does because it implies a certain kind of cultural snobbery that emerged from within popular music. (Analogue: photography critics — that is, defenders of an art form that was once maligned from outside as being artificial, mechanical, and not art at all — who went on to attack the snapshot aesthetic of Cartier-Bresson, then Robert Frank, etc., for the same reasons, while defending modernist vanguardists, pictorial landscapes, etc.)