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October 10, 2003
Rockism at its Finest
Note: The following entry was originally posted on Blueprints for Architectural Warfare. I have migrated it here for continuity.
Pitchfork's review of The Darkness
One of those pieces that seems to spend its entirety building up a rhetorical defense against a nevertheless inescapable conclusion, namely that, "[F]or the first time, the Top 10 singles on the Billboard charts are all hip-hop and R&B. By comparison, rock is middle-aged." In spite of that fact, this record merits an 8.4 out of 10 because, hey, it rocks. And, if you don't like it, it's because you're the one who's bought into some preconceived notion about what music should be, not the people who are doing their best to prop up a barely-tounge-in-cheek rehash of thirty year old stadium rock and paint it as The Next Big Thing.
Tags: Blueprints
Posted by Andrew at 11:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 7, 2003
Planet Rockism
Note: The following entry was originally posted on Blueprints for Architectural Warfare. I have migrated it here for continuity.
Looking over my last entry, one thing about it still nags at the back of my mind, and that's the notion of "progress" implied therein. Merely invoking the word conjures up images of the pre-punk late '70s popular music landscape, perhaps best immortalized in Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club or Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia, both of them novels whose characters find their lives and outlooks dramatically altered in the wake of the revolution of '77. Coe and Kureishi both have a real ear for the excesses of the era, not only in terms of the music itself but perhaps even moreso as far as the discourse surrounding the music is concerned; to read these 17 year-olds talking about the seriousness of thirty-minute rock symphonies and Tolkien refrences ought to be enough to check any writer's tendency to applaud "progress" for its own sake.
So how, then, to characterize the rockist/anti-rockist divide? How to explain that music has just sounded different to me ever since I first heard "Loveless," and that one of the first casualties of this change was rock for rock's sake? "Progress" and "pushing boundaries" seem like loaded terms with which to tackle the problem, but what is it, if not progress, that I'm trying to get at here?
I think part of the answer has to do with the difference between declaring onseself and one's music to be "forward thinking" and being constantly on the lookout for new, interesting music. We can all see the dead ends in self-aggrandizing progressivism: Prog Rock, Progressive House, IDM, etc. invariably end up as the worst kind of cul de sacs despite bringing a much needed breath of fresh air in their nascent forms (Well, okay, not in the case of Progressive House, but Prog's ancestor '60s Psychedelia and stuff like early Autechre certainly did). Like love and hate, progressivism's seemingly-opposite-but-really-quite-closely-related cousin is unabashed retroism; not "going backward to go forward," but backwards as the new forwards, digging up the old out of the desire for something "new." Interestingly, you can see this same dichotomy being played out in the mainstream rock(ist) press right now: One the one hand you have a band like Radiohead (inexplicably getting the same kind of critical attention due MBV; those who do not learn from history being doomed to repeat it, and all that) and on the other the garage blues retro rockism of a hundred bands.
While all of this sounds and feels quite tiresome to me, being anti-rockist is not the same as being anti-rock, per se; after all, I'd be willing to bet that most anti-rockists, like myself, hold a soft spot for '77 punk somewhere deep in in their Morr Music/Sunburned Hand of the Man/Soundslike/West London House hearts, and punk, for all its revolutionary fervor, is nothing if not rock music, at least in form. The emotional, intellectual and sociological impact of punk at the time, however, explains why '77 punk still stands up as noteworthy today, while '97 punk does not.
So in the end, I guess this sense of "progress" that I'm trying to evoke has more to do with the intellectual stimulation (not to mention physical stimulation; how ironic that rockist music, a longtime haven for the funkless, has also lost much of its supposed virtue as "serious," "thought-provoking" "crit-worthy" music) of the listener than the pretensions of the artists themselves. It's why music like 'ardkore and grime can engender such a wealth of critical analysis despite their anti-intellectual groundings. Wishing for a rock revolution may be futile, but it's rockism, not rock-based music itself, that's not up to such an insurrectionary task. How appropriate, then, that I should have unwittingly chosen Hood as an example of a most decidedly un-rockist rock-based band, as one of their song titles might suggest: "Rocck? I Can't Even Spell The Word."
Tags: Blueprints
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