Tag Archives: rock

Rock Is Dead

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I hate to be the one to burst Noah Berlatsky’s bubble but Gene Simmons is right: rock is dead. But it’s not dead for the reasons Simmons thinks it is. In the original Esquire interview, Simmons bemoans the changes in the record industry and scolds the entitled fans who ruined the support system that used to exist for rock bands. What he overlooks is the record industry greed that got us there.

In the late 1990s-early 2000s, the record industry was taken to court for price-fixing and to jack up the price of compact discs. They lost. To a lot of music fans, that was 2-3 hours of their burger flipping that went to pay for corporate’s hookers and blow, rather than to the musicians they loved and thought they were supporting. Artists like the Goo Goo Dolls had to embark on endless tours to pay back their record companies “support system.” Or they could take the TLC route and just file bankruptcy. Add to this, record companies themselves are no longer record companies: buyouts and mergers have turned record companies into just another arm of a corporate revenue stream. What little attempt these companies ever made at producing any semblance of “authentic art” ended long ago.

The most obvious sign of this lack of authenticity is the obsession with signing adorable morons before they’ve finished high school. It makes for more malleable performers. Thanks to Autotune, it doesn’t even matter that they can carry a tune. In this musical climate, nothing interesting is going to happen in the mainstream. Also, a singer or singing group singing to pre-recorded music is cheaper for a venue to book than a full band of people that like eating, and have to take time to set up and break down their gear. That cost consciousness has also led to the rise of the DJ. Not only is paying one or two people less expensive than a band, but it’s also easier to book them for several appearances at a venue. If anything has killed rock music (people playing instruments in bands), then it’s because EDM and dumb pop music are simply more cost effective to make and sell.
This isn’t the first time music has seen such a transition. After World War II, bop quartets started to push out full swing bands consisting of around a dozen people because smaller clubs couldn’t afford the bigger acts. More intimately minded artists like Miles Davis flourished in that atmosphere, while the bigger bands either pared down, like Benny Goodman, or ceased touring for a while, like Duke Ellington.

But what of the proverbial bedroom artists? People who still write songs and play an instrument? Do they even exist anymore? As Berlatsky points out, YouTube tells us they do. I suppose the best of them can hopefully sign to a genuinely independent label and flourish that way. But I suspect that many of these artists will mostly exist in a vacuum. It’s hard to say, because we’re in such a new place with this type of self-promotion.

What I do wonder, though, is how good these people can ever hope to get. I have two reasons for asking this: the first is that a generation of kids who have been given more anti-psychotic drugs than music lessons. The impetus to be interesting has been drugged and counseled out of them. If Bob Dylan was a kid now, he’d probably be given Ritalin instead of a guitar. It seems impossible to demand that this generation give us authentic musicians when it’s normal to deny them the privilege of being their authentic selves.

This line of questioning extends to the audience too. How can a generation who have been drugged into submission ever learn to appreciate an artist who calls out the bullshit in the world? Because that is the spirit of not just rock ‘n roll, but of great art. I mean, it’s not the only thing, but it can be a substantially more interesting starting point being another sparkly, dancing kid on Nickelodeon. And this is probably what scares me more than anything about the death of rock ‘n roll: that we’ve reached a point, culturally, where there’s no room for honesty or rebellion. So much of what we consume, not just in music, but in movies and television, has little room for anything that hasn’t been already designed and pre-approved by a committee.

Rock ‘n roll has had a good 50 year run or so, and by the time Gene Simmons’ kids are grandparents, it will be like jazz is to our generation. It will still exist in some pockets of the music world, among serious music fans taking themselves very seriously, but it will continue to move farther and farther out of the mainstream. And hip-hop will be on the chopping block very soon.

Rock The Apocalypse

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A version of this ran on Madeloud.
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The central thesis of David Janssen and Edward Whitelock’s book Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music is sound — there is a lot of American popular music that deals with the end times. Unfortunately, the vast majority of apocalyptic music at this point in history falls under the rubric of “metal”, a genre in which Janssen and Whitelock have no interest. Instead, the two of them are standard issue rock critics, which means that their canon is comprised of the usual holy trinity: roots rock, punk, and a couple random token black guys.

What this all means is that the Jukebox in the book’s title is probably more important than the Apocalypse. Rock’s canon, and its criticism have never really gotten out of the sixties and fifties — for Greil Marcus and all his bastard heirs, the real music still comes on 45s, or at least sounds like it wants to. For all their claims to revolution and/or apocalypse, roots rock and its criticism are both very much nostalgia exercises, compulsively referring back to…well, to their roots, in blues, country, and whatever other authentic volk music is handy.

The contradiction here is that those volk musics were, in fact, obsessed with future Armageddon, as Jannsen and Whitelock clearly demonstrate in the early, and best, part of the book. From bluegrass duo the Louvin Brothers harmonizing about retribution for sins, to the Spirit of Memphis Quartet calling the Lord on an atomic telephone, to rockabilly bombshell Wanda Jackson comparing herself to the annihilation of Hiroshima in “Fujiyama Mama”, American music demonstrated a communal fascination with Armageddon.

That “communal” bit is key. Individuals die all the time, but civilization goes on — except in the apocalyptic vision, where everybody dies, all at once, and the community itself is destroyed. Apocalypse, then, is in some ways an ultimate vision of togetherness and group identity. Whitelock and Janssen express some surprise that “Fujiyama Mama” was a bigger hit in Japan than in America — but of course it was. The song is talking about Japan, after all. Why wouldn’t the Japanese community embrace it?

Apocalypse, then, serves as a kind of social glue, a common ideology. In bluegrass, the saints will be separated from the sinners; in metal, abject nothingness, variously defined, will consume the world. Organized around apocalypse, both of these forms put a high premium on adherence to strict formal structures — dedication to a shared communal aesthetic vision. As Jello Biafra noted, no high school gym; teacher ever had as much success in getting kids to dress alike as metal does. Everybody dies together, so everybody lives together. Nobody stands out.

And in rock? Well, that’s the rub, isn’t it. There is no shared vision in the kind of critically acclaimed rock that Whitelock and Janssen are discussing. On the contrary, the whole point of the genius rockstar is a hyper-cultivated, hyper-marketed, endlessly fetishized individuality. The artists that Janssen and Whitehead have chosen to analyze are deliberately unalike — they use apocalypse in different, individualized ways. For Leonard Cohen, the apocalypse is a metaphor for his divorce; for Green Day it’s a metaphor for adolescence; for Devo, it’s a metaphor, contradictorily, for deindividuation and conformity. Regular folks may all go out the same when the fire comes, but each genius has a different end.

Whatever there other eccentricities, though, the daring individualists that Whitelock and Janssen love do share one trait in common: ambivalence. They’re all complex…or, if you prefer (and in the case of Michael Stipe, literally) inarticulate. Apocalyptic songs tend to celebrate the great simplification of the end — God will set your fields on fire, the traditional bluegrass lyrics insist; trying is not enough, roars Khanate. There’s not a whole lot of wiggle room there. But for Whitelock and Janssen, the apocalypse is yet another excuse to validate, not self-obliterating finality, but self-absorbed complexity. Dylan may insist that you have to serve somebody, but his burnt-out Beat poet doggerel mush ensures that, from song to song, it’s almost impossible to tell who — or, as the authors rhapsodize, Dylan’s audience keeps “bumping into mirrors on all sides.” Arthur Lee enjoys “playing with cacophony,” multi-tracking his voice singing different lyrics simultaneously in order to create a sense of “unreliability” and ambiguity. Devo both embraced and satirized pop success. R.E.M., through the power of refusing to enunciate, both did and did not make sense. They’re all having their Armageddon and maintaining their ironic distance from it too.

Which is to say that, as I read through this book, I started to suspect that for most of these performers, and, indeed, for the authors, the apocalypse was not so much a matter of belief as of self-dramatization. Like Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction, what the apocalyptic rhetoric means is less important than the fact that it is “some cold-blooded shit.” It’s a way of demonstrating rootsy bona-fides, much like boasting about your sexual prowess, or bragging about shooting your woman. The apocalypse is turned from a negation of self into a validation of it. The vision of a (supposedly) more authentic community is reified as part of some individual genius’ ambivalent contradictions. The go-to figure here is, of course, Harry Smith, whose “social music” volume of the Anthology of American Folk Music collected examples of 20s and 30s performers like Blind Willie Johnson warning of the coming end.

For critics like Janssen and Whitelock, however, those warnings become not literal calls to clean up your act, but secret subcultural testaments to Smith’s genius. They rhapsodize about Smith’s “sequencing” and about his decision to give no information about the race of the musicians he is appropriating — eclipsing their communal identity with his own liberal, proto-hippie, idealistic individualism. Smith’s final message, according to the authors, is “This is an imperfect world we have created, let us not uncreate it.” They limn this as apocalyptic — but surely it’s precisely the opposite. Celebrating imperfection, claiming that “we” have made the world — that’s not eschatological. It’s humanist.

At the end of the book, the authors more or less admit that humanism is where their sympathies lie. Working off of feminist writers like Lee Quinby, they highlight the cruelty and exclusionary nature of apocalyptic thinking, and praise Sleater Kinney for, refusing to “do ‘no future’ punk.”

It’s fair enough to point out apocalypse’s downside, certainly…but humanism has its problems as well. Specifically, to put your faith in the human (or in your rockstar heroes) is the definition of worshipping idols (and, indeed, the authors point out that poor John Coltrane has had a Christian church established in his name.) The human isn’t divine; to pretend that it is, you have to steal mojo from somewhere — a communal past, say — and then pretend that that theft is an act of generosity or continuity, betraying the faith you claim to espouse. A personal apocalypse isn’t an apocalypse at all; it’s blasphemy. If rock is the devil’s music, as Janssen and Whitelock ambivalently claim, it is not because it embraces apocalypse, but because it doesn’t.

Country Race

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This piece first appeared on Splice Today.
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Much of the best American music is the offspring of miscegenation. Whether it’s African-Americans in New Orleans repurposing white band instruments; or Elvis combining country and R&B just as his hillbilly forbearers did for generations; or mash-up artists deliriously merging together white and black; segregation has traditionally, and gloriously ended at the borders of the recording studio.

SoulJazz’s two-disc compilation Delta Swamp Rock: Sounds of the South, At the Crossroads of Rock, Country and Soul provides another satisfying instance of musical cross-breeding. Expected country rockers are represented—Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers show up on several tracks. But the comp spreads its net wider, too, focusing especially on the scene around the famous session players at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but also reaching out to Memphis and Nashville, with some surprising results. Cher, of all people, delivers a soul-soaked, down and dirty vocal for “Walk on Gilded Splinters,” recorded in Muscle Shoals. Area Code 615, a group of Nashville session musicians, provides “Stone Fox Chase,” a bluegrass-meets-blues-funk rave-up that was later sampled by Kool G. Rap and others. Dan Penn, known for writing hits for James Carr and Aretha Franklin, here sings his own Stax-ready, Memphis-recorded “If Love Was Money.” Linda Ronstadt on “I Won’t Be Hangin’ Round” is encouraged by a chorus that seems to have strolled out of a black church; Waylon Jennings’ “Big D” sidles up to funk, and the whole album is soaked in blue-eyed soul.

SoulJazz’s eclectic, thoughtful choices throughout the two discs emphasize the oft-ignored fact that the South, at least as much as the north, has been a locus of racial integration and racial borrowing. This comp makes sense of the fact that the couple who won the case for racial intermarriage in the Supreme Court, the Lovings, came, not from New York or LA, but from rural Virginia. It’s a reminder that some of the first integrated sessions ever were Jimmie Rodgers recordings.

And yet. While SoulJazz has provided a testament to the South’s proud and little-known history of color-blindness, it’s also highlighted the South’s much better known, and sadder, history of segregation. In its extensive liner notes, SoulJazz mentions several times that the Muscle Shoals scene, steeped as it was in soul music, nevertheless represented a step back in terms of race. The Memphis-based Stax, where so many soul hits were recorded, had as its house band Booker T. and the MGs, an integrated band. Muscle Shoals was inspired by Stax’s example… but its musicians were all white.

The Allman Brothers band did have a black drummer, Jai Johanny Johanson. But the other pillar of the Southern rock movement, Lynyrd Skynrd, was not only all white, but flirted with segregationist rhetoric, unfurling a Confederate flag during their live performances and giving a bump to George Wallace on their hit “Sweet Home Alabama” (not included on the comp.) The fact that African-American Merry Clayton sang back-up on that track intensifies the cognitive dissonance, but doesn’t exactly excuse it. As SoulJazz says, “Walking the line between southern working-class pride and simply reinforcing southern stereotypical bigotry could be a tricky business.”

The sad part about Delta Swamp Rock is that it chronicles a moment when maybe the South could have figured out how to separate bigotry and working-class pride once and for all. There is no doubt that the musicians represented on this comp, and the scene they were part of, loved black music… and indeed, no doubt that they saw it, not as black music, but as Southern music, an integrated tradition that was simply theirs, without the painful fetishization and authenticity-mongering that has so often marred work by non-Southern musicians, from Janis Joplin to the Rolling Stones. Bobbie Gentry’s rough vocals drip, not with black accents, but with Southern accents. She sounds like a black singer, at times, not because she needs black vocal tics to validate her, but because she comes from the same part of the world.

But then there’s the question—if you come from the same part of the world, if this is your tradition, and if that tradition is color-blind, why are the people you surround yourselves with so overwhelmingly pale? The tradition SoulJazz chronicles here was eager to integrate music, but its willingness to integrate musicians was much more nervous. A drummer here, a back-up singer there, but overall blue-eyed soul remained separate from just-plain soul. American R&B attained its current, not insubstantial level of integration through the urban bricolage of hip-hop, rather than through the rural byways of country. White Southern identity remains, to this day, white—defined by a sideways avowal of a rebel segregationist past, rather than by an embrace of its rich and honorable integrated culture. Delta Swamp Rock makes the case that things could have been different, and points to some of the painful reasons why they weren’t.