Culture

The Rules Of The Game No. 31: Rockism And Antirockism Rise From The Dead

Frank Kogan

“How come whenever any part of my exhaust system f--ks up I have to get the whole system replaced? Is this a ruse, or what? And the girl from Conflict in the VV R&R Quarterly was full of it when she said that junk (just like everybody in the Army used to) about standard transmission giving you ‘control’ of the car—or at least I think she was, which is to say it sounds like an authenticity thing and I wouldn’t understand it. Never learned to drive a standard myself, and never will. My automatic gives me all the control I need. (I think there’s an analogy to be drawn here to Thompson’s dismissal of TV as a ‘little box, for crissakes’ or whatever he wrote, but I’ll let you figure that one out.)”

--Chuck Eddy, Why Music Sucks #7, March 1991

Here are some preliminary thoughts, that I’m going to fill out over the next week or two.

Back in 2000 I posted on a message board that two of the words I wished people would stop using were “authenticity” and “rockism.” “Authenticity” you’ve seen in music reviews (Ken Tucker on NPR: “For devotees of authenticity out there who hear teenpop as manufactured material for performing puppets, I’ll just shrug and point out that Aly & A.J. wrote or co-wrote every song on this album”), whereas “rockism” you’ll only have run across if you read a lot of rock criticism and tend to read the mags and hang out on the message boards where rock critics congregate. My complaint was that “authenticity” and “rockism” had been reduced to buzz words, a means of waving a hand at ideas and issues without working out what those ideas and issues should actually be. “Authenticity” I wasn’t so hard on: I thought there needed to be a moratorium on the noun form “authenticity” but that the adjective was OK if it came accompanied by a noun that it was modifying. So rather than just calling something “authentic” or “inauthentic,” you needed to say what it was an authentic or inauthentic example of—e.g., is this an authentic Persian rug, as opposed to a rug from elsewhere or a latter-day recreation? (So, in music criticism you would not simply call Eric Clapton inauthentic, you would say that Eric Clapton is not authentic in that he is not a genuine Persian rug.)

“Rockism,” on the other hand, I felt was impossible; there was just no way left to fruitfully use the word. As for what “rockism” is, well, defining it is hopeless, though that’s not what I had against the word. It’s not so easy to define “rock” or “pop” either, and those are great words. And actually, next week I will take a shot at defining it; for the time being I’ll say, “‘Rockism’ is a pejorative term invented by antirockists to vaguely denote an ethos or practice (or something) that they’re against, the ethos/practice being what they consider to be a bunch of tired old tropes and arguments used to extol a tired old vision of rock—or of art music or folk or pop (the term ‘rockist’ being very flexible and not restricted to fans of rock)—at the expense of actually vibrant forms of music such as pop and dance and rock itself (in its still vibrant forms) etc.” To demonstrate the flexibility of the term “rockism,” if I thought the term had any explanatory value I would consider saying that the victory of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” over Rihanna’s “Umbrella” in the Pazz & Jop poll and the Grammys was due to the baleful influence of rockism (even though neither of those songs is designated “rock”). And probably someone out there would understand what I mean!

As for what those tired old tropes and arguments are, well, they’re all over the place, and I’ll put off giving examples until next week, except for one: “authenticity.” You’re never far, when people plump for rock (or whatever), from hearing an argument to the effect that some type or piece of music is more real than another, the other being fatally compromised in some way.

Far from disappearing, in the few years after I’d wished for the demise of the word “rockism” (which had existed fitfully since 1980), it proliferated rapidly, inundating my little rock-critic pond like a tidal wave. 2004: The Year That Rockism Broke. Then it receded, the antirockists feeling they’d made their point: rockism and antirockism having been stages they’d gone through, now they were ready to move on, issues such as authenticity being laid to rest in their minds and in their circles, if not in the world.

Authenticity is always being laid to rest. Even back in 1991 my friend Chuck was making fun of it (see quote at the top).

Anyway, my problem with the term “rockism” and with the antirockists isn’t that the term is vague or hard to define or that it pulls contrary ways or that people disagree about what it means. As I said, “rock” and “pop” are just as hard to define, and their flexibility and contrariness and discord are strengths, not weaknesses, are due to their designating cultural hotspots rather than being fixed categories.

My problem is more personal: I can’t tell if I’m a rockist or not, or whether a lot of other rock critics are rockists or not (Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus, Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Chuck Eddy), and I think the confusion is in the concept, not in me. My problem with the antirockists was their tendency to externalize “rockism” as some foreign body that needed to be defeated—or, if internal, as something that needed to be outgrown—rather than as cultural processes that we participate in. And authenticity… I may hate the noun form, but I find the adjectives—“real,” “actual,” “authentic”—absolutely crucial, and the tensions they signal are as alive and burbling and googooing now as the day they were born.

So, although I think we’d be better not to saddle ourselves with the word “rockism,” the conversation needs to continue. Nothing’s been laid to rest. The issues are as alive now as in 1965 when fans booed Dylan for going electric, or in 1971 when Lester Bangs wrote “James Taylor Marked For Death, or in 1985, when I wrote the following, which is an authenticity argument if I’ve ever seen one:

“Now so many musicians conform to the idea of truth that says that truth is raw, ugly, and primitive that this primitiveness is a cliché, it’s a new brand of deodorant, punk-hardcore deodorant; ultimately, it’s nothing. Punk isn’t punk anymore, it’s a bunch of musical/clothing signs that symbolize punk. It’s closer to literature or advertising than to music.”

--Frank Kogan, “The Autobiography Of Bob Dylan,” Cometbus #20, 1985.

See “Rules Of The Game No. 24: The PBSification Of Rock,” for more of the context of this quote. In saying “punk isn’t punk anymore” I was tracing a line of self-critical and self-destructive performers from Dylan and Jagger through to Iggy, and I mused that their apparent self-destructiveness and the inclination to pull the rug out from under themselves and their audience came across to me as “honest,” and I was wondering how this came to be. And my complaint about the latter-day hardcore punks was that they were letting the symbol stand in for the event, were symbolizing challenge while actually giving their audience reassurance.

Putting aside the question of whether I was being fair to the hardcore punks, notice that I’m using the exact terms that Geoff Himes used in his Nashville Scene essay that I ridiculed a couple weeks ago in which he lauded us country critics for wanting our assumptions challenged and therefore voting Miranda Lambert our number one, as opposed to the mass of mainstream country consumers who, he said, preferred reassurance and hence bought Carrie Underwood. The problem with Geoff’s contention wasn’t the values he was espousing, but that he was wrong. In fact, I’d say that as a critic I’m the real deal and Geoff isn’t in that I challenge my readers whereas Geoff throws them bouquets.

My 1985 attack on hardcore punk is a pure example of what some people would consider “rockism” in that it not only denigrates a new form (hardcore punk) in comparison to celebrated dadpunk (Stooges) and dadrock (Dylan and Stones), it also denigrates both the performers and the audience of the new form as opting for symbol over substance and reassurance over challenge. The fact that I’m denigrating a rock subculture rather than a pop audience hardly seems like a major difference here from the stereotypical rockist (say someone who lauds U2 or Coldplay or Springsteen while considering Fergie and Miley and Ashlee to be vapid corporate pawns peddling shallow songs to a gullible audience), given that I’m using the same basic argument. Of course, you can also point out that unlike the average rockist (1) I was right (but was I?), (2) I wasn’t parroting a standard line about hardcore punk, whereas our hypothetical average rockist is just pushing the same old cliché about mindless pop, and (3) if you view the piece in the context of my subsequent writing, it’s clear that I was thinking of both the old punk music I was extolling and its decline into hardcore punk as puzzles to be explained. So I wasn’t just pitching dogma. But “makes the sorts of arguments that Frank makes and holds the sorts of values that Frank holds but makes them and holds them dogmatically” doesn’t seem to me to be a very good definition of “rockist.” The words “dogmatic” and “lazy” are already in the language, and there’s no particular reason to associate them with proponents of rock more than with anyone else.

  • Get More Stories from Wed, Feb 20, 2008
Top of Story