In last week’s column I said I wanted to eliminate a word that has plagued music criticism—the word is “rockism”—but paradoxically I also wanted to revive and reanimate the conversation that people had when they were using the word.
I’m going to wait a few paragraphs before defining “rockism,” since “rockism” was a pejorative term invented by antirockists, and it’s the antirockists I’m concerned with, who are the people I’m trying to engage. When I say the word “antirockist” I don’t mean anything big by it—it’s just someone who now and then will use the terms “rockist” and “rockism” as pejoratives and who will take an occasional stab at figuring out what he means by it. It’s not necessarily a big part of his thinking. And antirockism isn’t an “ism,” just some people trying to get out from under something, they’re not sure what.
The reason I want to revive the conversation is that I think there’s still a lot to talk about on the subject of “what are people trying to get out from under?”
Antirockism seems to have two basic motivations, different antirockists leaning more towards one or the other.
(1) The first impulse is to revivify rock music and its near relatives, maybe your own music, if you’re a musician, or your way of writing about music, if you’re a rock critic. “Rockism” is a name for the deadly dull routines that you’re trying to break out of. Revivifying music seems to have been the motive of Pete Wylie, a member of the early ’80s rock band Wah! Heat, who coined the term “rockism” in an interview in British magazine NME in 1981. (I say “seems” because I can’t find the interview online, not even in the NME’s backfiles, so I’m going by what people have said about it. The piece was by Paul du Noyer in the NME of January 17, 1981. If you have the piece or your Web searching skills surpass mine, get in touch with me: koganbot at gmail dot com.)
(2) The second impulse is to clear a space for discussing and praising disco and pop and other despised music, “rockist” being a term of abuse you can throw at anyone who waltzes in and speaks disparagingly of mindless pop music and dumb disco dollies. This sort of antirockism often involves challenging a particular sort of authenticity argument that goes “rock music is more real and valid than pop because rock music has good characteristic X while pop has bad characteristic Y.” From there, the term “rockism” can be applied to any authenticity argument that uses rock-style praise words, even if what’s being praised is some music other than rock, or something that isn’t music at all.
The second impulse has predominated, so if I were teaching “Rockism 101,” I’d probably start with the following definition, cautioning my students that no definition is going to come close to embracing all the varied uses of the term but that this gives you some idea of how people actually use it:
Rockism is (i) a collection of loosely related tropes and arguments employed to argue that rock music is better than pop music owing to its greater authenticity, in contrast to pop’s shallowness and tendency to pander to its audience; (ii) by extension, an argument that some phenomenon X—a performer, a type of music, a taste in alcohol (e.g., whiskey vs. wine), etc.—is better than some related phenomenon Y owing to X’s greater authenticity and Y’s derivativeness and shallowness and tendency to pander.
That extension is important, since it embraces phenomena that anyone who uses the term immediately recognizes as rockism even when those phenomena don’t extol rock—e.g., Dylan being booed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 for playing with an electric rock band. In this instance, it’s the people booing who are the “rockists,” even though Dylan is playing rock and they’re booing him for abandoning folk. They’re seeing him as compromising his integrity and playing to the pop marketplace, though in this case what’s “pop” happens to be rock. (Israel G. Young, several months later in Sing Out! “He has given up his companions for the companionship of the Charts. Currently, the Charts require him to write rock and roll, and he does.”) Or when in 1999 Michael Roberts in Westword sneers at Ricky Martin for making music that’s “watered down” in comparison to real Latin music, and points out that “Livin’ La Vida Loca” was produced by pop-rock guy Desmond Child, this sneering is classic “rockism,” even though “Livin’ La Vida Loca” sounds more rock than what Roberts would consider genuine Latin music. And at one point in the ’90s I asked Simon Frith about “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep,” a song I only knew from a bootleg remix of a cover version I’d heard on a cheap cassette compilation out of Singapore, deriving I thought from what I believed to be the original version by Mac and Katie Kissoon. Simon told me he was surprised I was so rockist as to assume that the Kissoon version was the original. The Kissoons had been born in Trinidad, whereas the actual original version was by Lally Stott, a Brit living in Italy in 1971, and the big international hit was recorded in Italy by Scottish band Middle Of The Road. Wikipedia isn’t clear as to whether the Kissoon or the Middle Of The Road cover version came out first. But what Simon is chiding me for is assuming that a black version most likely precedes a white one, i.e., for making the “rockist” assumption that the wellspring of music is among nonwhites and non-Europeans. (Actually, the Mac and Katie Kissoon version was the one that scraped into the Top 40 in the U.S., and until I asked Simon about the song I had no idea that Lally Stott or the Middle Of The Road even existed.)
Not that Simon thought I was accusing the Middle Of The Road of pandering to its audience—as I said, my definition hardly encompasses all uses of the term “rockist.” But black versus white brings us to a disquiet caused by pandering’s close cousin, complicity. Black music, especially in its older forms, is felt to be more alive and organic than white music and less complicit in an unjust socioeconomic system and in a pale middle-class lifestyle. Now, on the page, what I’ve just written is laughably stereotyped. I deliberately used the vague wording “is felt to be” (felt by whom?), my point being that this isn’t an idea that you put into sentence form and examine, it’s a deep feeling throughout the culture that the mainstream is corrupt and frightened and that vitality and truth come from somewhere lower down or farther out from whatever you happen to be designating as the mainstream at that moment. And this feeling bubbles up in the statements that the antirockist considers rockist but it also bubbles up in antirockism itself. Antirockism is rockism with a few of the words changed, and I don’t mean that it shouldn’t be like rockism or that the antirockists uncritically like pop and sneer at rock, which they don’t, but rather that they’re trying to get out from under the drab and the false just as much as the rockist is, they just place drabness and falseness in somewhat different locales. In fact, “rockism” is among the antirockists’ names for the drabness and falseness.
So antirockism makes authenticity claims too, which is fine with me, since I love authenticity claims and I see nothing in principle wrong with them. To go into the antirockist conversation in detail would require at least another article (which will come someday, I promise, since it was pretty interesting, and itself deserves a more alive term than “antirockism”); the antirockists are basically saying to the rockists “you guys think you’re the real thing, but really you’re just spouting a temporary ideology, and we’re the real deal as critics, the ones who can see through you.” Where the antirockists went wrong was in leaving it at that, in telling themselves they’d seen through the rockists while in fact making no effort to see into them. This is because the antirockists put defeating an enemy ahead of trying to understand him, so in effect were seeking stupidity in others rather than trying to strengthen their own comprehension. The people the antirockists would dub rockists often accommodated this by saying really stupid things. E.g., some anonymous googler just hopped his way onto my livejournal and posted this bit of wisdom as to why he thinks Busted are better than the Jonas Brothers: “Busted is wayyy better! 1. they’re not babies and have a little more edge in their songs 2. they’re grown up and have a larger fan span (notice how almost all the fans for JB are ages 7-15) 3. they write their own songs (James has written a lot of the songs for the Jonas Brothers) 4. they’re original 5. they don’t give a shit about what people think 6. JB are too boring... too ‘G’ rated. I miss Busted a lot! but they’ve all done well for themselves. James Bourne is now in Son of Dork and a famous song writer (ask the Jonas Brothers). Charlie is in Fightstar. Matt has a pretty solid solo career. i think if the jonas brothers were to split up, they wouldn’t have much of a future. all they attract are young teen girls.”
It’s easy enough for someone to call that Busted guy a rockist and to diagnose him, given that he’s basically drawn a picture of himself in negative (I’m guessing it’s a he, given the denigration of young teen girls): he’s insecure about his maturity, he gives more of a shit about what people think of him than he’d like, and this is probably why it’s a big deal to him that Busted wrote their own songs, since you can guess he spends too much of his time singing someone else’s song. And that’s exactly what he’s doing in his livejournal comments, parroting tropes and arguments that he pulled from the culture and that feel good to him as he says them, without letting them pass through his brain before typing them on his keyboard. But this adds up to me as “person,” not “rockist,” and I don’t see where my tropes are all that different from his. I’m the one who wrote here: “Now that Paris has been beaten down, Britney seems like the last remaining public figure who’s not trying to say the right thing” (Rules Of The Game No. 14) and “There’s something heroic about Britney’s indifference to cred” (Rules Of The Game No. 23). Maybe I’ve got a keener ear to “indifference to cred” than this guy does, who seems totally enslaved to it. But it’s not as if we value it differently, or aren’t caught on the same hamster wheel, reserving cred for those who appear not to seek it.
In all of this, “authenticity” is the wild card, basically a moving target, can be anything from a claim of artistry to anti-art noise, “stands the test of time” to wildness and subversion, gayness to disco sucks, populism to the avant garde. The antirockists flubbed the conversation by failing to ask why claims to authenticity keep recurring. The impulses, tropes, and habits that get labeled “rockism” existed throughout the culture from high to low, long before rock, and the general cultural debate and uncertainty as to the value of popular culture was also already in place, these impulses etc. managing to run simultaneously in contrary directions—towards respectability and seriousness and towards subversion and wildness, the subversion and wildness themselves being completely torn as to whether they’re a form of respectability (albeit a supposed outsider’s respectability) or of irresponsibility. There’s simply no way to understand why “real versus fake” is a big anxiety if you’re not willing to think about people’s conflicted attitudes towards social power, how authenticity and respectability are required to present themselves as opposition to authority. The coming of rock intensified these tensions because its strength among middle-class youth and its bringing mass bohemia to that youth meant that rock could knock down pop culture notions of prestige (Sinatra, Armstrong, etc.) and knock down high art music’s claim to be higher or to be better art than rock was. But this triumph exacerbated the irresponsibility-is-responsibility conundrum, with rock now having to live down its own prestige, and I don’t see that the conundrum’s settled down one bit. We still don’t know whether to seek or shun respectability, whether we get to be the true wild things by rocking out or by dancing to girl pop, or which or what makes us hapless, conformist dupes.