The anti-rockist treehouse

[imomus]

Well, I've been up in the treehouse with the boys again, debating this rockism thing. 'The boys' in this case were the music editor of the Seattle Weekly, Drew Daniel from Matmos, Alex, Martin, Ned... the usual faces. It was sort of funny, because this time the debate was started by someone wearing an F.R. Leavis mask who accused anti-rockists of being Maoists in some kind of Cultural Revolution. The Seattle Weekly guy replied that the anti-rockist position was to 'let a hundred flowers bloom, a thousand schools of thought contend', which I thought was a scream because it's a lie Mao told to find out what his critics were thinking, round them up and kill them. So I got this picture of a Rockist University in which 'scrutiny' and 'the Great Tradition' are upheld (the Rockist Canon), and outside it there's an anti-Rockist re-education farm where captured Rockists are brainwashed by being exposed to Britney while they labour in the fields and, if they don't relent and renounce Nirvana and Patti Smith, are shot dead.



I stuck to my line that rockism isn't about whether something is sold in large quantities or whether something 'rocks', but about the claim that something is more real than other things. If someone said 'I rock harder than you, Momus!' I would absolutely not be offended. Rocking is something anyone can do. However, if someone said 'I'm more real than you, Momus!' I would be reaching for my costume jewel-encrusted duelling pistols!

Theatre director and rock critic Matthew Wilder recently attacked Kelefa Sanneh's 'The Rap Against Rockism' piece in the New York Times in an attempted refutation run in the Minneapolis City Pages. Wilder said that Sanneh played into the hands of the music industry by abandoning the canon which places Nirvana above Mariah Carey.

I think sales, or this question of which artists use the music industry the most, is a red herring in the rockism argument, and that's why Wilder's dismissal of Sanneh's piece fails. Any argument about released music artists in which one group tries to accuse the other of 'being on the side of the music industry' must inevitably collapse, because any artist you might want to endorse is part of the music industry.



Rockism is about claims that some music is more 'real' than other music. In other words, it's all about authenticity. Wilder dismisses the authenticity thing by claiming that Kelefa's perspective is based on opposing, in a 'creaky cultural studies' opposition, straight white rockist rock to 'periwigged artifice and the Other'. But having set the argument up in Queer Studies terms, he proceeds to throw the baby out with the bathwater. He doesn't get to the point of admitting that rockists make big claims when they say that some music is more 'real' than other music, and that the onus is really on them to defend this claim, rather than on the anti-rockists to defend the much more modest claim of liking... well, just whatever they like, really.

One place where rockist arguments reliably lurk is in Nick Cave interviews. True to form, the new Salon piece The resurrection of Nick Cave, the most talented romantic Christian poet rocker in the world is full of them. Here's Cave himself, talking about why Blixa Bargeld is no longer working with him:

"He was such a significant presence in my adult life," Cave told me. "That he's not around, there's just a big hole there. At the same time, we were moving towards something that was less ironic in nature, and he was very much about playing the guitar in a non-guitar way. You know, that I have this sort of foreign instrument in my hands, and I'll make the best of it that I can. Whereas, if, in a way, Warren has replaced Blixa to a degree, and filled that hole, Warren doesn't play music in that way. He plays it in the opposite way, without any irony, and with a real love of rock 'n' roll and noise."

Thomas Bartlett contines: 'One of the most intriguing aspects of Cave's lyric writing is his use of Christian imagery. Modern pop rock songwriting is full of it, but it is usually used for its aesthetic, rather than religious, potency. Cave's use of Christian imagery is different in that he is a believer... Rock 'n' roll, which so prides itself on being anti-establishment, and Christianity, the ultimate establishment, make uncomfortable bedfellows -- is there genre of music more reliably atrocious than Christian rock? Dylan went electric and his fans revolted. Dylan went born again and they were so stunned and horrified that they went into denial and pretended he didn't exist -- at least until he distanced himself from Christianity a decade later. But with Dylan, there's always the niggling, in this case welcome, suspicion that he doesn't really mean it, that he's just toying with the world, having some fun, being cryptically ironic. With Cave, that interpretation does not work. He is a deeply, unsettlingly sincere artist.'



Notice how Christianity here is re-constituted as 'the Other' -- something unusual, rebellious, unsettlingly sincere. The ultra-conservative becomes, somehow, 'radical'. If Bartlett were just saying that Cave's new stuff 'rocks', I wouldn't be offended. What offends me in that article is the talk of Cave being 'sincere', especially when it's based on things like Cave firing Blixa Bargeld from his band because Blixa plays guitar in a way that's too ironic.

Maybe rockism makes sense as a sort of code. It's using objective-sounding language, but it's really just a way of saying 'This is cool'. There are layers of bluff and doublespeak in every use of the word 'real' when it comes to showbiz. Are we talking about 'Realism'? 'Reality TV'? Or is 'real' here, as in hip hop, standing for 'uses rude words'? There's always a different definition.

In the Salon piece on Nick Cave 'real' is all about Nick being a Christian and believing in a non-ironic way in a supernatural deity. I think the writer hints at the ever-shifting, ever-illusory nature of the 'real' in showbiz when he says 'But with Dylan, there's always the niggling, in this case welcome, suspicion that he doesn't really mean it, that he's just toying with the world, having some fun, being cryptically ironic.' But he seems to go on to say that this doesn't apply with Nick Cave. However, I think the fact that he raises the doubt, with his Dylan comment, actually implies the possibility, at least, that the designation of 'realness' in showbiz is prone to suffer from some sort of infinite regress, and that no-one is exempt.

The problem with attempts to displace things like sincerity, realism, authenticity and soul is that when you hammer them down here they tend to pop up there. I may think that I'm an anti-rockist for saying that fake is the new real, but that's still a claim that something is real, so I'm still a rockist.

I'm a rockist to the extent that if you ask me 'Which is more real, real or fake?' I'll unhesitatingly reply 'Fake!' But if you then ask me 'Which is more fake, real or fake?' I'll think for a while and say 'Real... no, fake...' and get confused.

In purely logical terms, the 'Which is more real, real or fake' thing just implodes. But it makes sense to say that in showbiz fake is more real, and real is more fake.

Q: In showbiz, which is more real, real or fake?
A: In showbiz, fake is more real.
Q: In showbiz, which is more fake, real or fake?
A: In showbiz, fake is more real, I just told you that.

Because we're not redefining 'fake' here as 'real' in any cosmological, universalist way, it no longer leads to the infinite regress.

You could exempt rockist use of 'real' if you situate it in a similar way:

Q: In your head, rock fan, which is more real, real or fake?
A: In my head, real is more real.
Q: In your head, rock fan, which is more fake, real or fake?
A: In my head, fake is more fake, I just told you that.



So maybe the Salon article is saying 'In Nick Cave's head, Nick Cave's sincerity seems to be real. However, in showbiz these things are always a bit more slippery, look at Dylan.' The article makes great play of the fact that Cave doesn't want to talk about his faith, thus making it seem like a 'hidden' or 'depth' content, and therefore something Cave isn't doing for showbiz reasons. However, insofar as the article is showbiz itself, this 'reluctant admission of interviewee to private thoughts nevertheless revealed' schtick is about as credible as the muteness of Harpo Marx.

Up in the anti-rockist treehouse we made an interesting diversion at this point into Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which I mapped to Derrida's riff about language being like a banking system which secures its loans with other loans and Drew Daniel mapped to Lacan's definition of 'the real'. This led me to attempt a redefinition: 'the real is that which is absent from human symbolic systems, yet without which they are meaningless.'

At which point I said bye to the guys (and they were all guys) and went off to listen to Part 2 of The Kenneth Williams Diaries.

I leave you with Vladimir Nabokov's definition of reality:

'Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it's hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects... all art is deception and so is nature; all is deception in that good cheat, from the insect that mimics a leaf to the popular enticements of procreation. Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, "Wolf, wolf," and there was no wolf. His baboon-like parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born -- the tall story had been born in the tall grass.'

Comments

[dorothy-parka.livejournal.com]

i did read the Kelefa Sanneh article, and I thought it was, to be brief, bullshit. It's that sort of anti-intellect, psuedo-un-sobbery that makes me cringe, much as The Believer's "anti-snark" campaign did and does. I have a strong preference for musicians who create music that is outside of the mainstream, and yes, in my personal belief system these musicians are better than Ashlee Simpson or Mariah Carey. Pop superstars are pop superstars because they appeal to a wide audience, not because they're necessarily doing something artistically interesting. I, and "the rockists" are clearly a very small minority, and I wonder why Kelefa is so worried about us. I suspect she may be one of us, and feels badly about not "keeping it real."

In my mathematical equations, Nirvana=Wu-Tang, and both have more value than, say, Kelis. But Kelis's producers have more value than Kelis.

[theophile.livejournal.com]

I took Kelefa seriously until the last paragraph, when I realized that she was either taking the piss or dangerously stupid. incidentally: Sandy Dee, Janis Joplin, Poly Styrene, Patti Smith, L7, just to grab a few diverse counterexamples from diverse genres.

but about this rockist thing, since you (like me, to some extent) are accepting the label: have you ever actually met a rockist who fit Kelefa's (or Momus's) full definition? you know, a rockist-on-all-points?

because I sure haven't. I've known a lot of people who believe that music can be, in some sense, "authentic," and who lay down value judgments thereby, but this hybrid monster who believes that but also believes that there is a formula that can be followed for "real-ness" and that value judgments of bands are in some sense apodeictic, external things is, I suspect, a straw man erected purely that postmodernist music journalists can feel good about themselves.

I think Matmos and Guns N' Roses and Goodie Mobb are good. I think Avril Lavigne and the New Kids on the Block and 50 Cent are basically unlistenable. I think it would be disingenuous to fail to acknowledge that there are concrete differences between the approaches of the former group and the latter group to the construction of their music which help explain why one group sounds so vital and alive and inspiring and the other sounds like the aural equivalent of a Thomas Kincade painting.

if the central thrust of the accusation is: it is elitist to think that there is good music and bad music, music that is honest and music that is dishonest, music that is interesting and music that bores the hell out of us, then what's the alternative? are we supposed to think that music is as flat and featureless as oatmeal?

oh, and as a final point: Ashlee Simpson, in the incident that sparked this whole wave of criticism, ran from the stage, crying and embarrassed, when her lip-synching was discovered. this was before anyone had a chance to accuse her of anything. doesn't this indicate that she, too, understood her own performance to be less valuable since she was not singing? is she a rockist?

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

> have you ever actually met a rockist who fit Kelefa's (or Momus's) full definition? you know, a rockist-on-all-points?

Yes.

[theophile.livejournal.com]

I took Kelefa seriously until the last paragraph

d'oh, not the last paragraph. the last paragraph on page 1 of the original NYT article, which is about halfway down on the article you just linked; the one about older; familiar prejudices.

[dorothy-parka.livejournal.com]

i am sorry to say that i have never known a rockist. i believe that may be because i am a music semi-snob. most people i know who are music listeners are astute enough to admit that Nelson and Xtreme, or Sugar Ray and Blink 41 (is that their number?) (to use more contemporary examples), are as banal as Ashlee and her sister, despite the fact that they are white males who play in bands with guitars. i know no one who is giving a free pass to people making baby-food music, regardless of the genre. but, i live in a big city and i can isolate myself from people whose opinions are different from mine. I'm sure there are people out there who think hip hop or laptop music isn't as "valid" or real as Death Cab for Cutie, but those aren't people who are culturally astute in anyway--they're the same as the average pop music fan to me.

i think you're right about Ashlee being a closet rockist--she seems to want to be Avril-like, and claimed to not lip-sync during performances. clearly somewhere in there even she understands the difference. poor girl!

[buckminster.livejournal.com]

I think you'd all save yourselves a lot of trouble if you'd replace the word "real" with "authentic" whenever the subject comes up. surely we don't need to prove our existance in order to talk about music. authentic is a sticky word too, but at least it has a frame of reference, ie. the assumption that we and music exist and that the existance is knowable enough to talk about.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm sure Ashlee Simpson and Thomas Kinkaid and The Backstreet Boys are all to some extent rockists, because rockist discourse has a tendency to permeate the thoughts of the unsophisticated, no matter how ludicrously inappropriate it is. Just as Christianity is likely to appeal most to those whom great misfortunes have befallen, Rockism as ideology is likely to appeal most to those who are most 'produced' and showbiz and fake. This is why I postulated a while back that Rockist Robots are almost inevitable. The more fake the lifeform, the more it will obsess about authenticity.

I think anti-rockism is an intellectual movement a bit like Marxism, in the sense that it's an elite philosophy that wants very much to connect with the working class and reject the received ideas of the bourgeois doxa. Anti-rockists have the metaphysical self-confidence to have abandoned any need for 'authenticity'. They're able to like things viscerally, or to like things ironically, or to like things other people make for reasons other than the intentions of the makers. An anti-rockist can indeed like a Thomas Kinkaid painting, despite the fact that Kinkaid is probably extremely rockist in his claims about his own work.

Everybody is using their arguments to distinguish themselves from the people next to them. The anti-rockist wants to mark his distance from middle-class good taste, and Thomas Kinkaid wants to mark himself off from abstract or conceptual art, or whatever. Everybody uses arguments about authenticity to make what are essentially 'narcissism of small differences'-type social distinctions between social affiliations.