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

[dragonmonkey.livejournal.com]

"I seek not beyond. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom's realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer's Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live, let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."
-Conan the Barbarian
from Queen of the Black Coast 1934.


Even Conan the Barbarian is an anti-rockist! Who would've known?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, but an anti-rockist murderer. 'I slay, therefore I am.' Surely killing is a way to make oneself 'more real' than the people one leaves in a bloody pulp?

[(Anonymous)]

that's a fake reply, momus. it's not authentic. you just trying to be "cool" becos u realize nobody cares about your obsession of fake and real so u have enuff self consciousness to not bang on about it (if u didnt, u'd be authentic becos autehntic is a certain ignorance of yaself - yes, u could be authentic talking about pomo, if its close enuff to ya heart, but its not, so u just like the rest, dont belive in anything, so why should we belive in you?)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I admire your self-conscious decision to use deliberately sloppy spelling and grammar in an attempt to seem more 'real', Anon. You could be authentic doing that if you were merely 'ignorant of yaself', but I believe you're doing it to look cool, and have practised for long hours in front of a mirror. 'Yaself' is good, but you're going to have to work on 'autehntic' because you spell it correctly in the same sentence. What you need is a slightly different, but always wrong, spelling every time.

[(Anonymous)]

Nick, honestly, why do you bother with this stuff (arguing with eejits)? You're a sensitive soul -- isn't there a Mrs C you could be talking to?

FC

[(Anonymous)]

see, thats the thing. i don't write badly to seem more koool or anything, its just the way i write - u know, as much as i dig your kind and i even agree that nothing is more real than other, then i still have my soul - and u can argue day in and day out that its a vague word, hell yea it is, but it means somethis to us fellas who use it, we know what it means, and thats fine, i use the word soul when i see a Sam Shepard play, or a FASSBINDER or EUSTACHE movie, when i read poems by BUKOWSKI or see a painting by BASQUIAT.. u know, they have a certain soul, and "authenticity" - what that means is a singular obsession about a particular theme i suppose, that they just bang on about it and fail to "fix their problem" (if we assume that that is the basic for artistic production). and thats so fucking real, the pain, the desperation, etc...yea, these concepts can also be seen in playful pomo artists of course, but the canon, the way we sorta think about it (at least me) still is more rooted modernism...and u know, u seem to wanna kill a modernist idea with a pomo idea. im not interested in that, i just dig both man. i love murakami and flatness and shit, but i dont dig it as bob dylan, or Cassavetes, they realer.