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

[(Anonymous)]

Entirely unrelated - you featured heavily in a dream of mine last night Momus. I bumped into you (you were accompanied by a large black woman) on the deck of a small boat somewhere in the UK, and asked you to autograph the copy of 'Relax' (the food issue) I had with me. We then - minus the black lady; not sure where she got to - ended up on the set of a live TV show (like a DIY show)hosted by a couple in matching yellow jumpsuits; the guy looked a little lot the guy in the classic 'Joy of Sex' illustrations. Live on TV, you then instructed the man to use the large hand drill he was holding to penetrate the woman's backside... and that was all.

I don't know you, but do find your blog very thought-provoking. Also my life is in quite a state of flux at the moment and I'm not sleeping too well. Cheers Nick!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Nice to know I have such an interesting parallel world life in your dreams! Sleep better!

get real

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

Very interesting post. I've been socialized to have-- and self-consciously cultivated-- an aesthetic sensibility that finds distinctive nuances in very similar rock records. I like rock music. Is rockism the mistake that this sensibility is in fact some kind of rapturous contact with a more authentic reality? If you've ever rocked out, you may know that this mistake is easy to make.

Up a "tree"

[xyzedd.livejournal.com]

Running as fast as I can from those tar-some "rockists," I immediately scan down to your Nabokov passage, a favorite of mine; I'm pleased to quote once again from something lurking deep within the pages of "Strong Opinions" (I think):

"Reality is the only word which should always have quotation marks around it."

Sorry--I'm rather tiresome about this subject, too.

[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.

You can't win that easily.

[caoilte.livejournal.com]

Good rock is controversial, like that article which got a rise out of you! ;-)


What's nice is when artists _do_their_own_thing_. Whether it is real or fake it doesn't matter... as long as it is new and progressive and interesting. Nick Cave is special because he never cared whether the Goths or the Punks or the Grungies liked him or not, he was doing his own thing.

[(Anonymous)]

Cave no doubt takes himself way too seriously, and yet irony has nonetheless been key to his career and his image. The whole besuited crooner image of his is ambivalent and a bit of a joke; we don't really know how seriously we're supposed to take it and how seriously he takes it. Ditto the Southern Gothic. I mean, this is a middle-class guy from the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia who went to a snooty private school (and who can't sing in tune to boot). Even on his most recent 'unironic' album he's backed by a gospel choir etc.

I can't help feeling that "anti-rockists" want to have their cake and eat it, though. You don't like Cave's exchange of an "ironic" guitarist for an "unironic" one, because it smacks of a search for "authenticity". Are you saying that irony is good and lack of it is bad? Or that everything is irony and pretending otherwise is bad? In any case, you don't escape from value judgements, because you're simply setting up a meta-value judgement about value judgements (ie Godel's theorem). It's inescapable, and that inevitability isn't dealt with in an argument that dismisses the notion of the "real" or "authenticity" on an absolutist basis. Godel says there are truthful propositions in every system that are impossible to prove within that system - so maybe we need a little humility not just from the rockists but from the anti-rockists as well. In other words, actually there may well be something that is genuinely "authentic" - only we can't show that to be the case.

H.

[(Anonymous)]

That was a little confused, so here it is again in more compact form:

1. Cave chooses "unironic" guitarist, in order to be more "authentic".
2. Momus disapproves, on the grounds that it's impossible to be "more authentic".
3. Momus sets up new value grid, in which "trying to be more authentic" is "meta-inauthentic".
4. X argues that Momus's new category of "meta-inauthenticity" presupposes a "meta-authenticity", and disapproves.
5. Etc.

H.

Rock vs. Consumerism

[(Anonymous)]

Fun read, Momus.

Just a couple of things I wanted to throw in the mix:

1) the Rockist Revival seemed to start at a point where the Internet really seeped into the underground and destroyed all meaning to the whole "hipster bricolage" sampling/Beck/DJ Shadow/Streetwear movement by making the referential sources easily indexed and the "limited-edition" products easy to buy. For a while in the 90s, authenticity was "I am sampling from the original vinyl, not a rerelease," but once anyone could figure out what the original sample source record was and where to get their own copy, authenticity became "we play in a rock band and make our own music." DJing was just elite consumerism, and the Internet killed off elite consumerism. While DJs were on the crate-digging search for "the rarest record" and perfecting their fancy mixing techniques, Lower East Side hipsters just started to spin the most "rocking" tracks that people wanted to hear. The information deluge left only "real rockism" as an answer for authenticity.

2) When did the standard "Harpo Marx" painful interview routine start? I know Oasis were pioneers in the 90s, but I am always surprised when I watch old Beatles interviews and realize how energetic and spunky they were - even with John Lennon going all artsy in the late 60s. There seems to be a strain of anti-intellectualism and fear of intention in today's culture. You can't look like you've thought about anything in advance. Work is supposed to secrete out of the artist like sweat.

Marxy

[(Anonymous)]

Real = truthful expression of internal person
Fake = untruthful (contrived/calculated) expression of internal person

Ergo: all of us a mix of rockist (WYSIWYG) AND anti-rockist (liar), it is only a question of degree.

- FC

[(Anonymous)]

Rockism is a critical attitude towards a piece of music and not inherent to the music itself. It may or may not be an attitude that the artist himself has, but in this age of the death-of-the author and nothing-outside-the-text, that doesn't really matter, does it? In other words, one might deride Nick Cave's desire for unironic guitar-playing, and yet still like the result. I mean, God knows what Mozart's music theory was. Perhaps he thought it was divinely inspired. And yet his ideas about his own music are largely irrelevant to our appreciation of it.

I think it's an important distinction to make, because although we're living in a postmodern age, and therefore all music is postmodern, not all music is balls-out self-aware about its post-modernity. Furthermore, I don't see why it should be, unless you subscribe to some distinctly un-postmodern auteurist type theory, wherein what the music is about is what the artist thinks or says it's about. For music to be postmodern, it doesn't have to be telling you it's postmodern all the time. In fact, when such self-reflexivity becomes a cliché, it's time to move on.

The meme that to be postmodern is to make the work about its postmodernity is particularly virulent in the arts. But you just have to look at other fields of endeavour to see that it doesn't have to be like that. (Like food, for instance; nothing is more postmodern than contemporary urban eating habits, where we're having sushi for lunch and filet mignon for dinner, or vice versa. It's all good, and yet this has come about without food being "about" its postmodernity. It's "about" what it tastes like.)

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

I find 'rockism' a very useful term -- thank you for presenting and defining it. I used it in conversation with (against?) some hipsters the other day.

Meanwhile, to the Blixa Bargeld issue -- I wonder if good ole NC said that to mask some other, less interview-worthy, reason that Blixa didn't play with the bad seeds this time. You know, like drug addiction or child-rearing or something.

Re: Rock vs. Consumerism

[(Anonymous)]

Don't you just wish you had a wife and kids you could talk to? neighbours you knew, some mates from the next street? People you could rely on and who relied on you? And who told you you were talking shite when the need arose? (Not you personally, by the way) This internet bollox is a fucking poor substitute - required by misanthropes - for real relationships between people (or do people prefer fake relationships - here son, it's just a plastic tit with some white emulsion in it but never mind it's ironic milk). Some people even think its funny to fake their own death in this "live"journal crap. Is that the kind of relationship people want to have? Contact, but no contact? Suffocating in a condom?

[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?

[theophile.livejournal.com]

Blixa is way too fat these days to still be on heroin, though.

[(Anonymous)]

Salut Nick,

J'ai lu ton post au sujet de mon disque et de la musique en 2004. Personnellement je pense qu'aujourd'hui, l'attitude non-ironique est plus pertinente dans la musique dite 'intelligente'. Parce que l'ironie de l'ironie n'a plus de sens. Pour moi, la question essentielle, c'est: est-ce que les gens vont avoir envie d'ecouter plus d'une fois ces chansons.

Lou Etendue est une reussite pour moi parce que le contenu est totalement neuf par rapport a mes 2 premiers disques. Pour ce qui concerne le style, chacun a le droit d'aimer ou ne pas aimer. Mais il y a un vrai travail de renouvellement. C'est la premiere mission d'un artiste qui cherche de nouvelles pistes que de creer quelque chose de neuf pour ses propres oreilles et celles de ses auditeurs.

Par ailleurs, la pochette de ton prochain disque est magnifique!

Gilles

Re: Rock vs. Consumerism

[imomus.livejournal.com]

My 'wife' is arriving tomorrow to cohabit with me, so this little pow wow with the virtual boys in the virtual treehouse was probably the last for a while. By the way, I don't think it's 'bollox', I think it's completely wonderful. But yes, real life matters too.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

I'd agree with this.

Surely if music is postmodern there is no critical position we can take to decide what is 'real' or 'fake'? Surely your own individual view is the only one that's important to you?

I find a lot of bands around at the moment hilarious, in an ironic way - the Kings Of Leon, for example. Does it really matter if the band are in on the joke, or if the band take themselves seriously and the record company are marketing them knowingly as ironic pastiche, or if everyone involved with the creation of their music thinks it's ultra-authentic? I don't know, and may never know, but *I* find them funny (and quite like the tunes).

In fact, sometimes that's the fun - trying to work out if bands are taking the piss or not. I'm sure Nick Cave is.

[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.

[zotz]

As you ask, according to what they both said at the time Blixa left because Neubauten were loosening their ties to Mute and handling more of their own affairs. This was going to take up too much of Blixa's time for him to tour with the Bad Seeds.

The other factual point worth noting is that Warren Ellis is a fiddler rather than a guitarist.

[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.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I agree with you on that.

I'm wondering whether, without getting too Lionel Trilling about it, we shouldn't distinguish between Sincerity and Authenticity? Sincerity is a claim about a person, therefore it's intimately connected with postmodern things like situatedness, identity politics, radical subjectivity... Authenticity, on the other hand, is a claim about the status of a thing. This is what rockism is all about, calling something 'more authentic' and 'more real' than something else. It's very hard to 'prove', because it's basically a metaphysical claim'. Now, we might just mean 'I think this thing is cool'. People like me probably take Rockism much too seriously, and should relax and see it as an un-selfconscious form of situatedness, one which wants very much to project its subjectivity onto a screen the size of the universe and call it objectivity.

I don't know about rockism, but

[(Anonymous)]

when I was 12 and Cindi Lauper came out with "She's So Unusual" and she sang "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun", I said YEAH, she's so right, WOW! She knows how it REALLY IS! As I grow older and go through my Janis Joplin/Sioxsie & the Banshees/PJ Harvey stages, I get the SAME emotions. Does this sound hopelessly subjective or what?
Anyhoo, it seems that I have been living in some alternate reality that began around 1975 when that actor Ronald Reagan began a serious run for president. Having that ass-grabbing Austrian guy elected gov. of Cali has only reenforced this notion. Somewhere among the 12 or so dimensions there is still a USA where TV hasn't totally distorted our democracy, RIGHT????

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

Unless it's fat heroin.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

J'espere que tu n'etait pas trop blesse... juste quelques jours avant je t'a cite comme un des 'jolies laids' de Clumsy Grace (http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/61980.html), avec Bowie et Buster Keaton.

C'est tres subjectif, tout ca. Je ne peux que repeter que cette piste m'a rappele Gainsbourg, et ta piste precedente n'a evoquer que Toog. L'ombre de Gainsbarre est dangereux et grand...

Je pense que ma reaction est aussi influence par un certain mepris pour Asia Argento, certainement une 'rockiste' in extremis, et qui entraine des ames innocentes vers les memes erreurs! Mais ca deviens, finalement, de la theologie, et les chasses aux sorcieres ne sont pas loins derriere...