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Utopian Turtletop. Monsieur Croche's Bête Noire. Contact: turtletop [at] hotmail [dot] com
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
what's sin got to do, got to do with it?cobain died for somebody’s sins but not mine
[updated with further thoughts the next morning]
[updated with further thoughts the next morning]
[updated with further farther thoughts later the same day, Wednesday]
In 2002 EMP announced the theme of their 2nd Pop Conference: “Skip a Beat: Challenging Popular Music Orthodoxy.” On November 1, the deadline, I sent in a proposal for a 20-minute talk:
In 2002 EMP announced the theme of their 2nd Pop Conference: “Skip a Beat: Challenging Popular Music Orthodoxy.” On November 1, the deadline, I sent in a proposal for a 20-minute talk:
TITLE: "Cobain Died for Somebody's Sins but Not Mine: Notes on Rockism as Religion"
ABSTRACT:
Rockism employs the language of religion. This conference invites challenges to "orthodoxy"; more crucially, Rockism posits what Robert Christgau has called a "schism" between rock and its pop predecessors. Early commentators accurately named blues, gospel, mainstream pop, and country as rock's influences. Late '60s Rockist writers narrowed rock's progenitors to blues and country -- blue-collar genres. What became Rockism's myth of origin emphasized spiritual affinities while denying musical experience.
Rockists promoted blue-collar chic (a fashion that goes back to Theocritus) as they struggled for cultural dominance, which the post-war generation's demographic power helped effectuate. Rebellion is a core Rockist value, and Brando-esque masculine alienation is a basic stance. Punk added an anti-pop coating (a la Carl Sandburg and the folkies), which Rockism swallowed and popularized. Kurt Cobain's heartbreaking suicide note sketched his belief in punk -- and its betrayal by his mass popularity. The contradiction between Rockist ideology and experience tortured him.
Nevertheless, rock's religious appeal is authentic. Dance and rhythm are keys to a schismatic tradition that stretches from ragtime to electronica and teen pop. New styles embody subcultural declarations of independence and play a powerful role in the formation of social identity. This is a sacred function -- music ROCKS our worlds.
I borrow insights from Christgau, Susan McClary, Michael Ventura, and Martin Williams, locating rock in the ragtime-to-electronica tradition, while exploring its musical and Rockism's ideological particularities.
I have only recently learned that a 20-minute talk means about 3,000 words; I would have been hard-pressed to flesh this out within the limit. But this wasn't even the whole proposal; here's the last sentence:
My presentation will include recordings and a live band. [note: ! ! ! ]
The “live band” would have been mine; the idea was to perform my rewrite of Patti Smith’s “Gloria/In Excelsis”; hers begins, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”; mine begins -- you know how mine begins.
Which is just incompetent -- the idea that I could go through 100 years of popular music history, with analysis of ideological underpinnings of various stripes of it, sidelines into Carl Sandburg, the folkies, and Theocritus -- and then close with a 5-minute song with full band. “Time is malleable” -- that must have been what I was thinking -- “infinitely expandable or contractable to fit the needs of the moment.” Actually -- a perennial personal problem of mine is that I frequently act on this belief. And don’t learn from repeated mistakes.
The conference organizer, Eric Weisbard, quickly wrote me back a friendly note, saying he had recently given a speech with the title, “Kurt Cobain died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” Curious, I googled Eric and his title, and found the article where I found his quote maligning Mariah Carey’s fans, which I discussed last night. I was shocked by Eric’s anti-pop sentiment (expressed barely a year earlier), but I kept it to myself.
A few months later, Eric wrote me a terse but personal rejection note saying the rock vs. pop debate was old news.
I huffily asked him to send me a historiography of the debate, which is what I felt I was proposing. Frankly, I didn’t think of myself as a “poptimist” (I don’t think the term had been coined yet), but more of an enthusiastic participant/observer of music with an amateur (and shallow) anthropological as well as a semi-pro (and not much deeper) musicological bent. I wasn’t into running down rock -- certainly not rock music.
Rock is a style of popular music. The Rockist values of passion and authenticity and ambition and individual style -- I value them too. I value them highly. But I also value the lust and heartbreak of teen pop and dance music -- primal human stuff, primal human “content.” Whether the writer of a song is also its performer is an interesting but not anywhere close to being a make-or-break question for me.
I have a lot of problems with Rockism, but passion, authenticity, ambition, and individual style aren’t among them. One of my big complaints about Rockism is that it isn’t authentic enough: Rockism’s blue-collar chic is an anti-authentic ideology which has been bad for music criticism and bad for people. (Blue-collar chic is probably behind Greil Marcus’s diss of Anita Baker, which I discussed last night.) “Be authentic -- and don’t be middle-class” -- well, that’s great, unless you’re middle class (as I am) -- or unless you want to be.
I find it liberating to think of the Rolling Stones as a pop band -- man, those greatest hits of theirs -- they’re a gas, gas, gas.
Update the next morning: The motivation for this post wasn't to embarrass myself by publicly confessing my incompetence with time management and my resentment for having been rejected. The rock-pop debate is raging again in the rockpopside of Blogville and in Slate magazine and elsewhere. My point is: it's false to see rock as other than pop music. It's a particular style, or it contains particular styles, of pop and not-so-popular music. Its styles have particular qualities which one is free to love or loathe; insisting that its style is especially the best or especially the worst marks you as a partisan fan. Nothing wrong with partisan fan-ship, per se; it's just annoying when coming from professional critics who dress it up with bad intellection.
And it's funny that the Rock Museum of Seattle hosted a conference on "Challenging Popular Music Orthodoxy," when, as far as I can tell, Popular Music Orthodoxy consists of a couple very basic endlessly flexible rules:
1. The customer is always right.
2. Good beats and catchy hooks rule.
Optional: it helps if the performer has sex appeal.
By these rules, the Rolling Stones are (or were) a great pop act. And only a rockist -- or a fundamentalist partisan of classical, jazz, or folk -- would want to "challenge" this "orthodoxy."
Which is just incompetent -- the idea that I could go through 100 years of popular music history, with analysis of ideological underpinnings of various stripes of it, sidelines into Carl Sandburg, the folkies, and Theocritus -- and then close with a 5-minute song with full band. “Time is malleable” -- that must have been what I was thinking -- “infinitely expandable or contractable to fit the needs of the moment.” Actually -- a perennial personal problem of mine is that I frequently act on this belief. And don’t learn from repeated mistakes.
The conference organizer, Eric Weisbard, quickly wrote me back a friendly note, saying he had recently given a speech with the title, “Kurt Cobain died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” Curious, I googled Eric and his title, and found the article where I found his quote maligning Mariah Carey’s fans, which I discussed last night. I was shocked by Eric’s anti-pop sentiment (expressed barely a year earlier), but I kept it to myself.
A few months later, Eric wrote me a terse but personal rejection note saying the rock vs. pop debate was old news.
I huffily asked him to send me a historiography of the debate, which is what I felt I was proposing. Frankly, I didn’t think of myself as a “poptimist” (I don’t think the term had been coined yet), but more of an enthusiastic participant/observer of music with an amateur (and shallow) anthropological as well as a semi-pro (and not much deeper) musicological bent. I wasn’t into running down rock -- certainly not rock music.
Rock is a style of popular music. The Rockist values of passion and authenticity and ambition and individual style -- I value them too. I value them highly. But I also value the lust and heartbreak of teen pop and dance music -- primal human stuff, primal human “content.” Whether the writer of a song is also its performer is an interesting but not anywhere close to being a make-or-break question for me.
I have a lot of problems with Rockism, but passion, authenticity, ambition, and individual style aren’t among them. One of my big complaints about Rockism is that it isn’t authentic enough: Rockism’s blue-collar chic is an anti-authentic ideology which has been bad for music criticism and bad for people. (Blue-collar chic is probably behind Greil Marcus’s diss of Anita Baker, which I discussed last night.) “Be authentic -- and don’t be middle-class” -- well, that’s great, unless you’re middle class (as I am) -- or unless you want to be.
I find it liberating to think of the Rolling Stones as a pop band -- man, those greatest hits of theirs -- they’re a gas, gas, gas.
Update the next morning: The motivation for this post wasn't to embarrass myself by publicly confessing my incompetence with time management and my resentment for having been rejected. The rock-pop debate is raging again in the rockpopside of Blogville and in Slate magazine and elsewhere. My point is: it's false to see rock as other than pop music. It's a particular style, or it contains particular styles, of pop and not-so-popular music. Its styles have particular qualities which one is free to love or loathe; insisting that its style is especially the best or especially the worst marks you as a partisan fan. Nothing wrong with partisan fan-ship, per se; it's just annoying when coming from professional critics who dress it up with bad intellection.
And it's funny that the Rock Museum of Seattle hosted a conference on "Challenging Popular Music Orthodoxy," when, as far as I can tell, Popular Music Orthodoxy consists of a couple very basic endlessly flexible rules:
1. The customer is always right.
2. Good beats and catchy hooks rule.
Optional: it helps if the performer has sex appeal.
By these rules, the Rolling Stones are (or were) a great pop act. And only a rockist -- or a fundamentalist partisan of classical, jazz, or folk -- would want to "challenge" this "orthodoxy."
UPDATE 2: Remembering through the haze of years: I didn't ask Eric Weisbard for a historiography of the rock/pop debate, I asked him for a historiography of how rock criticism became Rockist. I haven't seen any writing on this; that's what I was proposing; I'll be posting more on it soon.
Also, partisan [anti-]fanship dressed up with bad intellection is what an esteemed commenter accused me of (though he didn't use those words) when I described similarities between Mick Jagger's sneering attitude of "to hell with everybody else" and George Bush's. I happen to think my intellection wasn't so bad, but -- tastes in intellection vary too, no?
Next up: seering biographical examinations of the formative influences and socio-political consequences of individual musicians' tastes in philosophy.
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