As a kid, I liked everything: rock, hip-hop, classical, jazz, pop, dance, country, whatever. In my teenage years, however, I succumbed to the pressures of a racist society and turned into a devout rockist. I dutifully renounced pop, disco, techno, even hip-hop, anything that was “inauthentic.” I swallowed the rockist dogma that grants legitimacy to Delta blues and classic Motown but not contemporary R&B; to bluegrass but not commercial country; to acoustic jazz but not fusion. I felt earnestly moved by the rockist national anthem:
It took me until my twenties to shake this atavistic silliness and re-embrace the whole universe of Afrocentric music not made by white guys with guitars. Wherever I go, however, I continue to encounter resistance to such musical practices as sampling, synths, rapping, dancing and fun. This resistance is epidemic among my friends, fellow musicians and students, and the music world at large. Consider this post my contribution to the fight against rockism.
So what exactly am I talking about here? Urban Dictionary defines it best:
Rockism is essentially a prejudiced attitude to any form of popular music that doesn’t conform to the values of rock music (in the most narrow and conventional sense of the term.) The most obvious example of this is the tendency of middle-aged fans of ‘classic rock’ to describe any music that involves the overt use of electronic instruments as not ‘real music’.
Do you really think Jethro Tull are better than Kraftwerk, or is it just rockism?
Extremely narrow-minded taste in music. Rock ‘purists’ who are so obsessed with raw blues-based rock music that they fail to appreciate anthing else.
This is basically the reason why people complain about rock being ‘dead’ these days and believe that all current music made now is pure garbage (the only current bands rockists like are The White Stripes and The Strokes).
The rockist canon is well-represented by Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. However, these lists are problematic because they attempt to accommodate non-Baby-Boomers by including an awkward smattering of jazz, country, R&B, hip-hop and EDM. Endless Window, in an otherwise not very cogent post, does pose this eloquent challenge to Rolling Stone:
In this new frontier, why should we be doomed to a life of old print publication that, for purely generational reasons, still insist on the primacy of white heterosexual middle-class men with guitars, and that Exile on Main Street is mankind’s finest work?
Rockism has become passé among the music critical establishment, but it’s alive and well on the internet. Here, for example, are some of the greatest hits of rockism on Quora:
- Do you think that music slowly started getting worse after the 70’s?
- What would be different today had Kurt Cobain not died?
- Do you think Kurt Cobain would have killed himself if he was alive after listening to the crap music today?
- Why is there such a decline in the quality of popular music?
- When and why did pop music become so terrible?
It’s easy to equate rockism with racism, sexism, homophobia, or a combination of all three. There’s some ugly history to support such an equation, most infamously Disco Demolition Night. Not all rockists are even aware of the political content of their beliefs. I will observe, however, that rockists direct most of their ire at music made by and for African-Americans, women and girls, gay people, and the intersections of all of those groups. The kind of virulent hatred that leads to mass record burning is not a good color on anyone. My own rockism concealed some bad attitudes I unreflectively picked up from my peers and my elders. As I got older and did more self-scrutiny, I came to realize that I had been right as a child, that rock is no more valid or “authentic” than any other kind of music.
During its heyday, rock was coextensive with anti-authoritarianism and free thinking. It’s a cliche to say that the rebellious aspect of rock has been co-opted by corporate America. But in the past few years, something else seems to have happened to rock: it has become an avenue for outspoken conservatism. The burgeoning Christian rock scene is one indicator; the presence of Ted Nugent on the national stage is another. For me, what really brings home the connection between rock and a yearning for a more wholesome past is seeing Mike Huckabee play bass on his TV show. Here he is accompanying Lynyrd Skynyrd, whose Confederate bona fides were never much in doubt:
Wikipedia usefully contrasts rockism against poptimism, the idea that there no guilty pleasures. Poptimism says that if music makes you feel good, then it is good. This doesn’t mean that you have to love everything on the radio. I mostly find the music on the radio boring or irritating. I find most classic rock, jazz, country and classical boring and irritating too. All the different styles and genres appear to contain roughly the same ratio of good to bad.
The best musicians and producers I’ve met are the most ecumenical in their listening. They may not love everything equally, but they strive to find the emotional message in whatever they’re listening to, and to understand how it’s being communicated. Paul Geluso, my professor of audio production at NYU and my supervisor as a recording engineer, exemplifies poptimism (and every other kind of musical optimism.) In Paul’s Advanced Audio Production class, people brought in a dazzling variety of music, the full spectrum of NYU hipster tastes, from death metal to Engelbert Humperdinck. I kept waiting for Paul to register distaste for something, but his reaction every time was some variation on “Cool man!” I know he has his tastes and preferences, and certainly has a discriminating ear for production, but somehow he’s learned to suspend judgment when hearing what other people like. It’s a quality I admire and am trying to develop in myself.
Thanks for the recommendations Ethan. I think you could also add MySpace. Hip-hop is a form that I found some artists I like. Michael Franti and Buck 65 come to mind. Campus radio is still alive and it is still a place where people play they music they want to play. The one thing artists from the 60s say is that while the industry was venal, it did allow some artists who weren’t very commercial to be on a major label. John Prine, Frank Zappa, and so many others were on Reprise and Warner Brothers for a long time. They probably could rationalize keeping them on because so many artists were making the big bucks. Pete Townshend said that ITunes doesn’t give artists the support they need. The Internet has opened the doors, but they aren’t very known if they can get on the radio, TV, or get a distributor. We live in interesting times for music indeed.
Very good point. The business of making music often gets in the way of the music itself. You are also right that there are people who nostalgic for the 80s, although I am not one of them. I do like Devo and Talking Heads, and while I don’t like Prince, I admire him. I think that there is a significant amount of bad music always, but I am not sure that Bob Dylan could get a contract today nor could so many other musicians who existed in the 60s. The problem is that there is more and more pressure to make money and less and less focus on songwriting and music craft. When I listen to the music in the mall, in the bars, or TV, while I try to be open-minded it just doesn’t do it for me. Even when I heard a song I liked such as Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer, it was overplayed to a point where you felt like you were being hit over the head with a sledgehammer. Granted that taste is a very subjective thing and that people will always differ on that, it is still hard for me to find contemporary artists that I like although I keep searching.
From what I know of the music industry back in the sixties, it seemed about as venal and horrible as it is now, maybe just less corporate. There’s plenty of good music being made out there, but you’re unlikely to encounter it in the mall or on TV. The internet is your friend here: Pandora, Spotify, SoundCloud, Twitter… I think that most of the excitement and creativity right now lies in the intersection between hip-hop, R&B and electronic dance music. If you’re not feeling these styles, yeah, the landscape looks a little bleak. I’d keep an open mind, especially about hip-hop.
Good post, I wasn’t even aware that such a term exists. To me, I like a lot of music of different genres, but I never liked a lot of the popular music that was around in the 1980s and its contemporaries. For me a lot of the music is done just to make money and I has no soul and it isn’t made by people who really want to make music. While it is true that the bands of the 60s(my favorite decade even though I was only a child)is that while they wanted to get famous and get girls, they had a love of the music and the craft which is something that comes through when I listen to them. With some exceptions(forgive me for giving any names)I find most if not all commercial music boring. The good news is that campus radio stations exist and there is a lot of really good alternative music or music that isn’t commercial. The good news is that you don’t have to listen to music you don’t like anymore.
If you feel that the music on the charts now is shallower and more nakedly commercial than it used to be, you’re right. But you may not know the real reason for that. It isn’t the music; it’s the way the charts are determined. Before 1991, Billboard gathered record sales data through the highly unscientific method of calling up record stores and asking what was selling. Store owners were free to invent whatever numbers pleased them, inflating the status of their favorite bands. The system was easily subject to manipulation by unscrupulous record labels and promoters. The manager of a major rock band described to me how you could literally purchase a number one Billboard hit. This system favored rock and roll, since that’s what the record store dudes liked and that’s what the labels were pushing.
In 1991, everything changed with the advent of Soundscan, a system for automatically tallying record sales based on barcode scans at the register. For the first time, the Billboard charts suddenly objectively reflected what people were buying. It turns out that they were buying a lot more country, a lot more hip-hop and especially a lot more teenybopper pop than had previously been believed. It isn’t that pop music suddenly got shallower; it had always been that shallow. We were only just finding out about it.
I’m quite confident that the ratio of good music to bad is constant across time and across genres. We look back at the sixties and seventies because time has filtered out a lot of the garbage. Ironically, young kids now are nostalgic about the eighties, because all they know about is Michael Jackson and Prince and Talking Heads and Devo; they don’t have to separate the wheat from the chaff in real time. I’m sure future generations will be just as nostalgic for the days of Kanye West, Daft Punk and Janelle Monae.
:-)
I… forgot to finish the sentence. Now corrected.
As you got older and did more self-scrutiny,
… you…? … what?