Let’s Talk About by Rock (and Music in General)
The next time you wonder why old white men care so much about a passé art form, you should realize there are stories that go past the musical merits of said musical style and into what the music does
Rock is dead, etc. What killed it? It’s like a murder mystery, except the culprits are lame bean-counting 65+ year olds who still act and dress like they’re 20. “Whodunnit?” Who cares? At least if the murderers were interesting, maybe we’d care to know.
No, rock isn’t dead, though it’s been declared dead many times over the decades. The Who, in fact, used “Rock is dead” as the refrain in their song “Long Live Rock,” released in, uh, 1972, when rock was, uh, maybe 20 years old?
Yeah.
Rock is like jazz or orchestral music in that it’s still around and there are purveyors and performers of it, but it no longer matters as a cultural force. I’ve often said the last guy with a guitar who mattered blew his own brains out in 1994.
Of course, there are still really good, talented bands out there. They’re just not going to move the cultural needle and become household names. Rap and hip-hop are where it’s at, chaps, like it or not. Country and pop, too, I suppose, but even those have been rap-ified and dance-ified.
And that’s all fine. What do I care? I’m old. I’m over 40. I’m not cool, and that’s fine. What am I trying to prove? Nothing. It’s just music. That people base their entire lives over a musical genre is fucking pathetic. I do get it—firsthand. Music is powerful, and when you come to think of it, any major political movement has a soundtrack (and every major musical movement has a fashion; who is really wagging the dog here, anyway?).
Personally, though, personally, and that’s why you’re reading this, for the human touch—personally, rock music means a lot to me. This is why I care.
Ahem.
So let me take you back to 1990 or so. I was 9 years old. We had a TV in our basement, our spare TV, one of those jobs that had a wooden frame and dials, big ol’ chrome-played dials like from a spaceship in a 1950s sci-fi movie . . . I can almost hear the theremin playing now.
Those dials had a channel 1, which always gave you nothing but static. Why was it there? Why were any of us there? There was also a second dial that switched between UHF and VHF or something, which I only way later in life sand for “ultra high frequency” and “very high frequency,” respectively.
The TV also had an ancient cable box, because things were like that back then. This was also wood-paneled, which I always associated with the 1970s. This was the early 90s, man! Everyone should’ve been wearing bright neon body-glove leotards and zubaz. Scrunchies. People still had Nagel paintings everyone, right? Leather jackets with diagonal zippers? I grew up in central New Hampshire, so no. We were as far from culture as someone not in the Midwest could be.
The point is, I was in the basement because there where my brother and sister and j had our Nintendo. We could also watch all 13 channels (“of shit on the TV to choose from,” right Roger Waters?) so as to not bug our parents when they were watching the news (boring!) on the nice big new TV we had upstairs. It had, like 30 channels (but still no channelp 1).
Actually, with the cable box we even got more than 13 channels downstairs. So there I was, alone for whatever reason, and I caught the episode of The Wonder Years where Kevin joins a band. He gets a guitar because of some hippie kid at school he thought was cool and starts to jam. They called themselves The Electric Shoes; I remember this for some reason. I don’t remember much else about it except I sort of hated that show. I found it depressing. There was always this weird nihilistic undercurrent that nothing would ever work out right for Kevin and his family. I also hated his asshole brother Wayne. One of TV’s most unlikeable fictional characters.
In any event, I felt Kevin’s rush when he hit that first power chord. Damn, man! I played freaking clarinet in the school band. Suddenly I wanted an electric guitar. I pretended some old plastic halloween weapons, maybe a pitchfork or a double-bladed axe, was an axe of the six-string variety, hopping around the basement alone, thank God, ripping off some killer imaginary riffs. Woo, man, this was fun! Later that summer at our family’s beach house I remember someone asking me what I wanted for my birthday (it’s in the fall). “An electric guitar,” I said. “Oh boy, it’s starting already,” said my aunt.
No, I didn’t get a guitar for my tenth birthday, but my uncle did tape me all of his Beatles albums, and even photocopied the album covers for me in cassette-size and stuck them in the cases. I listened to those non-stop for years. Yes, sorry Boomer-haters, I am an unabashed Beatles fan. They were the first band I ever got into. And I wanted to be George Harrison. I loved his stinging leads on songs like “Taxman,” which I later learned Paul McCartney actually played, and “Good Morning, Good Morning,” which, uh . . . Paul McCartney played . . . and . . .
Let’s just say I wanted to be a lead guitarist. Except we had no guitar. No electric guitar. We had my mom’s old nylon-stringed classical guitar from when she was a kid that my brother, who’d also been bitten by the rock n’ roll bug, took a few lessons with, but two things happened around the fifth or sixth grade that made me want to switch my instrument of choice:
I saw Primus play “My Name Is Mud” on some live MTV thing. I couldn’t believe the sounds he was getting slapping and thwacking his bizarre six-string fretless bass, and
My dad, a huge rock fan himself, brought home CD copies of some of his favorite record albums (he was slowly replacing his vinyl with compact disc). Two albums stuck out: Cream’s Live Cream Volume I and The Who’s Live at Leeds. This was the first time I’d heard Jack Bruce (Cream) and John Entwistle (The Who). “N.S.U.” by Cream definitely got my ears to perk up at Bruce’s fat sound and nimble, but one I heard Entwistle swooping all up and down the fretboard on “Heaven and Hell” with his clattering, distorted sound, I was dead. Game over. Whatever instrument those dudes were playing, I wanted to play.
That instrument was the bass guitar. For some reason, that sound spoke to me. It sounds so cool, so different, than the guitar, and it made me want to move. I could feel the bass, rattling my rib cage, in a way I didn’t with other instruments. From that point on, bass was for me.
You’re probably worried that the rest of this post is going to get into every gory detail of my personal experience as a musician. But you’d be wrong. This post is about why rock and roll matters to some people, and I think it’s why any form of music, or any form of art, matters to any group of people: it provides a place where you can be good at something and feel good about yourself.
Yes, people get into music for the girls and the money (ha ha what money?), but there’s actually more. Music gives someone an opportunity to express what they feel in a way that words cannot. A way to connect and communicate. The ability to have all eyes on you is also very intoxicating—these people come to a concert for a reason, and brother, you’re that reason. But beyond that, music lets you accomplish something and get praise for an actual, tangible, concrete skill.
Being a kid is torture. It’s hard growing up in the best of times. This is not due to war, famine, etc., but because that liminal phase between true childhood and true adulthood is difficult and awkward. You are finding out who you are. You are trying on identities. You are trying to suss out the phony, hypocritical world of grown-ups. You have an innate, uncompromising sense of right and wrong and you can’t believe other people can’t see the world as you do.
Nuance is not most adolescents’ strong point.
So performance, being good at something, is a way to validate yourself in a way you know is real: you’re either good at a musical instrument or you’re not, end of story. My dad took me, completely by surprise, to our local music store on my 14th birthday and let me pick out a reasonable starter bass and amp. The bass was a Höfner Beatle-bass knock-off with a scrolled headstock that had pickups that buzzed so uncontrollably we eventually traded it for a fire red Hondo P-Bass copy that was much more fit for purpose. Best birthday gift ever.
Putting the time and effort into getting good at something is powerful, and the lessons learned spill over into other areas of life. I will always be a proponent of music education because I have experienced first-hand how wonderful it is. Music is special and it should be treated as such.
For me, ultimately, rock was never about “rebellion” for me. It was about passion. Feeling. Aggression. Energy. Getting kicked in the face and loving every second of it. Inner ear trauma. Catharsis. Community. Being a part of the chain connecting musicians past to musicians future.
And it was about finding my place in the world. A place that lived on far longer than my career as a musician. That’s why some of us care. I know it’s “just music,” but it’s also more than just music.
- Alexander
Quite apart from commercial considerations, the thing that afflicts most (not all) rock made these days is the dreary use of cookiecutter mixing/mastering styles, including but not limited to autotune. There's still some marvellous music around, much of it Scandinavian (Motorpsycho, Spidergawd, Elder, Wobbler, Hallas etc), but postproduction techniques make most contemporary rock , which was always best when it at least *tried* to sound loose and spontaneous, artistically as well as commercially dubious. It just sounds sort of disposible.
I've always said that if you're a male and you don't like any form or subgenre of Rock music then there might be something wrong with you, but the fact of that matter is that there is something so distinctly male about it that I've never met any guy who hasn't at least made an exception for something or the other.
Since we're in a time where masculinity is bad word in big industry, it's just the exact sort of thing they don't want to promote. Even "geek rock" back in the day had testosterone (Weezer, Nada Surf, Nerf Herder, and Ash . . . kinda), and is too much for modern radio.
I don't see the genre disappearing overnight or anything, but given the climate we're in, it's going to be rough goings for it for a long time.