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The war against rockism

Warning: this blog consists of a staggeringly self-indulgent rant with no particular topical relevance.

It’s about rockism. In the top 100 ‘most horrible ideologies ever’ chart, rockism probably wouldn’t be in the top ten, alongside fascism. I don’t think I’d be prepared to go to prison in protest against it (not that this would happen anyway). But it really does make me cross sometimes, to the point where I occasionally feel like turning this blog into a Which magazine style ‘rockism monitor’ for consumers. I’m sure some people would find it useful.

What is rockism? There’s little consensus on the definition, I’ve found, but I’ll give it a go for the sake of argument. Loosely, a rockist believes some forms of popular music are more authentic, and therefore more worthy of serious attention, than others; that, as Wikipedia puts it, “certain genres of music sacrifice artistic depth for mass appeal, self-expression for manufactured process”. Rockism is a legacy of 1960s and 1970s music journalism, a time when pop writers were still struggling to overturn a consensus that popular music – derided by many “serious” critics – shouldn’t be taken as seriously as other, more specialist forms (classical and jazz, principally).

The result was a new distinction, between pop music (frothy, insubstantial) and rock music (serious, important). It served a purpose at the time, making the case that the likes of Dylan, Brian Wilson and the Beatles were musical pioneers on a level above most pop music. The problem was that it ended up doing exactly what “serious” music critics had done previously, airily dismissing not just individuals but whole forms of music – disco, most infamously – as worthless. All it did was move the critical goalposts, and create a new, equally flawed hierarchy. Punk punctured this to an extent, killing off a lot of overblown, self-important 1970s rock, but ultimately it just moved the goalposts again. For a long time, music made using synthesisers or drum machines was widely viewed as less “authentic” than music by “real” rock musicians (who made music with guitars). It seems crazy now, but for a while hip-hop – long after punk – was dismissed as not being “proper” music. By POP critics! (This, it has to be said, had as much to do with racism as rockism, but that’s another story.)

Anyway, the distinction between rock and pop is – and this bears repeating as often as possible – total nonsense. How can pop and rock be two different things? Rock is a genre of music (music made, most people will tell you, using electric guitars and, preferably, a proper drumkit), but pop is not; it is simply music that is popular. If Pavarotti has a number one single, then Pavarotti is pop music. If the Aphex Twin are at number one, then the Aphex Twin is pop music. If rock music is popular, it is by definition pop music.

And yet, even now, rock and pop are discussed as if they are higher and lower forms of the same music. U2 are still thought of as being “rock”, for example, while the Pet Shop Boys are “pop”. I suspect Neil Tennant would have rolled his eyes at the way reviews of the Pet Shop Boys’ last album, Fundamental, favourably compared its intelligent “pop” music to the cliched “rock“ music of some of their peers - faint praise if ever I heard it. Even while attacking rockism, its critics can’t help propping it up.

The Pet Shop Boys were gleefully attacking this foolishness decades ago – in 1991, in particular, when they released a cover of U2’s Where The Streets Have No Name as a medley with Andy Williams’s easy listening hit Can’t Take My Eyes Off You (and “easy listening”, it should be said, is another loaded term - in what sense are the Beatles, for example, “difficult listening”?). The Pet Shop Boys’ point was that Where The Streets Have No Name is a pop song in exactly the same way as an easy listening tune (or, to repeat another example they used at the time, a Stock, Aitken and Waterman tune). It has a simple idea (there’s this place where the streets have no name, let’s go there, it’ll be great - roughly the same storyline as YMCA, in other words) and a big, euphoric chorus.

To be fair, there has been a substantial shift away from rockism in recent years. When British guitar music hit a commercial peak in the mid 1990s, the movement was conspicuously not dubbed “Britrock” but “Britpop”, and Oasis, Britpop’s biggest band, made a point of singing the praises of Burt Bacharach, an easy listening star. Around the same time Abba - so unfashionable in the 1970s - finally started to be taken seriously by critics. Serious music journalists wrote endlessly about Kylie (Paul Morley wrote a whole book, most of it impenetrable). Eventually U2, seeing which way the wind was blowing, attempted to reinvent themselves with an album called Pop. Alongside all this, black pop music is now, quite rightly, frequently praised by white rock critics for its innovation (and rightly so; hip-hop and R&B is, on the whole, far more innovative than white rock music, which has been stuck in a creative rut since the early 1990s). The Nationwide Mercury Prize, silly as it is in its own way (I wrote a piece about this recently for the Scotsman newspaper) puts albums considered to be pop alongside albums considered to be rock on the same serious music prize shortlist without anyone raising an eyebrow.

This revisionism came to be known – quite early on I believe, although I’m sure there’s someone better informed than me out there who can pin down a date – as poptimism. The poptimist believes that (back to Wikipedia): “Beyoncé is as worthy of serious consideration as Bruce Springsteen, and ascribing shame to pop pleasure is itself a shameful act.” (There’s an irony in this, which is that one of the most obvious recent poptimist movements is Guilty Pleasures, with its club nights and compilations and various imitators. And yet, if you’re a true poptimist, you should surely believe there is no such thing as a “guilty pleasure”)

And yet only last year Q magazine, a cautiously poptimist publication in the main, was noting the commercial decline of what it called “pop music”, which was a slightly bizarre notion. How can there be such a thing as unpopular pop music? It turned out the magazine was referring to the decline of “manufactured” pop – boy and girl bands chosen by audition, Take That or the Spice Girls being the most successful examples in recent years – and the rise of exciting new (white, unsurprisingly) and “authentic” guitar bands (Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, The Killers, The Fratellis, lots of other “The” bands). This, the article implied, was good news, but is it? Only if you believe that records by people who write their own songs are intrinsically of more worth than records by people who don’t. (And if you do, of course, you have to dismiss Motown, along with great vocalists from Frank Sinatra to Dusty Springfield, in the same breath, so you’d be a fool to do it).

I’m playing devil’s advocate a little bit here. Yes, of course a lot of ‘manufactured’ pop is made cynically, for money rather than artistic expression, and lacks heart as a result. But the percentage of this is no higher than it is in rock music, where the likes of Snow Patrol now blatantly write music for stadiums and American daytime radio as much as themselves. The point is, generalising about this kind of thing is pointless. And yet critics can’t help themselves, often tying themselves in self-conscious knots over whether it’s ok to like, say, Girls Aloud or not. Girls Aloud are a “manufactured” band, created - quite openly - for maximum profit, so surely, some feel the need to argue, devoid of artistic merit. Then again, their music is clearly not created cynically; it is written and produced by people who love pop music and understand its history, which is why the songs knowingly reference everything from 1960s Motown to 1970s disco and 1980s synth-pop, skilfully taking the best bits from each. Even the lyrics - usually way down pop music’s priority list - are full of sly wit and attitude. While similar groups are content to regurgitate 30-year-old clichés, Girls Aloud’s last album invented a whole new word, “grundulating”. This, for some reason, leaves an alarming number of critics in a cold sweat. I’ve heard Girls Aloud described as the TV talent show winners it’s “OK to like” - which just promps the obvious comeback: “Why is it not OK to like winners of TV talent shows?” For an alternative, more enlightened view, read the ever wise Alexis Petridis in the Guardian, who is not distracted by such silliness (except when he’s writing about the Pet Shop Boys, ironically).

When I rule the pop world, I might just ban the word rock. It just isn’t useful anymore, and it legitimises too much bland nonsense. (Coldplay, for example, the Westlife of the rock world, who have absolutely nothing to say but are taken far more seriously than they should be simply because they sound the way they do, write songs with titles like Politik - a song which was, in an amusingly ironic twist, completely apolitical - and talk earnestly about Fair Trade. They do write really good pop tunes, of course, but that rarely seems to be the point.) Until then, ask yourself what is being said whenever anyone is described as either rock or pop. They’re very loaded words.

I can predict, pretty confidently, that Swimmer One will never be described as a rock band, even though we use electric guitars. Suits me fine. That said, strictly we’re not a pop band either, despite describing ourselves as that on this site and elsewhere. Since not many people have heard of us, we can hardly be described as ‘popular’, therefore we can’t really claim to be pop. What can I say? We had to call ourselves something. ‘Electronica’ makes us sound like a reclusive, geeky duo who make bleepy instrumentals. ‘Indie’ is virtually meaningless these days. Calling yourself that suggests you’re either making lame excuses for not selling any records or that you want to be part of some supercool, subversive, anti-establishment club (regardless of whether you’re doing anything radical or subversive or not - and most ‘indie’ bands are not, even slightly). So we’ll just have to do our best to live up to the ‘pop’ label. Or get a drummer.

Andrew

Permalink • Save in De.li.cious

Poptimism.Don’t you just love wordplay?(Not Coldplay-yuk!)
Another one I love is “Popera"-title of an awesome collection by Associates.
I will try to think of a descriptive word for Swimmer One to replace “pop”.Alas my vocabulary is not as extensive as yours Andrew,so it may take some time!

Posted by Logan 5 on 11/18 at 10:19 PM
In the late 1960s, rock music was blended with folk music to create folk rock, blues to create blues-rock and with jazz, to create jazz-rock fusion, and without a time signature to create psychedelic rock.

Posted by zone rezidentiale Bucuresti on 03/22 at 09:47 AM

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