November, 2004
"ROCKISM"
A sickness discovered.
No sooner had a friend said something deriding "those people who criticize things for a living" than someone, either through carelessness, forgetting that I don't want to see such things, or malice -- knowing full well subject matter of this type would be disturbing to me -- left an article lying around the Rat Blood Soup offices here, a thing titled "The Rap Against Rockism" by Kelefa Sanneh, from the October 31, 2004 edition of The New York Times. That it was published in the Times is important to remember as we wade through this piece of writing -- it is not a clip from a fanzine, a rant from someone's blog, or a column from a weekly paper in some place like Branson, Missouri. It is in fact a very good example of what exists today as music "criticism," or "pop culture criticism."
The article is about Ashlee Simpson who was about to sing or lip-synch a song in front of a band on Saturday Night Live recently when the prerecorded vocals for her presentation went obviously haywire and she fled the stage, most likely humiliated. After this incident, anyone casting aspersions on Ms. Simpson's talent and career was not just rude or mean or a jerk, he was, according to Mr. Sanneh, an ignoramus speaking from a retarded belief/orientation defined as "rockism." Not that Sanneh claims to have coined this term himself:
"Music critics have a word for this kind of verdict...the word is rockism"
We must like it when professionals, giving a peak into the ivory tower, clue us in to the jargon of their various disciplines. The music critics; rockism; it all makes one tingly.
Sanneh sets up his false dichotomy; it is the "authentic old legend (or underground hero)" versus the "latest pop star"; "punk" against "disco"; the "live show" against the "music video"; the "growling performer" against the "lip-syncher"; with the rockist of course loving the former and loathing the latter in each case. Things are further underlined:
"It's supposed to be self-evident: U2's entire oeuvre deserves respectful consideration, while a spookily seductive song by an R&B singer named Tweet can only be...[very bad]"
One might counter that many serious "rock" people would happily flush "U2's entire oeuvre" down the toilet. Or one might ask some questions: Who is Ashlee Simpson, and why does anyone over age 15 think at all about her music? Who in this time could be ignorant of and surprised by the practice of lip-synching by cheesy music performers? Even -- who watches Saturday Night Live anymore? But put away these too-obvious thoughts and let's look closer at this straw man Sanneh is erecting for us.
There seems to be an ignorance of his own peers, of those in Sanneh's milieu; "Countless critics assail pop stars for not being rock 'n' roll enough..." he states. It's understandable Sanneh wouldn't want to acknowledge that nearly all pop music "critics" suck the donkey's ass pretty hard.
He singles out a writer, Jim DeRogatis, who "grudgingly praised [Avril] Lavigne as 'a teen-pop phenom that discerning adult rock fans can actually admire without feeling (too) guilty'". A rockist revealed! Sanneh may not be aware that if being able to discern art from dog shit were a requirement to get hired as a pop music critic, there would be maybe three such people in this position in the whole United States. But there is no need to be mean. Who could be so hateful as to wish to send all those rock writers at all those weeklies and otherwise around the country back to dreaded service jobs? Let us move on, since the article does get better; in fact the highlight may be in the next paragraph...
"Rockism isn't unrelated to older, more familiar prejudices -- that's part of why it's so powerful, and so worth arguing about."
The reader here may sense we are going someplace unpleasant.
"Could it really be a coincidence that rockist complaints often pit straight white men against the rest of the world?"
Our rockist, a white and a man, is also non-homosexual.
The "literary zine The Believer" is knocked for only covering indie-rock in its music issue, and Sarah Vowell is presented as suspect for a comment she made about Nirvana and Mariah Carey in a New York Times book review. Again we can't help having questions -- what by any stretch does The Believer, or Sarah Vowell, have to do with rock music? Why don't we just contact Field & Stream or Oprah Winfrey and Jim J. Bullock to get their insights on the current state of popular music? And who reads The Believer? And wouldn't The Believer at least be likely to have a higher percentage of homosexual readership than most magazines? But we push this all aside and read on. At least until we run into another line stopping us: "Much of the most energetic resistance to rockism can be found online, in blogs and in critic-infested sites..." I see -- the Internet, place of endless productive intellectual activity. That is some explanation, but we hardly stumble a few sentences farther before being confronted with a statement revealing Sanneh as an ignorant of the worst type churned out by university "cultural studies" departments...
"You can argue that the shape-shifting feminist hip-pop of Ms. [Christina] Aguilera is every bit as radical as the punk rock of the 1970s (and it is),..."
We must have read enough by now. There is less than a third left to finish however; having come this far, might as well keep going...
"The challenge is to acknowledge that music videos and reality shows and glamorous layouts can be as interesting -- and as influential -- as an old fashioned album."
The reason Sanneh can find these things equally as interesting and influential is because he sees them as products first (and judging from the article probably last). Here we find him in agreement with with the very shitty, and quite successful, music and pop culture "writer" Chuck Klosterman. Always ready with apologies for anything, no matter how insipid, spewing forth from the culture industry. Moving on...
"Are you really pondering the phony distinction between 'great art' and a 'guilty pleasure' when you're humming along to the radio?"
I'm thinking now Klosterman might have written this under a pseudonym. A little searching on the net reveals that Sanneh did an article in Rolling Stone on Eminem. If that piece doesn't blow him up and down, then I don't know what I am talking about.
We must keep reading; the end is not far...
Rockism makes it hard to hear the glorious, incoherent, corporate-financed, audience-tested mess that passes for popular music these days. To glorify only performers who write their own songs and play their own guitars is to ignore the marketplace that helps create the music we hear in the first place...
Now I am positive that he and Klosterman were walking slowly through the park holding hands. Klosterman was twisting a fallen leaf he held between the thumb and forefinger of his free hand; he looked over to Sanneh and spoke the words above and Sanneh, very impressed, said "Wow, yeah..."
Are we done here yet? I don't think we need to read much more; a little farther maybe...
To obsess over old-fashioned stand-alone geniuses is to forget that lots of the most memorable music is created despite multimillion-dollar deals and spur-of-the-moment collaborations and murky commercial forces. In fact, a lot of great music is created because of those things.
That is quite enough for now. This Sanneh is very much an average person. And as a critic, unfortunately, quite typical.
I thought it important to read more of him -- maybe this article had been a poor example of what he does. Immediately I stumbled across a piece titled "Critic's Notebook; Dancehall's Vicious Side: Antigay Attitudes" also from the NY Times, September 6, 2004. This one was in part a review of a concert given at the Hammerstein Ballroom by someone called "Beenie Man" whose style is called "dancehall reggae" -- something that sounds even worse than regular reggae, but a music form that is apparently popular with enough people to draw a crowd, and that has been generating controversy over anti-gay lyrics apparently common in it.
Someone as sensitive as Sanneh must have felt the tickle of multiple sensors going off within him on being exposed to such a thing; what, with some lyrics even mentioning killing gays. And Sanneh does bring such lyrics up. He talks about the"infectious chorus" in a Beenie Man tune that goes, "We burn chi-chi man and then we burn sodomite and everybody bawl out, say, 'Dat right!'"
And he praises a song by someone named Budju Banton called "Boom bye bye," a tune about shooting gays in the head: "a blood-curdling [sic] (and -- if we're being honest -- brilliant) song with a low, lurching beat..."
Finally We arrive at what we've been waiting for as the critic gives us an explanation for this subject matter...
Even as they portray themselves as swaggering "bad men," reggae stars also present themselves as forces for good: folk heroes, social activists, prophets. ....to be really successful, you have to do both at once, this is one reason vocalists find antigay rhetoric so useful. It gives them a way to gesture to religious and cultural injunctions against homosexuality (in interviews, the stars often quote Scripture) while also reminding listeners of their "bad man"bona fides. With antigay lyrics, vocalists manage to seem simultaneously righteous and wicked.
That clears things up for us. But unfortunately there are problems when trying to take this music to a larger audience...
"Reggae stars, who have figured out that there's more money to be made abroad than at home, are now vulnerable to pressure from nervous companies round the world."
Anywhere there starts to be fun, The Man steps right in to ruin it. And that angers people. As Sanneh says...
"Not surprisingly, this state of affairs has bred no small amount of resentment among stars and listeners alike, who see something neocolonial in the way Britons are criticizing Jamaican music."
A British gay-rights group, Outrage, has pressured stars to stop the anti-gay lyric thing, but, as Sanneh tells us...
"The problem is that violent rhetoric is precisely the way many dancehall acts voice their disapproval of all sorts of things: homosexuality, the competition, cunnilingus...., women who borrow one another's clothes."
Soon we find even more much-needed explanation:
"Performers often unleash a barrage of antigay invective when they're in danger of losing the audience, so on this night, everyone had to rely more heavily on another standby: sex talk."
That night the concert apparently went well, the groups present aware of the attention and pressure they had, unfairly, attracted as...
"antigay lyrics were conspicuously absent...(although Jabba and Bobby Konders, the hosts of Hot 97's weekly reggae show, did sate the crowd's appetite with a short set of antigay records)"
A satisfied customer, Sanneh really enjoyed seeing his Beenie Man:
"...by the time he ended his set...it was getting easier to see how so many fans and critics could pin their hopes and grudges upon a brilliant performer with a funny name and a voice heard around the world."
And with that warm feeling we are done.
It must be something special to have that talent, to be able to listen to records and watch concerts and then translate these sensations and one's accompanying penetrating thoughts onto the page. Most of us will only ever be able to dream about possessing such wizardry -- the inscrutable, baffling mental prowess of the music/pop culture critic.
All contents copyright © 2004 Rat Blood Soup
