Monday, May 09, 2005
More EMP: It's All About the Memes
61. May 4-10. Douglas Wolk, "Thinking About Rockism", Seattle Weekly. One of the topics that's lingered from the EMP conference for him.
"Is rockism a bad thing? Well, yeah, it is, and nobody's free of it; I'm sure not. But it's pernicious because it makes it harder to understand any other kind of music on its own terms, and it chains both artists and their audience to an ideal rooted in a particular moment of the past, in which a gifted lyricist is by default a "new Dylan" (not a new Charley Patton, not a new Bill Withers, and especially not herself), in which the songwriter and the singer and the main instrumentalist are all on the stage and preferably the same person, in which any instrumentation for performance other than guitar-bass-drums-vocals-and-maybe-keyboards is some kind of novelty, because that is what's normal. Writers don't think this way because "19th Nervous Breakdown" is our favorite song; we do it unconsciously because it's the language we all internalized as pop-magazine-obsessed kids. And it trickles down to everyone who reads what we write.
So how do we get around rockism, if it's already ingrained in the way people talk about music? Mostly just by being aware of it and careful about it. But one shortcut is for music critics to stage raids on other kinds of culture criticism: great writing about movies, about literature, about food. They've all got their own biases and received ideas, defined by their own past masters—but they're not ours, and adopting perspectives, black feminist or otherwise, that don't take the rock canon as their baseline for normalcy can relieve the choking staleness of the way we talk about whatever music we love. They might even offer something new to say about that canon." ¶ 5/09/2005 04:17:00 PM
61. May 4-10. Douglas Wolk, "Thinking About Rockism", Seattle Weekly. One of the topics that's lingered from the EMP conference for him.
"Is rockism a bad thing? Well, yeah, it is, and nobody's free of it; I'm sure not. But it's pernicious because it makes it harder to understand any other kind of music on its own terms, and it chains both artists and their audience to an ideal rooted in a particular moment of the past, in which a gifted lyricist is by default a "new Dylan" (not a new Charley Patton, not a new Bill Withers, and especially not herself), in which the songwriter and the singer and the main instrumentalist are all on the stage and preferably the same person, in which any instrumentation for performance other than guitar-bass-drums-vocals-and-maybe-keyboards is some kind of novelty, because that is what's normal. Writers don't think this way because "19th Nervous Breakdown" is our favorite song; we do it unconsciously because it's the language we all internalized as pop-magazine-obsessed kids. And it trickles down to everyone who reads what we write.
So how do we get around rockism, if it's already ingrained in the way people talk about music? Mostly just by being aware of it and careful about it. But one shortcut is for music critics to stage raids on other kinds of culture criticism: great writing about movies, about literature, about food. They've all got their own biases and received ideas, defined by their own past masters—but they're not ours, and adopting perspectives, black feminist or otherwise, that don't take the rock canon as their baseline for normalcy can relieve the choking staleness of the way we talk about whatever music we love. They might even offer something new to say about that canon." ¶ 5/09/2005 04:17:00 PM
