koganbot | Rules Of The Game #8: Which Social Class Sounds Better?

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Rules Of The Game #8: Which Social Class Sounds Better?

Rules Of The Game #8: Which Social Class Sounds Better?

At 2 a.m. Tuesday, with the column due in nine hours, I realized I simply couldn't create a coherent piece about social class, so I started this, went to sleep for a couple of hours, then finished. It reads OK but feels like a holding action. And honestly, I'm not sure where I'm heading now. For weeks 1 through 7 there was a clear line of thought; now I'm searching for a direction, though I know that Ashlee needs to become the subject sooner or later. And the question atop this piece is provocative, and there's more to explore.

My use of "class" is as problematic as ever, but the question here is can one class (or whatever) make better music than another class? And my answer is "sure," but this isn't inherent in the class; the goodness of the music happens in a particular time and place and has to be explained historically in reference to that particular time and place. From 1963 through about 1979 Anglo-American bohemia made some of the best music in the world; then it rather abruptly went down the crapper (at just about the time I was starting to perform onstage). This doesn't mean it wasn't subsequently meaningful and of value to the people who cared about it. And interestingly some of my favorite current music from both the mainstream and from country - ordinary mainstream girls like Ashlee Simpson and Kelly Clarkson, country oddballs like Deana Carter and Big & Rich [whose new album is a snore, unfortunately] - is saturated in old bohemian values. So...????

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

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sometimes "holding action" pieces get to the heart of a simpler, broader question -- which you've been thinking about so long you can't even see clearly any more

i really like this piece, not because i agree with your judgments in it -- it lays you open much more than usual as being from a different time and space than me -- but exactly because you're laying back a bit and stating the tastes that formed you, without making that being a pretext for immediate plunging back into the thicket of the questions it raises (the latter is what you do, but in doing so you don't always allow space for others to think or breathe, even tho that's yr intention)

I think the difference between Stones and Monkees fans was less to do with class and more to do with age and rebellion. I imagine Monkees fans to be younger and hence quite happy to play the records suitable for mum in the living room. In this same universe, Stones fans are more likely to argue with their mum then storm out in a huff over to Unsuitable Friend's house/the pub to try and get served/behind the bikesheds for a smoke. They've reached that level of adolesence where they don't need parental vetting of their music choices. This goes back to that disreputable chap Elvis & the advent of teenagers, I guess. The Stones have more explicitly adult references (sex/drugs/rocknroll) than the Monkees or the Beatles (who still had references but much subtler!) - if you were desperately trying to feel 'more grown-up' then which would band would you choose to listen to? Even the music itself (louder guitars, harsher sounds) becomes more palatable as the listener matures and can 'handle' it (NB this ties in with

piratemoggy's post about small kids loving the harshness of Cascada!), even if they can't and it's just bragging. At 13, my metaller friends were always on a quest to seek out the 'heaviest' metal possible, to make themselves look hard/compete with the boys/piss off their mums/make an awful racket trying to emulate it on their Squire 'Stratokaster'.

Whether being middle class gives you more to rebel against (than poverty or lack of opportunities) is something I'm not really sure of (i.e. I don't feel confident enough in my knowledge of the class system to make pronouncements on the topic!). Do middle class kids have more at stake? My dad was most definitely middle class (and went to public school), and liked motorbikes, the Stones and the Who. My mum was working class (and a mod!) and liked the Beatles and the Who. Yes, they met at a Who gig, insert joke about still not being able to hear what the other is saying [here]. Neither were particularly rebellious AFAIK but I can see the vicarious appeal Townshend and Daltrey might have had for them.

This clearly means that at age 12 I, a Stones fan, was older than myself (a Monkees fan).

Confounded again by experience over logic! :)

Did listening to one or the other make you feel older/younger?

That makes perfect sense: in listening to the Stones you were taking an 'older' role than you were when listening to the Monkees. When I listen to Fall Out Boy I'm a great deal more teenage than I am when I listen to Arab Strap, even though I'd never heard any FOB until my twenties and was into Arab Strap most between fourteen and seventeen.

It might even work to say I was taking an older role when I listened to "Steppin' Stone" (the Monkees' most Stonesish song) than when I listened to "I'm A Believer," though I'm not able to go back into my psyche as a 12-year-old to test this. This is complicated by my being, even at age 12, sophisticated enough to associate strength with maturity but to think of attempts at toughness and coolness as potentially conformist and immature. And I'm certain that during the first week of January, 1967, the week "I'm A Believer"/"Steppin' Stone" hit number one, I had no idea that lots of people generally derided the Monkees as pop trash. (First clue was several months later reading a Life article about the new music in which some San Francisco-based musician or scribe said the Monkees were a commercial concoction that would leave no lasting impact on the music.) This is further complicated by the fact that though I knew who the Animals were, I'm not sure if I yet knew who the Stones were. Which is to say I knew there was a tremendous song called "Mother's Little Helper" which started with the snidely rebellious and subversive (to my ears) line "What a drag it is getting old" (so listening to the Stones can make you older but identify you with Youth rather than Adults), and I knew there was a really powerful and disturbing oldie called "Satisfaction" that a teen rock band had covered at a summer camp I'd attended, but I don't know if I'd yet discovered that they were by the same group, or the name of the group. Summer 1963, age 9, I got bored with pop radio and began listening to "folk" albums instead, and I didn't go back to radio until summer 1966, and man it was a different radio by then. Folk could seem older to my young ears, political content, dramatic content (my favorite song was the Brothers Four's version of "Spring Hill Mine Disaster"), comic content, though I think I registered this as "exciting" rather than "older." In retrospect I'd say that political content was a way into parent-sanctioned maturity, while the stuff I was hearing on the radio - I mean, the harder rock stuff, which to my mind included "Hanky Panky" and "96 Tears" - implied a way of seizing older behavior and older people's prerogatives (alcohol, cigarettes, drugs) without asking parental permission. And as I said in my post below in response to Kat, there's a class dimension to this, a split between those who take a school-sanctioned path towards growth and maturity and authority (these people are generally the preps and the jocks and the brains) and those who refuse the school's sanction and go after "real life" on their own (two different refusal groups here, the hoods/greasers on the one hand, and the freaks [or that's what they'll start calling themselves in a couple of years] on the other). Class dimension is that greaser and freak and prep do function somewhat as social classes, but also that the majority of greasers are from lower class families and the majority of preps and jocks are from middle class families, as are the majority of freaks.

The map I'm drawing here is pretty crude, mind you, especially since I'm drawing it in retrospect, and the cool kids in my junior high actually ended up all over the social map when they hit high school.

I remember Anne Leighton saying in a Pazz and Jop poll in the early '90s when giving her demographic info, "I'm 33 but I just turned 14 because of Warrant."

However, I'm sure I'm the same age when I listen to Ashlee Simpson and Aly & A.J. as when I listen to the Hold Steady and Alan Jackson. Recently I've been listening to Crime and Rocket From The Tombs a lot. Maybe that's me reverting to age nineteen, or age twelve.

I think at some point I'm going to argue that age differences sometimes are class differences.

Btw, both the Animals (working-class) and the Stones (middle-class) came off as hoods, which means that of all the Brit Invasion bands they got the most working-class male fans (or at least that was my impression, which could have been all wrong), and that means they also helped to make bohemia accessible to high-school hoods! (This could have class consequences, since a hood who goes bohemian can also transition from bohemia to the intelligentsia; or if not that, he could become a respected drug dealer.)

The age is mostly a 'control over your environment' issue. Aged 12 I had my own radio/cassette player but for CDs or vinyl I had to use my parents' players in the living room (which they barely used compared to me, I have to say). I wasn't allowed out on my own to go record shopping and usually had to ask my parents for money to buy anything more expensive than a cassingle. Just two years later I had a CD player, a guitar, more pocket money and freedom to go out and spend it on whatever I liked. Plus I had started to care about how my music was produced & the image of the popstars rather than my hitherto objective appreciation of a good tune. I was spending 90% of my pocket money on music and wanted to make sure it was going to a 'deserving' cause! Luckily I've grown out of all that and will splash my cash on any old toss that sounds a bit boshing...

this is good!

And "control over your environment" definitely has a class element (though it's not simple), in that in junior high school it was the cool kids and the hoods who were doing (or at least pretending to do) stuff - cigarettes, sex, and drugs - that symbolize "older," and that were older people's prerogatives, and were flouting or ignoring school authority; whereas non"bad" kids need other ways into authority and autonomy (which isn't to say that they all avoided sex and drugs and cigs, but that they didn't flaunt them), a school-sanctioned way that doesn't leave you being a teacher's pet. Extra-curricular activities were where preppy types could attain authority, whereas the hoods and the future freaks would leave the school behind during leisure hours.

I remember as high school went on fewer greasers or freaks would attend school dances (and I stopped as well).

computer nerds = exercise unusual authority over the selections playing on the computer with big speakers in the computer lab

"The sound of the Stones and The Animals—hard rock—gave signals about the apparent social commitments of the people who made the music, put them on the hard left socially no matter what they may have felt as individuals. If The Monkees had sounded like the Stones or The Animals no one would have given a thought to whether or not they wrote and played on their own songs."

I'm confused about the phrase "hard left." It's probably obvious, and I'm just not getting it, but do you mean "left" as in "left of the dial" (i.e., social outcasts)? You do say "socially," but I guess I'm saying I'm not really sure what social left is exactly. Or maybe it's just that I keep bumping up against this word choice as carrying a political context (in which case "hard left" definitely seems problematic... but I don't think this is what you're saying).

This is getting away from the "class" point entirely, but wasn't the TV context of the Monkees just as big a deal--if not a bigger deal--than the songwriting issue? Or wasn't it the two issues combined (plus other things I'm not considering) that cast a pall over the Monkees (among Stones fans, etc.) as being not real? Further to your point about the songwriting thing being a red herring, I find it hard to imagine that as early as '66 or '67 the songwriting issue was that entrenched as a big deal (it had only BEEN two or three years by that point that bands were writing their own songs, and some still weren't; also, I assume it was well known that most of the soul greats of the period didn't write their own songs). I guess I just think the TV thing *was* probably a big deal, and not a total red herring (and maybe it even has something to do with "class," or anyway, "access" or privilege, but now I'm just stabbing at words in the dark).

scott

The '60s social change and the political left were perceived to be mixed up together (whether or not the right-left axis is a good way to think about politics and society, this way of thinking was there), and freaks were assumed to be on the political left even when they were fundamentally nonactivist (Berkeley free speech movement morphed from concern with political rights and the right to solicit money for civil rights causes to a general rebellion against in loco parentis and in favor of wilder lifestyles, free speech meaning "fuck" as well as SNCC and CORE). The relationship between the radicals and the freaks was actually often tenuous, even if they looked the same to outsiders, and in 1966 "freaks" hadn't coalesced as a group yet and the Vietnam War wasn't quite the dividing line it was to become in a couple of years. But the rebel hoods and greasers who'd have been naturally attracted to the Stones' and Animals' toughness were ambivalent about the long hair, and hard rock definitely had connotations of taking you to some social extreme, even if this social extreme was only a vague feeling of extremity.

So "left" was where the Stones and Animals (and Yardbirds, if I'd have heard them) seemed to be going, which somewhat differentiated them from the hoods and greasers, not all of whom were going to be moved socially to follow the Stones. Of course this map with hard rock on the left didn't hold much beyond 1969, and heavy metal came along to allow kids to go hard without going left.

Two Questions:
1. How are you using class here? Is this some kind of bourgeois V. proletariat class distinction, with the Monkeys being the bourgeois (safe, conventional, status quo) and the Rolling Stones being the proletariat (I remember V for Vendetta playing Street Fighter during the closing credits). Or do you mean some kind of other musical class? In a sense, the question of 'Who Wrote It' which you want to say is indicative of greater class issues, has - either way - become emancipated from those issues. If you ask someone today if writing your own music is important, their answer may have more to do with some kind of new musical standard (that writing music IS important) than with an underlying class issue. For example, the Strokes are probably more bourgeois, but they write their own music. Contrast to, say, Avril Lavigne who is more proletariat, but does not.

2. You write: "the question here is can one class (or whatever) make better music than another class? And my answer is "sure," but this isn't inherent in the class." Does that make the class incidental? Or is it that the class is only an indicator, not a contributer. Or can class contribute even? Certainly the Rolling Stone's were great because they were grimy and dirty and rolled around in the mud and their music sounded like that. So the class contributed. Etc.

Sorry I didn't respond to these questions straight off, and I don't have time to right now, but briefly

(1) I'm deliberately using the word "class" loosely and problematically, which we discuss a bit here. Briefly, in some circumstances (e.g., a high school) you have to treat groups such as preps and burnouts and freaks as social classes, because it's these classes that structure the school social environment. But you also have to see relationships between these classes and stuff like "middle class" and "working class."

(2) Class not incidental or I wouldn't have mentioned it. What's going on in the culture will have a different impact on different classes, and classes will also evolve their shape and character over time, so a class that consistently creates good music at one time may do much more poorly at another. (Think of an analogy to genres.)

"I thought the Animals’ and Stones’ social commitments sounded better."

Isn't this what your friend Nathan would say about Nirvana vs. Back Street
Boys; or all alt-rock vs. teenpop? There is to the former a grit, mystery,
rawness, fucked-upness, where the latter is all polished, vacuum sealed
emotions. The latter comes from the mall, the former a Saturday market.
The latter an afternoon speical, the former a late, late show. Nirvana's more unbridled, dark social commitments sound better to him, right?

This sound of social commitments stuff seems very contextual. I always remember being struck the first time I saw some macho latino guy in a wife-beater tank listening to some flaming horns and congas salsa, a sound I liked but knew where I came from was not what guys were supposed to like. Saw a Malcolm in the Middle rerun recently where liking Abba was a gay thing. To this day, Jess, who I don't want to make out as some music bigot (these associations are common), ribs me for the gayness of my affection for dance music. So are the social commitments of disco that I think sound so good?

Again, I like when you ask how society would benefit from ridding the world
of Paris and pretty-teeny dance pop? Classic, Frank. For me the problem w/ people
dismissing teenpop and dance music out of hand is that they allow their principles (however inchoate) to get in the way of musical pleasure, where such distinctions are unnecessary at best and at worst a little like this interminable aethetic hangover of 'social realism' and 'folk music' from the Stalin era.

Viva la revolution but not one w/out room for beauty and dancing and beauty and humor, of course! So, why? And this maybe gets to your "corruptible" idea. It's like their instincts are right-- i.e., there isn't enough beauty and dancing and humor in the world-- but somehow they turn this into actions and choices that seem to say, 'we want a world w/ less beauty and dancing and humor.' Maybe they think there are things more important than beauty, like injustice et al, but, again, back to your original question— how would society benefit from less beauty and dancing and humor, or how would that reduce injustice?

At the same time, psychologizing the question away-- they don't think they are worthy of beauty and dancing b/c the pretty girls/boys shunned them once or b/c their own dancing always felt to them more funny than sexy-- makes some sense but is still dissatisfying to me.

I don't remember it off-hand, but I'd probably have liked that delicate
Monkee's ballad. I liked Pitney's "A Town Called Pity" or Lou Christie's
"Lightening Strikes," from them days. I like Scritti Politti's "Boom Boom Bap" or "Road To No Regret." I like guys singing bathetic ballads in high-pitched voices. I think this affection for this kind of sound, and dancing sounds as well, were formed b/f I could make associations ab the social commitments of musical sounds.

Welcom back! Just wrote a long response and lost it when pressing the wrong button while trying to put the umlauts in Hüsker Dü. But anyway, I love both "Teen Spirit" and "Backstreet's Back," don't buy into either of their social commitments, I don't think, but buy into something: the screaming denial at the end of "Teen Spirit" which for the final 45 seconds is a raving lava flow of intensity. But "Backstreet's Back" is more rock 'n' roll, is basically Bell Biv Devoe and Boyz II Men revved-up through glammy Europop, has a big whomping sound but also those harmonies that go back through doo-wop to the black gospel quartets. Doesn't sound so antiseptic to me, actually, the beats and Nick's aching voice (seems as if he'd listened to Stevie B and the Cover Girls back in the '80s). But I can understand Nathan's reaction, for sure, he being a teenager at the time of "Teen Spirit." Whereas I was nearing 40 and had been in no wave and postpunk bands and had heard scads and scads of Hüsker Dü and Flipper and Black Flag not to mention Guns 'N' Fuckin' Roses hurrah! and was good and alienated from alienation. "Teen Spirit" has its force (in fact, in my heart I give it a tiny edge over "Backstreet's Back," though not necessarily over Corina's "Temptation" or Lisette Melendez's "A Day In My Life (Without You)," which came out the same year as "Teen Spirit"). And it isn't as if there's no dance in "Teen Spirit," but it's not as strong a dance as it could be. Seems to me that if you don't like the conditions of dancing and dating the solution isn't to turn off the dance but to find your way to a better dance. Which at least the Stones and Who et al. tried to do.

AK: Yay! Corina! "Temptation"!

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Rules Of The Game #8: Which Social Class Sounds Better?

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Digressing a little...

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2 Questions

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mistaking principles for music?

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