Rules Of The Game #31: Rockism And Antirockism Rise From The Dead

[koganbot]

Here's my latest, in which I reveal myself to be a rockist, unless that's not what I'm revealing. I also don't come to a conclusion about what rockism is. Stay tuned for the exciting sequel.

The Rules Of The Game #31: Rockism And Antirockism Rise From The Dead

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

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I am so not a Benjaminion. Frankly I'd like to get that essay and any invocation of it outlawed from any discussion of media theory. Along with a lot of other things. (Ben-ya-MEEN-ion sounds like something they'd say on Ren and Stimpy.)

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I refuse to pronounce it properly, that's how anti-Benjamin I am.

CONTEMPT

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I'd change the name of my blog to Le Mepris but I don't want to be associated with a buncha assholes. (At least not French ones.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

follow-up splurge on some of the above here: i am off the net for the next three days so yr on yr own!

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

I think there was a very, VERY strong generational aspect to the rockism wars. A good moderate position to come down on might go something like this: applying "rockist" principles to acts from the rockist era (60s/70s) is totally fair, and that's why those terms of discourse came to be so prominent. Similarly, applying rockist principles to modern (post-rockist?) groups that consciously derive from that tradition--or at least the PARTS of those acts that are trying to be rockist--is fair as well. And at the end of the day, using rockism as one way to find value in an act is fine; the problem is when it's viewed as the ONLY standard of assessment and whole swaths of the musical landscape get dismissed out of hand. It's a problem when instead of being used as a metric to explain individual dislikes, it is expressed as a standard under which you MUST dislike certain things. That's problematic rockism.

What's NOT OK is for critics and fans who grew up in the post-rockist era to still be holding these terms as sacrosanct. Either you experienced rockist groups in non-rockist ways (you saw a Zep poster in Spencer Gifts and thought it looked cool, so you stole the LP from your parents' record shelf) or you are trying to wedge post-rockist groups into the rockist tradition. It represents a shocking lack of growth and a concession to the values of the generation that preceded us, which you'd think rockists would have a problem with! Similarly, as I say above, it's not OK for people who grew up rockist to try to impose those terms on new groups that have nothing to do with rockism, because it's a way of keeping the young folks down. Rockism was (is?) frustrating because it severely restricts the conditions for quality assessment in an era when music changes every few years (as it always has). Viewed by pre-rockist standards, rock was crap. The fact that rockist standards developed was a good thing; it gave a way for people to appreciate the art on its own terms.

I'm aware that the above was not a position many people (myself included?) would have actually taken in 2004. But I do think the squabble was at least partially legitimate, and that it was so divisive that many people got turned off by the whole thing and retreated into their own little corners, whereas at the time it really seemed like something was building to encompass more than just sub-genres.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

Addendum to the second paragraph: Anti-rockism was the argument that rockism was so pervasive that we had to break free in order to find ways to appreciate these new forms of music on their own terms, too, to make popisms and danceisms and so forth and so on.

Addendum to the third paragraph: Of course, there was also an "anti-seriousness" argument there, which got reduced to "popism" I think. And that's been lost as well.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I think if I could get one thing through everyone's heads it would be that that classification is not assessment, except for like "sexual molestation" or something. Calling something rockist is just to say that it falls under a certain category. Whether it is problematic or helpful rockism is another argument entirely. Similarly, the popism reductio ad absurdum arguments of "you can't think anything's bad!" falls under the same fallacy--something can be popist and still be shit. It just can't be shit because it wasn't made by four white dudes with guitars and beards.