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

Re: But what about what *I* wrote

[koganbot]

Yeah, but Sanneh's use of the word hardly matches a lot of other people's uses of the word; and certainly you can call something fashion (the passage was written in 1985, by the way) without being blindly prejudiced (or being derogatory, either, for that matter).

Re: But what about what *I* wrote

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

You *can*. But you weren't. "this primitiveness is a cliché, it’s a new brand of deodorant, punk-hardcore deodorant; ultimately, it’s nothing. Punk isn’t punk anymore, it’s a bunch of musical/clothing signs that symbolize punk." You're inherently linking (if not in argument, then in proximity) the idea that punk is fashion and that it isn't "punk anymore." And since I happen to believe that fashion punk (or mascara punk, or emo, or hardcore, or hot topic punk) is "punk," I obviously have to call that sentence a Rockist assumption. Since you're saying that 'grit' has become cliche, it first appears that you're subverting the Rockist beliefs (since a Rockist belief is that any grit is good) but you're still championing grit. You're just saying that you only champion real grit, and that this is bogus cliche fashion grit.

Re: But what about what *I* wrote

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

To wit: Glitter Grit!

Re: But what about what *I* wrote

[koganbot]

Well, if you read the full piece (pp 3-4 in my book), what I was angling at was the idea that real punk criticizes, savages, undercuts itself and its audience, whereas the new stuff (new in the early '80s) doesn't. But anyway, putting aside whether I was right, there's no reason that such an argument couldn't be right.

Also, your mention of mascara and emo and hot topic is irrelevant here, since I wasn't associating the idea of cliché with any of those: you associated what I was saying with "fashion": there's nothing I wrote that says that real punk, whatever that is, can't also be a fashion; what I'm saying is that current punk (c. 1985) substituted the symbols for the real thing. But I'm saying nothing about whether the real thing in its time had been more or less fashionable than hardcore was now (and in fact, given that I was basically counting Stones and Dylan as ur-punk, one could say that hardcore was less fashionable than punk once had been). Anyway, you projected "fashion" onto the idea of "musical/clothing signs" - an understandable projection, but certainly older punk had also used musical/clothing signs, and anyway it had been a musical fashion - and then you projected mascara etc. onto the idea of fashion (did mascara symbolize punk in 1985? maybe to Motley Crue and Hanoi Rocks, but not to the hardcore punks I was taking aim at, and I don't think I'd even heard Crue or Hanoi Rocks). But anyway, to repeat what I wrote, which I haven't repudiated:

So now [1985] so many musicians conform to the idea of truth that says that truth is raw, ugly, and primitive that this primitiveness is a cliché, it's a new brand of deodorant, punk-hardcore deodorant; ultimately, it's nothing. Punk isn't punk anymore, it's a bunch of musical/clothing signs that symbolize punk. It's closer to literature or advertising than to music.

And the nub of the issue is: you're saying that I'm rockist if I'm wrong but that I'm not rockist if I'm right. Whereas I think I'm coming pretty close to rockism either way. So I'm challenging the idea that this particular form of the "rockist" argument - something was vital but got reduced to a cliché, and the symbol now stands in for the event - is necessarily wrong.

And then the next point would be, can't someone present such an argument not because he's a rockist but because the argument is right in that particular circumstance?

Re: But what about what *I* wrote

[koganbot]

So, to dot my i's and cross my t's, I wasn't saying that grit had been replaced by mascara, I was saying that grit had become a cliché - and I guess I was implying that punk would have to abandon grit, since grit was no longer available to it, though I don't know if I'd come to that idea yet. Several years later I was claiming that Axl Rose and Michael Jackson were the only two punks left. (To be honest, I don't actually remember having said that, or where, but both Scott Woods and Xhuxk affirm that I did, and I'm sure they're right, so I put in my book that I'd said it.)