My thesis

Rock is mostly useless

Watching Rage and Video Hits Uncut, I’m struck by how bored everyone looks. In video after video, bands look like they can scarcely be bothered. It is, of course, a trope of rock that you should look bored with the whole thing but it has become more and more the thing conveyed. Band after band turns up, recycles some other band that did it better, and shuffles off. They are moody and young (they only seem to be getting younger every day, you silly sod, because you are getting older) but they don’t seem to have anything to be moody about.

Maroon 5 play one of their hits. It’s a dullard, by-the-numbers jaunty rocker. There’s no point complaining about how irredeemably tedious Maroon 5 are, because they are meant to be tedious. Their appeal, their pitch if you like, is to people who don’t want to be excited. This sort of thing – along with abysmal rubbish such as Little Birdy (tuneless lesbian philosophising) and Missy Higgins (if these girls aren’t lesbians they want to buck their fucking ideas up, because the reason they are having guy trouble is that no self-respecting guy would put up with their shit for more than an afternoon, less if they didn’t put out).

No, I’m not talking about dreary pub-rock. That has always been around and probably always will be, so long as the kind of dull fuck who could not pen a decent poem is bought a piano by mummy and daddy and realises that creativity is not needed so long as you have a grasp of the chromatic scale and a rhyming dictionary. (Talking of dull fucks, Nick Cave warbles some fucking nonsense to his usual dreary, tuneless backing – Nick, Nick, please, a melody! When you were doing artschlock, it was okay not to bother, but if you’re doing goth-crooner, they’re obligatory, man. The question has to be answered, how come in all those years of heroin abuse Nick Cave just never quite managed an overdose. Jeez, man, half the New York Dolls went the rock’n’roll way but you’re just determined to plod through to Alzheimer’s, aren’t you? How very unrock!)

No, I mean guys with guitars (and sometimes a chick on the bass). I take it as axiomatic that all-girl groups are rubbish. It’s extremely patronising to suggest otherwise. Women just don’t have the hormone problems men do. (No, I do not make an exception for Patti Smith. She’s the uber-Missy, a whiny singer-songwriter who cottoned on to the New York art-punk movement and rocked it up a tad, fooling Americans into thinking she was a punker.) But Dr Zen, I hear you whimpering, the only reason girl groups are rubbish is that the capitalist hegemonic rock music industry doesn’t give the talented ones a break. Sorry no. Nice theory but the careful reader will have noted that Dr Zen has specifically excluded talent as a prerequisite for being any good. Missy Higgins is “talented”. The Welsh guy out of U2 is “talented”. Maroon 5 are “talented”. Rock is a guy thing. I remember seeing some thing on television, Faking it, I think it was. A nice young woman was trying to “fake it” as a rock chick. Her route to becoming a rock chick seemed to be to adopt all the bad things about being a 20-year-old guy; indeed, it seemed that to pass as a rock chick, she would have been best advised actually to become a postadolescent guy. I felt it explained why women in rock stick out like sore thumbs. It’s an expression of maleness. It fits women as well as binge drinking. (As an aside and a halfhearted attempt to rescue myself from the charge of sexism that I know that SJ will be readying, if she hasn’t already fired off an angry comment, consider this: equality does not involve imitation. Being equal means having the same opportunity to drink yourself senseless. But the truth is, young men drink themselves senseless because they are stupid cunts. It’s not something admirable. So it’s not so much that I feel that it’s any worse a thing that women drink themselves equally as senseless but that I feel that if equality has led to matching men for cuntery, you probably shouldn’t have been given it. Anyway, I’m a heterosexual man, more or less. Part of what women mean to me is sex. Part of what they are is attraction or repulsion. This makes them something different for me and that part of them something that I weigh up without necessarily thinking about it too deeply – I am to say the least puzzled by feminists who have come to believe that equality should mean an end to sexual objectification. Do they just not realise that we are unavoidably sexual? They mistake the reasonable suggestion that we should not favour the attractive over the nonattractive in other spheres than sex for the entirely unreasonable one that we should not find anyone attractive. Sorry, where was I? Oh yes. I don’t find extremely drunk men very appealing. I avoid them. So guess what?)

When I heard the first few bars of Bone machine, I knew that rock had not died entirely. (Okay, I’m not quite cool enough to have heard Come on pilgrim first but, actually, cool is very overrated. I’m glad I don’t have to indulge in it. Imagine! A life of having to “Keep up”. And keep up with such bellends too! Cool people are even more dreary than Missy Higgins. This is because they don’t concern themselves with what they enjoy, what enriches their lives, what expands them but with what someone else has decided they should like. If you feel yourself becoming cool, squash that urge, dig out More than a feeling and have the guilty pleasure of bellowing along with it, knowing that enjoying doing that means you are irreparably uncool.) Because, let’s not fool ourselves, the Pixies were rock. It’s important to distinguish rock from postpunk of one kind or another.

Rock is mostly useless because punk swept it away

Punk changed the rules. Popular music was snatched from the hands of illiterates such as Phil Collins, chewed up and spat out.

Of course, the Sex Pistols were a rocknroll band. They were the bastard sons of Jerry Lee Lewis. Jerry Lee sang about what was real to him – the huge burning sun in his crotch – which most young men in music had ignored before he came along. (Elvis, you might note, did not make rocknroll music of that kind. He sang the usual moon-June nonsense. He had a rocknroll presence. He became an icon of rocknroll for his quiff, his looks, his sneer, his hips. The music is neither here nor there.)

The Pistols and the Clash sang about what was real to them. This is what distinguished punk from rock almost as much as any other thing (apart from the apparent difference in technical ability). Rock was concerned with elves, a Hallmark notion of “lurve” and halfbaked philosophy that tried to pass itself off as poetry.

It was no longer about fucking, first and foremost, politics and how we are. It had become about chords, soloes, gnomes. It was something you could learn in a Rockschool.

Music has to be about what counts to really move you. It has to touch your heart, your soul, whatever those things are. If your heart is touched by the verse on a greetings card, you need to trade it in for a new one.

Rock is mostly useless because punk swept it away by democratising music as a means of expression by making expression more valuable than prowess by valuing what you had to say more than your technique in saying it.

So why do I hate music now? Because it has become about how skilfully you can blend the past and make something new out of it. When I see Bloc Party, I’m thinking, ah, Wire. Bit of Gang of Four. Ho hum.

What I’m not thinking is “Somebody suck that man’s cock before he bursts.” And if you don’t know that that is what all great rock should make you feel, you don’t know a thing about music.

posted by Dr Zen @ 12:22 pm