Arguing with Rockists

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Do you bother?

If someone (online or IRL) starts banging on about how it's all just tuneless bollocks and there's no skill in it (not like 'real' music) and the only function any sort of dance music has to perform is to keep the beat steady so drunk people can dance at each other and hopefully get laid or people on drugs can be on drugs, do you actually try to argue with them? I suspect I probably shouldn't, but I just can't help it...
 

tom pr

Well-known member
No, you probably shouldn't. Just as you probably shouldn't bother arguing with the equally ignorant 'anti-rockists' who think guitar music is a load of old noise. Musical ignorance is widespread beyond boundaries of rock and non-rock; there are millions upon millions of blinkered, stupid fans of either musical form. And topics like this don't help, they just try to create sides out of it.
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Yeah just think rude things about them to yourself and walk away, or knee them in the bollocks.

The definition of rockism that focuses on rock music as opposed to trad-rock values annoys me but that's an endlessly boring discussion I want no part in reigniting.
 

swears

preppy-kei
"Rockism" isn't a belief that rock music is the best genre. It's holding up the idea that things like authenticity, musicianship, honesty, originality and seriousness are important ideas in themselves. An anti-rockist would say that those things are not self-evidently better, or at least not that simple. You could be a rockist hip-hop head or a rockist jazz fan.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Dat is not wot a rokkist iz.
I thought that the point was that originally, at least, the various criteria that rockists used to decide whether music is authentic and thus worthwhile were set up to let them dismiss music other than proper "white people playing serious songs that they wrote themselves on guitars" music out of hand, often based on a flawed understanding of the music and associated culture that they were talking about.

Which is kind of the approach that I'm talking about. Most critics who people talk about can no longer get away with it - they have to admit that actually, there are auteurs expressing themselves through the medium of hip hop or whatever - but a lot of the oldskool unreconstructed "disco sucks" types are still around on the internet. And they're often people who are otherwise quite musically or generally intelligent, which I guess is what actually tempts me into arguing with them...
 
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noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
That's a fair point. I was just typing a little list of what might now be acceptable to a rockist mindset and had to come to the conclusion that the term is more or less meaningless now. It just means canonically conservative. OK that means it's not meaningless. I said I wouldn't get in to this discussion.
 
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Chris

fractured oscillations
The rockist/popist argument is tricky, because I'd probably lean towards a psuedo-rockist postition of valuing innovation and cultural or artistic authenticity, or at the very least a standard of quality (which one could say is subjective, but I'm fine with just saying Jet or Nickleback sucks period.) ... but rock music itself in the generic sense (for the most part) doesn't live up to any of those standards anymore.

Older rock, when it was more vital and new, is another story... and if someone just prefers AC/DC or T Rex or the Velvets or Metallica or the Beatles to dance music, then it's understandable enough, that stuff is great too. But when they try to say dance or electronic music is irrelevant or inauthentic... well... I usually don't bother trying to convince them, unless they seem unually open minded (or do a lot of drugs).

To me, rock's cultural role has almost become like country or (non-hippy, working class) folk. It's tradition now, the people's music (and I don't mean that in any idealistic socialist sense, but that it's safe and conservative). When I go to normal dive bars with my friends, and U2 or Def Leppard are playing on the jukebox, it almost feels like the "times of old" when people would go to taverns and sing along to tradional folk songs they all knew. Except now the songs are by U2 and AC/DC, and you have moms and dads and college kids alike all singing along to them. Not very much "rockist" edge or authenticity there... :slanted:
 
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noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
"What's wrong with being rocky?"

ruckerblog_spinaltap_325x1.jpg
 

ChineseArithmetic

It is what it is
It always pisses me off when as soon as people of that kind of persuasion at work or elsewhere hear that you like hip-hop, techno etc, they assume that you won't like or know anything about rock. Whereas invariably I know more than they do, hence I am able to discern that the likes of The Stereophonics, Franz Ferdinand or whatever other indie rubbish they consider to be "real music" is in fact total shit.
 

Chris

fractured oscillations
:) Reminds me... I was going to add somewhere that even though metal is kind of a tradition now too, it still positions itself in kind of a contrarian outsider role that is very rockist*... which although that aspect of metal is a tradition in itself, I have to admire it in a way... like metal strives (and sometimes fails) to avoid being integrated into the larger culture out of an ideal to stay "true."

*edit to say... in contrast to the majority of other rock these days that plays it so safe that it's unknowingly popist... (although I think it's most rockers' aim for authenticity (a rockist virtue) which causes them to fall into traditional cliches, resulting in bland, inauthentic simulacrum, which only virtue is that it *hopefully* at least might be catchy and singable, making it ultimately popist music... *head spins*). In other words, there's nothing rockist about rock music anymore....
 
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Slothrop

Tight but Polite
It always pisses me off when as soon as people of that kind of persuasion at work or elsewhere hear that you like hip-hop, techno etc, they assume that you won't like or know anything about rock. Whereas invariably I know more than they do, hence I am able to discern that the likes of The Stereophonics, Franz Ferdinand or whatever other indie rubbish they consider to be "real music" is in fact total shit.
*aside* Kelly Jones from the Stereophonics was rockist to the power silly. I used to read interviews with him from time to time and he used to complain that Radiohead (circa OK Computer, as rockist friendly an album as you could want) were all very well, but he wasn't interested in them because all that stuff is just production y'know, it's just stuff they do in a studio and they couldn't get down and play it to a roomful of people with an acoustic guitar like a proper musician would be able to...

I guess the other interesting question (fsvo interesting) is that if you do decide to argue with someone who detests hip hop, techno, jungle and so on and does so on rockist grounds, do you accept the terms of argument and try to point out that there's identifiable skill and music of lasting value and records you can listen to at home and so on that they're overlooking, or do you go for the big one and start trying to convince them that actually music that fails to meet these criteria can still be a worthwhile thing...

For instance, if you're arguing with someone who detests all hip hop based on what they've heard on top 40 radio, would you point them at conscious / backpacker stuff that they might like, or would try to convince them that they should go away and listen to pop hip hop until they appreciate its functionalist avant-gardism and so on?
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Agree with them, spend an evening gettin stoned listening to Zeppelin or something, give em mushrooms and some high strength lager, and then when they're not paying attention gently switch the music in another direction. Use stealth tactics, my man. Or failing that just punch them in the face and tell them to fuck off.
 
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