Rock 'n' roll: more harm than good?

[swears]

Polystyle seems like a nice guy, I'm sure this is just a misunderstanding, if he really has taken offence to me that's a shame, because I really love "Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight".

 

[polystyle]

First of all - No, Gabba I do not connect those two things
I am irritated by the use of that as his excuse tho' ...

Secondly - How is he bringing this place down ?
by seemingly going on and on after getting called on his non question posts (musings ?)
by quite a few Dissensians - a few more then Martin and I (just go bk to the beginning of this thread and ck it).
No 'oh yeah, I guess I don't know what I'm talking about here' or any tone of
'hey I don't know - and I know that , so please hip me' which would go aways towards mitigating things.
That 'you ask -we help' has happened time and time again here , a well established mode.
Maybe he doesn't realize how it comes across !

That 'blithe' 'here i go again' tone ends up sounding much like the tit for tat , shabby exchanges and one line put downs on other forums ,
not really based on anything knowledge wise and motivated by what ?
perhaps someone being bored at home and deciding to reach out and blurt out some er... stuff ?

As for 'having a dig' , man this has been very mild.
And is NOT about people having to agree all the time or anything like that.

Perhaps you have 'missed something'
as i have called him on it again and again and not the only one

 

[DJL]

Maybe he doesn't realize how it comes across !

Maybe we're taking it the wrong way?

 

[Omaar]

Yeah FWIW I don't read swears' posts in the way that some people here seem to take them - I thought it was just quite dry wit rather than a confrontational thing. He can harp on about the same themes a bit, but people still seem interested in replying so that's not a big deal surely.

I guess maybe if you're sympathetic to, or find droll, the 'guitars are dead' and 'humans should all be replaced by immaculately coiffed fake-real instrument playing soulbots' propaganda then you don't find the endless proselytising quite as irritating?

 

[soundslike1981]

I would much rather discuss ‘spread of mass-entertainment as mass-distraction’ actually, but more on that when I have the time. (Does anyone know about any articles on that subject by the way?)


Isn't this merely the detached hipster stance though? I suspect that most people on this forum are ‘diggers’ rather than ‘lemmings’, but omnivorous record geeks (and I certainly count myself as one) share many unappetizing traits with the latter, one of them being an inability to become a true fanatic.

Not sure I follow this line of reasoning--hipsterism to me is about the pretense of enjoying something primarily because of how one imagines one will be percieved for ones "taste;" whereas being an addict/geek has primarily to do with a pure and simple obsession with the art that humans are capable of creating. In essense--being a music geek is about being the uber-fanatic when it comes to music, where the boxes and pegs provided by any one musical style (and especially any one musical "scene") are far too constricting for ones love for music. Hipsterism is about trying to fit whatever box is cool at the moment (maybe multiple of them) but fitting none of them substantially. I don't imagine the fellow who started this thread is a hipster--he just seems content to stand in one box, or at least hell-bent on pitting the box he digs against others. So he has passion, just not a lot of perspective.

 

[soundslike1981]

And anyway, when/why did it become assumed that it's a good thing to be able to become "a true fanatic" about a genre/style/scene/fashion?

Isn't "fanaticism" what ostensibly leads to all the exclusive (and to my eyes fairly elusive) isms, especially the dreaded muso-dino-fascism of Rockism, the fanatical aging ex-hippie corporatists who have rigged it to where Nickleback stays at #1 on the charts (without their ever qualifying as "pop," natch) and the critical/commercial discourse away from the people's music (Burial, Nelly Furtado, et al).

 

[crackerjack]

"its racist wholesale plunder of the blues,"

Oh do grow up. You sound like a 6th former trying to start a row.

And if you have a burning desire to be punched in the face by a nonagenarian, try telling my Gran she's a Tory and she'll oblige.

 

[nomadologist]

Think of all the lives rock 'n' roll has fucked up through dashed dreams of stardom, de rigeur drug addictions, its grotesque portrial of "chicks", its ineffectual efforts to stick it to "the man", its racist wholesale plunder of the blues, the idea that positive social change can come from shouty, arrogant brattiness rather than through a reasoned, informed perspective on society's woes. It's the soundtrack to modern capital isn't it? The Coca-cola of music. Providing just enough of an illusion of free will to make you think your selfish, drug-fuelled "lifestyle" is making a difference to, or is at least an escape route from, industrial society. When in fact you're easily as conformist as your Tory grandma.

Nihil sub solum novum est. Ever heard that one? Or read Ecclesiastes? Usually I'd be the last one to Bible-thump, but I'm thinking this Swears kid is more part of the "problem" (illiterate pop-culture junkie hipster music consumer whores! such evil as the world has never seen! ) he cooks up than he is the solution!

I barely ever come check out Dissensus anymore cuz I always forget about it and I have finals. Only this post was irksome enough to tease a response out of me. And I shouldn't bother but I just can't help it. Love a good pointless exercise in indulging self-pitying navel-gazers. As long as they return the favor as necessary in the future. RANT FOLLOWS:

Even if some of Swears' post is tongue-in-cheek, I find it hard to believe that anyone our age is this dire about everything. And I have a neurological disorder that comes with suicidal bouts of gut-wrenching depression that often last for months. If I start to have thoughts like this, well, I soon realize they're all about me and hating me and overvaluing my experience and not bellying up to the bar with the rest of humanity and choosing hope and I have to get over it or I may be a danger to myself.

In fact, to someone like me and to many many others who have it worse, this set of "nothing new, nothing good anymore, everything sucks" dictums really seems like a problem of leisure. No one who really thought any of these things were true would be in a state of mind where they'd bother saying them, nor would they bother to engage with the world even if the "world" we're talking about here is just the internets or goddamn message boards. You sound like Thom Yorke, already, love. Don't sign multi-million dollar contracts just to whine at all of us and get royalties from, like, car companies while abruptly stopping tours because your album suc--I mean, because it's a "waste of electricity" after it's too late to prevent wasting all the energy, paper, and other resources that went into your PR campaign and press had to drum up to sell tickets. Don't read NME if you don't like indie wankers. I don't, for that reason.

You try to come across as if you're upset about the world, where it's going, about everyone else, who will save them--what's this world coming to?? But thinly veiled under your words and worldview is a self-absorption so adolescent I find it hard to believe you even care about the content of what you say, so long as it sets you up as both the only person within a large radius of you who understands that things are not ideal in the world, and simultaneously as someone who is impervious to joining the herd that comprises this problem, while you sit back innocent and righteous looking down on them. Anyone who really had your concerns should be using their convictions to connect with other likeminded individuals to draw up a gameplan. Or at least to do your part in your everyday life by not consuming this information that's feeding you this picture of what the world is. It's the media that needs to create trends and hype--they do it in images, in mirages of material goods and services accumulating in public places, in everything inessential and wasteful--so they can sell you something. If you don't like Kasabian, they'll cough something up for you based on hating them. It's all good, for them. They're hustlers. It's such a good hustle, because it's a win-win situation for them unless you CUT THEM OFF, cut the mediumbilical chord.

The only way this "hipster" plight could be so bothersome to you is if 1) you really think hipsters represent some sort of homogenous group that is responsible for some sort of largescale human devolution, which I would argue ignores all of human history including things like war, famine, disease, holocaust, genocide, terrorism. Hipsters are a product of there being "too much"--we are decadent, yes, but this is not new either. Hipsters are nothing more or less than what, in advertising and business, we like to call "early adapters." They're upper middle class, college educated, dual-income professional family bred hyperconnected, hypersocialized, hyperworldly hyperconsumers who are so far ahead of the consumer curve that they draw the line behind them. Businesses use this line to walk along, feeding their leftovers to different shades of consumer along the spectrum. Under capitalism, you're either a hipster who makes trends, a slightly B-list hipster who adapts to these trends early, a poor exurban youth who lives in a trailer and longs to buy what hipsters were wearing 3 years ago after it's been licensed to Target, or someone else along the line 2) You fail to see that hipsters are, in fact, a product of much bigger set of historical circumstances which you see yourself as outside of and want to get in, you, in fact, see hipsters as normatively "cool" and as an obstacle to your own inclusion in coolness. Which strikes me as odd, seeing as in your view "cool" is somehow a pathology that is singularly symptomatic of "rock n roll" and it's all-pervasive and far-reaching controlling interest in everything that happens, ever. Don't make me laugh. Rock and roll didn't cause drug abuse, science and medicine harnessed very ancient experiments in herbology and made them exponentially powerful.

If you don't like these things, fine. Aesthetically, many don't. You're not the only one here who falls into this camp, the "doomsday happened as soon as x or y electronic genre of music stopped thumping in clubs, which was all so much realer and there was no simulcra or simultaions or hipsters then" set. Since you are obviously not alone--why not band together with others like you, start a community, and more importantly, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Inaction is your problem, and I wouldn't be surprised if you smoke too much weed and are burnt out. Drink lots of water, eat healthy food for a while, exercise, breathe fresh air. You'll get your libido back from Thanatos, eventually. Even I do if I try hard enough.

PS sorry there's no grammar here, tried to fix some of it just now

 

[IdleRich]

"Perhaps I'm too much of a non-joiner, but all the social trappings of every form of pop music I enjoy seem ultimately pretty ephemeral at best--oriented toward false senses of rebellion wrapped in conservative adoption of a code of signifiers, regalia, poses, vices. Popism, Rockism, Antirock-ism, Anti-Rockism, Pop 'Futurism', Authenticity, anti-authenticity, "cred," "the real hip-hop," fuck it all.
Guess it's a relief just to be a fully-addicted record geek who just wants to hear some fucking good music--I can condescend toward the rockers and the ravers and the rappers equally ; )"

Yeah but surely you can't remove ALL of the social (or any other type of) trappings of music however much you want to. It's not just a collection of sounds right? When you're listening to something it surely conjures up an image of a place or a time or something (not necessarily the intended one).
I'm guessing that Swears is asking, when you listen to some "rock n roll" (and I would say the same is true of many songs in all genres), say Who Do You Love? - surely part of the fun of that is how cool he sounds, how he doesn't give a fuck etc - are you buying in to a dangerous lie?
I don't think a good enough answer is to just say, "I don't feel all that I just like the tune" which is kind of how I take what you're saying, maybe I'm wrong.

 

[swears]

re: nomadologist

I really don't want to give the impression that I'm trying to wind people up just for the sake of it here. Honestly. Why are posters turning this thread towards speculation about my life (no I don't smoke weed, nor am I particularly depressed) rather than the subject at hand?

...why not band together with others like you, start a community, and more importantly, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Inaction is your problem...

Just because I'm not arrogant enough to think I change popular culture singlehandedly, doesn't mean I'm some sort of suicidal emotional wreck. I just don't have the required talents, either in making music or promoting it.

 

[Precious Cuts]

And anyway, when/why did it become assumed that it's a good thing to be able to become "a true fanatic" about a genre/style/scene/fashion?

Isn't "fanaticism" what ostensibly leads to all the exclusive (and to my eyes fairly elusive) isms, especially the dreaded muso-dino-fascism of Rockism, the fanatical aging ex-hippie corporatists who have rigged it to where Nickleback stays at #1 on the charts (without their ever qualifying as "pop," natch) and the critical/commercial discourse away from the people's music (Burial, Nelly Furtado, et al).

I think the question is when did it become OK to question the fanatics. Fuck the soulless Pitchfork eclecticism. Even though I disagree with a good 80% of what Poisonous Dart has to say, I think he's by far the best hiphop writer on here mainly because hes a true fanatic. I may not agree with him but at least I can respect him, unlike someone that spent the 90s listening to Pavement and now regurgitates cliches about Timbo reinventing hiphop, "crack rap", hyphy, cough syrup etc. etc..
w/ regards to Nickelback.. you've got it twisted. Nickelback is music of the people, Nelly Furtado is not. Trust me, theres a reason why Nickelback sell so well. Its not rigged. They strike a chord with hosers everywhere. Nelly Furtado lives in my city, and I can't think of anyone who relates to her in the way that the legions of ex-grunge hosers relate to Nickelback. They are the quintessential Canadian bar band. Nelly Furtado, by comparison, is an airbrushed Americanized media construction.

 

[tht]

Just because I'm not arrogant enough to think I change popular culture singlehandedly, doesn't mean I'm some sort of suicidal emotional wreck.

that's not what they're saying though is it.......'no one who really thought any of these things were true would be in a state of mind where they'd bother saying them'

i don't normally post but i thought nomadologist was really excellent in this thread and you are latching onto the least interesting part of it ie the recapitulation of the old 'fucking do something about it then!' plee, not to say that it isn't an apposite one in this case!

also you have enough polemic nous, however confusingly applied, to make me think you're undervaluing your talent for promoting stuff

 

[john eden]

i don't normally post but

large up all lurker massif!

 

[DWD]

The spread of entertainment as mass-distraction is key to this though, and whilst a lot of the things Simon describes as occurring in the 60s (feminism, decline in homophobia, a more 'open' society developing) are good in and of themselves, they equally function as a form of distraction, in many ways. Its almost like they are a negotiation around the extent to which Capitalism in the west will allow its citizens to do as they might wish, providing they agree to continually expand their demands. In some respect all these things allowed the west to not have its systems of government overthrown, to distract, entertain, and coddle its citizens, whilst using each of these areas of social progression to market ever more unnecessary products. Without rock, (indeed all youth entertainment cultures) and social relaxation the chances of all out societal change on a more fundamental economic scale would have greatly increased.

While it's entertaining to speculate that the revolution that The Beatles sang about might have happened if they hadn't existed, it doesn't seem very realistic to me. And I'm not sure it makes sense to think about rock music, feminism and increasingly liberal attitudes as part of a negotiation between capitalism and society either - as though there was a tug-of-war going on and capitalism was eventually bullied into giving up some of its rope.

What kind of concession is capitalism making in allowing kids to form bands and make noisy music? How is capitalism giving up some of its sovereign territory by allowing women greater freedom? How is capitalism inconvenienced by a wider acceptance of homosexuality? Capitalism wasn't preventing any of these things. In fact, I'd argue that capitalism - and the culture of individualism that it has fostered - played an active role in helping these things come about. It certainly didn't resist them: capitalism doesn't care how you spend your free time.

 

[henry s]

if we can get back to the original thesis for a moment, I would propose that we consider rock n' roll along the lines of farm-raised salmon...(and what could be more rock n' roll than farm-raised salmon?)...the good far outweighs the bad...sure, rock n' roll takes, but it gives as well...and it gives in spades...unconvinced?...look no further than the immortal words of the late great "Lonesome" Dave Peverett:

"when I was stone blue
rock n' roll sure helped me through"

wear your Foghat with pride, rockers!

 

[john eden]

Capitalism wasn't preventing any of these things. In fact, I'd argue that capitalism - and the culture of individualism that it has fostered - played an active role in helping these things come about. It certainly didn't resist them: capitalism doesn't care how you spend your free time.

This will be a bit rambling cos I am still hungover.

Bang on about individualism, etc.

I think it is worth discussing the last part. In terms of "free time", do you mean the time when people are not at work?

In which case I think we need to invoke the situationists, really. Free time is the space we are allowed to consume products instead of producing them. And of course we are supposed to travel to and from work in our free time, and not get so mashed up that we aren't able to work the next day.

Indeed I think I remember reading something about the imposition of standardised time being part of disciplining the workforce so they all showed up for their hours.

And it's not just rock, is it - it's culture as a whole, as created under capitalism. Radical chic is just the most obvious example of the desire to destroy society being sold back to people as product:

If rock 'n' roll didn't exist it would be something else.

----------

There is also a standard socialist critique of homophobia, racism, gender inequality etc working as a distraction - keeping people divided so that they don't unite as a class and bum rush the show. Which is perhaps why these things haven't been completely eradicated even when capitalism has developed less crude methods of social control.

 

[John Doe]

Personally, I'm really shocked that Swears has been getting all this personal abuse. I think his questions are valid and provocative (in a good way).

Not that I'm going to answer them mind - except to point out that his description of rock n roll is equally applicable to, say, Hollywood. The industrialised spectacle of mass-excess is, really, the defining characteristic of the twentieth century: rock n roll was as much a symptom as a cause.

I'd like to address a brief question to Gek-Opel though:

Gek, you say that one of the negatives of rock n roll (perhaps mass spectacle generally) is that it is distracting.

Distracting from what exactly?

 

[DWD]

I think it is worth discussing the last part. In terms of "free time", do you mean the time when people are not at work?

Yep!

In which case I think we need to invoke the situationists, really. Free time is the space we are allowed to consume products instead of producing them. And of course we are supposed to travel to and from work in our free time, and not get so mashed up that we aren't able to work the next day.

I think I probably went a little overboard when claiming that capitalism "doesn't care what you do with your free time": what I was trying to get across was that capitalism doesn't care what music you listen to (or whether you listen to music at all), and nor does it care whether you are gay-friendly, or a feminist. Capitalism requires you to earn enough money to live. Beyond that, what other demands does it make?

And it's not just rock, is it - it's culture as a whole, as created under capitalism. Radical chic is just the most obvious example of the desire to destroy society being sold back to people as product

If radicalism is glamorous, that's hardly the fault of capitalism.

There is also a standard socialist critique of homophobia, racism, gender inequality etc working as a distraction - keeping people divided so that they don't unite as a class and bum rush the show. Which is perhaps why these things haven't been completely eradicated even when capitalism has developed less crude methods of social control.

Homophobia is a method of social control?

I don't see it. Like I said above, if anything, capitalism has encouraged more liberal attitudes by loosening old social bonds and enabling individualism to grow. A greater plurality of viewpoints is tolerated and - in that plurality - ideas and attitudes which had been discarded or disdained by groups within society can slowly gain more currency.

This is all way over-simple, of course - and I'd also like to add that I don't see individualism as an inherently good thing. I think there's a point at which, if allowed to go too far, it might result in some of the progress society has made being undone - but this type of change happens as a by-product of capitalism, not as a direct result of it. It's not a negotiation. It's not a trade-off made by capitalism in order to underpin its existence.

Just as an aside, I feel more than a little silly talking about economic systems and political systems as though they were sentient beings capable of acting in their own self-interest. In Gek-Opel's image of a negotiation between society and capitalism, who or what does the negotiating on the behalf of capitalism? How does capitalism think "Fuck. The natives are getting restless. I'll have to throw them a bone to chew on. I know ... Heeeere's Elvis!"

 

[nomadologist]

I really don't want to give the impression that I'm trying to wind people up just for the sake of it here. Honestly. Why are posters turning this thread towards speculation about my life (no I don't smoke weed, nor am I particularly depressed) rather than the subject at hand?

...why not band together with others like you, start a community, and more importantly, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Inaction is your problem...

Just because I'm not arrogant enough to think I change popular culture singlehandedly, doesn't mean I'm some sort of suicidal emotional wreck. I just don't have the required talents, either in making music or promoting it.

People talk about your life because you project so much, Swears. And if you can't play music, be a record exec. Or something. Just stop fucking whining about the end of everything, it's useless and saying it doesn't make it true.

 

[nomadologist]

To get hauntological, the spectres of Marx are contained no more so than inside the very body of rock, (and all the rest) within their pseudo-rebellion and para-struggle.

Hauntology = a play on the word "ontology" as Heidegger used it. Derrida loved word play: cf Differance from Margins of Philosophy. "Ontology" is very loaded, which Derrida fully understood, and has a lot more to do with foundationally basic metaphysical structures or lack thereof, absolutely nothing to do with rock per se. If you wonder if this is true, just read Spectres of Marx again. This much seems abundantly clear to me whenever I refer to the primary text.