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Edited on Tue Jan-20-04 11:12 AM by RandomKoolzip
From Joe Carducci, who should know, having been a full-time grunt-worker/theorist for SST records in the 80's:
"A music that rocks can only be an active by-product of the playing of a band....its special musical value is that it is a folk form which exhibits a small band instrumental language as in jazz, rather than mere accompaniment to a vocalist as in pop."
Rock and the Pop Narcotic, pp.41
"ROCK IS NOT THE ONLY MUSIC WORTH LISTENING TO, but it is an important music, aesthetically speaking, and is due serious specific attempts at its definition and defense as MUSIC. (emphasis mine)....During my shift I came across many different mindsets by which rock music and its related culture are interpreted. Most of these are useful in some way, BUT THEY ALL SUBMERGE MUSICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR THOSE OF CLASS, FASHION, AND POLITICS........Simply because such resolutely undergroundist bands as the Stooges or Minor Threat were good does not mean that all other underground bands are good (or even trying to be good), or all bands outside the underground are not good. As we are dealing with a music and its artists' relative merits, the criterion for judement must be MUSICAL. And if it is musical then quality miht be judged found in any rock configuration whether its image lexicon is hip or tacky, elitist or white trash, urban or suburban...That is, AS LONG AS THE MUSIC PLAYED IS AN EXPRESSSIVE PRODUCT OF THE ROCK MUSIC PROCESS: GUITAR/BASS/DRUMS."
Ibid, from the preface
"Rock music needs some definition...that deinition will neither hold together nor aid us reconsidering the music unless it focuses on the essence of what rock music is AS A MUSIC, and IGNORES FASHION PARTICULARS and the flashier conceptualized fictions. Again, rock music is not the lyrics, nor is it the notes or the distortion on the notes. IT IS NOT AN ATTITUDE! (How typically New York, that one.) The msuic is rock when it is guitar, bass, and drums at the center, and they are played by musicians who know the language of the instruments enough to be expressive with them...it is a risky propostition; mistakes will be made....Rock reaches the spiritual by way of the physical; it requires an aesthetic of fully integrated completion whereby the musicians are listening to each other play and "talking" to each other via slight but constant adjustments and inflections which move the tune in new directions...."
Ibid, pp. 54-55
"The first group to use the then-rudimentary synthetic percussion technology in a rock sound was the French group Metal Urbain....They were certainly guitar-oriented and generated a cold, metallic, riff-based sound....The percussion programs were very simply set up and did not vary throughout the tune- a low frequency pulse for a kick beat, a light trace of white noise patterned after the hi hat, and an incorporeal popping in place of the snare drum....In an interesting post-breakup interview, guitarist Herman Schwartz indicated that he considered the group to be a rock band in the tradition of the Sex Pistols and Gene Vincent - his examples - and not an anti-rock conceit like Bowie or Throbbing Gristle (also his examples.) It seems he felt rock music can exist seperate from the concerns of the rythym section...later artists to embrace synthetic percussion would not be so sincere or so rock in intent."
pp.355
"It was the Black Flag work ethic that by example turned great local curiosities all over the country into touring, recording, record releasing rock bands despite the marketplace hostility of that day towards American rock music. The Industry, from A&R departments to reional offices, from Rolling Stone to college radio, had all but breathed a sigh of relief with the Sex Pistols' break up and the Clash's sell out. The spicy new pop flavors they would now embrace would be such as the English Beat, Madness, or if they wanted to get "radical," PiL or Au Pairs. They actually believed that the new American bands were hopelessly, garishly out of date - "punk" having been done. Get that? They thought that these signposts of contemporary rock music were brainless redundancies of a form that was an aesthetic dead end to begin with....! Oops."
pp. 364-65
"The pop process today no longer yields rock music even in the harshest, most "uncommercial" underground scenes. If Metal Urbain, Ministry, Big Black, Nine Inch Nails, etc. want to put distorted guitars over a drum machine IT MAY BE COOL BUT IT'S POP.... To the extent that they succeed in passing for rock they threaten what market exists for rock music. Pop COULD rock in the days of live analog one or two or four track recording when pop groups and even session groups like those of Sun, Chess, and Stax had to play live to record and so risked rock no matter how pop the intentions. But in the pop world now with its high tech recording studos rarely are two musicians ever actaully playing together. No rock is committed just because four guys are making loud noises at the same time. AND NO ROCK OCCURS JUST BECAUSE POP OCCASIONALLY SERVES ITS AUDIENCE QUITE INTIMATELY AND WELL."
pp. 105
Carducci's intent is to define rock music as an aesthetic process seperate from the aesthetic process known as pop...they are two different approaches: rock is played in a small band format by guitar bass and drums, whereas pop can occasioanlly come in a "rock" flavor, but once you have removed the central core of the small band format, you are dealing with a music that is NOT rock. The pop approach/process is derived from the Tin Pan Alley way: producer-driven, lyric/singer-centered, the song and the singer all important; this process was tailor made for the ProTools generation, as it in one fell swoop provides the amateur producer, to as you contend, take the power away from the hands of the big studios and into the hands of some kid in his bedroom....the ultimate result may sound cool and may even sound sorta rockish, but it's not rock music. It's a form of pop, just like all dance musics, hip hop, techno, etc. Like he says, rock music is not the only music woth listening to....In order for a music to be rock, it must be played on real instruments by a small band.
And as we all know, Nirvana was a rock band. In order for another mid-nineties moment to occur again, the arbiter of change MUST be the organic product of the rock process, like Nirvana, because it is exactly this physical approach (like that of the Beatles, Elvis's band, the Stones, the Sex Pistols, Black Flag, Led Zep, etc. before them) that most directly triggers the spiritual realm in the listener, leading to the most effective marketplace upheaval. Unfortunately, what is left of the rock audience these days for the most part favors the non-physical approach....and is quite happy with the synthetic, glossy, non-tactile product on the market.
I never said rock was dead; quite the opposite. Rock exists now outside the marketplace, with no real chance of effecting the pop charts...however there is a healthy local band scene in just about every city in America, with players from all classes working the rock aesthetic. This can be good, as it focuses these players' attention to the physical matter of creating the music itself instead of the pop concerns of monetary success, geting laid, pissing off mommy and daddy, etc. Basically, rock is no longer he dominant marketplace force as it was in the sixties, seventies, and mid-nineties; it is back being a localized phenomenon, like it was in the 80's, when Black Flag, Husker Du, et al. operated in isolation and in turn laid the groundwork for the explosion to come.
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