Problems of Rocksthetics, notes toward a seminar paper

OK.

Deep Breath.

We are work toward:
Understanding aesthetics in/of rock.

PROBLEM: VOCABULARY.

Rock is kind of like pornography -- you know it when you see it.

What do we mean by "rock?" By "rock and roll?" (I understand now that these can refer to two different musics, rock and roll being music that existed somewhere between 1940-1960 and Rock coming after, apparently.)

These terms seem to exclude an enormous amount of other music that you can buy at Sam Goody or wherever, which kind of acts as a measuring stick for me at this point. Like, I know there's a reason that all that music is lumped together in "rock/pop" and I know I agree with it, but I can't figure out WHY. (I guess that means that ultimately I am looking at an economic definition of this kind of music, but that makes me sad and I don't want to believe that's what I'm working with here. I want to come up with a non-economic explanation for why we understand that it's normal for, say, the "classical" section to be a completely different room in the old Tower Records in Seattle.)

So we get a little broader, because we want to include bands like the Album Leaf, Eminem, Iron and Wine, Bjork, etc., none of whom is really "rock." We go with "pop." I've long preferred this term to describe the kind of music I listen to, write about, and play, but again, I think there are some problems.

The most obvious: pop is short for popular, but everybody knows that the Album Leaf is not popular in the traditional sense of the word. Then again, when pop simply means popular, Korn and the Spice Girls end up in the same category, a juxtaposition that begs us to reconsider a social definition in favor of an aesthetic one -- i.e., anyone with ears knows that Korn and the Spice Girls do not sound like each other in any way but the most basic possible (they both have lyrics, they both have rhythm, etc.).

Popular as a term usually denotes "entertainment" or a music that is somehow "lighter" than what philosopher and music critic Theodore Adorno calls Serious music (by which he basically means classical music -- he called jazz "popular music"). Of course, the notion of Serious music raises all kinds of problems for us populist, postmodern types, since we pride ourselves on rejecting the high/low art dichotomy or sometimes even defiantly reversing it, imbuing the "low" with meaning and value and dismissing the "high" as irrelevant and elitist.

There are problems with pop as popular in this sense, too, because a lot of us take pop very seriously. And we run into the same kind of categorization troubles, too: Sigur Ros, a band who few would consider "mere entertainment," can't really belong to the same category as Mika (whose single totally rules even though I was tipped off to it by an utterly a-musical friend). Or maybe it can, but we as music fans and critics are quick to call this into question.

Then again, that impulse-- to separate Sigur Ros from Mika, Radiohead from the Black Eyed Peas, or even American Idiot-era Green Day from Dookie-era Green Day -- may simply be what Kelefa Sanneh (and countless other since, though more they used this term more clumsily) terms rockism, which is essentially a prejudice against pop music that doesn't conform to "the rock rules of the 1970's." Something is amiss when we call BS on a single, or a singer, just because they didn't write the song they sing, or were paid a million dollars to sing it, or use samples instead of guitars. Whatever rock/pop music is, surely it is not so narrowly defined as to only admit Dylan, the Beatles, and Led Zepplin or groups who aspire to be like them.

Understanding evaluation in rock.

Still, certain realities are undeniable when it comes to the way rock critics (if not "serious" rock fans) evaluate music. It cannot be more than a coincidence, even if we agree that the evaluation of popular music is highly subjective, that an overwhelming majority of pop critics agree that Nickleback is truly awful band, whereas that same majority tends to agree that Radiohead are a truly great one. But both bands have sold millions of albums, though the shaded area of that Venn diagram has got to be a mighty thin sliver.

This ought to tell us something: "critics" and "fans" probably disagree quite often, because if they didn't, Slint would be more popular than Cyndi Lauper. This is kind of a problem, because intuition tells us that while it may not be possible to prove that the Smashing Pumpkins are better than Mariah Carey, it's GOT to be possible to prove that the Beatles are better than Stroke 9. (I realize I'm doing a lot of seemingly unnecessary name-dropping and that it is largely symbolic, but I'm just trying to make sense of this in vocabulary that I understand.) This constant disagreement thing, though, seems to make the evaluation of rock a wholly subjective affair, which is pretty unsatisfying both to we critics who claim to know better and we fans who fiercely love our favorite bands because we just find them great.

We might just admit that rock critics are a breed apart, with special moral judgment and responsibilities (after all, with great power...). Walter Benjamin wrote "The public must always be proved wrong, yet always feel represented by the critic," by which I think he could have meant: fans often disagree with critics, but they (ought to) believe the critic is simply attempting an honest evaluation, the best anyone could do. But I think that whoever we in the Rock World are (and I am getting ahead of myself here, as you'll see later) are unwilling to accept the fan/critic divide, because popular music is sustained simply by people who care about it, which is to say I agree with people like Grayck and even Adorno who argue that pop music is probably best defined by its social function before it can be defined by any formal characteristics. Those who care about it can be fans or critics, can love or hate individual artists, but what we have in common is that we are really invested in the idea of pop music, and it means a lot to us (hopefully we'll get to WHY this is a little later), and we will keep listening to it because of that.

In lumping fans and critics together, I'm suggesting that pop music does not recognize the same kind of critical asceticism (NB, not aestheticism) that traditional aesthetics does; Benjamin believed "the critic" to be, if not an impartial, perfect judge, at least a special sort of person engaged in the "literary battle" in a way that ordinary citizen are not. Pop, maybe because of its, um, populism, doesn't really recognize this division, at least when it comes to imbuing the music with meaning. Fans and critics are, I think, utterly equal in this respect, and in fact fans may come out on top. To bastardize Rilke, you could say the fan's task is "to love good pop music into being." In a sense, then, I am arguing that pop cannot be evaluated in the elitist way that other types of Serious music can be and has been. But this could just be my problem; I kind of think anybody who publishes "criticism" in highfalutin' publications like the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism is probably a total tool.

This whole "pop evaluation is not elitist" thing does put pop in a category apart from most other art and music, but not below it in any meaningful way. Other kinds of highbrow, academic criticism are just as socially mediated. It's just that pop is mediated by a different set of people -- or not even that, since I know English professors who listen to M.I.A and Nick Cave, so maybe mediated by a different set of rules, really.

This brings us to the Rock World, which is my idea based on Arthur Danto's "The Artworld," an article that I haven't had a chance to read yet. I guess this is ironic. The basic principle (I have read about it) for Danto becomes: in order to be an art object, a thing must "be interpreted as art by the Artworld." Simple enough, I guess. Much more to come on this.

So evaluation, for pop, will probably have less to do with certain innate qualities of the music than it will with social and symbolic functions of music.

A few other problems to be explored:

The Process/Product dilemma: rock music can be defined in large part by the immediacy of feeling it provokes in listeners and by creatively emergent qualities which take place during the act of performance. How, then, do we evaluate what has become the basic "unit" of pop music, the recorded song? Is it an artifact, a facsimile of the actual art "event" but not an art object? Or, am I wrong to suggest that rock music is primarily defined by things that only happen during its performance? (I realize I haven't devoted much time to this definition of rock yet. That's coming later, maybe.)

The Post-Rock dilemma: What of "art-rock" (in all its possible and sundry meanings) that demands to be taken Seriously in Adorno's sense? Music that lacks the qualities most often associated with popular song -- danceablity, a backbeat, vocals, etc -- but still uses guitars and drums -- what is it and is this a problem?

I have more, but the biggest dilemma on my mind right now is the I'm graduating in less than 3 weeks and still have a million huge projects to finish dilemma.

I welcome comments.