Antirockism is just rockism with a few of the words changed

[koganbot]

In an egregious breach of self-discipline, I posted on an Ann Powers facebook thread* whose subject was "rockism." Given that the thread was mainly stupidity and floundering, and it didn't jostle anything loose in my own thinking, I fear that there was little useful I achieved. My justification, if there is one, is that the stupidity I refer to is

Comments

[ext_1660054]

Regarding 'authenticity' we still may not be close to entirely sculpting it out of the stone but we do have a general idea of what it looks like. The most authentic music continues to be social / ritual music that is precisely what it purports to be - this is choral music that uplifts the spirit, liturgical music that addresses the divine, folk music that entertains and creates kinship / produces sittlichtkeit. Folk music - the common passed down canonical often anonymous songs of an ethnoculture - has one of the strongest claims to authenticity. Not only does it exist as a shared heritage, but its association with the 'folk' connect it to political ideas about proletarianism and populism in addition to its socio roles.

Once names start going on compositions we begin to move away from this fundamental self-understood paradigm. With classical music this is a challenge to authenticity but court forms + canons are also tightly embedded into specific cultural and historical paradigms so while authenticity might not be the predominant consideration it isn't entirely "inauthentic" either. Benjamin traces the destruction of authenticity to the crisis of reproduction - he is talking about lithographs but the move from live performance to recorded performance would carry some of the auratic destruction too that we see in the visual.

The authentic is immediate, it is personable, it is shared, it is present, it is historical, it does something. Importantly none of these descriptions apply particularly to the pop/rock canons of Western popular music which exists mostly to express the individuated personality of the performer, or to sell records (embedded tightly in a capitalist economic process). I think I agree with you here, Frank - poptimism did nothing different from rockism but change the characters. Both rock and pop share all the same deficiencies of authenticity from my pov. As an identity/diversity movement it was a success (bc now you can read about Beyonce in the New Yorker) but as an attempt to reclaim authenticity it made the assumption that some artists are more authentic than others but ignored the fact that replicability and authorship itself are the daggers at the heart of authenticity.

If you're not sure if this distinction is true go to your church, or choir, or perform a musical, or sing some tunes with some friends at a meal, and compare that participatory experience to the experience of listening to anyone else's recording in any other circumstance. (And to a lesser extent contrast a live concert to any home recording.) It is a vivid contrast.

What is much more interesting to me is the process by which authored music pass into an authentic folk vernacular ie when a song has become fully owned and assimilated into lived experiences of the general pop. Certain Chassidic Rebbes have said that melodies/tunes from a low source (like popular tavern drinking songs) can be transmuted into a higher plane by being used for ritual, holy purpose. Metaphorically this is how I understand a process of authentication working - something from an owned, gated, authored source becoming owned by the people at large. I don't know that poptimism created conditions by which this was more possible but I do think it's possible to argue that the songs they championed (extremely well selling + omnipresent tracks) are those more likely to be embraced on this broader collective level and that some of the songs they derided (extremely obscure, difficult, challenging compositions) were never accessible enough to the people.