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

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Newport Redux pt. 1

[ext_3779724]

Frank, I spent several months last year trying to figure out what was going on the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the one where Dylan played "Maggie's Farm" with Mike Bloomfield and a bunch of Chicago and New York rock and blues musicians. At the time, I was working on revising Ed Ward's old 1983 book on Bloomfield, which contained a lot of writing about "authentic" music vs. "real" music and so forth. It was the story of a musician obsessed with being authentic to a form that is one of the foundational texts of rockism, the blues, and a downward spiral in which the said musician never finds the next step beyond blues, at least not in any form that he could translate into any kind of real power. So as I did my revisions and expansions and interviews, what I began to be concerned about was power and how musicians wield it.
I began to see, even more than I think I had already seen in a writing career that found me often concerned with the way musicians think about music as opposed to the way fans think about it, that what Bloomfield lacked was the ability to take himself seriously as someone who had something to say, not just someone who had something to play on his chosen instrument. Yet his entire career after his immersion in pop was an attempt to diversify, find new ways of playing guitar that would allow him to deliver new kinds of content--he liked country music a lot, and had he lived into the current era, or at least until say 2010, he would've been recording in Nashville with Buddy Miller, Emmylou Harris, maybe Marc Ribot, maybe the McCrary Sisters (black post-gospel group), maybe even with Miranda Lambert or Kris Kristofferson or Guy Clark on a tribute album to Townes Van Zandt. He would've been extolled as a natural resource, much like Steve Stills.
I pick Bloomfield partly because I have a certain sympathy for him, as a doomed fuck-up, and partly because he was almost a great musician, and partly because he's about as tired and moldy an exhibit of Rockism Rampant as you'd want to encounter in the year 2016. Yet the guy liked Leo Sayer! And George Jones, and maybe even the Osmonds, who after all cut records in Alabama.