Touch Sensitive

My two fabulous tube amps—the tiny Fender tweed Champ and the hulking Vox 125—couldn't be more different. It isn't just size and volume; it's about how they respond to my playing. Switching between them reminds me again and again how playing electric guitar is hugely about playing the amp.

I spend most of my time with the Champ. I'm playing in my basement late at night, and so the little amp is the perfect thing. Plus, it sounds absolutely glorious. But it has its limitations. I mostly play it clean, and at a low volume setting (between 3 and 4), and at this setting, it makes my strat sound so lovely, it shows just how much Leo Fender had a direct line to God in the 1950s. I'll give Seth Lover some credit too, 'cause the Seymour Duncan '59 I have in the bridge also sounds absolutely gorgeous through the Champ at clean volume.

I don't crank the Champ much at home; for two reasons: first, it's loud enough that it wakes people up; second, the kind of overdrive it produces, while really cool, is pretty ragged and scratchy. Partly because of the tiny speaker in the Champ, a lot of the low-register distortion is actually speaker breakup, it can sound pretty ratty. The higher-end stuff sounds a lot smoother, and chime-y chords break up brilliantly. I prefer this amp on the edge of breakup, where you can take advantage of its huge dynamic range and touch sensitivity to play between clean and dirty simply with pick attack.

The Vox is an entirely different universe. The single-coil pickups (and relatively low-output '59 PAF) don't overdrive this amp much on their own, so I use my Tube Screamer mostly as a signal boost. It drives the Vox into really meaty, crunchy territory. The Tube Screamer works vastly better driving the Vox than driving the Champ, at least at low volume, because the Vox has a tube pre-amp that the pedal can push. The Champ's overdrive is only in the power stage, so it doesn't crunch at all until you crank it up.

But here's where it gets interesting. As I say, I play the Champ most of the time, and so I've learned (or my fingers have learned) the amp's dynamics. I know—at an intuitive level—how to play this amp, how to make it sound good. So when I get the urge to tear it up a bit more, and go to the Vox, I am always stymied by how different it sounds. When I first get into this amp, I can't make it sound good at all. It takes me the better part of an hour to get the dynamics sorted out, between my ears and my fingers. Once I get there, the Vox sounds astonishingly good, and like the Champ it is enormously touch-sensitive. But it's an entirely different touch sensitivity; and the one doesn't transfer to the other. I am always surprised by how much they are different, and yet working according to the same basic logic.

Reading Fargo

So, on recommendation, I picked up Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City, which is his 2001 memoir/apology for 80s glam metal. Right at the beginning of the book, he sets out his mission to properly recognize the cultural importance of 80s metal in the face of the complete dismissal it receives (and always had) from music journalists. Not so different from what originally motivated me to start this blog (see here and here).

As Klosterman described his childhood self encountering Mötley Crüe's Shout at the Devil for the first time in the mid-80s, I immediately had the shock of recognition. Klosterman's rural North Dakota is the same cultural milieu as small-town BC, except where he has cows, we had trees. The way the music hit us, and the place it claimed in our hearts and minds, is exactly the same as he describes. Now, I'm a few years older than Klosterman, so some of these things reached my ears at a slightly different point in my life, and some of my major touchstones are a little earlier than the ones he talks about in the book—I was already 16 or 17 when I heard the Crüe, so it wasn't quite as eye-opening for me as he suggests. But everything he writes about the sensibility of 80s metal—and 80s metal audiences—is dead on, especially where he talks about how different bands (and different albums) had credibility (or not). Hey—I was there when Def Leppard hit the scene; I loved that first album in high school, and I also had to laugh at myself after a little critical distance. But AC/DC, Van Halen, the Ozzy albums, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest—this was the soundtrack to my life, and all my friends'. We were conscious of being 'losers' musically, that both the mainstream media nor the 'popular' kids laughed at our tastes. But it didn't matter. Angus Young mattered. (Actually, one of the scariest things was going back to my hometown about six years later and seeing high-school kids at the beach with their ghetto blaster, still playing Back In Black—whoa, the land where time stood still.)

Where Klosterman and I part is about 1987. The bands he lionizes in the book—Cinderella, Skid Row, etc.—came after I took a left turn and started to think that American metal was getting to be a bad joke. The difference was simply that I moved to the big city in 84-85, and got exposed to a new sound—punk rock and hardcore was completely absent from my early-80s small town world. In Vancouver, punkrock outfits like DOA and NoMeansNo, and the hardcore/metal produced by Death Sentence spoke to me in a way that the hair bands couldn't anymore. By the end of the decade, Hüsker Dü was providing me with umlauts in what I felt was a more authentic mode.

The thing that gets me about Klosterman's book—as funny and insightful as it is—is that he never talked about actually wanting to be in a band. He talks about his idolatry from a comfortable place in the audience. He never talks about identifying with his favourite bands as musicians. Tellingly, the one and only mention of "air guitar" in the whole book is an off-hand reference in a passage about his own alcoholism. My God, air guitar was pretty much what the whole affair was about for me and my friends—that is, until we picked up our own instruments.

Maybe this partly explains my point of departure. Klosterman at one point dismisses punk rock, repeating the old refrain that anybody who could play two chords was suddenly "only two weeks away from their first gig"—as if this was a bad thing! Thank the stars this turned out to be the minority view.

The '59 Sound

Note that this post has absolutely nothing to do with that band from New Jersey. I'm talking about my Seymour Duncan '59 humbucker, which, I am extremely pleased to announce, has finally found peace in my strat.

Last year I went through a long phase of experimenting with pickups. The stock "Highway 1" gear in my strat was not what it could be. So I put in a set of fabulous GFS overwound single coils, and then replaced the stock HB with a "real" humbucker: a Duncan '59 (TB59 to be exact).

The trouble was that even through the '59 was an improvement on the stock HB, it still didn't sound right—a bit muddy, especially noticable when switching from the single coils (yes, I know it's supposed to sound different, but it shouldn't come across as straightforwardly 'worse'). The solution was to re-wire the guitar so that the humbucker runs through 500k pots instead of the 250k pots that Fender normally puts in a strat. I wrote this wiring solution up in detail elsewhere.

The result really has me stoked. It sounds FABULOUS now, especially through my tweed champ. The brilliance and balance of this pickup is revealed, and what you hear going from the singles to the humbucker is now what you would expect: the glassy, harmonic-rich fender sound and the fatter, warmer humbucker sound. But it's all there now, where it really wasn't with the generic wiring. The clincher has really been the pinch harmonics—I mean, they're actually there now, where they kind of weren't before. Playing straight into the Champ, even at a low volume, I can pinch and get all kinds of high-end dynamics that make me think of Billy Gibbons. Similarly, the attack I get from muted picking and raking sounds much more like what it should be.

Why do so many people live with fat strats with the compromised stock circuitry? Humbuckers require different pots than single-coil pickups, and the sound suffers if you try to just run it through. Maybe all those HSS people are just playing through enough distortion that it's not so noticable, but gee, don't they want it to sound good clean too?

Update:

I got with some friends the other night and had opportunity to turn everything up to 11. I was even more impressed with the sound I was getting from the 59. There was another loud strat in the room, and drums, and I had a great cutting tone. The 500k volume and tone pots gave me exactly what I wanted; I was able to dial in what I was getting out of my Champ (which, with its tiny speaker can tend to be pretty high-mid). Most impressed with the blaze of sound from chords hit on the top 4 strings. All in all, more evidence that this is indeed the right way to wire an HSS strat.

Why do big guitar stores suck so bad?

Why are they so awful? I took the opportunity to check out our brand new Long & McQuade location, which merged at least two older stores into one new colossal two-story building. I don't know quite what I was expecting, but I came away pretty disappointed. Here's an entire brand new building, but still relying on the old, slightly nauseating showroom formula whereby you string up several hundred guitars: 50% of which are cheap, crappy, gimmicky, or some blend of the three; 40% which are insanely overpriced boutique/vintage fetish objects (which utterly fail to impress me—is there something wrong with me?); and maybe 5% are some kind of middle-of-the road things that they probably flog a lot of (L&M seems to sell—or at least stock—a lot of mid-range Godin axes).

The amp department is exactly the same: a great wall of Marshall stacks ('cause everybody needs one of those, right?) a couple of obligatory Fender Twins and Vox AC30 combos (an amp so heavy it must have been designed by underemployed chiropractors—but everybody needs one of those these days, too); and then a staggering variety of cheap junky things that no one needs yet which must be out there by the million.

Who is being served by this kind of selection? It must cost them a fortune to maintain this inventory. But who is it for? The kids who come in and buy a $200 guitar or a $200 amp can't seriously be interested in the wall of $3000 Gibsons, and how many of those things do they sell anyway? Anyone looking for a decent Les Paul must surely be working the used market, no? It's not like these guitars have changed a whole lot lately! Is it simply that you need to have this ridiculous mock-opulence in order to be credible as a destination store? What a sad business to be in.

While I'm at it... what the heck is Fender playing at with these "relic'd" vintage strats? They had another whole wall of these at L&M, with $3000-and-beyond price tags. They look exactly like somebody went at them with a belt sander. Who are they fooling? And who on earth is buying these things? At least the overpriced Gibsons give the impression that the people that make them take them seriously.

Personally, I see a great future for outlets like Sweetwater, where they can keep an enormous inventory on tap, dispense with the cost (not to mention the silliness) of the expensive showroom, and succeed on price and personalized customer service (not something that big guitar shops have ever been any good at). The only thing the online places need to complete the experience is an appropriate soundtrack: short snippets of licks played through a particularly loud and bassy Marshall would fit the bill perfectly.

I Love the Donnas

Is anybody actually reading this? Let me know...

Anyway, what is it about these gals? Currently, as I wrestle to get Last.fm to play me a station that isn't 90% dreck, I find that The Donnas are the only thing that keeps me from ditching it altogether... if I listen for long enough, eventually a Donnas tune comes around, and I smile. They have a kind of smartness and sparkle that makes pretty much everything else I hear on the "rock" and "indie" taglists sound like cardboard.

I just heard their cover of Dancing with Myself for the first time... starts out like a completely straight guitar/bass/drums cover, but as soon as Brett's irony-dripping vocals begin, I'm in my happy place. Reminds me of hearing their cover of Judas Priest's Living After MIdnight one night on CiTR... it literally brought tears to my eyes.

If it were just the drop-dead post-ironic vocal delivery, I think it would be pretty short-lived, but they really deliver on the guitars, too... I can't think of many bands that nail that Angus Young-meets-Johnny-Ramone sound so perfectly.

So here's a cheer to the Donnas!

The Other Amp

An amazing development this evening... I've been playing the Strat through the Tube Screamer into my Champ at low, low volume, and it's pretty cool. It doesn't exactly rock, though, as the 6V6 tube isn't getting a workout at all at that volume, so all I'm getting is the sound of the pedal. It's nice, but it really isn't as nice as the Champ on its own.

But tonight, I tried something out that I suspected might sound cool. I have an old Vox bass head, 125 watts (EL34 tubes) with a nice gain+master volume control panel. This is the amp I played very loud punkrock bass through for years. I have put guitar through it before, and I knew that I cranked everything to 10 (well, except the master volume), it would overdrive.

Tonight, I put the Tube Screamer between the Strat and the Vox head (running into my good old 15" bass cab). I set the pedal for a "clean boost"—the "drive" knob at 0, the "level" knob at about 9.

Oh. My. God.

Holy rock and roll, batman. I noodled around this setting for a half a minute before falling into the Ziggy Stardust riff, and then it absolutely floored me. Once I'd found that, I had the sound in my head and I knew how to play it. It sounded absolutely fantastic. Unlike my earlier test, with the Tube Screamer I don't need to max out all the knobs on the amp—just crank the Vox's gain up to about 8 or 9, and the mysterious "sensitivity" knob all the way up, and the boost provided by the pedal is enough to drive it way into overdrive, even on the single coil pickups. But especially with the humbucker. Wow! What an amazing sound, and what amazing dynamics—everything I had missed in the Champ at low volume was there: tons of compression, sustain, and CRUNCH like I couldn't believe. Even at low volume! This had me blasting away at the Strat in a completely new way, 'cause the amp dynamics are working like you expect them to. What a find!

I've got to get a mic set up and record some of this. My rig now includes killer sounds for the Strat, both clean and overdriven (for that matter, the Vox sounds pretty decent clean, too, though not quite as charming as the Champ).

The Strat

On the occasion of my (eek) 40th year, the completion of a rather sizable project I'd been working on, and the ongoing project of collecting musical instruments for the kids, I finally bought myself a real guitar. Now, I used to play the bass pretty seriously, both in terms of what my hands could do on the thing and also the size and weight of equipment I had acquired. And I've beeen noodling on my acoustic for years—and especially since the kids were born. But I've always wanted a strat. So I did it, and am I stoked! I've been playing for several hours each night, something I haven't done in about 15 years. So call it my mid-life crisis if you will. Beats a red sportscar and all that embarrassing shit any day.

The Guitar

After somewhat intensive research and digging about, both online and off, I chose a new Fender "Highway 1" strat. I learned that you can pay just about any price you want for a strat, from a hundred bucks right up to several thousand, depending on what it's made of, where it was built (US ones are of course the most prestigious), what components it has, and whether or not it has Hello Kitty graphics. The Highway 1 occupies a spot at the bottom end of the US-made models, or, to put it differently, halfway between the Made-in-Mexico ones and the American Standards. It's US-made out of Mexican parts, or vice-versa, but that's not the important part.

What it is is a very decent and thoughtfully put together blend of vintage and new features. It beats the Mexican strats on feel (the neck is way nicer) and pickup quality (as far as I can tell, anyway) and a few detail points. It lacks the American Standard's 2-point trem and nicer tuners, but otherwise shares lots of details with its more expensive sibling. It has a 70s-style large headstock, a vintage 6-point trem, real alnico pickups, big fat frets, and a matte "nitro" finish that supposedly makes the body more resonant.

Mine is flat black, with a rosewood neck and a bridge humbucker, and it sounds terrific, with all that great pop and twang that strats do. I have it strung with medium-gauge strings (11s) so I can whack it a little harder, and it feels very solid. It even stays in tune.

The Amp

One of my long-term reasons for wanting a strat is that I inherited my Dad's vintage tweed Champ, which he bought new with a Fender lap steel in about 1970. The serial number and the Internet tell me this amp is from 1961 or 1962. I think one of the tubes had been replaced, but otherwise it's entirely virginal. It has the classic one-knob panel with the on/off/volume that goes up to 12. It has an 8" speaker, runs about 5 watts, and sounds amazing, especially with those strat pickups. The Champ kind of has one sound (no tone knobs or switches), but it's a really good sound, and the strat is capable of lots of different sounds, so it works very, very well in combination. The 6V6 power tubes (er, tube) distort into a wonderfully ratty overdrive when it's turned up to about 4 or 5, and this setting is actually disturbingly loud, at least in my basement.

The Champ has a long mythical history. Apparently Clapton recorded the original Layla with one, and I've heard at least rumours that the first few Zeppelin albums were done with nothing more than a telecaster and a Champ. Could be—in any case, the thing sounds absolutely fabulous with the strat.


The Stompbox

After more Internet research, I learned that the box I really wanted to round out this rig is an old Ibanez Tube Screamer, a pedal made in the 1970s and 80s that both simulates an overdriven tube amp and can also do a nice job of actually overdriving a tube amp. Trouble is, these things—and especially the old TS-808 models—were apparently what Stevie Ray Vaughan used, and so they go for $375 on eBay. Yikes. There is, thankfully, a whole industry devoted to modifying newer pedals to 808 specs, and so I found one reasonably priced on CraigsList. I am very happy with the pedal. With the Drive knob set to zero, it pretty much maintains the Champ's natural sound, until you whack a chord or a doublestop (and especially with that humbucker) in which case it breaks up very nicely. The Champ makes a hard, round, bell-like tone (especially with the single-coils) and the pedal just makes them crumble. Of course, you can crank the knobs up and pretend to be Green Day too.

The Music

So far, I don't think I've produced any music on this rig. It's been far too easy to just knock off blues licks. The strat is so incredibly playable, and the whole rig sounds so nice that I find I can while away an hour without leaving the Strat's sweet spot—between the 5th and 10th frets where all those Hendrixy, John Frusciante-ish sounds live. Noodles aplenty. The sounds it makes are so clear and defined that it is really easy to just wail, and rejoice in the little bits of Hendrix, Knopfler, Santana, and Stevie Ray that seem to just fall out of a rig like this.

Not that I'm really all that into those players; just that those particular tones are kind of low-hanging fruit on a strat and a Fender amp—you have to get past that, I think. So what I'm actually doing, I guess, is learning to play the amplifier, which is an entirely different thing than playing the guitar—the dynamics that pickups and amps and effects boxes produce are a whole different thing, and in that sense, I'm starting from scratch, even though I know my way around the fretboard pretty well. And there's enough scope, sonically, in this simple rig, that I have a long, long way to go before I really know it well.

I need to keep in mind something I learned while playing acoustic guitar: that I play better when I think more about my singing. Which also means paying attention to songs, rather than licks. This is where I go next.

Searching for Rock

So I went looking for rock, looking in books and listening online.

Ironically enough, I started with books...

I took a trip up to my local ChaptersIndigo supermarket (where else can you look at books? But that's another blog post -- actually, that's another blog), and I found next to nada (somewhat as I expected).

The first thing I noticed were the two categories in Chindigo that could contain books about rock: Cultural and Media Studies, and Performing Arts. Notice that these two sections are about 300 metres from each other physically. We wouldn't want to think that performing arts have anything to do with culture or media, would we.

Next, I noticed the genre divide here: there was practically nothing in the Culture/Media section on music. Lots on journalism, terrorism, sexism, global warmingism, and so on (I guess this is the 'ism' section). But it is as if music doesn't exist. Dead rock stars exist: Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself to Live was here, but isn't about music so much as fame and death.

Conversely, over in Performing Arts, there is practically nothing about society, culture, or media. It is as if these concerns don't exist. What there is... lots of books about specific bands, and lots of books about specific decades or genres. Lots of particularities, and lots of star power. The problem I have with this system is that it treats a band like, say, the Beastie Boys, in exactly the same way as a band like N'Sync... that is, it reduces them both to their buzz, and completely ignores the music. Similarly, lumping things into decades or pre-existing genres is pretty useless, too. So you get Bauhaus and Bananarama lumped together, or Black Flag with Blink-182 (this, btw, is a major part of my beef with automated playlist services like Pandora).

I found one interesting looking book, Philip Dodd's (2005) The Book of Rock, which is a 500-page collection of bands: each band with one full-page photo, one pithy quote, and a brief write-up. Very nicely produced, and with very good breadth. But again, it's not really about the music so much as the star appeal, or at least the attitude.

So then I looked (er, listened) online...

I have recently given up (again) on Lastfm and Pandora, so I tried some different angles. Notably, one of the more successful (read: less annoying) ways to get music online is simply to troll through the MySpace charts—very simply, these are lists of the top-rated (as in, added to 'friends' or 'favorites' lists) artists on MySpace. Handily categorized into about 3-dozen genres and arranged in 3 lists: unsigned, indie, and major label, and then simply ranked by numbers. They arrange themselves, unsurprisingly, as long tails, with a handful of very popular ones followed by thousands of minor players. But most of them have a little 6-song player, allowing you to get a pretty good sense of what they're about. Not bad. If somebody on MySpace actually started collecting these into playlists, they'd have a killer radio station.

Then I tried Internet radio. Now, I have great hope and expectations for Internet radio, mostly established by the stupendously great somafm, which delivers 10 different streams (depending on your mood or the theme of your party), which are all great, and which I listen to a lot (especially Beat Blender). The problem is that for the most part, the somafm streams are electronica and dance, and not Rock. How do I find the Rock equivalent of SomaFM?

For starters, Google sucks at this. I couldn't find squat via Google. So I settled on the "radio tuner" function in iTunes, which lists about 50+ streams under the "alt/modern rock" category. I went through most of these over about 3 days at work (as in: tune in, go back to work, and then see whether it breaks through to my attention in a good or bad way). Most of them are lame, but a few were worth going back to.

A number of them are hosted through live365, which has the most annoying ads (do they know how obnoxious their ads are?), and I also suspect it mangles or downsamples the audio quality somehow—I wasn't able to confirm the latter, but the poor audio quality of some of these made me disqualify them right off. So did the appearance of blatantly non-rock or over-clichéd music (like Tom Petty). What I was left with is the following shortlist:


3WK Undergroundradio - 96kbps, from Missouri. A decently varied mix, with elements of electronica and remix in there too; few ads (if any); not terribly heavy, not much I had heard before, but lots that interested me.

indie 103.1 - 96kbps, from Los Angeles. This is a real radio station from LA, so it has commercials for car washes and body shops, but of course LA is a big enough market to have a decent indie station, and to do it well. This is one of the best of the bunch, definitely.

Kink FM - 192kbps, from Netherlands. Pretty varied, in a college-radio way, but has lots of edgy stuff. Has ads, but not in English :-)

MusicalJustice.com - 64kpbs, from Kansas. This runs on live365. Much more mainstream "alternative" stuff from the past two or three decades (as I write this post, I hear Death Cab for Cutie, and that old World Party tune from 1984 or so), but a mix I can listen to pretty comfortably. Wish it sounded a little better.

Punk 45 Radio - 56kpbs (who needs more than that for this stuff?). This is pretty much what it says it is; a big playlist taken from old vinyl. When you're in the mood, this fits the bill.

RadioIORock - 128kpbs, from Florida. Pretty good for a wide range of mainstream "alternative" and bordering genres. RadioIO is actually a big radio/playlist service, and "rock" is only one of their many streams (I tried a few others and found them too "generic"; this one is vague enough to be a good mix), and I suppose this is the closest thing to what SomaFM provides. It seems a little less "personal" than Soma, but not bad, and it certainly sounds good.

There are lots more, and they may have their merits. The usual problem with the Internet is sifting through the dreck. What I've presented here is a start at that, at least. If you have recommendations, please post 'em here.

The Most Important Cultural Movement?

SOMEBODY, and I wish I'd taken note, 'cause I can neither remember nor Google who it was now, recently said on TV that Hip Hop is the most important cultural event of the 20th century. This struck me at the time, since I had written—in the liner notes to a compilation of classic 1950s R&R I was putting together—the exact same sentiment, except it was about rock & roll. Russian Revolution? OK... World War II? Yeah... Nuclear weapons? Sure, but what has really made a difference to global culture, worldwid, to individual men and women? It's rock&roll, no doubt. Think about it. Think about how much scope there is in half-a-century of rock, in all the permutations that have been dreamt up, invented, and reinvented, in that time.

Now, there's a lot about Hip Hop that I like, so I don't mean this post to be a competition between these two claims; in fact, I kinda think the Hip Hop comment was in a similar spirit, and of course that has the whole racial relations aspect going on. I'm going to disqualify myself from commenting on Hip Hop because, much as I like parts of it, I just don't I think get it the same way. I grew up in Whiteboy, Canada, and so I grew up with rock music, and so there's the cultural bed I slept in.

I found this article online, called "Popular music and processes of social transformation," by a Peter Wicke (1996), which is part of a book-length study:

In September 1996 the European Music Office published its report on "Music in Europe". The second part of this study was titled "Music, Culture and Society in Europe" and edited by Paul Rutten. It contains six critical essays and five case studies on the cultural value of music in the European Union. This critical contribution on rock music in the former East Germany was written for the occasion by Peter Wicke.

The article discusses the fall of the Berlin Wall and related ideological tensions in Germany since the 1960s. Pretty interesting, but still pretty dry stuff. It hits the right points, though:

...events in the GDR demonstrate in a manner not profiled nearly so graphically and explicitly in the West the fundamental importance of cultural processes meaningfully related to the everyday lives of people to the survival of a society's political and economic fabric. This importance demonstrates additionally the impossibility of dealing with the question of culture's relatedness to processes of social production and reproduction in a purely abstract and theoretical manner.

Uh, yeah! Which represents to me not so much the right kind of talking about music as an admonition that unless we start talking about music in some kind of meaningful way, we're bound to miss the real things.

What is Rock? Why do you ask?

I'm starting this to let some of the steam out of my head of late—steam built up by a cluster of events not terribly significant individually but which together have got me a little bit jazzed (if I can use that word). The first thing was hearing Norway's Death Is Not Glamorous on CiTR one night a couple of weeks ago; here was a hardcore band that hit me straight in the heart, and instantly provoked a reaction: first, the pulse-quickening effect that any decent rock&roll manages; second, an awareness of the sheer unadulterated joy of this music, the unstoppable kick against death and dying, in the largest sense (interestingly, a reaction I had to the song before I knew the name of the band). This is art, I thought, in the simplest, purest sense. It is an organized movement for life and vitality.

Second was my unexpected pleasure at the second season of Rock Star on TV, this time with Supernova instead of INXS. I had kinda enjoyed the first season, but figured it was a one-off, and that they'd never manage to re-capture it again. I was wrong; the new season is better in almost every respect: first, they got rid of the INXS component (a band which has never even come close to producing in me the reaction I describe above), and second, the level of talent they have this year seems considerably higher... some of these folks are seriously talented, making the some of the stuff on this show up there with the best television I have ever seen (Dave Navarro's comment on one of Dilana's performances was, "Wow, did I did I just see that on television?"). I had to ask myself, what was it about this show that works so well? How come this works for me where American Idol and its numerous imitators leave me absolutely cold, when I bother to watch at all? Something about what they're doing on Rock Star is honest —though I hesitate to use that word in conjunction with anything televised. At least... it is immediately obvious whether a given performance is great or it sucks; there's no appeals to relative taste or genre here; it either works or it doesn't. So what is that?

Third up, when I started to think about these first two things, I started to realize how impoverished our collective vocabulary and discourse about rock is. Yes, we have tons of music journalism, but it remains entirely within its own world, unable to make real connections to life beyond. On the other hand, academic sociology of pop culture seems unable to get rock out of its ghetto of quaintness—I think simply by treating it as an object and failing to meaningfully engage with it on a personal—first personal— level. But... I have been through some fairly extensive graduate school and academic experience, and the closest thing I've ever seen to a treatment of what rock music actually meant to somebody or something is the odd Bob Dylan quote in an epigraph somewhere (Dylan has acheived such historic status that I guess he's a legitimate high-culture touchstone). There's maybe a little tiny bit of an in-jokey trend of sneaking Talking Heads quotes into articles that I've noticed (and perhaps even indulged in), but otherwise, there's a clear boundary between what's important now and what you might have embarrassingly been listening to in your youth. Well bollocks to that! I listened to AC/DC and Ozzy Osbourne in my youth, and it damned well made a difference.

And then the little things: I hear the Go-Gos Our Lips are Sealed over the shopping mall musak and think, "gee, that tune really rocked," despite the Go-Go's distant and dubious credibility. I found an interesting thread of discussion about the social impact of rock in latter-day eastern European history (fall of the wall, and all that), but that's pretty isolated. And I try in vain to find a decent way to listen to rock on the internet, and fail: both lastfm and pandora just suck at producing a good "station"—none of the most important qualities seem to come through that medium at all. I've had better luck just listening to the top-charted MySpace bands. My default is to return to CiTR again, as they at least have human DJs that get it. BUt surely there is more...

Anyway, am I crazy? Is this just my own, personal, view of the world? or am I on to something more general here, that might just be possible to talk about in words with more than one syllable? Let me know.