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.