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.