Philosophies of rock are rarely explicit. It is as if contemplation of something so visceral were somehow inauthentic. And yet, philosophical assumptions about rock are endemic to its discourse, not least in respect of its identity. Both historical and geographical locations are important. “Rock” certainly does not exist prior to the 1950s, if rock’n’roll is seen as its point of origin (Peterson 1990; Everett 2009). This is frequently regarded as the case among US scholars. However, if rock is marked by the advances made particularly by Lennon, McCartney, Ray Davies and Bob Dylan, then rock gradually emerges in the mid-1960s. In this latter history, the role of the “British invasion” of US cities in 1963–64 is crucial. Whichever position one takes, there is a time before which “rock” is not part of the cultural experience. So, just what is it that does not exist prior to its originating era? At the risk of jumping ahead of myself, it seems to me important to insist that any comprehensive declarative statement (“rock is . . .”) is bound to fail, for the term “rock” (like equivalent terms – “soul,” “blues,” “gospel,” “folk,” “classical”) describes a set of discrete ways in which music works. First, the term describes a style; in other words, a means for musicians to regulate musical decisions about what sounds to make, and how to organize them temporally. Second, it describes a genre; in other words, a means of making the results of these decisions public, or entering into quasi-contractual relationships with agents, listeners, and other manifestations of music’s institutions. Third, it describes a practice; in other words, a way of prescribing the (un)acceptable behavior of musicians who desire to be regarded as rock musicians. And finally, it describes a repertory; in other words, it categorizes individual items of music. None of these descriptions is possible without the term “rock” to organize them, while consideration of any one of these four is most effective when continuing to observe its relationship with the other three.
The four senses I have identified may often operate together. (Aretha Franklin’s live recordings at a Los Angeles Baptist Church in 1972, released as Amazing Grace, qualify as “gospel” in all four senses.) But they are not necessarily coextensive, as can be observed in relation to The Nice’s recording “America” (1968). Written by Bernstein and Sondheim for West Side Story, it is a “show tune” in terms of repertory. The Nice approach it as “rock” musicians – this defines their practice. It is an example of what contemporary discourse named “progressive pop,” aimed at and consumed largely by a burgeoning student market; this defines its genre. However, its stylistic amalgam of explicit beat, improvisation and (quasi-elite) status identifies its style as “art rock.”
This level of analysis is rarely resorted to. I deal in this section with types of comprehensive definition: the relations between “rock,” “pop,” and “popular,” those between “recorded” and “live,” and the importance of rock as “sound structure.” Despite their unsuitability, comprehensive declarative statements remain popular. It seems that critics (and listeners) need to find a usable working definition, even if it is hardly “definitive,” and the problems caused by a recording such as “America” are rarely given any attention. Two types of “comprehensive” definition are current, and both are explored in a recent virtual symposium where Richard Middleton argues that for definitions of popular music, “two overarching positions are visible, which we might term ‘descriptivist’ and ‘discursivist,’ respectively” (Popular Music International Advisory Editors 2005: 45). “Descriptivist” positions implicitly assume the possibility of listing all the features held in common by all members of the same style, genre, practice, or repertory. “Discursivist” positions define the term by declaring it the negation of everything it is not (“soul,” “classical,” “folk” etc.). Neither of the positions Middleton identifies is ultimately satisfactory. An exhaustive list even of the features which define rock as a style is unachievable (Moore 2001: 1–4), while defining something against its negations takes anti-essentialism to an untenable extreme. A better approach may be by way of prototype theory (Lakoff 1987) which offers graded membership of categories, thereby according better with how we use them. Fabbri (1999) briefly explores this approach in defining musical genre. Note, though, that I am allowing that symposium’s “popular music” to stand for this chapter’s “rock”: Between the 1960s and the rise of electronic dance music and hip-hop (variously in the 1980s and later), “rock” and “popular music” were synonymous to the music industry, in much scholarship, and to many listeners. “Rock” was therefore the mainstream, much to the dismay of those who, following a preferred position within cultural studies (e.g. Willis 1978), identified it with rebellion. This preference stems from the earliest constructions of cultural studies as a discipline, whereby an attitude of rebellion among youth was lauded and, as the most compelling expression of that attitude, rock music was identified with it. Even in more recent decades, as we shall see, a distinction between rock and popular music in general can be hard to draw.
Though “rock” is hard to distinguish conclusively from “popular music,” attempts are also often made to distinguish it from “pop,” usually in relation to the opposition between “authentic” rock (to which I shall return) and “commercial” pop – or to refuse such distinction (Everett 2007). Nicholas Cook ties the term “rock” to questions of authorship (an aspect of rock as practice), arguing that rock musicians tend to “see pop musicians as industry puppets but themselves as genuine authors” (1996: 40); as both Stan Hawkins (2002) and Fred Maus (2001) have pointed out, the Pet Shop Boys (among others) problematize this view. For Cook, at least in this article, the presence of multiple texts (i.e. different recorded versions) and multiple authorship (a consequence of the social practice of rehearsal) has the potential “for opening theory up to new perspectives, to the benefit of our understanding of all music” (Cook 1996: 40–1). Graham Vulliamy (1975) also accepted a pop–rock distinction, at a far earlier stage in rock’s history, basing his decision on the views of musicians themselves, their fans, and what he then regarded (with concern) as the growing cultural legitimacy of “rock” (to which I have already drawn attention). From another sociological perspective, Gregory Booth and Terry Lee Kuhn argued that the labels we apply “relate to commonalities that are economic and transmissive in nature, and that . . . the type and nature of the music content . . . are a result of these economic and technological support systems” (1990: 414). This analysis deals with aspects of rock as genre and as practice, seeing style as subsidiary: As music aimed at a mass audience, “rock” here becomes an exemplar of “pop.” The point is that since there are no agreed grounds for the definition of “rock” (or of “pop”), writers can supply their own and develop individual perspectives. Is “rock” subsidiary to “pop,” or to “popular”? Is it distinguishable from them? Is it altogether distinct? Each position is defendable, but these definitions appear to be subjective.
However, on any understanding, we have to construct “rock” in such a way that there is something at least provisionally distinctive about it, and that distinctiveness must be analyzed for a chapter such as this to have any viability. A prominent view is that of Theodore Gracyk (1996), whose position is summarized thus by Andrew Kania: “the primary work of art in rock music is . . . [the] sound structure encoded on a recording and properly instanced through playback of a copy of the recording” (2006: 401). (This is a similar concept to Even Eisenberg’s “phonography” (1988), but Eisenberg applies it to a range of musics outside anyone’s conception of rock.) This ontological definition has two components: that a piece of rock music is principally a “sound structure” and that hearing the recording has primacy over hearing other things (such as live performances). However, as soon as one asks questions about that “sound structure” (“What is it?” “How does it work?” etc.), one is inevitably addressing rock as style (rather than as genre, practice, or repertory). This emphasis on rock as manifest sound is not trivial when one recognizes that, for much music, how it sounds has had little impact on how its functioning is conceived. Within academic circles, how music is structured has long taken precedence over how it sounds. Serious non-academic scholarship (at least in the popular field) has given precedence to biography, authorial intention, and lyric content. It is only among (many) everyday listeners that how the music sounds appears to have been a more important consideration.
Andrew Chester (1970) made an early attempt to formulate one difference Gracyk is concerned with: that between recorded musics and musics for live performance, although Chester distinguished between “extensional” musics dominated by pre-planning and “intensional” musics dominated by spur-of-the-moment decision-making. For Chester, rock was an instance of the latter; for Gracyk, rock seems to be an instance of the former. It is the construction of music as precisely pre-planned which has enabled the dominance of its consideration as structure, and which accords with a current of thought that has assumed rock can adequately be addressed via its notation or transcription (a normative procedure for critical attention to concert music and jazz), a misguided view which receives critiques in, for example, Moore 2001 and Zak 2001. Kevin Holm-Hudson (2001) has added to this mix a concern for intertextual reference and historical consciousness.
Indeed, it is the historical circumstances of rock’s arrival which impact most on its identity. Gracyk is certainly right to insist on the essentiality of rock’s historically emergent technology, although, because the distinctions between style, genre, practice, and repertory are rarely addressed, there remains space for fans of Bob Dylan, for instance, to maintain that, for some musicians, how they approach live performance is a more central concern than the issuing of recordings (e.g. Marshall 2007, esp. 189–97). But the primacy of recording over live performance inherent in Gracyk’s formulation is itself historically circumscribed. Edward Macan’s recent biography of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer refers to Greg Lake’s view that the relationship between studio albums and live tours was that between a check and cash – “the former is merely a promise to deliver payment in the form of the latter,” arguing that prior to the 1980s, live performance “served as a living, breathing commentary on the music, rather than a stylized . . . presentation of the music” (Macan 2006: 185). The rider “prior to the 1980s” is vital, since the relationship is now widely agreed to have reversed (at least until the 2008 credit crash) – a rock show, at least at the more expansive (and expensive) end of the genre, exists to re-create, as far as possible, the sound of the album.
Whatever rock is considered to be, discussions which reference “authenticity” dominate the discourse. As it pertains to rock, authenticity is a highly complex concept, used in different ways depending on whether it is considered an “ascribed” (contingent, interpreted) or “inscribed” (inherent) value, on whether it is class-based, and on whether it is seen as a function of performance or of composition (in any of the various ways that happens in rock). The dominant view has long been that it is inscribed, and that it identifies either a personal integrity and an ideology of self-expression, or a commitment to the maintenance of particular (originary) practices (or both). It is this identification which has allowed numerous critics to pronounce its demise. (See Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000 in particular.) And yet it has refused to vanish from music discourse. Lawrence Grossberg (1992) broke with the monolithic view, arguing for three genre-specific authenticities: those of rock (founded in the romanticized ideology of community), of black genres (founded on the rhythmicized and sexualized body), and of self-conscious post-modernity (as in the Pet Shop Boys’ honesty in the acceptance of cynical self-knowledge). Johan Fornås (1995: 275–7) generalized this analysis, producing categories of “social,” “subjective,” and “meta-” authenticities, validated by communities, perceivers, and producers respectively, each of which has both conservative and progressive variants.
My approach has been to view authenticity (and other values) as always ascribed rather than inscribed, not only due to a Derridean mistrust of naturalist discourses, but also through a refusal to determine who has the authority to pronounce the presence of a particular value in the face of the varied experiences of other perceivers. This produces three authenticities – of expression, experience, and execution – depending on whether the music is experienced as authentic with respect to some aspect of the musician producing it, the listener(s) perceiving it, or an absent other involved in its history (for instance, its original writer) (Moore 2002). Taylor (1997), writing about “world musics” has developed a different, but not altogether unrelated, tripartite system. Kivy (1995) has also argued that there is not one authenticity (but probably three); however, the restriction of his sphere of reference to that tiny minority of music we call “classical” renders his arguments out of place here.
Here I raise questions about the way the presence of meaning is determined, the question of music’s emotional content, and the idea of meaning inherent in the use of lyrics. In some respects, the question of the understanding of rock replays that of understanding other music. First, of course, is the question “What’s to understand?” While many listeners listen to “classical” musics for their sensuousness alone, there is general recognition (I believe) that understanding of such musics is both possible and, on occasion, enlightening. With regard to rock, and partly resultant from its construction as a music of rebellion, there is no such recognition among most users and media commentators. In the academy, the understanding of rock was first pursued solely in terms of social function. It is only recently that questions of purely musical meaning have been broached. (For reasons of space, I take it for granted here that “purely musical meaning” is a meaningful descriptor, that music exists in and of itself aside from its perception; in some disciplinary contexts this position is denied.)
Most of the few attempts to understand musical detail in rock are either formalist or semiotic. Early work by Walter Everett exemplifies the former. In his study of the Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home,” he argues that as the song progresses there is a gradual divorce between the song’s “surface” (i.e. every element of detail we actually hear) and its “structure” (a widely hypothesized notional pitch-entity which, through rules of transformation, generates the “surface” in a way analogous to Chomskian grammar). This divorce “symbolize[s] the girl’s sought-after freedom from home, and ultimately, the distance symbolized by the ‘generation gap’” (Everett 1987: 12).
The main proponent of semiotic techniques for understanding the range of popular music has been Philip Tagg, who complains (following Umberto Eco’s proposal for an integrated semiotics) that most music semiotics is concerned with syntax, at the expense of semantics and pragmatics (Tagg and Clarida 2003: 51–6). Tagg’s classic study (1991), by observing the semiotic references at play in the musical detail, demonstrates that the protagonist of Abba’s “Fernando” deludes herself (and hence, propagandistically, us) into believing in her commitment to the revolutionary cause. Elsewhere, semiotics rarely addresses musical details (hence the general dominance of formalist analysis). Instead, valuable though they are, we are more likely to find studies such as Dave Laing’s of punk, which treats “all types of sign (written, spoken, sung, played, gestured)” (1985: ix) as equivalent in their act of signifying, or Barbara Bradby’s analysis of Buddy Holly’s “Oh Boy!” which reads the song as an enactment of the achievement of male adolescent independence (Bradby 2002). What is absent from any of this work, with the exception of Tagg’s, is adequate theorizing about method. Tagg adheres to explicit semiotic principles and invariably produces an interpretation, but he rarely addresses rock.
Disciplinary perspectives are relevant here: Tagg is a musicologist; Laing and Bradby are sociologists. But a particular disciplinary perspective does not entirely determine one’s view of rock. Although writing “[f]rom a sociological perspective,” Simon Frith seems to agree with Tagg, arguing that “[t]o hear combinations of sounds as music, it is necessary to know something about the conventional meanings of agreed musical elements” (1998: 109), their semiotic dimension, if you will. I am reminded here of Walter Watson’s (1993) elegant, exhaustive demonstration that the answer you get depends on the question you ask, but Frith at least implies that there is a right question. What is particularly interesting is that any reference to “rock” as such, while common in his earlier work (e.g. Frith 1984) is missing from this more recent study, and yet he devotes much space to sound structures encoded on a recording and properly instanced through playback of a copy of the recording. Edward Kealy (1982), another sociologist, agrees with the focus on the encoding of sound, but for him this is definitional of a much broader popular music aesthetic: he argues that as early as the 1970s, rock musicians took control of every stage of the recording process, in contrast to those uninterested in (or incapable of) doing so, people he called simply popular musicians. So, it seems that in order to explicate an understanding of how these sounds mean, it is necessary first to categorize them (an enterprise the grounds for which, as we have seen, are not agreed).
Surely, though, rock creates meaning primarily in the emotional sphere. This seems, after all, to be a principal reason why listeners choose to spend time with music. Emotional content is readily assumed of all rock but, surprisingly, it is rarely explicitly addressed. In discussions of its emotional sphere, rock is supremely cast as a music of the body, right from Elvis Presley’s earliest television appearances. Dick Bradley’s comments, while among the more measured, are quite typical. He privileges the Lacanian psychoanalytic term jouissance to refer to “the thrills, the shivering bursts of pleasure which we sometimes experience, perhaps sexual climax is its most intense or characteristic form. . . . Rock listeners experience – and know and recognize – jouissant pleasure in listening” (Bradley 1992: 117–18). Although Bradley’s analysis is careful, others’ are less so (as Grossberg’s use of a similar position above might suggest), and “the reduction of the rock body to sites of sexuality and little else” (Tagg and Clarida 2003: 71) has become a widely held assumption, due in large measure to the hold post-Lacanians maintain on contemporary cultural theory.
Both Tagg and Clarida (2003, esp. 66–73) and Frith have argued strongly against this construction. Frith problematizes the mind–body dualism as played out across a series of musics in order to undermine the simplistic equation of the rhythm of rock with the pleasures of (simulated) sex. He finds it “striking that the pleasures of rock music continue to be explained by intellectuals in terms of jouissance, the escape from structure, reason, form, and so forth. . . . [W]hat’s involved in such assertions is not a musical (or empirical) judgment at all, but an ideological gesture, a deviant expression of respectable taste,” concluding that “music is ‘sexy’ not because it makes us move, but because (through that movement) it makes us feel; makes us feel (like sex itself) intensely present” (Frith 1998: 144). Most prominent in Frith’s analysis here is recognition and critique of the desire, or even need, of critics who wish to affirm rock’s values to construct them as rebellious, or deviant in some way.
So far, I have equated the notion of “sound structure” with the “music” of rock. But what of its lyrics? After all, ask most of my students about the philosophy of music, and the question of meaning will figure highly in the answer. Ask the meaning of a song, and it is frequently reduced to the lyrics (and not even the lyrics as sung, but as they are posted on the internet). This position is countered in, for example, Moore (2005). There is little in the literature which attempts a philosophical overview of the subjects addressed in rock lyrics. Harris (1993) takes a very broad approach to repertory, addressing a range of themes: alienation, theology, hedonism, individuality, and idealism are particularly prominent. More specific studies address similar themes: theology, existentialism, postmodernity, identity, and the philosophy of language (Wrathall 2006, on U2); Nietzsche, existentialism, epistemology, ethics, and difference (Baur and Baur 2006, on the Beatles). Literature which demonstrates how these themes are instantiated as music is notable through its absence.
So, how do we know whether the music is any good? Most writing about rock (whether academic or not) makes implicit assumptions about value. Edward Macan, rarely among writers, is willing to be explicit about what these values might be. His procedure for evaluating the worth of the output of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer requires him to address “innovation and originality; historical significance [i.e. influence on contemporaries] . . .; compositional, arranging, and technical mastery; inter-album cohesiveness; conceptual depth . . .; production savvy” (Macan 2006: xxxiii). At one level, this is nothing more than a list, but it at least serves to organize those separate features that critics believe listeners (among whom are critics themselves, of course) can find of value. But rock, even if understood in a more limited fashion as a genre or style, is not monolithic. Wendy Fonarow, for instance, finds that the audience for “indie rock” (i.e. independent rock which first emerged from the industry shake-up initiated by punk, in the late 1970s) assesses that music through intertwined values she labels Puritan and Romantic. The Puritan encompasses a “distrust of authority, a preference for non-corporate, independently owned commercial operations, an avocation of simplicity in musical form, production, and style, a promotion of high moral standards regarding issues of sexuality and conduct, an emphasis on education, and an underlying theme of austerity and absence,” but “indie’s ideology expresses . . . contradictory values at every turn, demonstrating Romantic Bohemian youth still deeply embedded in a Puritan aesthetic moral system” (Fonarow 2006: 28, 183–4). Again, such detail about the values implicit in such broad categories of music is rare in the literature.
Frith argues for three forms of evaluative music discourse. The first, “the bourgeois art world [which] is the world of classical (or art) music,” and the second, “the folk music world [where] ideally, there is no separation of art and life,” are familiar enough; the third is “the commercial music world [whose] values are created and organized . . . around the means and possibilities of turning sounds into commodities” (Frith 1998: 36, 39, 41). This last certainly encompasses (“authentic”) “rock,” (“commercial”) “pop,” and the “popular.” What is interesting about these distinctions is that although Frith follows the assumption that they are style-related, they seem not necessarily to be so. A key marker of the first category is the “autonomy” acquired by a musician no longer subject to the necessity of making his or her mark. But we could say the same of artists such as Sigur Rós, or Robert Fripp, both of whom produce forms of rock music. John Covach’s exploration of the “formal types [which] apply to much of the rock repertory” (2004: 75) exemplifies the rather restrained approach to evaluation typical of this discourse. The second category is sought by many young audiences, and is found in the lack of separation between performer and audience common for many “local” performers (intimately known to their audience). This is by no means restricted to folk; where they are still to be found, pub rock acts and local club DJs exemplify this. As for the third, although rock musicians may fight against commercial pressures, most conform to them in terms of their use of management, record companies, large-scale (impersonal) tours, etc., particularly those musicians on the way to gaining a name. Recognition that these criteria of evaluation are not deeply tied to particular styles may open the way for individual listeners to recognize that their value system is under their own control, rather than being prescribed by a particular (sub-)cultural ideology. As such, this parallels the recent move from consideration of (prescriptive) musical subcultures toward less rigidly defined, even virtual, “music scenes” in the sociology of popular music. For the rock musician, I suspect that these evaluative categories may work as process: starting with Frith’s second category, a successful musician will be found to have moved through the third to the first.
This may seem an unsatisfactory way to conclude. Not only do we not really know what “rock” is, but there is also no more clarity about how to understand it, what it means, or how to determine whether it is any good. Indeed, as I have intimated throughout, the most illuminating contributions to its philosophy address particular limited, circumscribed areas. More than two decades ago, Alan Durant argued that we do not understand the detailed conditions of rock fully enough to enable us to generalize effectively. He called the then-current situation “one of outstanding contradiction and diversity of practice and belief” (Durant 1986: 119). In twenty-five years, nothing much seems to have changed.
See also Music and politics (Chapter 50), Popular music (Chapter 37), Sociology and cultural studies (Chapter 51), and Song (Chapter 40).
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