The Story of Rockism
How much influence do music critics really have?
About ten years ago, I was standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier with Kelefa Sanneh. From where we were standing, we could see downtown San Diego, where Comic-Con was happening. Every street was visibly choked with undulating masses of gooning, sunburnt redditors. As the plastic lanyards they all wore around their necks caught sunlight, they glittered, in aggregate, almost as much as the ocean.
Behind us, employees of a men's lifestyle website that no longer exists (I think it was called something like Dunk, Spliff, or Jones) were setting up a DJ booth. There was going to be a party on the aircraft carrier later on, and Kelefa had to cover it for a profile he was writing. I was the DJ's plus one, so we were both stuck there until the party was over. That meant he had nothing better to do than to stand around and talk shop with me for the duration.
Naturally, I quizzed him enthusiastically about every band and artist I could think of. Everything I'd grabbed from file-sharing networks but had absolutely no real-world context for. In any other situation, maybe I would have sounded like a name-dropping know-it-all, but on the carrier I was a pitiable novice. No matter what name I tossed out, whether it was Graveland or South Park Mexican, Kelefa deftly swatted it back with effortless finesse.
The most memorable thing he said to me, though, was not a response to one of my queries. It was more of an admonishment. At one point in the conversation, you see, I started getting too comfortable and talking like I would around my artist friends. I said something to the effect of "critics should use their influence responsibly." Some kind of "with great power, there must also come great responsibility" trip, but for album reviews. Artists love to hear that kind of thing. Kelefa, on the other hand, was more bemused. I think I remember him grimacing a little before saying something I found kind of shocking at the time. "Critics," he told me. "don't influence shit."
Once upon a time, the British empire spanned the entire world. In terms of the total amount of land it controlled, it was the largest empire in history. It included colonies on every continent, in every corner of the globe. That's why even now, no matter where on Earth you travel to, official signage usually includes English in addition to the local language. That all ended after World War II. The long-term consequences of Britain’s brutal conflict with Nazi Germany left them unable to maintain control over their many imperial conquests. India, for example, secured independence almost immediately, and decolonization only ramped up from there.
By the time the sixties rolled around, Britain was no longer a global seat of imperial power. The responsibility of running the world had been ceded to the United States, which meant that Britain was reduced to being just another bog-standard, regular-ass country. They weren't sending their own citizens out to occupy far-flung exotic locales on behalf of the crown anymore. Instead, they had begun to accept immigrants from places like the Caribbean and South Asia as equal members of British society.
In nineteen sixty-eight, a conservative member of parliament called Enoch Powell gave a speech about immigration at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham, England. Parliament was getting ready to pass a law that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, and Powell was very upset. He suggested that because Britain was allowing fifty thousand immigrants into the country every year, it was "a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre." Here is a recreation of the speech read by the Scottish actor Ian McDiarmid, who most people know as the guy who played Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars movies. A classic bit of typecasting, as it were.
Powell was giving voice to the concerns of constituents who could see that the glory days of the British empire were over, but were not yet ready to let go and allow something new to be built in its place. The viewed the decline of the empire and the arrival of foreign-born citizens as equally unwelcome developments that must somehow be connected, scapegoating immigrants for larger problems they couldn't possibly have caused. Right-wing media outlets like News of the World had already been stoking these sentiments for years before Powell's speech legitimized them, and media coverage of the speech inflamed the issue even further. This sort of resentment remains very popular in Europe even today, which is kind of wild when you consider how old most people in those countries are. Who do they think is going to staff up all their hospitals and nursing homes if they won’t let any immigrants in? AI?
Anyway, in the world of music, Powell's rhetoric found sympathetic ears in high places. Eric Clapton infamously ranted about immigrants onstage at a concert in Birmingham in nineteen seventy-six, allegedly shouting slogans like "vote for Enoch!" and "keep Britain white!" There were no phones in the audience to record any of it, so no precise transcripts of what slurs he used exist, but that was the basic gist. That same year, at a press conference in Stockholm, David Bowie told reporters that believed Britain "could benefit from a fascist leader" because "after all, fascism is really nationalism."
A number of artists and creatives became concerned that popular music was turning into a platform for bigotry and right-wing politics, so they formed an organization called Rock Against Racism in order to fight back. They staged a number of large events that they hoped would promote an alternative viewpoint, including one called the "Carnival Against the Nazis" in London's Victoria Park that was attended by eighty thousand people. Artists on the bill included Steel Pulse, X-Ray Spex, and The Clash. If you're interested in learning more about it, there's a very cool web page here with a lot of photos that looks like it dates back to the GeoCities era. The event itself looks like it was a great time.
The following year, though, the Conservative party defeated James Callaghan's Labour government at the ballot box and Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. Though Powell often directly criticized Thatcher throughout her tenure, she continued to count herself among his many loyal admirers until the very end. She stayed in power for a decade, and in so doing, changed Britain forever. Having tried to defeat the ascendant right wing and failed, British rock became listless and impotent. It hung around without purpose, festering like mold in the cracks of a broken system.
The term "rockism" was coined by a Liverpudlian post-punk musician called Pete Wylie in the early eighties. He played in a band called Wah, with an exclamation point, like the sound Mario makes when he does a spin attack. Not Wham. That was something different.
Wylie first introduced the rest of the world to the concept of rockism in an interview with the writer Paul Du Noyer that was published in the NME in January of nineteen eighty-one. On the surface, it was just a play on the name of Rock Against Racism, the name of the organization that leftist artists and musicians had established to oppose Powellite bigotry in the seventies. Throughout his interview with Du Noyer, however, Wylie brings up rockism too often for it to come off as a simple gag. The "race against rockism" he and his bandmates were engaged in was clearly a concept that he had spent a lot of time thinking about.
In order to understand what Wylie was really trying to say when he complained about "rockism," we have to look past his words and take a look at his circumstances. Especially if we're looking at this from a twenty-first century American perspective, the information contained in the music journalism of the time is insufficient. We need to zoom out a little bit.
In Britain, in the eighties, higher education was free. Not only were there no tuition fees, but your university would set you up with housing on your first day and your basic cost of living would be covered by what were called "maintenance grants." No student loans, and no working your way through college. You would finish high school, complete the relevant exams, and then apply to the university or art school of your choice. Once you were accepted, that was it. You moved out and spent the next four years completely focused on your own development, with all your basic material needs accounted for. If what that meant to you was playing in bands and going to shows, no one could stop you.
Wylie was a toddler when Beatlemania happened, and he arrived at the University of Liverpool just in time for the punk moment. Throughout his youth, then, he had experienced music as a series of massive culture shocks. Big waves that swept in periodically and shifted everything around. Obviously, students had been central to all of it. John Lennon attended the Liverpool College of Art. Mick Jagger went to the London School of Economics, and met Keith Richards at a train station while he was waiting to catch a ride to class over at the Sicdup Art College. John Lydon and Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols first met at Hackney College. Their manager Malcolm McLaren went to Goldsmiths, where he helped organize a music festival. The first Pistols gig took place at St. Martin's College of Art for an audience of students.
In nineteen eighty-one, Wylie was twenty-two, which meant that his school days were over, and he was naturally beginning to worry about when the next big wave was going to show up. The factories that had once powered Liverpool's local economy were sitting empty. Storied venues that dated back to the Beatles' Cavern Club days were shutting down. Surrounded by dilapidation and decline, Wylie felt a sense of great urgency when it came to his musical ambitions. If a career in the show business was going to happen for him, it needed to come together while he was still young enough to look the part and justify the lifestyle. Time was running out.
Wylie's "race against rockism," then, was personal, not ideological. He was not motivated by a zeal for social justice, like the leftists who had staged the Carnival Against The Nazis in Victoria Park. He wasn't worried about the rise of Margaret Thatcher or Enoch Powell. His concern was that British pop culture was moving too slowly to keep pace with the future that he and his friends were toiling in the trenches to create.
"Rockism" was the name Wylie came up with to describe the obstacle he felt like he kept coming up against. The agitators of the punk moment had threatened to make space for themselves in the world by taking a sledgehammer to the past, and Wylie had similar goals, but he tended to be more polite about them. The conversation he wanted to have about "rockism" was less of a diatribe and more of a negotiation. He wanted success, and was flexible about what he was willing to offer in return. "If rock is dead, then we're not a rock band," he told Du Noyer in his interview. "If it still has the potential to be an inspiring, exciting thing, then we are, y'know? It's that simple."
"Rockist," therefore, was how described any tradition or institution he was willing to sacrifice in order to secure his own position. He suspected the word "album" was rockist, and volunteered the idea that we should start calling them LPs instead. He wondered aloud if the word "gigs" was rockist, and suggested that "bookings" might sound better. Whatever it took to clean out pop culture's clogged-up arteries and get the new blood flowing in to replace the old.
"The only thing Wah is aiming at," he explained. "is giving people the feeling I got [when] I first heard The Clash, or even way back to the early Elvis, to get [that] buzz."
So, what exactly was rockism in material terms? What regressive force was stopping Wylie from giving audiences the the kind of thrills he experienced in his youth? Who was holding back the big wave? Was it music critics? Were they too fixated on the norms and conventions of the rock era to appreciate new ideas?
Well, no, actually. Professional music critics were Wylie's staunchest allies. Listening to loads of new records every week, as it happens, has a tendency to harden the ears, which makes critics the ideal audience for complaints about how contemporary music isn't novel or exciting enough. Critics are the reason Wylie got profiled in Britain's biggest music magazine in the first place. They were not who he was complaining about.
The writer Paul Morley, for example, may not have come up with the term "rockism" himself, but he'd been trying to articulate a similar idea in the pages of the NME even before Wylie's interview ran. In December of nineteen eighty, he published a piece that was ostensibly a profile of a band called ABC, but it read more like a manifesto against what he called "rock conservatism." Morley described this sinister force as an "iceberg" that was "taking centuries to melt."
Morley, Wylie, and ABC were all in unanimous agreement about who the real enemy was. Not critics like Morley, who mocked Jerry Garcia to his face and championed so-called "new pop" groups in the pages of Britain's biggest music magazine. Not the underground, which was teeming with iconoclastic pretenders thanks to free higher education and mandatory maintenance grants, some of whom even made decent records. No, the blame for Britain's "rockism" problem lay somewhere else entirely. Here's how Paul Morley put it in his profile of ABC:
"If there's a renovating return to an emphasis on style," he wrote. "to the tantalizing disciplines of the active, loquacious three-to-four minute song: if there are a thousand and one versions of the pop vision from Stray Cats to Cabaret Voltaire, if dance and excitement and gossip and neoteric demands are seeping back into fashion, you wouldn't know it through Radio One or TV pop."
In the eighties, BBC Radio One was not just the most popular radio station in Britain, it was the most popular radio station in all of Europe, with over ten million daily listeners. By "TV Pop," Morley meant Top of the Pops, which was the BBC's weekly chart show. It was typically seen by even more people than that. The NME's circulation, by comparison, topped out at a quarter million. Even if every single copy they printed was being read by multiple people, the overall impact of the music press paled in comparison to that of broadcast media.
In present day America, radio has been a consolidated, hyper-commercialized hellscape with very little curatorial heft for at least twenty years. Artists are much more likely to complain about review scores than the number of spins they're getting on terrestrial stations, and MTV hasn't really been in the business of playing music videos since they briefly suspended normal programming after the World Trade Center towers fell. As such, contemporary debates and history lessons about rockism tend to omit the role of broadcast media and cast critics in the role of the villain.
The original rockism discourse, however, revolved around radio and television. Specifically, it concerned the non-profit corporation that ran radio and television in the United Kingdom. Artists were mad because they weren't getting played enough, and critics were mad because the all-powerful tastemakers at BBC Radio One weren't taking enough cues from the NME. If there was a political subtext at all, it had nothing to do with racism or sexism. It had more to do with the idea that the existence of a public service media monopoly in Britain was stifling competition, making British popular music more boring than what was coming out of America's market-driven media ecosystem.
Speaking to historian Andy Beckett for his book Promised You a Miracle many years later, ABC's Martin Fry explained that in contrast to the dour, intellectual post-punk groups who used to dominate the underground, his band's goal was, above all, to compete. "Trying to compete was an old showbusiness idea," he said. "but I think it was also a prevailing mood. In Britain in eighty-one, it was just there."
From Fry's perspective, competition in the context of the entertainment industry was an old idea. It was something that the architects of the BBC had done away with in the service of their mission, which was to inform and educate as much as entertain. Radio One didn't even run advertisements, and nighttime DJs like John Peel often used it as a platform to expose the masses to willfully uncommercial music that would never have made it onto the airwaves in the United States.
From a certain point of view, it was fortuitous that UK bands like ABC developed such a lust for competition at the same time Thatcher and the conservatives came into power. The tories had ambitions to reform the BBC and force it to begin running ads. When Beckett confronted Fry and Morley thirty years later with the possibility that their position had aligned them with Thatcher rather than against her, as Rock Against Racism had been, they were uncomfortable with the implication.
"I always took it for granted," Morley said. "that anyone who was doing anything interesting in [music] was going to be of what we call the left. But we were living in a time when the left, obviously in a way, had failed. Political campaigns seemed to me fraught with problems. I was committed to ultimately the same ends as those who were more directly politically involved on the left. But I was more interested in the politics of the imagination. In trying to keep alive the spirit of the left through the art, through the way that a record sleeve was designed. The better works were going to encourage people to think about better things, to want a better world."
With the benefit of hindsight, it would be hard to argue that well-designed record sleeves benefited the left much. Morley was a massive Joy Division fan and perhaps their most enthusiastic champion in the UK music press, so the cover art for Unknown Pleasures is surely the sort of image he had in mind. If the ubiquity of that artwork has done anything to keep the spirit of the left alive, it doesn't seem to have been enough to arrest the rightward momentum that kept Thatcher in office so long. Nor did it prevent her successors in Tony Blair's Labour Party from following in her footsteps - it was them, after all, that first introduced mandatory tuition fees for all British students in nineteen ninety-eight.
On an individual basis, though, Wylie, Morley, and Fry did win their respective races against rockism. Wylie scored a minor hit in eighty-two with a song called "The Story of the Blues." Critical support for the tune came not from the BBC, but from Granada TV, a local independent station that exclusively served Northern England. Factory Records fans might know it as the station that Tony Wilson worked for in the late seventies, before the label got started. At that point in time, the typical British viewer would have had access to two BBC channels, one local independent channel like Granada, and a nationwide independent broadcaster called Channel Four.
ABC's Martin Fry found an even more effective stepping stone to chart success in the form of MTV, an American cable network that launched in August of eighty-one. At that time, UK artists had already been making promotional videos for years because Top of the Pops played them. While American labels adopted a wait-and see approach, refusing to spend any money on videos until they saw concrete proof of the medium's impact, UK labels were gleefully clogging up MTV's mailbox with all of the clips they already had lying around.
"Video Killed The Radio Star" by the Buggles was one obvious, early example of this dynamic in action. ABC's over-the-top visual for a song called "The Look of Love" was another. "We wanted to have a party, to show people having fun," Fry told Andy Beckett, reminiscing about the video's success. "MTV hammered it." The song went to number eighteen on the American charts, which was a level of success Fry could scarcely have imagined when Morley first profiled for the NME. The competitive, market-driven American media ecosystem proved to be much more receptive to what he was doing than the public service monopoly at home.
Strangely enough, even Morley himself managed to catch the wave. He learned all about MTV when he made a cameo in ABC's "The Look of Love" video, and then he left the NME in order to start a new record label called ZTT with Buggles member and aspiring pop producer Trevor Horn. The two of them put theory into practice and waged a guerilla war against "rock conservatism" through their work with Frankie Goes To Hollywood, with Horn producing the music and Morley crafting a marketing campaign that actively courted controversy. Their breakout single, "Relax," breached the top ten in America after receiving enthusiastic support from MTV. In Britain, the BBC intially refused to air the song's raunchy video, but it went to number one anyway, forcing the recalcitrant network to back down and allow the group to play Top of the Pops.
The broader left that Morley considered himself to be a part of may have lost ground, but individually, the anti-rockists won big. The iceberg of "rock conservatism" melted in the face of their competitive spirit. "A lot of the things that were happening in the nineteen eighties were benefiting me," Fry later told Beckett. "People were spending more money, more people were buying records after the dark end of the seventies. Our audience was changing, getting wealthier. British pop went around the world."
On Saint Patrick's day in nineteen seventy-nine, a very important gig happened at the Elks Lodge Hall in Los Angeles. On the bill was a diverse lineup of upstart talent that represented the full width and breadth of the west coast punk scene. It included X, the Go-Gos, the Wipers, and the legendary Chicano DIY outfit the Plugz, among others. Like Martin Fry, these bands wanted to compete. They were tired of punk being written off as a freak show by the media, and they were tired of the LA scene being overlooked in favor of London and New York. They wanted to show off a different side to the movement, and so, to that end, they organized what was to be the biggest west coast punk show since the Sex Pistols' legendary final show in San Francisco the year before.
It didn't work out like they'd hoped. The LAPD showed up in force and indiscriminately beat down everyone in the audience. The newspapers called it a riot, but those in attendance were just as likely to call it a massacre. This is how Chris Morris described it in his review of the gig for the LA Reader. The headline was “A New Wave of Police Brutality.”
As the Plugz were preparing to take the stage at around 11:30, the whip came down… I was standing in the downstairs lobby when the heat made their unexpected appearance. Perhaps 20 cops, in full riot drag, entered the front door. No general announcement was made, no reason offered for the intrusion… The long flight of stairs leading to the ballroom on the second floor was at this point lined with perhaps 200 kids sitting around and talking during the break between sets. The cops, nightsticks in hands, pushed their way to the top of the stairs and began, still without announcement or explanation, to push and beat the kids down the stairs and to the door. Screaming, shouting, crying, and confusion ensued. I moved out into the street immediately in front of the hall. Standing near the door, I heard people screaming that kids were being beaten inside. In the hall, cops had moved upstairs to clean out the auditorium.
Robert Vodicka, who ran New Alliance records in the late eighties, wrote his master's thesis on L.A. punk. According to him, "people in the scene almost universally agree that after the Elks Lodge show, the audiences became more violent." He quotes Black Flag's Chuck Dukowski as saying he felt "sold out by the bands at the Elks Lodge" and their "cooperative attitude." If rejecting negative stereotypes didn't stop the cops from bashing kids' heads in, why bother trying to compromise at all?
After the Elks Lodge riot, the police crackdown on LA punk continued. The cops shut down so many Black Flag shows that even the national media took notice of what was happening - in November of nineteen eighty, NBC's The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder sent out a camera crew to document a gig at the Baces Hall in East Hollywood. The venue owner called the cops before the show even got started, and the only violence the cameras managed to capture involved members of the LAPD's Rampart division descending on a crowd of punks after they were unceremoniously kicked out of a gig they'd been waiting for hours to see.
The program's producers invited Dukowski to participate in a panel discussion about what happened, where he described the LAPD as "a nazi movement" and explained that the their actions were part of an ongoing police campaign to pre-emptively shut down punk shows that had been going strong since the Elks Lodge show two years prior. Another panelist, who went by the name Daphne Vendetta, characterized this campaign as "history repeating itself," citing the Sunset Strip curfew riots of nineteen sixty-six and the moral panic that erupted after the initial outbreak of rock and roll during the fifties.
This kind of dubious publicity, bolstered by the release of Penelope Spheeris' documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, was the only real promotion Black Flag had access to. They tried to do a distribution deal for the release of their debut album with Unicorn, a subsidiary of MCA, only for MCA's president to pull out on the basis of his objection to the album's lyrics, which he described as "anti-parent." Local radio stations like KROQ turned their nose up at the local punk scene as well, preferring instead to platform imported music from the UK. To add insult to injury, even one of KROQ's star DJs, Richard Blade, was British. As the "new pop" being cooked up by the likes of Martin Fry, Paul Morley, and Trevor Horn went international, American punk went deeper underground.
Unable to mount gigs in their home city, Black Flag had no choice but to take their act on the road, using their mild national notoriety as an excuse to book shows in any town that would have them. They formed alliances with other misfits in the southwest, like the Minutemen, before venturing even further afield. The legend goes that for years, other bands looking to book national tours would literally follow in Black Flag's footsteps by looking up places they had played and calling up the same venues. Trading notebooks full of contacts during tête-à-têtes held in flophouses on tour, these bands knitted together their respective scenes into something bigger and more resilient. Some of the most promising acts Black Flag encountered, like Hüsker Dü and the Meat Puppets, even signed to their label, SST. Not ZTT. That was something different.
For much of the eighties, SST's operations were run by Joe Carducci. In a lot of ways, he was kind of like an inverted version of Paul Morley, each functioning as his scene's resident publicist-turned-philosopher. Instead of working with post-punk musicians who were shifting their ambitions toward the pop mainstream, Carducci worked with hardcore bands who eschewed radio and MTV in order to play defiantly uncommercial music in tiny venues. Instead of partnering with pioneers of electronic studio production like Trevor Horn, Carducci preferred to work with Black Flag producer Glenn Michael Lockett, better known as "Spot," who focused on representing the sound of live rock bands as accurately as possible on record. Instead of being a leftist with a soft spot for pop consumerism, Carducci was a right-wing libertarian with a soft spot for punks and misfits.
In nineteen ninety-one, Carducci published a book called Rock and the Pop Narcotic. It read as a manifesto for the American hardcore scene that blossomed in the dive bars and punk houses that the US underground retreated into after having been banished from the broadcast mainstream by new wave. The book defined rock as a sound that small bands with live rhythm sections developed on tour, a tradition that he traced back to Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys in the thirties. "Pop," in Carducci’s view, was a sinister force with heroin-like properties that included any sound cooked up in a studio rather than onstage. During the eighties, hardcore outfits like Black Flag shouldered the thankless task of keeping "rock" alive, while the pop and new wave coming over from Britain threatened to replace it with what Carducci dismissively referred to as "limey fag wave music."
Rock and the Pop Narcotic is not an easy read, which makes sense, because Carducci seemed to resent the obligation he felt to write it in the first place. Though he readily acknowledged that material support from radio DJs would have been much more consequential for Black Flag and the other bands he worked with, Carducci spends much of the book chastising professional music writers for not knowing enough about the history of American music, the differences between rock and pop, or the sacrifices that underground bands made in order to keep rock going. It almost reads like one big letter to the editor of rock crit writ large, a demand for corrections to a lifetime's worth of errors. It can feel like the literary equivalent of spending an entire hardcore show getting shoved around in the pit.
Anyone who picked up the book when it was released, though, would have quickly come to see it as prescient. One of the many underground bands Carducci name-checked as contemporary stewards of the rock tradition was Nirvana, who subsequently broke containment and brought the aesthetics and ethos of the American hardcore scene screaming into the pop mainstream. The slam-dancing that once prompted violent crackdowns from the LAPD became an accepted part of pop culture, and MTV quickly swapped out the colorful outfits and hairspray that eighties metal bands and UK new wavers had favored for the "grunge" look that had been percolating in the underground since The Decline of Western Civilization.
In America, for a time, it seemed as though Carducci had conclusively won the argument. Authenticity replaced showmanship as the coin of the realm. Rock bands who worshiped SST signings like Hüsker Dü and the Meat Puppets started setting all-time Billboard sales records, and widespread backlash against Milli Vanilli’s lip-synching suggested that the American record-buying public wouldn't willingly tolerate the replacement of live musicianship with studio trickery. The odd British export continued to find success in the US mainstream, but UK acts never again dominated the American market the way they had in the eighties. The chip Carducci had on his shoulder during all those years spent running SST from the trenches became a must-have accessory for the entire American youth culture of the early nineties.
Even after the Telecommunications Act of Nineteen Ninety-Six deregulated the radio industry and paved the way for the consolidation that rendered the medium culturally and curatorially impotent, the battle between rock and the pop narcotic continued to play out on MTV during the late nineties. Every day, legions of teenagers would call into Total Request Live in order to show support for one faction in a war for pop culture supremacy against the other. Californian nu-metal bands did battle against a coterie of manufactured pop groups that favored electronic production and broke through in Europe well before they caught on stateside. Once MTV started shifting towards reality television, it still found a way to pay lip service to the old eighties DIY underground when Jackass debuted with the Minutemen's "Corona" as its theme song.
In two thousand one, Michael Azzerad published Our Band Could Be Your Life, a book about the eighties underground that heavily focused on Black Flag and the Minutemen, among others. It quoted liberally from Rock and the Pop Narcotic but sanded down that book’s rough edges in order to present the scene in a more aspirational light, which made sense for that moment in time. When Carducci wrote his book, Black Flag’s long march across the United States had looked more like a doomed war of attrition, but Nirvana’s breakthrough had given the story a happy ending. At least, that’s how it probably felt at the time. Readers who devoured Azzerad’s book and longed to relive the exploits detailed within loved to wonder aloud about when the next Nirvana would arrive to claim Kurt Cobain’s empty throne and bring the scene back to life. It was rockism with a millenarian edge.
The second coming never happened, though. The pop narcotic had a bullet in the chamber that could kill even the fiercest, most unreasonable strains of rockism stone dead. It wasn't critics, radio, or even television. It was a force much stronger and less compromising than even the police that had forced Black Flag out of Los Angeles. Though the zine-makers, van-dwellers, and slam-dancers of the eighties had managed to find ways eke out a living just beyond the reach of this new enemy, the aughts would prove to be different. No musical institution was safe.
In nineteen ninety-eight, Ricky Martin's "Livin' La Vida Loca" became the first Billboard Number One ever to be mixed entirely "in the box," using a Digital Audio Workstation. That same year, Cher's "Believe" introduced the masses to Antares Auto-Tune, a digital pitch correction tool for vocalists, by tweaking the settings to extremes as a stylistic choice. The runaway success of these records heralded a world in which consumer-grade personal computers - not traditional instruments or analog recording gear - would become the fundamental building blocks of all popular music. That's the world we live in now.
The live, full-band approach to rock music that Joe Carducci had so fervently championed became an economic liability almost overnight. What did it matter what live rhythm sections sounded like onstage if it were possible to make hits by dragging and dropping different recordings on top of one another with the click of a mouse? Why bother with the band format at all when one person working with digital tools could create the same sort of product that used to require a group of specialists? What kind of sense did it make to split the royalties five ways when the charts were full of acts that had successfully replaced drummers with loops?
In Britain, the BBC's public service monopoly meant that at one point in time, there really were a bunch of eggheads in a room somewhere whose job it was to decide what sort of music was suitable for mass consumption. When Pete Wylie, Paul Morley, and Martin Fry raged against "rockism," they were waging war against those eggheads. America is different. The American mainstream has always been defined by competition, not elite consensus. As soon as it became clear that small bands playing electrified instruments could sell just as many tickets as the big bands of the jazz age, the big band era was effectively over. As soon as it became clear that producers with computers and auto-tune could sell just as many records as small bands and trained vocalists, authenticity was yesterday's news.
When New York Times music critic Kelefa Sanneh wrote "The Rap Against Rockism" in two thousand five, he was confused about the backlash he'd been witnessing against Ashlee Simpson since a botched performance on Saturday Night Live had made it clear to the entire country that she relied on pre-recorded backing vocals during her live shows. He wondered why anyone cared enough to slag her off as a phony at a time when basically all popular music of any sort was employing some sort of digital sleight-of-hand. After all, the unmistakable sonic footprint of Antares Auto-Tune had become just as much a fixture of mainstream rock as grungy distortion ever had been.
Unlike Wylie and Morley, Sanneh's beef with rockism didn't really have anything to do with radio or television. He wasn't concerned that rock was too popular, because it wasn't, really. Pop had conclusively won the TRL wars of the late nineties, and sleek, digitally-produced rap and R&B was commercially ascendant. Sanneh seemed annoyed that intellectuals didn't seem to have caught up with these developments. He bristled at a New York Times book review that insulted Mariah Carey in order to praise Nirvana. He rolled his eyes at a VH1 special that backhandedly complimented "Oops! Oh My" by Tweet by describing it as "awesomely bad." He derisively noted that the most recent "music issue" of The Believer, a literary journal with a peak circulation in the low five figures, was focused entirely on indie rock.
In substance, "The Rap Against Rockism" read less like an update of Wylie and Morley's tirades against the BBC and more like a direct follow-up to Carducci's book. In the years since it had been published, the American market had moved on from rock and enthusiastically embraced the pop narcotic. What was the point of continuing to fetishize authenticity when authenticity had essentially vanished from the mainstream? Why worry about whether or not Avril Lavigne can play guitar when all the audience really seems to care about is whether or not she has bangers? Clearly all of the critics he singled out were still choosing to engage with modern music rather than retreat from it in disgust the way Carducci had, so why were they still trying so hard to sound punk?
What Sanneh's piece did have in common with the eighties rockism discourse was that it functioned as a full-throated defense of market competition. "To glorify only performers who write their own songs and play their own guitars," he wrote. "is to ignore the marketplace that helps create the music we hear in the first place, with its checkbook-chasing superproducers, its audience-obsessed executives, and its cred-hungry performers. To obsess over old-fashioned stand-alone geniuses is to forget that lots of the most memorable music is created despite multimillion-dollar deals and spur-of-the-moment collaborations and murky commercial forces. In fact, a lot of great music is created because of those things."
Market competition, of course, didn't really need a champion. Rockism as Sanneh defined it was not long for this world regardless of whether or not he ever put pen to paper on the subject. If any of the grungy indie rock hipsters I used to hang around with back then still cared about whether or not artists wrote their own songs and played their own instruments when "The Rap Against Rockism" first ran, we all stopped the second we heard "Since U Been Gone" by Kelly Clarkson, which took everything we liked about Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and married it to an actual chorus you could sing along with. American market competition was too much for even the mighty BBC monopoly to resist. It was never going to need an assist from any critic to clean up whatever vestigal remains of Carducci-era rockism still clung to life in soon-to-be-closed record stores and the offices of niche literary journals.
By singling out rockist critics for scorn in the pages of the paper of record, though, Sanneh may have given readers the impression that critics' opinions matter more than they actually do. In the years that followed the piece's publication, many pundits have cited it as the point of origin for an ideology they call "poptimism," which they claim has now become the dominant way of thinking about music in critical circles. The phrase “poptimism was a mistake” functions as kind of a rallying cry for folks who overestimate the impact that critical praise for modern, celebrity-driven digital pop has had on popular culture writ large.
Kelefa Sanneh didn’t invent Pro Tools or Auto-Tune, though. He just pointed out something that should have been obvious: American music is a market, where you succeed by making hits, not by being virtuous. Nirvana had succeeded where bands like the Replacements had failed because they made compromises the eighties underground had been unwilling to make. They made music videos for three-minute pop singles with big, melodic choruses. Just like ABC and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, they decided to compete. There’s no room full of eggheads sitting around making decisions about who gets to be successful based on who they think deserves it the most. There are just hit songs. Critics don’t influence shit.
When Carducci complained in his book that so-called rock critics weren’t rigorous enough in their analysis of popular music, he was right. Genre descriptors, for example, are absolutely meaningless in music, especially when compared to categories with a material basis, like radio formats. Spotify fired the one guy in their employ who believed real-world expertise about genres and scenes was critical to the way their recommendation algorithm works over a year ago, and they have continued to add subscribers without issue. The official position of the only company that actually has the power to make decisions about this kind of thing right now seems to be that all of that shit was made up and that they can recommend music to people more effectively by focusing on harder metrics, which they have plenty of access to given that they’re a surveillance platform. It turns out that if you really want to learn how music works, the best play is to ignore all of the stuff people say about it to entertain themselves and track their listening instead.
Being rigorous, to Carducci’s obvious dismay, has never been critics’ job. Deciding what style of music ought to be the most popular has never been their job, either. Music critics are entertainers. They sell stories, which do well in the market when they make people feel good. Their profession is just as much about chasing hits as the “checkbook-chasing superproducers” and “audience-obsessed executives” that Kelefa Sanneh talked about in “The Rap Against Rockism.” As the legacy institutions of the print era continue to dissolve in the democratized, metrics-driven acid bath of the social internet, it becomes clearer and clearer that it never actually mattered whether or not the stories are true.
The narrative that rock is a higher form of art than pop was a product. It found purchase in the mainstream during an era where rock bands were very competitive in the market, and then faded away when a new wave of music created by producers with laptops made Carducci-style rockism economically untenable. Hit songs are what kept the crowd from wandering off to check out whatever was happening at the other festival stages. The narrative that critical “poptimism” is to blame for seismic shifts in the sound and culture of popular music is a product, too. It proliferates not because it describes something that actually happened, but because it makes people feel good.
Part of that is probably the internal resistance a lot of folks feel towards what John Maynard Keynes called “capitalism as a way of life.” The BBC’s public service monopoly came into existence during an era where Keynes’ ideas about economics were dominant. Back then, the prevailing view was that there should be a room full of eggheads somewhere that had the authority to make decisions about how society ought to be organized. The notion that human beings who care about virtue and values are steering the ship rather than buyers and sellers in a market is comforting to a lot of people. It can be difficult to accept evidence that suggests this is not the case. The narrative that critics have misused their influence comforts those who want to believe that experts are in charge.
As far as music is concerned, there is no better example of this dynamic in action than Pete Wylie, who took every opportunity he could to complain about BBC Radio One DJ John Peel during the eighties, only to eventually come around and go out of his way to eulogize Peel after his passing in two thousand four. As frustrated as Wylie may once have been with his country’s cultural institutions, he never actually wanted to live without them. He just thought they could be better. That there was some way for the thrills and novelty of the American market-driven system to co-exist with the BBC’s ad-free public service monopoly. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too. No wonder the word “rockism” stuck around for twenty years. People like stories about how they can have their cake and eat it too.
Speaking of which, the word “poptimism” doesn’t actually appear anywhere in “The Rap Against Rockism.” As far as I can tell, it actually started popping up in posts by Mark Fisher quite a bit earlier. He was having lively arguments with various critics, both amateur and professional, in the comments section of his blog almost a year before Sanneh’s piece went to press. Kelefa was actually a fairly late entrant to a conversation that had been happening online without him for some time, and his take was much less strident and ambitious than what a lot of his peers had to say. I think the primary reason people make such a big deal out of his contribution is just that he was the best writer to weigh in on the subject. Kelefa is the GOAT, and his work is simply just more pleasurable to read than anyone else’s. “The Rap Against Rockism” still goes down just as smoothly today as it did when it was published, which is not a claim I think anyone would make about most of the messy, spiky, painfully of-the-moment takes that followed and preceded it.
I think that rather than crediting “The Rap Against Rockism” with kicking off the poptimism discourse, it makes more sense to look at it as the final chapter in the story of rockism. A pithy, mildly disrespectful send-off to a conversation that had reached a natural conclusion. An argument that began in the eighties with Wylie and Morley, continued into the next decade via Carducci and Azzerad, and then ended definitivelyy with the advent of digital production in the aughts. The story of poptimism is a different thing. Perhaps I’ll get around to telling it some other time.
Appreciate the time and energy that went into this. This seems to be the crux: "That there was some way for the thrills and novelty of the American market-driven system to co-exist with the BBC’s ad-free public service monopoly."
I guess my feeling about the pushback to poptimism isn't so much that people actually think the critics caused it, it's more that they long for a world that's less market-oriented, and think the critics were wrong to embrace the aesthetics of pop without realising they were also embracing the market as such. Capitalism crowds out other ways of life. In the words of Terre Thaemlitz, "there has to be more than the sale." So it's not that people think "human beings who care about virtue and values are steering the ship" -- does anyone look at our world and think that? -- but that they'd like a bit more space for virtue and values, maybe?
insanely fucking good piece wow