Roger Scruton would have hated The Replacements’ “Unsatisfied” (Let It Be, 1984) had he known the song. I do not know for sure that he did not, but given the bands offered as examples in “Youth Culture’s Lament,” I strongly suspect that these Minneapolis misfits were well beyond Scruton’s mastery of the music he was criticizing. No matter how much we may disapprove of Nirvana’s commercial appeal, someone who mentions Nirvana and Hanson in the same sentence or Nirvana and the Spice Girls in the same article, could never know anything about The Replacements. Even so, we can still see how this song in particular would fall under his criticism, one that is as capable of an accurate and perceptive description of rock music as it is completely misguided in its interpretation of the intentions and purposes behind it. “Unsatisfied” is all about the disease Roger Scruton diagnoses in “Youth Culture’s Lament,” an essay published in the City Journal’s issue of Autumn 1998. According to him, this new human type called the youth, created in modern times, has its own culture and “at its center is a void, which it continually tries to fill, without success, and continually bemoans, with characteristic inarticulateness.” An idea Paul Westerberg puts simply in the most literal terms ever: “I’m so unsatisfied.” Only to insistently scream it against whoever may try to convince him of otherwise, probably with the covert intention of selling a product or an ideology which would fill the void: “Look me in the eye and tell me that I’m satisfied.” And, by returning the accusation, remember that we are all made of this same emptiness: “Are you satisfied?” Scruton believes the problem is in the willful denial or unfortunate unattainability of a sophisticated way of life capable of offering young people the means to clearly think and express themselves, accusing theirs of being “a culture that treats articulate utterance as a capitulation to the adult world.” The growling would be due to the lack of a proper language, venting the frustration with it: “behind the anarchic words another message is encoded, a message that resides not in what is said but in what is not said, in what cannot be said, since the means of saying it have never been supplied.” I believe Scruton misses the point here, something he is usually guilty of whenever talking about modern art. What he calls inarticulateness is just a very different way of articulating not only human experience in general but that same experience at a given time in history. One he dislikes so much he could never care enough to understand. Not only does The Replacements’ vocalist know very well what void is he talking about, explaining how this unsatisfaction consists in that “everything you dream of / is right in front of you / and everything is a lie”; as he is part of a particular form of art that, by having his breathless scream recorded for posterity, has created one of the most effective and unique means of articulating a voracity no finite thing seems to satisfy, no matter how young or old one is.
Scruton’s critique of pop music
“Unsatisfied” is guilty of most faults Scruton finds with pop music. “Repetition” is, in every sense, “the principal device” used in its composition. As to the percussive sounds having little or no relation to anything else that is happening (has Scruton never heard of math-rock? Don Caballero’s What Burns Never Returns had just been released when his article was published), I suppose one is always free to interpret the drums syncopated work in the song, not as a counterpoint to the guitar, but as sheer disconnection. Its pop melody is definitely “assembled from curt phrases, with little internal variation or prolongation and no modulation but only unprepared changes of key.” Because of its acoustic nature, “Unsatisfied” escapes Scruton’s criticism of the electric guitar, “a machine, which distorts and amplifies the sound, lifting it beyond the realm of human noise.” He obviously knew nothing of shoegaze or he would have presented My Bloody Valentine as a case in point. The closest he gets to this genre wiped out by grunge and Britpop is when he mentions The Verve, but it is clear that he has only listened to their pop singles, quoting from “The Drugs Don’t Work.” Because there is no greatest evidence than Kevin Shields’ famous wall of sound that “if a machine could sing, it would sound like an electric guitar,” as Scruton somewhat tritely says. He goes on to add, a little more insightfully, that “so-called techno-music, assembled electronically from a store of recorded and processed sound effects, literally is the voice of the machine.” He could almost be referencing Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noise (1913) when observing that “in such music, we encounter the background noise of modern life — the buzz of traffic, the clamor of airplanes, the whirr of the automated teller machine.” But, if no electric guitars can be heard in “Unsatisfied,” there is no lack of noise with Westerberg hoarsely shouting until he goes out of breath and voice. And there is no doubt that the song “treats the harmonic dimension of music purely vertically, as a sequence of chords.” There is no recognizable polyphony, no idea that “chords are composed of notes that stand in horizontal relations to one another and therefore should sing like separate voices.” Of course, Scruton is again neglecting, out of ignorance, post-punk, new wave or post-hardcore bands such as Television, Mission of Burma, The Talking Heads, Fugazi or Pavement, math-rock bands from the more virtuosic Don Caballero or Battles to the emo-oriented American Football or post-rock bands as diverse as Slint, Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Interpol. In these bands, chords are built out of guitars (or other instruments) interlocking their melodic lines. It is one of punk’s many strategies for avoiding hard-rock guitar heroism, ensuring that none of the guitars survive alone. But since these are all more progressive forms of rock, achieved by stretching acoustic blues, rock’ n’ roll or punk hardcore toward either jazz, classical or avantgarde music, Scruton’s critique stands valid. As to pop music’s tonality issues, “Unsatisfied” is the perfect example:
Modern pop rarely comes to a conclusion. The music bursts out, repeats itself, and then fades away. Lacking any harmonic movement of its own, it cannot move toward anything—certainly not toward anything that requires careful preparation, like a cadence. There is, to put it another way, a lack of musical argument—a lack, indeed, of musical thought.
Finally, “Unsatisfied” is guilty of pop music’s major sin, that of having the singer, rather than the song, be the focus of attention. Paul Westerberg is “projecting himself and not the melody, emphasizing his particular tone, sentiment, and gesture,” “the croaks and the groans with which he delivers it become the central features of the melodic line, and the song’s distinguishing feature.” Scruton cleverly notices that “when the accompaniment is deprived of any melodic organization and reprocessed as noise,” “the singer stands revealed exactly where the music should be—in stark contrast to the tradition of classical performance, in which the singer is the servant of the music, hiding behind the notes he produces.” And more cleverly still, Scruton draws the conclusion that, if “until recently, the song has been detachable from the performer, it has been a musical entity that makes sense in itself,” now “modern pop songs are put together so as to be inseparable from the group.” In fact, whatever rare covers of “Unsatisfied” there are, they are sensible enough to keep the singing while leaving the screaming out (just listen to Calexico’s version on their Maybe On Monday EP). I do not know if Sunny Day Real Estate have gone through with their promise of playing the song during this year’s reunion tour: “That song totally encapsulates the Sunny Day experience. Never in the history of Sunny Day Real Estate have we covered a song live. But we’re going to play ‘Unsatisfied’ at some point during this tour” (Condran). But they might have been the only ones to pull the shouting off, managing to sound like themselves instead of just pathetic. Truth is, while Scruton’s description of rock songs’ non transferability is spot on, it fails to find an explanation that would highlight the value of this central aspect of rock music. It is the purpose of this essay to succeed where Roger Scruton, driven by his unsympathetic look at modern art, willingly failed.
Is it music? Rock’s lack of musical structure
Scruton may be right when questioning whether rock can be considered music. The criteria he presents in the article that rock fails to meet, all presuppose classical music as the standard in this art form, with jazz and folk still fitting the category as defined by it. Scruton ultimately accuses rock songs of having no internal logic and being non-transferable. The reason why pop music cannot even be considered folk is that it cannot be abstracted into something which could be interpreted by others, and become the public property of a community: “Pop fans therefore find themselves deprived of one of the most important gifts of traditional folk music—the gift of song. It is almost impossible to sing the typical pop song unaccompanied and still make musical sense. The best you can do is to impersonate the idol during karaoke night.” It seems true that rock’s songs and composition techniques reveal a certain primitivism or outright simplicity. When it comes to punk, such lack of proficiency is even either proudly assumed (at least feigned) or actively looked for. No Wave is one of the earliest and most extreme cases of the latter tendency. As punk waned in New York, with its main bands—Television, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith—spending most of their time out of the city touring, a new scene emerged circa 1977, in the Lower East Side, with its major players coming mostly from film, poetry, experimental theater or the visual arts, such as multimedia, painting or sculpture. Reacting against punk and New Wave, influenced by various avantgarde movements from Dadaism to Pop Art and their art college background, No Wave bands shared the modernist impulse “to sever all connections with rock tradition” and, unlike the more conservative early punk, “defined radicalism not as a return to roots but as deracination” (Reynolds 51). Dissing punk as no more than “sped-up Chuck Berry riffs,” this revolt was achieved not by refusing, but subverting and deconstructing the standard rock format of guitar, bass, and drums. James Chance (The Contortions), Lydia Lunch (Teenage Jesus & The Jerks) or Arto Lindsay (DNA) explored ways of playing these instruments that would lead to a chaos of startling sounds anchored only in the vaguest suggestion of a groove. Despite his conservatory education, when James Chance started his band, he made sure no one had ever played their instruments before, because “people who can’t play have more fresh ideas” (63). Even so, The Contortions’ music retained at least some kind of tonal center, being written on a key, even if it had no chord structures. That was not the case with Mark Cunningham from Mars, who did away with unified tempo and then tonality, exploring “detuning the guitar, retuning within songs, having the tuning be mobile” (59). And DNA’s songs “often seemed to disassemble themselves in front of the listener’s ears,” with Lindsay playing his twelve-string Danelectro guitar, not for melodic, folky arpeggios and finger-picking, but as a rhythm instrument, “chipping out a scrabble of texture shards, like scrambled Chic” (65). This revolutionary effort has been indelibly documented by the Brian Eno’s produced No New York (1978). If this album, together maybe with Buy (James Chance & The Contortions, 1979), remains the only durable outcome of the whole scene, it is because No Wave was closer to performative art than it ever was to music, with sound being just an aspect of the overall event. “Music was just a particular tool to get across the emotional impact; if spoken word had been more readily available in the late seventies, I’d have done that,” said Lydia Lunch (57). Live shows were an opportunity to “shatter physically the performer/audience barrier, to turn a spectacle into a situation, spectators into participants” (52), with Chance eventually entering into bloody fights with members of the public. Hardcore bands from Black Flag and Dead Kennedys onwards would soon excel at this aspect of live performances. These are obviously limit cases, and Sonic Youth would eventually channel the chaotic impulse of No Wave into the genesis of noise-rock, a genre capable of incorporating within a musical framework these less structured and more improvised ways of creating sound. But such cases help seeing just how sharp is Scruton’s observation that rock songs are primitive to non-existent, since they can so easily become a fleeting and irreproducible event, be little more than the histrionic acting of a performer.
In Rip It Up and Start Again, discussing the No Wave scene, Simon Reynolds explains how its bands shunned not only electronics but also “the sound-warping possibilities of the recording studio” as an experimental road, investing instead in the live event, “playing in a small club at overwhelming volume” (52). Other bands and genres have preferred to explore the recording dimension of rock as a way to, depending on the perspective, move outside the realm of rock or expand the general understanding of what counts as rock music. Reacting to the label “post-rock” attached to Tortoise, Jeff Parker, who had not yet replaced Bundy K. Brown as one of the band’s guitarists, explained that the problem he had always had with the term was its need to reduce rock music to clichés in order to have any application. But for Parker, “rock music, it was never just about three chords or no rhythm” (Leech 213). How rock should be defined and whether or not it is music, if by the latter one understands something continuous to classical, will obviously depend on the perspective. Although Scruton perceptively pinpoints some of rock’s major features, because he speaks from the point of view of an outsider, with little knowledge of the practice he is criticizing, he ignores how, from within that practice, rock can be variously defined by musicians, journalists or historians, with every definition heading creation into different, even usually opposite directions. Scruton has no issues mixing Nirvana and Oasis with Hanson and the Spice Girls, never acknowledging how different grunge and Britpop nevertheless are from the pop commercialism of the latter two, but considering it the same simply because they are all famous and idolized by mainstream youth. From an insider’s point of view, however, they are all distortions of a legitimate art form. Listing Tortoise’s ten greatest songs for Paste Magazine, Alexander Heigl has little need to justify why “Djed” ranks first place, since this “monumental achievement,” this “fully-realized work that’s practically a mini-history 20th century avant-garde music” is universally recognized, within the field, as one of post-rock’s masterpieces. What is surprising is the context it emerged in: “That this came out in a year dominated by ‘Wonderwall’, ‘Wannabe’, the Fugees’ ‘Killing Me Softly’, and the fucking ‘Macarena’ still blows my mind. This band was so far ahead of its time, we’re still catching up to them now.” From within, although Oasis and the Spice Girls still show up in the same sentence, there is something called rock—Tortoise—that is different from either of them. Scruton could be accused of falling into the straw man fallacy had he not noticed those relevant aspects that both cases, artistic rock music and shallow pop industry, ultimately share.
Tortoise was only one of the myriads of bands or projects resulting from the shifting collaboration of a group of Chicago or Chicago-related composers and multi-instrumentalists, most of them coming from a music college background. David Grubbs, John McEntire, Bundy K. Brown, Jim O’Rourke and others ended up working together in a set of bands that crossed post-hardcore, most evident in Bastro, the first of these projects, with the Chicago electronic and hip-hop scene of the mid-nineties. Thanks to McEntire’s enrolling in the Oberlin’s Technology in Music and Related Arts program and the contact with both Chicago’s and London’s dub, reggae and drum and bass scenes, their particular brand of post-rock moved from the more quiet, slow-paced and acoustic experiments of Gastr del Sol, as seen in Crookt, Crackt, or Fly (1994) or in The Serpentine Similar (1997), to the bubbling electronic collage of Tortoise. Jeanette Leech, in Fearless, extensively quotes John McEntire explaining the creative process behind “Djed,” from their classic Millions Now Living Will Never Die (1996), how it grew out of finding ways to glue together numerous fragments, unrelated in tempo or key:
While in Vermont, Tortoise had lots of fragments along with more cohesive tracks. “Doug came up with the intro bit, and he had the krautrock section, too,” John McEntire says of what was to become “Djed”. “And then I came up with the organ mallet thing. And we didn’t know if they were going to develop more substantially into their own things. Or how to treat them. So, I don’t know, maybe we had the idea when we were there that we would make a kind of collage with the stuff that’s not really related and that we didn’t have to put a whole load of pressure on ourselves to actually write more stuff. We would just use those fragments as seeds for extrapolating as much material as we could without being too heavy-handed about it. It was really fun and interesting to put that together because we just recorded the sections all separately, and I’d do a mix of something, and then I’d do an alternate mix, and a third alternate mix, and so then we had all these things that were still existing in their own world. Then it was a matter of figuring out how to make the transitions. And that was kind of a painstaking process ... OK, these things are totally unrelated, in tempo, in key, you know ... so it was like, there was one part where I had to vari-speed the tape down so it would match the tempo of the next section, and weird stuff like that. It was definitely a learning experience.” (218)
This piecemeal, collage approach to composition, along with the incorporation of found sounds in song texture that electronics and recording techniques allow for has rock music veering into the realm of atonality. The focus of attention becomes, not what Scruton calls “harmonic movement” or “musical argument,” but isolated notes within their surrounding soundscapes, an experience more properly cinematic than musical. Leech explains how this music is “vertical”: “it tended to explore the ‘colour’ of sound, the timbre. The plethora of sounds layered and interlocked to draw attention to harmonic differences, with less emphasis on the ‘horizontal’ melodic line” (208). She claims that “it rejected expected structure (although it could still be highly structured), and did not move laterally from stage to stage” (207), again confirming the assembling nature of rock’s composition method identified by Scruton. By taking the studio as instrument to its limit, this music can turn out impossible to perform live or at least in its studio version. It is not at all unfeasible, especially at the end of the more guitar-oriented post-rock music, as the legendary Battles’ rendition of “Atlas” on the Later…with Jools Holland show (9th of November of 2007) very well proves. But even with such instances as “Djed,” of which Tortoise sometimes play a shorter, stripped version in concerts, it is still viable. The limiting case here might be Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, that Mark Hollis refused to perform live. One can see why he would:
[Hollis] believed that ‘the first time that something is played, it is at its finest’, so participants were given a basic chord structure and then left to it. To overcome the inherent practical problem in this—that the vast majority of improvisation is ‘rubbish’, to use Hollis’s own word—pruning and arrangement was paramount. Over forty musicians were employed for Laughing Stock. Fewer than half of them are actually heard on the album. Of those, often only sections of their performances were saved, rather than the whole, and sometimes just orphaned individual notes. Hollis reckoned that, for every minute of music on the album, an hour’s worth was discarded. Those flecks populate and charge Laughing Stock, dislocated from their context, fragmentary and disorienting on one hand, imperceptibly sutured on the other. (Leech 97)
What captivated Hollis were certain particular instances of musical sound, events that occurred during the improvisation happening in the studio. The final composition resulted then from the isolation, assemblage and stitching of such events. This means that no other iteration or interpretation of them will do, for whatever the meaning Hollis intended to convey with Laughing Stock, it was tied to those particular tokens of sound and not their types. Here it is not only from the singer that the song is undetachable. In this case, there is just nothing to abstract from that particular thing that the album is, no detachable pattern those sound creations could be instances of. The only way to perform those songs is by playing the record again. Interestingly, by following the opposite road of experimenting with rock’s recording dimension, we have arrived at the same end point as No Wave’s investment in the live show—rock music as a one-time, unique event, where meaning is attached to an irreplaceable particular instance.
Is it music? Rock’s collapse of the distinction between song and performer
Scruton claims, and this remains his strongest accusation against pop music, that the singer projects himself by enhancing the contingent and theatrical aspects of the delivery instead of serving the melody. It is true that this is a common practice in rock music and that what characterizes its greater vocalists is not the ability to sing but having an unmistakable timbre, expressing certain emotions and finding a distinctive performing style. In fact, various iconic rock singers, especially in folk and punk, sometimes (when not always) sang out of tune. In an interview to R.E.M.’s frontman, Michael Stipe, discussing the band’s cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning,” the journalist comments on how Nico “wasn’t exactly the most pitch-perfect vocalist,” with which Stipe agrees, saying that “she sang out of tune” (Roberts). Stipe goes on listing various singers guilty of the same fault, beginning with the classic example of Bob Dylan (who, truth be told, maybe more than singing off-key just generally had a bad, hoarse voice, very much like Tom Waits). But then, advancing the case of Cindy Wilson from the B-52’s, Stipe notices how she “sings a little flat, and that adenoidal, raw beauty is a huge part of her appeal as a singer.” Here we see surfacing the different criteria rock has from classical music for what counts as a good singer. These criteria are not simply misguided or arbitrary but are sustained by reasons, and Stipe immediately explains the relevance of Cindy Wilson’s way of singing: “It lends a humanity to the performance that you’re not going to get with a professional singer who hits every note.”
An extreme case of this might be Beat Happening. The band was responsible for creating, in the eighties, the entire new genre of twee pop. Not only do we have Calvin Johnson’s K Records to thank for such albums as The Microphones’ The Glow Pt. 2 (2001), as his band opened up an entire field within punk which thrives to this very day. Indie-folk and bedroom pop singer-songwriters from Alex G and Frankie Cosmos to Julien Baker or Phoebe Bridgers are among the few rock musicians to find critical support in a world nowadays dominated by rap, more or less experimental pop and R&B and, generally speaking, an agenda that has no room for whatever it sees as displaying toxic masculinity. Beat Happening amassed every punk sin, from rudimentary song structures built around a simple, infectious groove, deliberate lack of technical proficiency and lo-fi recording to out of tune singing. They were actually almost annoying in that, for a movement within punk and post-hardcore that helped bringing melody back to rock, they were masters at boycotting it with their purposefully, almost appallingly bad singing. Of course, nothing can be punkier than this contrast between melodic songs and hoarse, off-key singing, as it continuously anticipates the pleasure of an agreeable sound only to thwart those expectations by failing to perform it adequately. Together with the hammering repetition of simple structures, this musicality (if we can call it that) becomes intentionally irksome, as uncomfortable and awkward as adolescence itself, one of Beat Happening’s major topics. Take the apparently upbeat “Teenage Caveman” (You Turn Me On, 1992), where Calvin Johnson sings about the wildness of rock and roll, the euphoria of getting primitive, only to let slip the hopelessness laying under it. Tongue-in-cheek, Calvin sings that he has “got a strand of barbed wire twisted around [his] throat,” alluding as much to his tuneless singing as to the painful choking of the voice right before crying—because in this “cry of the wild” (an obvious reference to Jack London) “we cry alone.” The fact that only when the chorus enters, with its rise in pitch and obsessive repetition of “we cry alone,” does Calvin sing melodically and in tune adds an extra, piercing emotional layer to the song’s pathos. To this very day, Calvin Johnson remains one of punk’s groundbreaking and distinctive vocalists, having carved a niche for himself at the time when mid-eighties underground favored the loud, the aggressive, the noisy: “Johnson just didn’t have a hardcore type of voice—he had to find some other way to be punk” (Azerrad 455). His sarcasm shows everywhere, not only in his lyrics but in the entirety of Beat Happening’s music, its feigned naiveté a half-serious, half-joking comment on teenhood melodrama and what punk can or cannot be. Because the meaning of his statement cannot be reduced to the song’s melody or its lyrics, with both of them being only a part of it, because so much of this meaning is ironic and, therefore, context-dependent, the song is indeed impossible to detach from the singer. While within the field of classical music, the tendency is for the singers to depersonalize their performance in order to purify as much as possible the melodic line and its notes, in rock tuning does not seem to be a sufficient not even a necessary condition. As Scruton notices, here the distinctive feature of the song, that is, what gives it identity and relevance, is the groaning and not the singing. In the end, given this significant difference in criteria one may rightly wonder whether we are still talking about the same thing.
It is not that rock songs can only be performed by their authors (in some cases, as in Laughing Stock, not even by them). They can still be interpreted by others, with covers being an important field within this art form. Yet, the concept of cover is a curious one, which instead of representing a counter-example, actually vindicates Scruton’s claim that pop music is non-transferable. Paul Westerberg is not the only one uncomfortably breaking the fourth wall when asking us directly to look him the eye. Another equally excruciating moment for the audience is when, in “Atmosphere,” Ian Curtis angrily implores us not to walk, not to turn away in silence. This piercing plea, breaking now more than just the fourth wall, keeps resounding from beyond the grave to where he let himself go in despair, making us wonder whether we could, whether anyone could have done anything to help. According to Peter Hook, the song, that has his third favorite bass riff, “a very simple, evocative” one, came from cleverly joining two separately written songs, his own bass riff and Bernard Sumner’s reed organ melody: “It is very moving and very melancholic, which Ian capitalized on with the vocal line and the lyrics” (Edwards). Stephen Morris attributed the track’s mood to the “lovely, mournful tone” of Sumner’s Winfield Bakelite plastic reed organ and the early version of the song, known at that time as “Chance,” recorded for their Manchester Piccadilly Radio session in June 1979 (officially released on the 1997 box set Heart and Soul), still featured it, plus Ian’s incomplete lyrics (York). The final version of the song, recorded months later with their producer Martin Hannett at Rochdale’s Cargo Studios, was released in 18 March 1980, exactly two months before Curtis’ suicide, and if his ultimate gesture of hopelessness was foreseeable in the confusion he sings about, his death makes it impossible to understand it any other way. Not by chance has The Guardian encapsulated it as “a glacial, glittering masterpiece that serves so beautifully as their final farewell, the song handpicked by John Peel to be played on the airwaves after announcing Curtis’s death” (Hewitt). The foreboding, mournful keyboard and bass lines blend in echo and reverb to create a reverential environment that, moving away from Joy Division’s earlier, more guitar-driven sound, pioneered that set of Closer’s songs, such as “Heart and Soul,” “The Eternal” or “Decades”, which written in early 1980, veered heavily toward synths. But, apart maybe from “The Eternal,” “Atmosphere” does not sound like any other Joy Division song. If anything, we mostly associate its glittering, chiming keyboards and percussion with The Cure’s circa Disintegration sound. Only the swirling, propulsive, pattering drumming vaguely recalls the post-punk essence of the band, working here as the marching sound of incoming battle and near disaster. Framed by this soundscape of implicit tragedy, the swelling instrumental chorus, with its glass shattering, wordless emotion and pop melody so rare in Joy Division, suggests for a fleeting moment the elusive happiness that never got to be. It becomes an achingly beautiful shaft of light within the somber darkness.
Albeit being miles away from both No Wave’s chaotic, ephemeral events and post-rock’s recorded ambient atonality, sounding very much like, well, music—it is a ballad, what could be more tuneful than that?—“Atmosphere” is still a statement, not a sentence, so to say. Its meaning, just as with “Teenage Cavemen,” is not being conveyed by a song written in a musical score, but tied to a performance where the person referred by such deictic terms as “my” in “my illusion” is made part of the artwork, because their voice and delivery are captured in the recording, embodying the melody and lyrics. Ian Curtis and the particular circumstances of his depression and death are part of the meaning of “Atmosphere,” enacted every time one plays the record. Not a lot of bands would ever have the nerve or the legitimacy to cover it, apart maybe from Codeine, whose personality was partially shaped by Joy Division. Not by accident are they credited with having pioneered the genre sadcore, also known as slowcore, by quieting and paring down grunge in their two albums Frigid Stars (1990) and The White Birch (1994). Codeine’s musical and lyrical personality is so honestly, so authentically sorrowful and dejected that the cover sounds earned and organic. But what it does not sound is anything like the original. The vocal melody and the lyrics are the source’s only remaining traces, with the rest of the instrumental arrangements sounding just like every other Codeine track. The cover stands far closer to Codeine’s “Cave In” or “New Year’s” than it does to “Atmosphere.” Somehow, Stephen Immerwahr nasal vocals and echoing bass, together with John Engle’s ringing guitar and Codeine’s overall glacially slow pace made everything theirs. They also made everything special. Frigid Stars’ “New Year’s” was co-written with Bitch Magnet’s Sooyoung Park, who later recorded his own version of the song with his following band, Seam. While Codeine’s interpretation feels appropriate to the lyrics, fleshing out the melodic vocal and guitar lines with a strained sound that, without ever truly easing down, lends believability to the straightforward statement that “I feel so sad, so bad today,” Seam’s rendition just turns “New Year’s” into a generic indie rock song with the mandatory shoegazey coda, to the likes of the Stone Roses’ “Waterfall” or Ride’s “Vapour Trail.” Since the song was never really credited to Codeine and Seam claim that theirs is the “original version of Codeine’s slowcore classic ‘New Year’s’,” we can accept Codeine’s performance of the song as the cover. But that they were the ones giving the song their identity is made plain obvious in Seam’s description of it as a Codeine “slowcore classic.”
Actually, the unwritten rule for a successful cover is that it should sound more like the interpreting band or singer-songwriter than the creating, authorial one. Issues of copyright, going all the way back to the origins of rock’n’roll, in the fifties, when so many black musicians saw their hit songs tamed by white singers and re-released as originals, can account in part for this practice. But ultimately, it has more to do with Scruton’s idea that, because in pop music the song’s identity consists in the performer’s projection of himself, the songs are ultimately non-transferable. If some of the song’s components can be abstracted and adapted to the interpreter’s sound, trying to recapture the entirety of it is a futile exercise, reason why tribute bands will never be taken seriously. That is also why, after Ian Curtis’ death, because so much of Joy Division’s punk sound had been reshaped by producer Martin Hannett as a mood framing Ian’s lyrics, when Bernard Sumner took on lead vocal duties, the only way to ensure the survival of the band was by making it anew, changing not only the name but its sound. Joy Division reflected too much of Ian’s personality to outlast the loss of its frontman. I sympathize with Peter Hook’s desire for the surviving members to own their past as Joy Division and celebrate their songs (Goodman) but it is true that, apart from the usual problems surrounding nostalgia tours or bands revisiting their catalogue when they are past their prime, something just does not sound right in having live renditions of Joy Division’s songs without Ian Curtis singing them. Not so much because it seems a lack of respect for the tragic and traumatic event of his suicide, but because one can honestly wonder whether they are still the same songs.
Out of recording and amplification, a new artform
At first sight, the relationship between recording and reality seems to be one of documenting and reproducing live performances. As a method for registering a composition, this technology would represent a progress relative to the previous method of musical notation. More accurately than a staff, the album faithfully records every detail of a musical event. And more powerfully, the album does not simply consist of a set of instructions that allow for endless performances of the original, which would be the various particular and historical versions (tokens) of the abstract musical composition represented through the musical notation (type). The album may also fulfill this purpose, but it serves most of all to infinitely replicate a certain performance, a first and original interpretation of the musical piece. In this sense, contrary to the score, the recording forgoes the need to perform new live versions for the composition to be experienced. Under closer inspection, however, this naïve realism appears simplistic and inaccurate, assuming that “the rationale of recording technology is to provide a transparent window onto the acoustic reality of the living performance” (Brown 212). Instead, here too the observer effect applies, with the act of observation and documentation altering the observed system. The possibility of recording introduced, at least, two major modifications in the practice of music that contributed to the ongoing differentiation of rock music within it.
Contrary to popular belief, more than documenting a pre-existing reality, recording technology actually builds that reality. On the one hand, the acoustic conditions of the recording location, the techniques used and practices followed, the specific characteristics of the equipment and the possibilities of sound manipulation it offers, they all determine as much as collect the sound of the musical performance. On the other hand, the material resulting from the recording can be edited, with the track that appears on the album resulting, for example, from the assembly of clips from different takes of the song. In this case, the recording is not of a single interpretation of the theme, but a weaving of the best sections of various interpretations of it. In the mid-1960s, with artists such as Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Beach Boys no longer thinking in terms of singles but albums and using the studio as instrument, the long-play (LP) emerged as the work of art in rock music, the center of fanhood and critical attention within this practice. The recording is not seen as a documentation of one of the endless performances that instantiate the work of art, but is itself the work of art, a studio creation that becomes the standard for the ensuing live interpretations, serving as example to follow and standard for every interpretation or variation. Theodore Gracyk, who theorized this conception of rock as a studio art in his landmarking Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, upholds that “rock is popular music of the second half of the twentieth century which is essentially dependent on recording technology for its inception and dissemination” (Gracyk 13). According to Andrew Kania,
The ontological thesis that Gracyk develops through the first half of his book is that the primary work of art in rock music is not a “thin” sound structure to be instanced in different performances, as in classical music, but the almost maximally “thick” sound structure encoded on a recording and properly instanced through playback of a copy of the recording. (Kania 401)
Once the idea and practice of studio music is established, the range of deviations from what would be possible to perform on stage, given the means normally available, becomes unlimited. These can be as minimal as the overlap of main and background vocals sung by the frontman. Or as extensive as that incorporation of atonal found sounds which, at the limit, is able to transform hearing into an experience more cinematic than musical, as in the extreme case of field recordings. The expansion of pop music and experimental R&B in recent years or the existence of genres such as techno and ambient music make evident just how fictional it is what, at the end of the day, was thought to be documentary, how the recording is not limited to register the music generated by instruments but itself creates music that only exists when we hit play. In these cases, the work of art could never be a musical composition written on a score and instantiated by endless live performances, but the record from which infinite copies are generated and played in a sound system, wherever and whenever desired: “Step by step, recordings have become an ever more fictional world, even as they become ever more ‘real.’ The final frontier—for the moment—has been reached with Auto-Tune, Pro Tools, and other forms of digital software, which can readjust out-of-tune playing and generate entire orchestras from nowhere” (Ross 60).
From this substitution of the recording for the imaginary object written on the staff follows the qualitative difference between rock and classical music which prompts Scruton’s criticism. According to Alex Ross, in “Infernal Machines: How Recordings Changed Music,” the magnetic tape led to the most crucial shift in the relationship between recordings and musical reality. Perfected by German engineers during World War II and taken by Jack Mullin to the United States, where he showed it to Bing Crosby, the magnetic tape recorder allowed the singer the pioneering development of what is perhaps the most famous of all technological effects, the croon: “Magnetic tape meant that Bing could practically whisper into the microphone and still be heard across America; a marked drop-off in surface noise meant that vocal murmurs could register as readily as Louis Armstrong’s pealing trumpet” (Ross 59).
The invention of a highly sensitive recording method, together with the development of amplification technology, not only democratically expanded the amount and type of singers who could pursue a professional career and achieve success, but lead also to a new way of singing, altering the criteria of what constitutes a good singer. Michael Campbell recalls that, in addition to the obvious benefit of “greater volume in both live and recorded performances” (Campbell 107), of making “the volume of sound that a band is capable of producing independent of its size” (220), microphones, amplifiers and loudspeakers also gave singers whose voice would never have the technical or physical ability to project in large theaters the opportunity of leading a successful career: “This new generation of singers broadened the spectrum of vocal styles heard in popular music almost overnight. By 1930, listeners could choose from the nasal twang of country’s Carter Family, the intimate crooning of Bing Crosby or Russ Colombo, or the jazz-inflected, conversational style of Louis Armstrong” (107).
It was not only the lack of power that led blues, jazz, country, folk and rock singers to explore other features of the voice. Certain musical properties, such as timbre, performative style or some subtle elements of dynamics, such as inflection—“the note-to-note dynamic shading of a singer or instrumentalist” that “occurs when a performer stresses a syllable or note to highlight its verbal or musical importance” (15)—were considered accidental or even irrelevant until the advent of recording. First and foremost, they could not be captured by musical notation. Then, either they were not transferable from interpreter to interpreter, as in the case of timbre, or they were too difficult to reproduce from performance to performance, as in the case of inflection. Finally, the tendency in professional singing was for these features to be discarded by technical training, either because the prevailing environment in music practice tended to be normative, or because certain purposes, such as voice projection and sound purification (notes should be purged of every overtone that was not a harmonic), could only be achieved at the cost of depersonalization:
In classical music (and popular styles heavily influenced by classical music—such as operetta and pre-1970 film music)—there is a “correct” way to sing or play an instrument. Performers spend years learning how to produce the most desirable sound from their voice or instrument. Although there are subtle but telling differences in tone quality among of the finest artists, overall there is little variation in sound production. (Campbell 21)
Amplification technology, however, enables singers to be heard in large arenas without the need for depersonalizing their voice, rather cultivating a conversational tone that thrives on the tension between the voice as a “musical instrument” and the voice as an “instrument of self-expression,” according to the terminology of Jeanette Bicknell. In “Just a Song? Exploring the Aesthetics of Popular Song Performance,” quoting Susanne Langer, Bicknell states that “all actual emotions, crude or fine, deep or casual, are reflected in [the voice’s] spontaneously variable tone; it is the prime avenue of self-expression, and in this demonstrative capacity not really a musical instrument at all” (Bicknell 268). Throughout the song, Bicknell continues, elements of this self-expression mix with elements of musical performance: “When great performers sing the ‘right’ songs there seems to be little gap between the voice as expressive of self and the voice as musical instrument. It is all too easy to believe that the song comes ‘straight from the heart,’ although the more sophisticated a listener, the more he or she is likely to be aware that professional singing is not mere self-expression” (268). Because unlike musical notation, a recording captures the various emotional inflections together with the melody, rock can explore as meaningful and song defining this self-expressive, more theatrical dimension of the voice, going all the way from whispering to shouting, singing to spoken word, heartfelt confession to ironic detachment. Since the other dimension of the voice as a musical instrument is never abandoned, singers must find several and sometimes difficult techniques to articulate singing with conversation.
In the democratic environment of popular music and modern liberal societies, given its romantic vein of authenticity, on the one hand, and modernist break with the past, on the other, it was only to be expected that a search for distinctive, individualizing singing styles and instrumental practices would spread, experimenting precisely with those unique and non-transferable features, such as tone color, inflection, theatrical conveying of emotions or unstructured approaches to an instrument.
In popular music […] the rule seems to be “Anything goes,” as long as it works. Some of the most revered performers in popular music sing or play in a way that would not be acceptable in classical music, folk music, or even previous generations of popular music. The singing of Louis Armstrong and Paul McCartney or the trumpet playing of Miles Davis fall well short of classic standards. But their music has an individuality and a personality that draws us to them, that makes their “failure” to meet classical standards of performance totally immaterial. In fact, their performances would not be as effective if their style were more classical. In this context, it’s worth noting that one measure of excellence in popular music is individuality, the extent to which performers or bands cultivate a distinct sound identity. (Campbell 21)
Thanks to recording technology, all these contingent and ephemeral aspects of music can now integrate the melody as meaningfully as pitch and duration. Melody is no longer abstractly written in a musical staff, but documented in an embodied way, retaining physical traits of its performer and peculiarities of their style. As the recording progressively became the work of art in rock music, and not the score, elements that were once accidental such as tone color and performative style became as much part of the artwork as melody, harmony or rhythm and, depending on the circumstances, even identity criteria. Is “Ceremony” a Joy Division or a New Order song? There is no studio version of the song sang by Ian Curtis, only by Bernard Sumner. But the song was composed by the band while they were still Joy Division and at least three demos of it performed by Curtis, who wrote the lyrics, remain—a live version from their final concert at High Hall, Birmingham University on 2 May 1980 (Still, 1981); a version recorded at the soundcheck on the afternoon of this concert; and a rehearsal tape made in April/May 1980 (“Rarities”, Heart and Soul, 1997). And yet, timbre and performing style are so defining that the studio version having Sumner as the vocalist is enough to make it a New Order song. The same happened with “New Year’s,” which to this very day is never thought of as a Seam’s song, but is seen as Codeine’s odd one out (the song is unusually melodic for the band). And is Codeine’s interpretation of “Atmosphere” still “Atmosphere,” when the “don’t walk away in silence” can no longer be heard as Ian’s cry for help, the pop shaft of light, gleaming through the synth gloom and doom, replaced for dragging dejection? The original atmosphere gone, the meaning a different one, can it still be the same song? And what of Galaxie 500’s version of “Ceremony,” where the dance-y feeling of the song has been replaced by the slow jangling touch of the dream pop, slowcore band? Is it still the same song if Dean Wareham’s guitar and Naomi Yang’s bass interlock and blend in a unified ringing sound and gone is Sumner’s personality, the sharp slashes of his guitar that, filling the empty space left by Hook’s leading bass, contrast with it as they shrillingly cut through the echoing deep melody?
Probably not, because what would be neglectable, unnoticeable details for the outside ears of Roger Scruton, to the trained ones of rock fans are meaning happening and altering with the change of the people involved and whatever statements they are putting into record. Thus, the need within the practice for qualifying such things as “covers,” a category created within a field where, because the recording has collapsed the distinction between song and performer, there really are no songs or compositions to be played by different performers throughout history. Of course, identity criteria can always be, to a certain extent, thought of in more flexible, non-platonic terms and what counts as being the same thing change depending on context, purposes, people involved, etc. But there is still something to be said about how, in rock music, the contingent traits of the people and circumstances involved in the performing of the song are captured and made defining, as relevant to the song’s identity as all other more traditional musical features. In rock music and its artworks, the albums, one listens to people, not songs—literally. Traits of them and their histories are part of the experience and meaning of the album track, the “song,” in ways we do not see happening within the tradition of classical music (jazz is a case somewhere in between) where the recording remains a mere documentation of the live performance, still dependent on the musical score. In rock music, the recording is actually a new object, whose status is difficult to determine. It seems to occupy an intermediate place, somewhere between the song—documented by a musical score and performable by endless interpreters—and a particular live interpretation. Andrew Kania, resorting to the terminology created by Stephen Davies in Musical Works and Performances, distinguishes between “thick works” and “thin songs”: “Rock tracks are not special kinds of performances of the thin songs they manifest, as Davies would have it. Rather, they are studio constructions: thick works that manifest thin songs, without being performances of them” (Kania 404). What the “thick work” seems to include beyond the “thin song” are precisely such properties as tone color or emotional inflections that integrate the listening experience as significantly as melody or rhythm.
Roger Scruton criticized pop music (a dubious category that includes both the entertainment musical industry and the independent artistic creations) for its songs’ lack of internal logic and non-transferability. Both claims are mostly true. We have seen how both ends of experimental rock, the live events of No Wave and the studio productions of ambient-oriented post-rock, gravitate toward some form of noise and atonality, in the wake of futurism, dadaism and 20th century classical music—atonality, 12-tone, musique concrète, Stockhausen experiments with electronics and musical spatialization, the minimalism of Reich or Glass, etc. And in every case, ranging from one to the other of these extreme ends of the spectrum, the artwork is a recorded statement from which no universal “song” (the equivalent to the “proposition,” “sentence” or “type”) can be abstracted to be then interpreted by others and still be considered the same thing. The Replacements’ “Unsatisfied” (Let It Be, 1984), Beat Happening’s “Teenage Cavemen” (You Turn Me On, 1992) and Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” (“Atmosphere”/ “Dead Souls,” 1980) are irreplaceable, non-commutable particulars, that very much like Moby Dick, can only be copied and mass distributed. Apart from that, they can be either performed by their creators—the band or singer-songwriter—in ways that will always be measured against the studio version or covered by others in ways that must reflect more the identity of the interpreter than that of the author. It is understandable that Roger Scruton would doubt rock’s musical status. It is now a borderline artistic genre that has developed into an autonomous practice, something akin to performative art, which inhabits a space between music, cinema and literature (poetry and theater) by including elements of all three. An artistic tradition which has the merit of exhibiting just how much, as Iris Murdoch would have it, “works of art are individuals and they are the work of individuals” (Murdoch 257).
Rock criticism’s use of a normative-descriptive vocabulary
Scruton is right in noticing how central the performer is to rock music, how the distinction between the song and the people embodying it, normal in classical music, has collapsed. But he fails to see (as most impersonal theories of art will) the reasons behind it, and the merits of this incorporation of personal traits, such as timbre and performative style, in the music itself. In an age of increasing dehumanization and loss of personality, caused as much by a functional reduction of the individual to a piece in a mechanism, under state control or large multinational corporations, as by the growth of scientific descriptions of the human being (the “social sciences”), an artform has developed which highlights, in the work of art itself, the person behind it. By using amplification and recording technology to capture some of the contingent bodily and idiosyncratic stylistic features of the performer and make them part of the artwork’s meaning, rock helps seeing that everything in a work of art comes from, and can be understood only relative to, a person. Not by accident does rock kindle so much affection in those involved with it, with fans using their favorite bands or indie labels T-shirts, bonding in small venues’ concerts and starting their own fanzines. A devotion that, unlike entertainment pop’s idolatry, comes from entering into some form of meaningful and close relationship both with the artist at the source of the artistic statement and the community gathered around it. This centrality of the personal element in art is also evident in rock criticism, the activity of interpreting the meaning of a record and assessing its artistic value through the use of a specialized vocabulary forged, in time, within the practice.
In his Pitchfork review of Beat Happening’s vinyl box set issued in 2019, We Are Beat Happening, Quinn Moreland begins by contextualizing how “the punk and underground music [that] Johnson discovered as a teenager was driven by independence, egalitarianism, and an urge to destroy life’s rulebook.” Nevertheless, “while punk was presumably loud, fast, and aggressive, Beat Happening, with their instrumental amateurism, unintimidating appearance, and unabashedly sentimental lyrics, were provocative by simply existing.” They represented “an unintentional sort of defiance.” If some of these words refer to factual, physically measurable features such as “loud” or “fast,” or to emotions, with “sentimental” being an obvious case, most of them are ultimately ethical in nature. Of course, terms such as “independence” and “egalitarianism” are political and recall punk’s crucial place in the 1980s counterculture of the Generation X, its critical “urge to destroy life’s rulebook.” But when talking about people and what they do, one inevitably gravitates toward commenting on their virtues or vices, how Beat Happening, by subverting punk’s virtue of aggressiveness with their viciously unintimidating presence, found their own brand of punk attitude. Other forms of excellence, or deficiencies, as Beat Happening’s “instrumental amateurism” are also mentioned. But, as everything else, only to be connected, in the end, to what might be the intention behind this “sort of defiance,” for instance. It is this unavoidable ethical vocabulary, related to the attribution of intentions and character traits, that eventually makes more factual, non-evaluative features such as “loudness” and “fastness” meaningful by seeing them, in this case, as the means used for aggression. The same with emotions, as the “sentimental” lyrics are given a context and a role in Beat Happening’s ultimate purpose of commenting upon adolescence, as Moreland recalls Johnson’s famous letter to the punk magazine New York Rocker: “It all boils down to whether they’ve got the love in their hearts, that beautiful teenage spirit.” This ethical vocabulary, far from being the exception, is instead the cornerstone of artistic judgement, undercutting positivism’s attempts at scientific descriptions of art objects or emotivism’s reduction of them to some more or less intelligible aesthetic feeling. Notice how in his list of Joy Division’s ten best tracks for The Guardian, Ben Hewitt ascribes to “Atmosphere” or its sound moral virtues that actually belong to the performers as agents. Joy Division’s track is “delicate and pristine” and Stephen Morris’ drums “sparse” and “subtle,” which is to say they were played in a sparse and subtle way. But all these features get their meaning from, and work as a preliminary to the person at the core of the band, his dramatic demise: “And has Curtis’s voice ever sounded as rich, and heavy, as it does here? ‘Walk in silence / Don’t turn away, in silence,’ he sings wearily. ‘See the danger / Always danger / Endless talking / Life rebuilding.’ A perfect goodbye” (Hewitt). And in his review of Rhino’s reissue of Let It Be in 2008, former Pitchfork’s editor-in-chief Mark Richardson encapsulates the Replacements’ personality saying that they were “a creative, smart, silly, exuberant, and often hilarious rock'n'roll band,” describing “the wailing "Unsatisfied," with its disarmingly direct expression of frustration” in such terms as to make it a manifestation of that personality. Three distinct rock critics, for two very distinct journals, use a similar normative-descriptive vocabulary that centers around the artists and what they have to say, within certain historical contexts. And the entirety of all three articles reveals just how personally invested they are in the music they are commenting upon, because in rock there is really no difference between being a fan and being a critic.
In her groundbreaking “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958), Elizabeth Anscombe suggested abandoning the obligatory force of concepts such as “ought,” “should” or “need.” As they derive this force only when used within the framework of a law conception of ethics and as only God can be the foundation for such conception, in a modern secularized world they have been emptied of this legal function and whatever mandatory meaning they may retain is vacuously psychological:
It is as if the notion ‘criminal’ were to remain when criminal law and criminal courts had been abolished and forgotten. A Hume discovering this situation might conclude that there was a special sentiment, expressed by ‘criminal’, which alone gave the word its sense. So Hume discovered the situation in which the notion ‘obligation’ survived, and the word ‘ought’ was invested with that peculiar force having which it is said to be used in a ‘moral’ sense, but in which the belief in divine law had long since been abandoned: for it was substantially given up among Protestants at the time of the Reformation. The situation, if I am right, was the interesting one of the survival of a concept outside the framework of thought that made it a really intelligible one. (Anscombe 165-6)
Anscombe suggests the return, instead, to the ordinary role these terms have in establishing a relationship between the factual possession or lack of certain features and the flourishing dependent upon them. A plant needs water to grow and, if we want it to survive and develop, then we should, we ought to give it water. The attribution of value terms such as “just” or “dishonest,” relative to virtues and vices, can easily be justified by sets of facts. If someone does not pay their bills (a fact about an agent that can be true or false) they are “bilkers,” which is a species of dishonesty (a value assessment of that agent). And, if a human being needs to be honest to flourish (a society will decay if its members are not), then he ought to pay his bills. This language of virtue ethics allows for an easy transition from “is” to “ought,” and a justification of value judgements based on facts about the object of assessment.
Iris Murdoch refers to this “normative-descriptive vocabulary” in her essay “The Idea of Perfection” (1964). There she connects the ethical life to the development of a normative vocabulary, as much in the history of a community as in the history of those individuals who belong to it. It is acquired and grows together with the individual himself and his life activity. Learning the concept of “repentance” does not come with becoming proficient at an impersonal language set by science and logic but, although “this investigation is subject to some public rules” and the individual “derives the concept initially from his surroundings,” the investigation “must remain a highly personal one,” which means that “repentance may mean something different to an individual at different times in his life, and what it fully means is a part of this life and cannot be understood except in context” (25). For Murdoch, “where virtue is concerned we often apprehend more than we clearly understand and grow by looking” (30) and, despite expressing her doubts that there is any such thing as an objective and universal language, she restricts this historical approach to concepts, following Wittgenstein’s definition of meaning as use, to the specific case of morality. But this is just an instance of how language is acquired in general. In his “Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language,” Stanley Cavell shows how language acquisition happens within a “form of life”:
In “learning language” you learn not merely what the names of things are, but what a name is; not merely what the form of expression is for expressing a wish, but what expressing a wish is; not merely what the word for "father" is, but what a father is; not merely what the word for "love" is, but what love is. In learning language, you do not merely learn the pronunciation of sounds, and their grammatical orders, but the "forms of life" which make those sounds the words they are, do what they do—e.g., name, call, point, express a wish or affection, indicate a choice or an aversion, etc. (Cavell 177-78)
Later in “Art Is the Imitation of Nature” (1978), Murdoch will make what she calls “evaluative language” the default case: “One might say here that almost all language is evaluative language, language is soaked in value” and it is only “with great difficulty, in artificial situations, for artificial purposes, scientific or legal, for instance, that we attempt to expel value from ordinary language” (253). And, at a certain point in “The Idea of Perfection,” extending her claim to fields other than morality, Murdoch recalls that words are not timeless, word-utterances are historical occasions, words have spatio-temporal and conceptual contexts, attention to which is fundamental: “We learn through attending to contexts, vocabulary develops through close attention to objects, and we can only understand others if we can to some extent share their contexts. (Often we cannot.) Uses of words by persons grouped round a common object is a central and vital human activity” (31).
Rock criticism, and the general practice it is part of, with its set of criteria implicitly shared by those involved in the creation and appreciation of rock, exemplifies this historical development and acquisition of a network of “normative-descriptive words, the specialized or secondary value words” (31) within small communities gathered around objects of interest. Because a normative vocabulary applies only to agents and whatever may be related to them, that rock criticism resorts so strongly to such a vocabulary goes to show just how crucial the personal element is to this form of art. At the core of rock music stands the performer’s character (both in its ethical and literary sense) and the beliefs associated to it, expressed through the music as statement. No wonder punk is always ultimately defined as an attitude. Roger Scruton was perceptive enough to grasp this much. What he never understood was how rock has become, in this day and age, the greatest artistic reminder that, in the end, all we do want is for someone to look us in the eye.
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