The End of the Rock Era
and the Ensuing Diminished Role of the Human Voice
by J Kaw
1.
Besides its cultural import, Rock played an essential role in social and political changes of the 1960's and ’70's in the U S A, Britain, and elsewhere, as it helped expose the contradictions behind the promise of progress toward universal values and standards made nationally and globally by political liberalism, the welfare state, and the very concept of "social democracy" [say, the contradiction that those not enlightened, so to speak, must advance by the rules set out by those who saw the light before them - rules which in a different context seem arbitrary, encouraging a vicious cycle]. Rock's vision of popular art being as sophisticated and grand as any other, both representing and empowering its mass of listeners, will be the object of close attention - wonder, adoration, scrutiny, condescension - for ages to come. But it was just that: a vision of that which was to be. Indeed, Rock’s radicalism was delusional, and ultimately self-defeating, as it was forced to repay its debt to the oppression inherent in capitalist civilization and become a figment of the consumerist dystopia. In other words, rather than challenging said contradictions, it came to embody them, much like other contemporaneous manifestations of radicalism and youth rebellion. A medium which gave voice to the upwardly-mobile, but only a few (the rest send to Vietnam or keep locked up in the void of vast housing developments - public and private, urban and suburban), only showed how little we all had to hope for, to dream of, and that we hoped and dreamed less and less every year. Rock stars did not have much control over the socio-political role their music played, and - even if we presume they had - lacked any widely-agreed-upon ideas on what it should be. Rock made real Harry Smith’s dream to see “America changed through music” (and, thus, many other parts of the world as well) but it neither had much say in what those changes were nor won any assurances against being discarded when it was no longer useful, when it came to seem too silly and naive.
As it turned out, the kids were all right; they wanted to be happy. Once our imperial overlords let us know that we would not have to be involved in the nitty gritty of oppression - as they had unwisely asked us to do in Vietnam and in the segregated South - we buttoned up, calmed down, and got to work. Rock, and other musics, became the soundtrack to, for adults, weekend hedonism and workaday catharsis and, for the young, consumerism-as-rebellion and consumerism-as-identity. Thus, we could say that Rock’s descent into self-parody was complete by the end of the 1970's. Even those wary of such a harsh critique must deal with the inevitable decline of a cultural practice which more often than not inspires only the awed consumption of its wares, instead of the mindful learning of a craft and thus the perseverance of tradition.
We hesitate to join this refrain because we are especially interested in Rock’s second phase, that of Punk and Indie, which followed its two earlier stages, the first defined by its tortured relationship with the folk and other popular musics it borrowed from, the second being its ensuing Golden Age. [We also follow the Post-Punk example of being obsessed with Rock's demise, although Punk artists and many of those who followed them were convinced they would play an instrumental role in the process, while we know that it was done for us, by the onslaught of post-industrial capitalism]. The Punk-Indie era was different from Rock's first phrase in that it was largely a product of U S A and English culture, quite unlike the worldwide, transnational reach of Rock in the Golden Age, and was characterized by an eventuall overwhelming sense of irony, shifting from high-modernist disillusionment toward post-modernist frivolity. The limited number of influences whom Punk and Post-Punk artists acknowledged - commonly, The Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart, The Stooges, The New York Dolls, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Roxy Music, and the most "out-there" Krautrock - in itself makes evident the skeptical perspective from which it began.
Common accepted histories hold that Punk birthed a larger shift in popular music, within which it became merely another genre, particularly popular among angst-ridden teens. But, no... Punk led into post-Punk, at least in England, New York (in the form of No Wave) and a few, isolated spots across the U S A and Europe. Post-Punk artists attempted to create a new liberated space in which to work, wherein singers were freed of arbitrary standards of tone and content and instrumentalists taught themselves how to play, treating their tools more like raw material than finished products. Post-Punk quickly faded, became a mirror-image of Rock in general, a radical splinter unable to escape the end-times it predicted. The British Indie music which resulted worked from an increasingly-small palette and has rarely been received well in the U S A, except for a few artists associated with either the 4 A D label or the shoegazer movement, or both. In the U S A, especially where Punk and Post-Punk movements flared or left some sort of impression, music akin to British Indie appeared, such as the Los Angeles "paisley underground" or groups like Throwing Muses, His Name Is Alive, Galaxie 500, and Low.
Nevertheless, the course of each culture’s popular music deviated significantly: for, in the U S A, Hardcore, a sort of reactionary version of Punk (Leninism to punk’s Marxism) emerged. While, it must be said that Hardcore produced artists who in some respects fit in with post-Punk (The Minutemen, Flipper, Mission of Burma), it not surprisingly incited a post-Hardcore response. In rejecting or attempting to transcend the belabored radicalism of Hardcore, post-Hardcore contrasted with post-Punk in taking a more-benign view of the Rock past. Thus, compared to British Indie, most U S A Indie music possessed brighter prospects of blending into, yet changing significantly, the accepted ways Americans listened to music and supported music artists. It ended up, in the 1990's, at various attempts, varying wildly from the aesthetically-impressive to the coldly-manipulative, to reconstruct the tarnished pre-Punk past, artistic moves which were initially the product of a culture at its peak of influence, in the early '90's, but soon dissipated what remained of its oppositional foundation. As such, Indie has become part of the entertainment industry - and a ghetto-like, specialized, highly-referential one at that - devoid of the unstable, volatile, and thus vital place in U S A society Rock once had, which Indie had tried to enhance and maintain. In Britain, the Brit-Pop movement was necessary to affect a similar change.
In exploring the history of our beloved late Rock music, we do see well-delineated paths of development, linear or circular, which we designate by way of abstract concepts such as the four phases of rock noted above (Folk, Golden Age, Punk, Indie) and a smattering of smaller movements and styles that may not fit in said categories. History - and the act of writing itself - imposes such distinctions, so neat in our minds, so awkward in daily social interactions.
Rock music’s time under the sun has come to an end; its cultural power and grace are past, while remnants and memories continue on, hidden in the shadows of non-successors. While, from our nostalgia-tinged - no, nostalgia-inundated - perspective, we are sad, we must also admit we are glad we no longer have to struggle over a lost cause, a dogged pursuit, no longer have to engage extraordinary mental energy in fretting over a romanticized music culture's lost innocence, debating what constituted its essence; all of which only diverted attention away from making music, toward the ephemera surrounding it.
2.
Instead, as often as many critics refused to acknowledge the fact - enthused as they are with the opportunistic post-ironic embrace of shameless idiotic "pop" music - the best music of the early years of the century was that growing out of American Indie music and its wider cultural milieu. Some movements have already been defined, most notably the Free Folk of the Jeweled Antler collective, Six Organs of Admittance, Charalambides, Hall of Fame, and Tower Recordings, and the Noise Rock of Wolf Eyes, Lightning Bolt, and Sightings. With regard to the latter, the word (“underground”) often used to describe it is, in such hyper-communicative times, rather absurd. Nonetheless, the concept is meant to convey both the surprising number and diversity of the Noise tradition’s present-day American followers (who as such are not very innovative whatsoever) and, in the case of Noise Rock, its infusion into the work of artists who might otherwise make generic music.
To these two, we add the crucial idea of New Improvised music, a non-musicianist [even if many of the artists involved in fact are skilled musicians] approach to improvised music developing from Rock - as such clearly distinguishing it from other improvised, or improvisation-based, musics, which have developed from, often as a reaction against, Jazz and Academic music. The leading artists here: The No-Neck Blues Band, Pelt, Jackie-O Motherfucker, The Vibracathedral Orchestra, and The Micro-East Collective, several of whom were not young or new at all, but received more attention in the early years of the century. Free Folk and New Improvised artists share a lot, obvious given that "free folk" is play on the term, "free jazz"; the "folk" brand distinguishing the two, though, is telling. The No-Neck Blues Band at times - indeed, in their most-acclaimed work so far - fit the Free Folk mold. Yet, they impress when more "free," concocting an imaginary scenario wherein Rocked-out "freaks" and "loft scene" Free-Jazzers got together in the early 1970's to form a U S A version of A M M.
Others worked in the space among these movements, in some cases trying to wrest themselves from the inhibiting Rock past, and yet drawing upon other trends, such as Experimental Electronica and the Reconstructionism of the 1990's: Sunburned Hand of the Man, Dean Roberts, Black Dice, Gang Gang Dance, Double Leopards, Growing, Oneida.
At least two groups synthesized these varied movements: Animal Collective and Excepter. The former did a better job than most of picking up on what was happening in the 1990's without descending into pointless regurgitation. If only they delved more into experimentation with song, The No-Neck Blues Band would also deserve such an exalted place.
Two other extraordinary groups, who built upon the Reconstructionism, Post-Rock, and Experimental Electronica of the 1990s and yet seemed in a world of their own, were The Fiery Furnaces and Menomena. In addition, many noteworthy artists continue the Reconstructionism of the 1990's, especially New Psychedelia groups like Circulatory System and Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U F O.
Then there was Radiohead's, Wilco's, and Califone's brilliant infusions of experimental electronics into Rock, each having led to exemplary re-workings, from the ground up - radicalizations - of the Rock ensemble, resulting in the bold syntheses of their most-recent work. Radiohead obviously took the most-compelling route of the three; even as they remained a Rock group, they equaled the inimitable Björk in managing to concoct electro-acoustic music out of the House-Techno tradition, largely using its tools, that could accompany independently- (and beautifully-)crafted songs. Both were among a selected few, including also Stereolab and The Olivia Tremor Control, who understood that a new open-ness to electronic music entailed a look backward to its academic roots as well as an interest in its popular present. Given that Thom Yorke is also a devoted inheritors of the Post-Punk poet-singer tradition, and that, like so many other post-Punk artists (unlike much contemporary Indie music) Radiohead actually show signs of sociopolitical consciousness, they certainly deserve status alongside Excepter, Animal Collective, and Björk as the exemplary popular-music artists of the present-day, those able to create music which seems like a worthwhile, enlightening addition to our culture, while not allowing any desire to evoke or represent society lead them to the manipulative capabilities of technology.
Having embarked upon his Howling Hex project, we add Neil Hagery to the list as well; although plenty of other artists from the 1980's-early 1990's Indie, home-recording underground (such as The Tall Dwarfs, Richard Youngs, Caroliner Rainbow, The Deac C, Jandek) still seem to understand that, just as the personal is political, the artistic is ethical, none - besides the aforementioned Charalambides - enacted startling changes in their methods like Hagerty did.
Above all others, though, Sun City Girls were perhaps the exemplary ensemble of the present day; they were welcomed in the current Free Folk-Noise Rock-New Improvised milieu precisely because the diversity of their work had always mocked the limitations post-Punk artists had unwisely and rashly placed on themselves. While the relatively open-ended music of the post-Indie era [it is post-Indie so long as one is wise enough to leave Rock behind] comes close to replicating what Sun City Girls had already accomplished on their own, it still only comes close.
Despite the fall of Rock, popular music at the millenium's dawn still offers much in the way of populist/D I Y (radical) approaches to art - but not so much in the plentitude of artists and styles growing out of Rap/Hip-Hop and House-Techno, the other late 1970's-early 1980's developments besides Punk. Though both were more radical than Punk in providing a simple, no-instrumental-skill-required approach to making music outside the European tradition, House-Techno, as well as a disappointing large amount of Post-Techno music, is too utilitarian (too afraid of distracting its consumer base) or still too enraptured by the mere fact of electronic instruments, while Rap is hindered by the internalized barriers rappers impose upon themselves, as the common perspective on what rapping entails, both verbally and sonically, is extremely limited. Mike Ladd is the remarkable exception here, having created an oeuvre that ranks him as the one of the best artists of the past decade or so, regardless of the pitifully-limited scope of so much Rap/Hip-Hop.
3.
As hinted above, for political and ethical reasons we have an interest in radicalism in music - in other words, democraticizing, D I Y methods - the ideal being that art serve a holistic purpose for both individuals and communities. This perspective begins with the individual, who of course, before anything else, has at his disposal his voice with which to make music. Thus we come to the apparent lack of interest in - or, rather, what at times seems like a calculated rejection of - the human voice and language found in Free Folk-New Improvised-Noise Rock music. Beyond Animal Collective, Excepter, and certain projects of the Jeweled Antler collective, such as The Ivytree/The Birdtree and The Skygreen Leopards, the vocals found in the music of these artists either drift in and out of the background, not taking center ground, or - when they do - refuse to command too much attention, as if any outward sign of emotion or intellect would spoil the mood of the music.
The quiet, slowly-progressing approach to music which many of the Free Folk and New Improvised artists employ, which has become a sort of fad in Japanese and European Improvised music [signified succinctly in Sachiko M’s emptying of her sampler of all sounds save an in-built sine wave and Toshimaru Nakamura’s use of the “no-input mixing board” as an instrument], encourages a foundation of silence, as compared to a music-“theory”-derived base of set harmonies or the standardized rhythmic bases which are the norm in popular music, thus liberating the musicians from pre-arranged structures. Yet, at the same time, it has led to little creativity in vocalization. To look at a potential counter-example, the lauded Ami Yoshida, who has built upon the work of other vocalists in improvised music such as Phil Minton, first of all, as expected, works with wordless (vocable) singing in order to focus on relatively abstract sound and, second, because of an apparent desire to complement and expound upon the sounds of digital media, especially in their falling apart, malfunctioning (“glitches”), has severely limited the textural and emotional range of her work. Ultimately, her music is too inaccessible - that is, too personal, all her own, descending into a sort of self-absorbed narcissism akin to a group of technically skilled instrumentalists “reading” notes on a page.
While they work in a vastly different context, many singers in Free Folk-Noise Rock-New Improvised music similarly submit themselves to their instrumentals. See, for example, Six Organs of Admittance, Charalambides, and Dredd Foole and The Din. Far more promising, and evocative of a future course for popular music, is the electronic manipulation of the voice heard in Jennifer Herrema’s new R T X project, Animal Collective, Excepter, and to a lesser extent Gang Gang Dance and Sunburned Hand of the Man. In a similar vein, though less interesting, others prefer to use the voice as just one sound source among many, morphing it into the larger mix, such as with Wolf Eyes or Double Leopards.
The more experimental work of many of these artists fits quite seamlessly into the larger milieu of non-Academic experimental music, once a rarity, now consisting of a vast array of artists who fall roughly into the following categories: improvised music far removed from its Jazz and Academic backgrounds (particularly pervasive in Britain); the Post-Rock and Post-Techno avant-garde-cross-over of artists like Oval, Tortoise, Fennesz, and Pan Sonic; and the Post-Industrial and Post-Ambient pseudo-academic electro-acoustic work of John Hudak, Ralf Wehowsky, Bernhard Günter, Tetsu Inoue, Steve Roden, Rafael Toral, and Francisco Lopez. From listening to selected portions of this music, we wonder if the voice and language have been deemed too unsanitary sonically and too meddlesome intellectually to warrant a significant place. However convinced one is of nostrums about the value, or superiority, of “pure” music, as a language in and of itself, the shift away from the centrality of the voice is a significant historical signpost, which could tell us a lot about what is happening in European and global civilization.
Though its willful radicalism - primitivism even, to use antiquated standards - and its Year Zero mentality make Free Folk-New Improvised-Noise Rock music similar to Punk and Indie music, it is less likely to descend into negative, reactionary contrarianism, as the latter gradually did. Punk artists allowed the desire to kill off Rock, or at least avoid its traps, consume far too much energy; more importantly it impelled them to join in on the creation of an equally hegemonic alternative, even as there was confusion as to what that alternative would be. Free Folk-New Improvised-Noise Rock artists, working in a more diffuse popular-music climate, instead run the risk of dissipating into the ether. Admittedly, all music does as such (recall Eric Dolphy's famous dictum about sound, once it is in the air); the question is: what traces it leaves behind in the mind of the listener. Experimental music, or at least non-vocal experimental music, with its tenuous connections to a system of cultural production capable of reaching beyond a small elite of listeners - which means, generally lacking the means and methods by which to embody social and ideological positions - has difficulty leaving any sort of impression. Indeed, such music often does not aim to, but as such attains its greatest relevance at its most accessible and compressed: non-noteworthy additions to the soundscape, inspiring no-one but musicians with similar technical know-how. When experimental musicians do stand out, they do so with a brief clamor, apparently driven by the simplistic notion that: the noisier the music, the more "avant-garde" it is.
4.
Perhaps an extraordinary shift has occurred in our collective musical consciousness, away from the notion of music as an art, which may use new technologies as it sees fit, to that of music as a science of sound, always beholden to the latest and most efficient - or most novel and clever - means of controlling nature. The mysterious little black boxes - with all those buttons, pedals, switches, knobs, and keys for us to handle and those flashing screens for us to stare at - serve as intermediaries between humans and a scientific understanding of music which is beyond the mental and physical grasp of most, and as such have lured us into a stupor, numbed and drunk with power which we do not see as oppressive because it was attained by past generations and is maintained now by mercenaries both in our midst and beyond. That is to say, we did not do the raping and strangling ourselves. Even Rock and other musicians who work with relatively little input from electronic instruments (at least before they enter the recording studio)... when, as described above, they engage in what some call "record collection rock," the creative process centers around the dissemination of past music and then the regurgitation of these "influences" in an elaborate competition over an artist's social status; this milieu has expanded greatly with the rise of the Internet, resulting in the current malaise: more Indie bands than ever, precisely when Indie music has lost its relevance, salience, charm, intellect, you-name-it. A similar situation arguably exists in Improvised music. Instead of a science of sound, an intrigue-filled game of capitalists jockeying for position.
We thus arrive at a point we will explore in depth: that the unique place Punk and post-Punk music occupies, and the unique promise it offered, in the array of twentieth-century experimental art derives from the central position of the poet-singer. On one hand, in its approach to technique, Punk fits in with other movements and individuals who avoided professionalism and espoused populist, or at least anti-elitist, values, such as the Dadaists and the Situationists [of course Greil Marcus has argued for their connection with Punk in Lipstick Traces], Jean Dubuffet’s art brut, non-traditional “folk” artists, and the unprofessional alternate-universe-studio system of Andy Warhol (superstars instead of stars). As such, its rebellion against traditional European standards is easily appropriated and commodified by a global market-place culture that also wants to destroy tradition, but for the sake of eliminating the nuisance of culture altogether. On the other hand, most of the great singers of Punk and Post-Punk music, and several of their most direct precursors [Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico, Jim Morrison, Don Van Vliet, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, John Lydon, Mark E Smith, Julian Cope, Ian McCulloch, Morrissey, Nick Cave, Michael Stipe] in stretching the limit of what was possible when putting words to music, occupy a place in the English-language literary tradition, making the radicalism of their art ambiguous and uncertain, difficult to make into a cartoon-like self-parody. The Post-Punk artists who are still making great music in the twenty-first century (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Angels of Light, and The Mekons, for example) deftly explore this dynamic between experimentation and the limits placed upon it by selected customs.
Indeed, to return to our claims regarding the disappointing vocal art of younger artists, the singer above all else maintains the tenuous connection popular music has with both the rarefied art world, with all the possibilities contained therein, and the wider social context. As we see with the least-song-oriented of the contemporary artists noted above, as well as several Post-Punk groups, the popular musician who takes on a non-musicianist, DIY approach can easily make the move into the realm of non-academic experimental music and, at least in the contemporary cultural climate, do quite well by themselves. But once that shift takes place, the connection with mass culture is either entirely gone or in a constant state of flux, disappearing into a web of sounds, only to return in fits and bits when the musician wants to get attention - for example, when Black Dice or Gang Gang Dance break out a steady Rock beat or, to see the same thing happen from the other side of the tracks, an improvised-music ensemble like the Art Ensemble of Chicago circa 1972 or the D K V Trio circa 1997 slide into Funk groove. And, as much as a connection to popular music for many brings to mind the commercialization of their craft, from a different point of view - one that simply ignores the music "industry" - a connection to popular music means that an artist's work is more likely to inspire others to create. It also ensures that musicians do not grow too comfortable within the confines of certain practices. Without the singer, there is not just no song, there is also no tension between the singer’s words, assuming he dares to pollute “pure” music with language, and the accompanying instrumental. The more the singer attempts to say in his songs, and the more sounds and structures the instrumentalists develop in tandem, the greater the tension. And thus the music produced more effectively links itself to the greatest work of the century just-past, and before - for the radicalism of an artist is always of the highest caliber when he takes an inter-media approach, undermining the means and methods of differing practices, the very things in which he had been trained or which were used to judge him, which were offered as a way toward expression and liberation but actually constricted him.
The rise of Rock in the 1960's was bitter-sweet, in both giving the art of song a newly relevant place in society and yet closing off other musics from wider public reception. Since the hyper-commodifying early 1980's, though, a reversal of fortune has occurred. The resurgence of electro-acoustic and improvised music, which peaked in the 1990's, was spurned by and in turn further impelled the surprising codification and popularization of the experimental lineage. One sees this in the countless digitally-remastered reissues of rare and previously-unreleased recordings, the bewildering Wire magazine- a sort of People magazine for the upwardly-mobile music literati - and the general post-modernist understanding of widely contrasting canons (or differing interpretations of said traditions - for example, what "punk" means) existing simultaneously. This trend has allowed for an extraordinary array of cultural choices and even, at times, led to great music. But the use of experimental methods in popular music has clearly not inspired large audiences. More important, it has been dwarfed in its effect by the development of digital media and computer music-composition programs, which - unlike a historicist look into the electro-acoustic past - do not encourage a radical approach. Meanwhile, much of contemporary Rock music is consumed by the desire to mix and match prescribed genres or the shameless plundering of the outward, most easily commodified characteristics of certain traditions - or even certain artists - as if the sheer volume of past music, so easily accessible, fit for quick consumption, has deadened our sense of hearing as much as hazy computer screens enervate our sight. Among the more vibrant Rap and House-Techno traditions, usually only in the former is the untrained individual, with only his voice and his words at his disposal, offered an outlet, and even then it is in a highly restricted space, stuck in a dualistic relationship with those who construct the accompanying music. Overall, it seems, the scientific, academic approach to music has returned like an avenging phantom, making popular music an increasingly specialized craft, with a concomitant hierarchical division of labor.
