Originally published in Barrelhouse
Magazine, 2006.
This Essay Doesn’t
Rock
You may be tempted to argue otherwise. After all this is an essay
concerning sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll—that archetypal trinity of a certain
kind of “rocking” lifestyle. But the mere appearance of these three classic
indicators of “rock” does not a rocking essay make. In fact, rocking essay is an oxymoron. Essaying—the
crafted attempt to weigh a certain issue in order to gain a deeper
understanding of it—by definition does not rock. I say this not because I have
access to some specific definition of what rock is, but instead because I think I have a pretty clear sense of what
rock is not. Rock is not crafted.
Rock is not calculating. Rock is not honed and edited and revised. It is not logical or cohesive or polite—at
least it shouldn’t be. Rock is not
trying to get you to think. Rock doesn’t care what you think. And although rock
may be heavy, it certainly does not weigh
anything, at least not anything that approaches significant societal import (it
often does, however, weigh the relative merits of rock itself, i.e., whether
one should or should not rock—or be rocked—longer or harder or louder or like a
hurricane).
Rock is a slippery concept,
subject to varied and often contradictory interpretations. To my grandparents’
generation, rock is what one does in
an unfinished wooden chair U-hauled home from Amish Country. Baby Boomers used
the verb to rock to mean “playing
rock ‘n’ roll music” or “living the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle” (read: sex, drugs,
and rock ‘n’ roll). The word, like the music itself, suggested urgency,
shamelessness, a need to run counter to the suit-and-tie establishment, and a
general tendency to not give a good-goddamn about anything but the here and
now. But as rock music and its original, boomer audience have aged, the word rock has aged with them. In twenty-first
century America, rock has been
watered down to mean something benign like really,
really great, a little better than
awesome, or maybe a slightly more
ass-kickin’ kick-ass. In this form rock
is less a verb and more a verbal—a
verb that does the work of an adjective.
Rock/rocks would fit toward the right
on a continuum of “good” and “bad.”
The opposite of rocks is sucks. And to be
blunt, the current usage of rocks
does just that. The word has been
commandeered by advertising agencies and cheerleading squads and other
sloganeering types who assault us with an endless list of things that rock. We
are told: Fruity Pebbles Rock!
Westerville North Girls Volleyball Rocks! The Coast Guard Rocks! The Fourth
Avenue Peace Coalition Rocks! We Rock! You Rock! Doesn’t this all just totally
rock? Well, no. It doesn’t. But I’m not exactly being fair here. __________ Rocks! is not strictly the
domain of pitchmen, political operatives, and high school hallway decorators.
Even supposed “rockers” are guilty of this assault on the word. I’d like to think the twenty years I’ve spent
playing bass and singing in a rock band have taught me a little something about
what rocks and what does not. And still, I find myself getting sloppy and
saying ridiculous crap like, Ohio State’s
Defense Rocks! all the time. But this horrendous corruption must stop.
Right now. Because if Miss Mulcahy’s
Third Graders Rock, then everything rocks. And if everything rocks, nothing
rocks.
What’s really disturbing is saying
something “rocks” has become not only an accepted way to describe things that
patently do not rock, but worse, the word is often used to prop-up and make
credible the same straight-laced, establishment-approved things that rock ‘n’
roll used to rally against. This became clear to me during the last Republican
National Convention. Our burly codger of a Vice President saddled up to the
podium with a half wave and a crooked grin, and the camera cut to the
conventioneers on the floor. Right there, in the sea of Bush-Cheney 04 signs, floating above the chants of Four More Years!, on a large poster
board with block letters that must have taken three or four Sharpies, it said:
DICK CHENEY ROCKS!!!
Now hold on. Dick Cheney does many
things. He’s man of power and influence. He served in the Nixon White House. He
was a five term congressman. House Minority Whip. He led the charge to invade
Iraq. He possesses the nuclear launch codes. But Dick Cheney does not rock.
Whatever you think of him as a man and a politician, surely we can agree on
this point. I know. I know. The Republicans want to be the party of
inclusiveness. They call themselves coalition builders. They are constructing a
big tent in which we all feel welcome. But what would happen if a Keith
Richards circa ’77 or a strung-out
Johnny Thunders circa ’88 or even a
neo-junkie like ex-Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland circa now was to crash this little
metaphorical tent party? My guess is that Dick Cheney would be choppered out
like the fall of Saigon. Maybe this is an unfair scenario. The three above
“rockers” all rock in a specific, old fashioned, snorting coke off the mixing board kind of way. But I know this for
certain: Dick Cheney and Keith Richards can’t both rock. In order for rock
to mean anything at all, we must choose.
But the choice isn’t between a
Republican and a Rolling Stone. That choice is obvious and pointless. Everyone
knows Richards rocks, and sane people know Cheney doesn’t. There is no
universally agreed upon standard. We just know this intuitively. Much like Supreme
Court Justice Potter Stewart stating that he couldn’t provide a satisfactory
definition of pornography, but that he knew it when he saw it, most of us can
recognize rock when we see, hear,
smell, feel, or taste it. Does Keith Richards rock? Christ, just look at
him. Sixty-odd years of rock are carved into his face. He’s a one man Mount
Rushmore of rock, the (somehow still) living, breathing template for the rock
‘n’ roll lifestyle. And Cheney? Uh, no. Power Lunches at The Palm on DuPont
Circle aren’t so much carved into his face as they are spilling over his shirt
collar. Obviously the definition of rock
can’t be so wide as to include Cheney, but it can’t be so narrow as to include
only Keith. Rock can’t be limited to those who have copped heroin in Tompkins
Square, but it also can’t include those who hold breakfast meetings with
conservative Christian groups.
So if we all have some DNA-level
knowledge of what rock is, how did we get to the place where even the stuff we
know does not rock is still filed
under rock? Society writ-large was once
both fascinated and repelled by rock ‘n’ roll music and the antics of its
practitioners. In 1969, the year I was born, Jim Morrison—the bloated,
ex-film student and self-coronated Lizard King—exposed himself to a Miami audience. This got him
arrested, charged, and eventually convicted of lewd and lascivious behavior,
but it also helped to create the persona that became a cultural fascination,
and it certainly made the Doors a more popular band. Would anyone today notice, much less care, if Billie Joe Armstrong from Green
Day—that heavily eyelined father of two and singer for the current biggest band
in the world—dropped his drawers on stage? I suppose a few mini-van driving
chaperones would write fiery letters to the daily paper, but it certainly
wouldn’t cause a Morrison-sized stink. And my guess is it wouldn’t affect Green
Day’s popularity either way.
This is not because our view of lewd
and lascivious has changed (we still don’t cotton to the free-swinging of male
genitalia—the almost guaranteed X-rating for a movie featuring a naked penis
testifies to that, as does the Clinton impeachment trial). Instead it is our
view of rock and roll (and rock and rollers) that has changed. Rock music has
become so ubiquitous as to be invisible. As it moved from being a voice of the
counterculture to being an integrated part of The Culture, it didn’t so much
fall off the cultural radar, but it became so on the cultural radar that it is now the background noise that
other, suddenly edgier cultural movements are made vivid against. Rock and roll
is not any less dangerous or urgent than it ever was. The difference is in how we perceive it. The fact
is we no longer look to rock ‘n’ roll to fulfill our need to rebel or be
shocked. Instead we are simultaneously shocked and fascinated by the
“thug-lifestyle” glorified by ex-drug dealing rappers. We worry that our kids
will be contaminated by “gangsta rap” videos that make violence look sexy and
sex look violent. We can’t believe that our kids have access to bloody video
games like the Grand Theft Auto series that allow them to virtually act out
this sex and violence. And just like our own parents, and their parents before,
we think back to a day when things were simpler: when kids liked baseball, and
people wished they could buy the world a Coke, and the biggest danger at a rock
‘n’ roll show was that the drunken lead singer might unzip his pants.
Rock ‘n’ roll was rebellion, an act of
defiance, a shaggy spit-in-the-face to Eisenhower’s high and tight America. But
when the baby boomers took over America’s societal institutions, they
commodified the rock and roll lifestyle. Suddenly the music of everyone from
Dylan to Janice Joplin to The Stones was being co-opted by ad executives and used
to sell luxury cars and computer software and silk lingerie. Sex, drugs, and
rock ‘n’ roll—the very weapons of the revolution—were used to sell bourgeois luxuries to the same people
that once rocked in an act of
rebellion against that bourgeoisie
lifestyle. Today, many of those formerly shaggy parents encourage their kids to form rock and roll bands. Once a year I
read a story in the paper about a couple of freewheeling suburbanites who have
outfitted their garage with a state of the art PA system, space-age
soundproofing, and digital recording gear so little Hunter and his buddies in
the cul de sac can have a place to,
ahem, rock-out. Forming a rock band
is seen as a good, clean, parentally-endorsed alternative to other types of
rebellion…at least until Hunter comes home with a dime-bag hidden in his
amplifier. Everybody seems to want to
rock but only up to the point when it becomes dangerous. But that is when rock
truly rocks.
Maybe the problem is not that rocks has lost its meaning, but rather
that it means too much. Either way, this climate in which anything somebody
likes is said to rock provides an opportunity to construct some standard to
help us gauge who or what is truly rocking and how hard he or she or it is
doing it. But you
should also understand that attempting to codify rock by applying some fixed
set of qualifications is probably the least rocking thing I can imagine. Anyway,
here I go. Back to the beginning.
Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.
That’s the standard. And why not? The
thinking has already been done for us. Three easy-to-remember categories. Like
most-things-rock, the beauty lies in the simplicity. Cheerleaders and
Advertising Executives won’t even have to stop using the word to describe their
wrestling team or F-150 trucks or whatever; they’ll just have to be more
judicious in its use. Before spelling out Cardinal
Wrestling Rocks! in Elmer’s Glue and glitter dust, the vernacularly
responsible cheerleader will stop to consider how the wrestling team measures
up in the three criteria. No sex? No drugs? No rock ‘n’ roll? Then no rocks.
But wait. As mentioned above, the
standard must be broad enough to be useful, and insisting that the three
categories are all-or-nothing makes meeting them far too difficult for people
who aren’t in Mötley Crüe. So I’ll propose a time-tested compromise: a
minimum of two out of three. Sex and drugs. Rock and sex. Drugs and rock. This
idea was inspired by Spinal Tap drummer, Mick Shrimpton. When he is asked what
he would be doing if he weren’t in a rock ‘n’ roll band, he replies, “I suppose
as long as I had the sex and drugs, I could do without the rock and roll.”
Leave it to the fictional drummer of a fictional band to say something that
captures the nature of rock perfectly. Mr. Shrimpton knows that with the sex
and the drugs, the rock ‘n’ roll is superfluous. He wouldn’t need it; he’d
already be “rocking.”
The SDR&R standard (with the
Shrimpton addendum) seems like a reasonable way to measure rock, but let’s apply it to a test case and see if it holds. I
would hope it would go without saying that Christian rock doesn’t rock—that
rocking for God, however righteous or holy or commercially successful it may
be, isn’t really rocking at all. Two generations of rock journalists have pretty much established that the devil has
the better musical acts in his corner (think: Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis,
AC/DC, The Stones, The Kinks, The Clash, Zeppelin, Creedence, Nirvana, The
White Stripes, on and on ad infinitum).
But beyond that, much like the previous discussion of Dick Cheney, I just know
that Christian rock doesn’t. I know
it. But let’s see how Christian rock measures up to the SDR&R standard. Take
the last criterion, “rock ‘n’ roll.” I
might try to argue that Christian rock isn’t even rock music, that rock and
roll itself should contain some element of sex and drugs to even be rock and roll, but that would get
dizzyingly circular. Instead I’ll concede that Christian rock, because the
bands generally utilize the classic rock ‘n’ roll instrumentation (electric
guitar, bass, drums), is in fact rock music. Besides, most Christian rock is
indiscernible at first listen from what Christian rockers call “secular” rock,
until the lyrics sink in and you make out the not quite veiled references to a
loved one who could either be a lover or the Almighty or both. So if it sounds
like rock, maybe it is, and one element out of three is nailed. However, I’m afraid Christian rock’s active
stance against taking drugs and having indiscriminate sex prevents it from
meeting the SDR&R standard. Christian rock might be rock music, but it
doesn’t rock.
The very words, rock and roll, from their inception were a kind of code for sex;
they even sound like sex or at least
a description of sex. And until relatively recently, only heterosexual sex was
overtly considered. But this brings me
to an important caveat to the SDR&R standard: rock must continually confound our expectations. For example,
cycles of strict heterosexuality tend to lead to a kind of testerone-fueled
meat-headishness that simply does not rock. This in turn creates a counter movement toward
sexual ambiguity and at least a token acknowledgement of homosexuality. And
this confounds our expectations. Listening to the lyrics of the rock and roll
canon, we might expect heterosexual sex to rock harder than homosexual sex, but
this is not a sure bet. In a climate of prevailing heterosexuality,
homosexuality rocks harder. But as soon as this homosexuality plays like a
blatant and conscious attempt to be perceived as rock (and sell a bunch of
records), it doesn’t rock at all.
This brings me to caveat number two: as soon as something self-identifies as
“rocking;” as soon as it is conscious of its own attempt to rock; as soon as it
is too obviously trying to convince you that it “rocks,” it almost certainly
does not, regardless of the amount of sex or drugs or rock ‘n’ roll. A
month ago I stopped by my friend Phil’s guitar shop to buy a couple packs of
bass strings. As I reached into the rack to pull out my old stand-bys I noticed
a new product from GHS string company called “Nickel Rockers”—“Nickel,” as in the metal the strings are made of and
“Rockers,” as in either these strings
rock or guitarists who play these
strings will then rock. Now Phil has been playing, fixing, and selling
guitars for a long time, and I’ve come to him often for rock and roll advice.
But while paying for my strings, my question to him was this, “Hey Phil, what
kind of self-respecting ‘rocker’ would ever buy strings called ‘Nickel
Rockers?’”
“Yeah, I don’t know. It’s stupid,” he
said.
“But here’s the thing,” I said,
handing him my credit card. And I paused for a second because I knew I was
about to use a word that is as offensive and hurtful as it gets in my circles.
“If these strings were called GHS Nickel Faggots, then I would buy them in a
second.”
“Yeah, it’s funny,” he said.
“‘Rockers’ is gay, but ‘Faggots’ rocks.”
Here we see much of what is true and
infuriating and confusing about rock. In this single statement we get the
notion that a) rock is contradictory; b) it undermines our expectations; c) it
shouldn’t be too blatant in announcing itself as rock; and d) as soon as it
leans too hard in one direction it must reverse itself. Perhaps the most
frustrating contradiction is that even as rock appears to make room for
homosexuality, by conceding that “Faggots Rocks,” this is still a kind of
ironic, wink-wink, empowerment that
is undermined by the use of “gay” to signify
the worst kind of not-rocking.
Make no mistake, in today’s rock
climate, homophobia is prevalent. But this homophobia set the stage for my
friends in The Fags (three straight guys from Detroit) to sign a major label
deal with legendary Sire Records President, Seymour Stein. I’ve had many
discussions with people who are offended by the name “The Fags.” Newspapers
have refused to print the name in their concert listings. And sure, this band
of heterosexuals is admittedly co-opting an ironic homosexuality and parlaying
it into a major label record deal. However, by flying in the face of what is
culturally accepted and by risking the wrath of both gays and gay-bashers—by calling themselves The Fags instead of something
ambiguous and safe like, maybe, The Vines—these Detroiters are giving us a
lesson in what rocks, for now.
But here’s the ultimate problem with
trying to apply standards—be they my requirement for sex and drugs and rock ‘n’
roll or the 1950s-style standards of decency—to what rocks. Let’s say I could
get everyone to agree to my SDR&R standard, with the Shrimpton addendum and
the two caveats, and everyone from you and me to Extra’s Dayna Devon only used rocks
in reference to people and things that meet the standard: Keith Richards Rocks, Johnny
Thunders Rocks, etc. As soon as that was achieved, one ornery
upsetter—maybe even little Hunter from the cul
de sac—would surely announce to the world that all of us, with our sex and
drugs and our ex-hippie parents and our standards and our addendums and our
caveats were one-hundred-percent full of shit, and what really rocks, what really, really rocks is American Girl
Place or Emeril Lagasse or hell, maybe even Christian rock. And you know what?
He’d have a point.
Once the world had measured precisely
what rocks, there would be, as Sammy Hagar sings, “only one way to rock.” And
that way would be to do a one-eighty against everyone else. Hunter would rock
by trading his guitar for a three piece suit, by quitting his garage band and
joining the Debate and Forensic team. He’d rock by becoming an actuary for an
insurance company. Or maybe he’d go into politics instead. Why mess around? The
hardest rockers would step right up and join the Establishment. He’d become a
five-term congressman, get a job in the White House, arrange breakfast meetings
with conservative Christians.
So maybe Dick Cheney does rock.
Power and wealth are sexy. I mean,
chicks dig rich, powerful guys, right? So, there’s the sex. And America’s
presence in Afghanistan gives us access to most of the world’s supply of the
opium poppy. There’s the drugs. Now the Veep has two out of three. But maybe he
doesn’t even need the sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. What if, despite my
adherence to the SDR&R standard, the one true criterion for rock is simply the ability to convince
somebody that you do rock. I suppose if Cheney can somehow motivate
somebody, anybody—and perhaps most impressively a bible-banging Republican—to break
open a package of sharpies and spring for $.79 worth of poster board with which
to declare his rockingness for all the world to behold, then goddamn it. All I
can say is rock on, Mr. Vice President. Rock on.
In addition to being the bass player for Watershed, Joe Oestreich is the author of Hitless Wonder: A Life in Minor League Rock and Roll. Find him online at www.joeoestreich.com
.
This is why Russian lesbian duo
t.A.t.U do not rock, but Joan Jett and Ani DiFranco do.
