Who Can Really Say?

Rockism and Reality

Kelefa Sanneh rips apart "rockism" in today's NYT. I'm not surprised I hadn't heard the term before. Her springboard was last week's appearance by Ashlee Simpson on SNL, where she was caught lip synching to a song.

One of 2004's most popular new stars had been exposed as. ...

As what, exactly? The online verdict came fast and harsh, the way online verdicts usually do. A typical post on her Web site bore the headline, "Ashlee you are a no talent fraud!" After that night, everyone knew that Jessica Simpson's telegenic sister was no rock 'n' roll hero - she wasn't even a rock 'n' roll also-ran. She was merely a lip-synching pop star.

Music critics have a word for this kind of verdict, this knee-jerk backlash against producer-powered idols who didn't spend years touring dive bars. Not a very elegant word, but a useful one. The word is rockism, and among the small but extraordinarily pesky group of people who obsess over this stuff, rockism is a word meant to start fights. The rockism debate began in earnest in the early 1980's, but over the past few years it has heated up, and today, in certain impassioned circles, there is simply nothing worse than a rockist.

Got that? "Producer-powered" idols? I thought "no talent fraud" handled the matter quite well. After all, what exactly is her talent if she isn't actually singing? Is the point to simply look alternately cool and hot? Sanneh's only just started. Later she tries to reconcile things.

The challenge isn't merely to replace the old list of Great Rock Albums with a new list of Great Pop Songs - although that would, at the very least, be a nice change of pace. It's to find a way to think about a fluid musical world where it's impossible to separate classics from guilty pleasures. The challenge is to acknowledge that music videos and reality shows and glamorous layouts can be as interesting - and as influential - as an old-fashioned album.

To Sanneh, a fluid musical world is a world where people who can't sing get to pretend to sing. No, the challenge is to pretend that music videos, reality shows, and glamorous layouts can be interesting or influential.

Rockism makes it hard to hear the glorious, incoherent, corporate-financed, audience-tested mess that passes for popular music these days. To glorify only performers who write their own songs and play their own guitars is to ignore the marketplace that helps create the music we hear in the first place, with its checkbook-chasing superproducers, its audience-obsessed executives and its cred-hungry performers. To obsess over old-fashioned stand-alone geniuses is to forget that lots of the most memorable music is created despite multimillion-dollar deals and spur-of-the-moment collaborations and murky commercial forces. In fact, a lot of great music is created because of those things

Yeah but that's the point, isn't it? They were geniuses, right? Why shouldn't folkls complain that there's a lack of genius around when instead we've got an aptly described "glorious, incoherent, corporate-financed, audience-tested mess that passes for popular music these days". Good music doesn't have to pass some sort of "rockism" authenticity test. It has to pass a musical authenticity test. Is she playing that instrument? Is he singing that song? How simple does it get?

If I read her right, she's saying: "It doesn't matter if she can't sing" but can she really mean that? Sanneh's not against rockism. She's against singism.

Posted by Peter at October 31, 2004 06:50 PM