Nowadays, to be labeled a "Rockist" is a borderline slur: music critics lob it at each to slander their opponent as snobbish, stagnant, out-of-date and out-of-touch. Among certain cultural critics, it is practically synonymous with "racist," inasmuch as "Rockists" supposedly only prefer music gate-kept by an overwhelmingly-white establishment of elderly men. A part of me is sympathetic to these anti-"Rockist" screeds, for indeed a myopic insistence on a single, aging genre can indeed cut one off from so much other excellent music--especially from minorities, which our country has a long, atrocious history of silencing.
Yet like all sweeping terms, there are significant problems with "Rockist". First is the fact that the biggest, most unapologetic "Rockists" I have ever met are Hispanic. It is the young Mexican-American men I've known who are the biggest fans of, say,
Soundgarden, of
Metallica, the
White Stripes, the
Strokes, who claim that Radiohead peaked with
The Bends.
Given how much of Rock 'n Roll was influenced by
Ricky Valens,
Carlos Santana,
? and the Mysterions,
Rage Against the Machine, and even
At The Drive-In, this shouldn't surprise us. To stereotype "Rockists" as exclusively white is itself rather racist.
It's also classist: Coastal elites and suburbanites may have long ago moved on from Rock 'n Roll, but, having lived in the Midwest, I can assure you that most the middle of the country has most certainly not. And lest one dismiss that all as "Flyover" country conservatism, let us remember that Rock was first and foremost a Working Class genre, the music of the anti-elites. From
Chuck Berry singing "Johnny B. Goode" to
Little Richard out of Jim Crow Georgia; from
Alan Freed broadcasting across rust-belt Cleveland to
Elvis Presley emerging from Memphis, Tennessee; from the
Beatles out of the Liverpool docks to
Bob Dylan hitch-hiking from northern Minnesota; from
Bruce Springsteen escaping the failing-factories of New Jersey to the
Ramones trapped in Queens; from
Black Sabbath in the Birmingham steel mills to
Guns 'n Roses running from Indiana to L.A.; from
Jimi Hendrix out of rained-out Seattle to
Kurt Cobain on the muddy banks of the Wishkah; from The Stooges'
Forgotten Boy to The Replacements'
Bastards of Young; from
U2 in bombed-out Ireland to the
White Stripes hailing from dying Detroit, and etc., etc., etc.--Rock 'n Roll has most often been identified with the Working Classes. Even when so many of these bands are of Middle-Class or even Upper-Class extraction (as with, say,
Led Zeppelin or
Queen), their most faithful audiences nevertheless remain found in the lower income tax brackets that dominate the middle of the country.
Which makes sense, given that these "Rockists" are often folks from hard-labor backgrounds who work all day with the power-tools of heavy-machinery, and then work all night with the power-tools of amplifiers and guitar-distortion--all in a quest to reclaim their humanity from a dehumanizing industry. It is no mystery to me why so many Hispanics are "Rockists" so-called--they above all are still entangled directly with physical labor, struggling to survive in an exploitative market system. We can map the rise and fall of Rock's fortunes with the rise and fall of the Working Classes' fortunes, as America has shifted from a Manufacturing to a Service economy.
This crucial shift may help explain that most petulant of "Rockist" boasts, "At least we
play our own instruments!!" Now I will be the first insist that whether one plays or programs ones music is completely irrelevant to whether or not the music is beautiful; nevertheless, one can understand where a "Rockist" Working Class is coming from, how threatened they would feel to behold their skills and livelihoods rendered largely irrelevant by computerized machinery--
as has already happened to the American Working Class at large. For the sad fact of the matter is that U.S. Manufacturing is
not on the decline, in fact that sector has never been more robust--but the jobs no longer exist because it's all automated now. Foreigners didn't kill the factory jobs, computers did--and so the Working Class is naturally resentful of computers.
Likewise, with the rise of the DJ, human beings are rendered irrelevant to the production of music--just as human beings are rapidly rendered irrelevant to production
generally. Even Hip-Hop at least requires a human voice; EDM requires no human presence whatsoever. One can easily imagine a computer algorithm programmed to write all our dance music for us, eliminating human input entirely. The dancers on the floor become subject solely to the whims of the machines, like some dystopic Matrix-cum-Terminator nightmare, wherein the vast majority of world is rendered superfluous, disposable, excess population. It's not just Rock 'n Roll we worry about disappearing, but the human race entirely.
These are real concerns; the Working Class is indeed being left behind, as the majority of the jobs created in our sluggish economic recovery have occurred in the cities, and that primarily within service economies, while the Rust Belt and rural-areas are forgotten--where, not coincidentally, drug-use and suicides are soaring. If ever you were baffled by the rise of Bernie Sanders and (much more alarmingly) Donald Trump, know that they have little to do with the rise of free-loaders or racists respectively, but the reaction of a working class lashing out. It is telling to me that the most vicious thing Bruce Springsteen could think to call Trump was "a con man"--of working class origins himself, Springsteen fully understands the blind rage that drives so many of the working poor to Trump. Springsteen only objects to how that anger is hijacked by a rich sleaze-bag, not as to whether its justified in the first place. No matter what else happens in November, as long as this country continues to ignore the poor like we do, then all those potential-Trump voters will still be there--as will the Bernie Sanders voters. And though those two groups may hold vastly antithetical ideas for how to fix America, one thing remains for sure: both groups will remain
pissed. And nothing fuels Rock more than anger.
