Definition

Musical historiography has spent at least the last four decades warping our view of rock. Over the last couple of years I’ve come to view the history of rock music as a continuum, rather than by the far more common discourse on genre ghettoization. Revisionist history written by orthodox rock critics has attempted to obscure this essential truth in service to advertising concerns. To clarify, I am not opposed to the use of musical definitions. Terms like thrash, grunge, punk, sludge and so on have their uses as sonic descriptors. When someone says a band thrashes, you generally take that to mean that they play fast, heavily distorted chugging rhythm guitars with lots of complex, winding instrumental breaks, jackhammer drum beats and shredding guitar solos featuring lots of hammer-ons. The problem arises when artificial barriers are erected between styles that are only superficially different. Music is fluid, and the best bands, as they themselves have been saying all along, cannot be pigeonholed.

Rock is a specific term, not an umbrella one. When I say rock, I’m talking about small band music that is dominated by the electric guitar, bass and drums and built mainly on amplified and usually distorted guitar riffs. For a band to be a rock band it must rock, and if you’ve been listening long enough now, you know what that means. Rock is a non-dance music that provokes a physical response. The physical impact of rock music when amplified generally is the force that compels acolytes to bang their heads or play air guitar. Despite their stylistic differences, the Rolling Stones, Stooges, Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Replacements, Soundgarden, Kyuss, High On Fire and White Stripes are all working within the same idiom. These bands and thousands more are all quintessentially rock. The instrumentation is the same, as is the small band format. A drummer, a bass player and a guitarist or two are the central voices in their sound. Vocals may be handled by a dedicated singer or one of the players. It serves the interest of the media (whose goal is to sell advertising, not music) to subdivide rock bands into categories because they can be more easily marketed or ignored, as the case may be. Guns ‘n’ Roses and Jane’s Addiction crawled out of the same Los Angeles club scene and parlayed the same set of arena-ready, classic rock approved influences and a similar glammed up media profile into short-lived but brilliant parallel careers as avatars for diametrically opposed scenes, MTV hair metal for G’n’R and SPIN’s Alternative Rock Nation for Jane’s. Why? It’s not as though Pearl Jam and Bad Company were all that different musically to begin with, but for the majors to present the Pearl Jam in 1991 as the Next Big Thing, an artificial break with the dinosaurs of the past had to be created to produce a groundswell of hype and move units. Failing to hide from the crucial twenty-something Generation X demographic the fact that their new sounds were highly influenced by their parents’ boomer rock would have been commercial poison, hence the need for a new name – grunge. Being an arena rock band to the core, Pearl Jam and the far more metal-influenced Alice In Chains and Soundgarden were lumped in with the ragged pop-punk of Nirvana. Sonically they all were extremely different, but still essentially rock. So basically we have this ridiculous paradigm constructed by which these bands do not share their historical antecedents but instead lept fully formed into the public's consciousness as a homogeneous "new wave" of music. I'm not buying it. Again, it was not the bands themselves who were saying this, but their major label handlers' marketing departments doing their best to obscure the music and wrap it in fashion conceits to move units. Pearl Jam themselves realized this once they were left in the dust by contemporary trends and at least had the integrity to own up to their influences and play on record with Neil Young.

Revisionist rock history has come along for the ride. Typically, a survey of early 90's rock makes some point about the symbolic gesture of Nevermind knocking Michael Jackson's Dangerous off of the top spot on the charts, but this is hardly surprising given that album charts always reflect more accurately (although not all that accurately) the serious record-buying public's perception than the fickle pop audience and insular broadcast industry. These outlets are better represented by the singles charts, which are based on airplay. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" only ever hit number 6 on the Billboard charts, and did so after a slow and steady climb rather than an explosive debut. Conclusion? The song that gets picked again and again and again as the greatest song of the '90s was never as ubiquitous as we are taught to remember. And as for the idea of Nirvana and their alt-rock ilk ending the reign of MTV hair metal well... MTV might have jumped off the bandwagon some time around 1992, but Quiet Riot's Metal Health still sold two million copies during the 90's, and Mötley Crüe's Dr. Feelgood sold twice that. People were still listening to and even buying this music. These sorts of sea changes don't actually happen and take place only in the minds of broadcasters and music writers.

Music criticism as it stands has contributed to the problem for decades. The vast majority of music criticism is not about music at all, but instead catering to the core audience demographics’ self image as being tuned in to what is cool. The advertisers which supply the revenue want to be able to sell their products to these people. If you’ve read as much music media as I have and have at least a modicum of critical thinking ability in your brain, you should have noticed how little time is actually spent talking about music itself. Where they are from, what they wear on stage, who in the industry they are associated with, what their videos look like and so on do not tell us anything about what a band actually sounds like. The idea is to build an image for the band and the publication itself and by implication the advertisers. Sometimes you will see albums advertised in the same publications that are reviewing them! How can we expect an impartial critical review if the advertiser is paying the writer’s salary?

Fashion and production trends have obscured the relative stability of rock as a style (ignoring its fluctuating commercial prospects) to a large degree, and their primary influence on the music itself was to date it. This doesn’t have to be the case, and the bands that have always remained committed to finding their musical voices have discovered this time and time again. If they are good enough and work hard, they might with luck even be able to make a go of it for a little while, touring and recording. Really, playing in a rock band is not a commercially rewarding enterprise, and aside from a few obvious exceptions it never has been. Again though, commercial concerns are irrelevant to the quality of music. As long as the sound of a rock band is built on solid musical bedrock, timeless and relevant music can be made whether or not the musicians themselves are aware of their own musical DNA. For this reason, bands that are superficially different due to whatever production tricks happen to be in vogue (giant, arena-ready gated reverb snare drums in the ‘80s, pseudo-electronic industrial textures in the ‘90s, digital distortion and auto-tuned vocals in the ‘00s etc) can be appropriately grouped together based on the musical traits they all share. The Who and Mountain and the Clash and Black Flag and Kyuss and the Smashing Pumpkins and the Black Lips might sound different, because the techniques used to record them differed and because each band’s particular voice was unique, but their instruments and techniques and song structures are all based on similar antecedents -- they all speak the language of rock.

Musical differences between bands and styles are a different factor, and by this I mean techniques. Morbid Angel use blast beats and guttural vocals, the Jimi Hendrix Experience did not. Earthless play guitar solos, the Ramones did not. These are not arbitrary or qualitative judgments, but simply statements of fact. The presence or absence of identifiable musical qualities such as these allows us to accurately refer to Morbid Angel as a death metal band and the Ramones as a punk band. Rock has sprouted its fair sure of offshoots, punk and metal being the most important and each of these encompassing their own sub styles. It is important to remember that these all fall under the dominion of rock however. There can be, and except for the most extreme cases (Napalm Death, Deicide, Mayhem, Extreme Noise Terror, Fear, Crucifucks, Hirax, Cryptic Slaughter) almost always is crossover between the styles in the work of all bands that do not fit squarely into the rock mold. Just as Led Zeppelin and Cream could easily be thought of as super loud blues bands, Motörhead and Metallica could easily be thought of as amped up, ultra-heavy rock bands (something Lemmy himself has always claimed), and Minor Threat and Sick Of It All as rock bands in a (sometimes permanent) state of pupation.
Certainly the bands themselves were aware of this, if not consciously, then at least musically. They were all listening to each others’ records anyways. Malcolm McLaren’s manipulation of the media and Johnny Rotten’s mouth got a lot more attention for the Sex Pistols than Steve Jones’ conventional pub rock approach to the guitar ever did, but it was the boys in the band who knew how to give Budgie and Black Sabbath licks a steel-toed boot to the ass and play them more primitively than even those artisans had. The media fell for it and went along for the ride because they love shit like the idea of the front man for a rock band talking about destroying roll. Yeah right. I’m sure there was no rock whatsoever that went into peeling off the riffs and solos (!) that make up “Anarchy in the U.K.”At the end of the day it was still the same power-trio racket that had defined rock ‘n’ roll since the ‘50s. Never mind the Bollocks indeed.

Don’t be fooled by Madison Avenue and its cronies. It’s about the music, and always has been. Ignore the extraneous bullshit and listen without distraction. Maximum volume yields maximum results.