Roke Timetraveler, Know Thyself
In keeping with my personal return to roke last night, a quicky embed from one of the best guitar pop songs I’ve known, My Bloody Valentine - “When You Sleep”:
For the last week, I’ve been flipping around in We Rock So You Don’t Have To, a collection of essays and embarrassing interviews with 90s grunge navel-gazers that carefully details modern rock’s last gasp. Read it in tandem with the 80s underground equivalent, Our Band Could Be Your Life but find-replace “embarrassing” with “inspirational”. I can’t quite identify the shark, but these books go a long way to describing the jump.
In the My Bloody Valentine article by Mark Kemp, Kevin Shields makes some particularly insightful comments regarding the waning relevance of rock in postmodernity.
“It’s funny,” Shields says, “the world has gone into this weird, like, time warp. You watch TV and hear people condemn bands for their ’60s-isms, but it’s honest because we still hear that music all the time. It’s not like we’re trying real hard to search it out and be retrogressive, it’s just that it’s always there in front of everybody’s faces. [...]
“I realize that hip-hop is very modern music in a way that ours isn’t,” he says. “If people in the ’60s were to hear us they’d go, ‘Wow, that band’s kind of weird.’ It might seem alien to them because of the technological precision-ism in what we do. But we are in a machine age, so we kind of naturally imitate those machines. So that side of us would seem alien when put beside the Velvet Underground, who were all loose and flowing.
“But if you played hip-hop or house music to a ’60s audience, people would go ‘Wow! That’s weird, avant-garde wildness!’ And that’s kind of strange, because in the ’90s it’s totally commercial music. So, in that sense, hip-hop and house music is more modern than what we’re doing; not that what we’re doing is less relevant. It’s realness that matters, and in England, it’s trendy to be modern - to be hip-hop or house or ethereal, or this or that - whereas in America, it’s pointless to be trendy.”
He loses me with the bit about “realness” and the pointlessness of trends but his image of the timetravelling record is revealing. For Shields, it is meaningful and possible to be modern (perhaps “contemporary” is a better choice of words?) yet the benchmark he uses to determine modern-ness is the opinion of an earlier generation. Pretty much everything identifiable as rock has been time-traveler music since My Bloody Valentine so who thinks in these terms today?
Has hip-hop inherited Shield’s burdensome relationship to history? With anticipation of Tha Carter III at a fever pitch (and quite a few leaks spinning on our harddisks), the hip-hop digerati squabble to identify the core character of a “classic album”. Without fail, heads trot out the canonical examples - the Illmatics, the Reasonable Doubts, the Ready to Dies, etc. - always the history lesson.
In a recent thread at DatPiff, NewMexicosFinest even writes:
Classic albums don’t have this auto tone gah-bage on it B-)
Do Jay-z Shit Gotta Vocoder On His Shit??
Did Biggie Have That Shit On His Classics????Lil Wayne Is A Good Lyricist….but A Classic Album Maker???
Shield’s interview in “We Rock…” was recorded just before the release of his own classic album, “Loveless”. Were there fanzine op-eds at the time decrying his use of drum machines and digital delay because the Beatles got by with Ringo and tape loops?
Roke ruin begets hip-hop hypocrisy. The cyclical nature of pop?
Tags: books, grunge, hiphop, history, music, rock, roke, shoegaze
