Listening to the Future - Bill Martin

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Sergeant Pepper’s, had opened up fundamentally new territory?

      This is perhaps a weird way to broach the subject of musical avant-gardes, since the legitimacy of radical innovators is what has most often been called into question—even more so in rock music than in jazz and classical music. It seems that the prevalent point of view has been that rock is not supposed to become avant-garde. My standard response to this now well-established dogma is, “Blame it on the Beatles.” But what I hope to show here is that, in fact, the roots of progressive rock are intertwined with the roots of rock music more generally.

      When I claim that “generosity” is one of the fundamental elements of rock music, one of the things I mean is this: “rock music” is an exceedingly large category, under which many, many kinds of music can flourish. However, we might identify two kinds of rock music that do not always get along so well. The first might be called the “real rock ’n’ roll” camp, which is mainly defined by statements about what is not (or what ain’t) “real” rock ’n’ roll. There is also the camp of simply rock ’n’ roll, which is more able to define itself by what it likes as opposed to what it is willing to excommunicate—the point being that “rock music” is now the broader category, which includes rock ’n’ roll. The “real rock ’n’ roll” camp is dismissive of anything that departs from basic blues-chord structure or beat, so I sometimes call this camp the “blues orthodoxy.”1 The music that especially departs from this orthodoxy is, of course, progressive rock.

      Generosity in rock music also refers not only to the breadth of the form, but also its tendency to be ever open, ever growing, and ever willing to engage in experiments with redefinition. The irony is that, especially as regards the critical establishment around rock music, blues orthodoxy has been the dominant trend since the late seventies, even while this trend is, demonstrably, the least generous. Or, at least, it seems that the blues orthodoxy has come down heaviest on progressive rock, because the latter has taken rock music where it is presumably not supposed to go.

      Perhaps rock music tends to be generous in whatever present it finds itself because it was synthetic in its origins. Rock music represents a flowing together of diverse music cultures: most especially musics of the African American experience, from Black church music to blues, jazz, and rhythm-and-blues, but also elements of country music, folk music, and the tradition of American popular song associated with such figures as Cole Porter and the Gershwin brothers. Arguably, rock music provided the first forum for what has more lately been called “multiculturalism.” Perhaps we would find, upon further study, that those who today warn us of the dangers of the latter were yesterday those who warned us about the former. Indeed, there was never a time when the social and the musical experimentation of rock music was not intertwined, as both the music and its larger culture presented the sedate, post-war, 1950s “era of good feeling” with its first truly dangerous example of “race mixing.” Today it may be the fashion in Lubbock, Texas, to pretend as though dear, departed Buddy Holly has always been the local hero, but in his day all he heard was condemnation from the older white generation for playing “nigger music.” Meanwhile, when Buddy and the Crickets showed up to play the Apollo Theater in Harlem, they turned out to be a good deal more pale of complexion than expected.

      At the same time, class and gender also asserted themselves as central issues. This new music was made, for the most part, by both Blacks and whites who were from the wrong side of the tracks. Indeed, one of the frightening things about the music, from an establishment point of view, was that it had the potential to transcend racial barriers and prejudices by showing poor whites and poor Blacks that they had a great deal in common. In the United States, of course, there is not and never has been a question of class that can be isolated in a pristine way from the legacy of slavery, anti-Black oppression, and racism.2 (Similarly, in England, there is no pure question of class that can be completely separated from English imperialism, colonialism, and the ideology of “rule Britainnia.”)3 However, the fact that the kids were dancing together and digging some of the same music—what was, significantly, originally called “race music”—was a good start; could the specter of “miscegenation” be far behind?

      Here, too, the question of gender—and the more recently named question of “sexuality”—is already intertwined with race and class. Even as the cultural, political, and economic establishments hoped for a “well-ordered” and “smoothly functioning” society, where ideology had come to an end and the appropriate roles and behaviors for well-adjusted individuals at all levels of the social hierarchy seemed rock solid, there began a kind of groundswell on the cultural front, a rebellion against the little boxes all made of ticky-tacky.

      What brought these diverse musical and cultural elements together and allowed them to congeal into something called “rock music”? Arguably, the musical streams that flowed into the music could not have given rise to a new musical form without one key element: electricity. Rock music is the first music to be entirely formed in the age of electricity. It is also, therefore, the first music to emerge in the time of the maturing of the mass media—and to some extent as an expression of mass media. This is perhaps what most of all links rock music with other artistic genres that are not even possible without mass media, especially film and video. Indeed, in recent years it seems that rock music—and “popular music” (a term that will require further interrogation) more generally—has been increasingly absorbed into the Hollywood/Los Angeles entertainment machine, with the movie business at the heart of this complex.

      Therefore the question has to be asked: Does the corporate serpent wend its way over all forms of rock music, including progressive rock? Taking the “nontechnological” elements that went into rock music, there is a solid core of rebellion. But make these elements dependent upon electricity (and advanced technology more generally), and it appears that there is always a ready recipe for cooptation. In the case of the industry-promoted “rebels,” such as Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, or Prince (or some of the younger generation, for example the “angry” or “bitter” music of an Alanis Morrisette), antiestablishment postures cannot help but be somewhat contrived, even while certain social conventions seem to be contravened. For sure, the “rebellious” aspect of certain rock superstars is simply posture. Yet, I am not convinced that this is entirely the case with any of the first three artists—or “artists formerly known as”—whom I named; there I think the motives are more of a mixed bag, that there are some honest motivations mixed in with an attempt to negotiate a very difficult cultural and economic arena. The point remains, however, that there is something problematic about saying that some rock music has “sold out” or “gone commercial,” when the connection with commercial imperatives is so built into the emergence and development of the very form.

      Without being reductivistic or deterministic about it, there remains a great deal to be said for the claim that every form of culture bears a significant relationship to the social formation in which it arises, and to the mode of production that is at the heart of any given formation. Rock music could not have existed in the time before advanced industrial economy and global social relations. These relations are unequal and for the most part predatory, even though they are also part of a single, global, competitive mode of production—the stage of capitalism that Lenin called imperialism. One hundred or more years into this development, we now have systems of media that are productive of consciousness on a level unimagined in previous centuries. It might be said that imperialism plus MTV/CNN/etc. equals “postmodern capitalism.” Rock music, then, is the form of music that has arisen in this time and against this background.

      Furthermore, and to reiterate, rock music is unthinkable without electric amplification, electronic sound modification, and advanced recording technology. The electric guitar (and perhaps in a lesser, though also related, way, the electric bass guitar) is at the center of rock music. “Acoustic” sounds in rock music play the role of “relief” or dynamic contrast, and, for the most part, are not really acoustic anyway (as anyone who has watched an edition of “MTV Unplugged” can see). Theodore Gracyk, in Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, goes so far as to argue that rock music is so thoroughly mediated by technology that, in fact, its technology is its art. In his book on English progressive rock, Edward Macan identifies sampling technology as one of the innovations

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