May 302016


Is this the overwrought rock criticism we aimed to skirt, or did we encourage the following New York Times piece by Chuck Klosterman?


  6 Responses to “This Is What You Want?”

  1. Well, I hope we encouraged it. It seems a totally RTH topic – important and pointless at the same time.

    But maybe I think this because I’ve toyed with a similar thread multiple times and thought about this topic many more times.

    I touched on another aspect in the Prince thread a few weeks ago, although then it was about which deaths among remaining rock & roll stars would warrant the kind of coverage seen recently with Bowie and Prince.

    I think Klosterman might well have mentioned Sinatra since he exhibits the characteristics ascribed to Sousa and Marley. Sinatra = the Great American Song Book. All such songs are also known as “Sinatra songs” even if he never sang them. I think Sinatra will be around for a long time.

    If any rock & rollers have attained or will attain that status, it seems to me that the Beatles and Dylan are the only contenders. The anthemic songs of each (All You Need Is Love, Give Peace A Chance, Blowin’ In The Wind, Times They Are A-Changin’, etc.) would appear to have a very long, long shelf life that inevitably would get transferred to the artists themselves.

  2. I hadn’t realized there was a page two to the thread opening when I responded. I get your page two criticism and basically agree with it.

    I still thing it would have been a great RTH thread; we would just have done it better 🙂 And with a lot more humor!

  3. Yes, that’s what I was getting at, Al. I was reminded of our old Mt Rushmore of Rock thread and how well that encapsulated what we’ve done here. Excuse me, all, for taking some time – for however long – to prepare and present our own eulogy.

  4. misterioso

    So much wrong with that article. Let’s start with a dubious premise (that the rock music/marching music comparison or analogy is even remotely revealing, as opposed to comparing it to another genre that is not known solely by one practitioner), move to give the obvious (and probably correct) answer to your question (The Beatles) and then, for no good reason (or not stated reason, actually) other than needing to reach a certain word count, dismissing it, then raising other interesting but problematic answers before dismissing them, finally lighting on a no less problematic “solution.” While invoking the Voyager space probe. Brilliant.

  5. Wasn’t there also something about jazz being the defining musical genre of the first half of the 20th century? Is that true, even by a broad definition of jazz?

  6. misterioso

    I suppose it could be seen as such. Whose definition, though? I imagine that if we’re talking sales and radio play, “pop music” is the dominant music of the century, period, and pop music intersects with jazz as it does with rock or country or whatever.

    But how is it that Elvis is rejected (perhaps rightly) because “It has been said that Presley invented rock and roll, but he actually staged a form of primordial “prerock” that barely resembles the post-“Rubber Soul” aesthetics that came to define what this music is. He also exited rock culture relatively early; he was pretty much out of the game by 1973” but the same argument is not applied to Chuck Berry? And why, dear God, does it really matter if Johnny B. Goode is on the Voyager disc?

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