“Nobody should be playing rock and roll anymore—no exceptions. It’s about as urgently needed—as opposed to socially, culturally compulsory—as making papier-maché frog masks. It was possibly once needed, but that was before it was everywhere— when you didn’t hear it in supermarkets or coming out of every Mercedes at a stoplight—before ‘rock-surround.’ What we need now is to turn it off. What was once liberating has become irredeemably oppressive. It exists to make you stupid— like sitcoms or the news or college football or your parents, for crying out loud.”
-- Richard Meltzer, 1998
1. This genre of comment about rock suddenly being oppressive, inescapable muzak has a few precursors - Iggy Pop speculating that old records would soon be blasted by police to subdue riots in the late 80s - but it seems to have hit a peak around the late 90s, when the more perceptive Boomers felt the dissonance between the end-of-history moment and the history-is-now music they were still listening to (From Nick Bromell's introduction to Tomorrow Never Knows, published 2000: 'Scraped by a muzaked "Help" in the supermarket, stuck in traffic on my way home and ambushed by four bars of "Purple Haze" on the radio, I feel a panic of discontinuity. Did the 60s really take place? How could such intensity fade away, overnight as it seemed, leaving only these spectral songs behind?")
ReplyDelete2. This sort of sour grapes-inflected scorched earth policy has always seemed both unworkable and misguided, but I prefer it to the old No Wave notion (later reiterated ad nauseum by Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon) that one could somehow 'destroy rock 'n' roll' from within a rock band - unless your act consists of breaking Little Richard records with a hammer, it seems like the worst sort of sophistry