It’s only Rock and Roll and that’s Great

What chain of events needs to happen for San Francisco residents to stop looking for well mannered sweet singers and self-starter promoters who claim to be finding ways to get you off of your couch to see music, but end up giving all kinds of unsolicited advice about what music you have to like? When did rock vocabulary die? What is rock vocabulary and who ran off with the dictionary?

Not unlike some fans who used to go to Phish concerts and saw in front of them a huge effort at making teenagers and young adults as passive as possible, rock and roll was encouraged to lose its expressiveness and lose its edge. Many people have actually turned to rock musicians in many ways for answers to questions that they have. This can be considered odd, since rock and rollers I think only wanted to be rock and rollers and have people like them for their music. You might find it particularly interesting that nowhere in the rock dictionary does it say to force people to like your music if they are unwilling. You might also find in the rock dictionary words that have to do with perception: an angry singer sings and no one feels compelled to discipline the expressiveness. And in the rock vocabulary of rock music itself, you have 3 odd minutes songs and usually four four time. Distortion. Feedback. Sometimes a group’s own perception is really at work when say a group of fans can attain the emotional gratification of belonging while feeling like a distinct peer group. Some psychedelic fans have found that they were part of one cultural group and take issue when another group claims their own aesthetic codes of rock. More often than not when someone tries to get too sophisticated with rock music in the interpretation, you won’t find their words in the rock dictionary. And you will find in the rock dictionary some mention of its love and hate relationship with being a commercial enterprise and that without consumers, you have a hard day, hard night and possibly a good reason to step away from the refinement that critics want to bring to the rock world before there are fans participating in the grassroots that make the scene.

I’d say the people who ran off with the dictionary are the ones who wanted to make sure that fans got spoonfed what is good music and what isn’t. And whoever it was that made alternative mainstream.

Oh and don’t forget that that alternative scene which had turned music and art toward it being the impulses of the artist not the number of record sales, was also very clearly responsible for making authenticity claims totally unhip.

Anyway, so what unhip San Francisco rock groups will loosen the grip by those who want everyone to remain calm and passive and eat retro-culture and learn? I think of RubberSideDown. Tell me tell me.