Commentary

One of the things that stands out to me when people talk about rock music is the firmly held belief that the history of the genre is divided into clear movements, that each of these movements sparked a revolution, and that bands should be categorized by which movement their music is most associated with—rockabilly, psychedelic, punk, etc.

For each movement in rock history, there is a heroic narrative: a small group of renegades bucked up against the old ways and created something newer, better, with more shelf life. The old stuff is thrown out. In fact, the music our heroes just overthrew is now passé, gets associated with our parents, or is labeled too commercial, too unimaginative, too restrictive. The new stuff, though, is going to save the day.

Think on it. Some of the big “revolutions” in rock history bring to mind entire eras in our culture. There’s that initial spark out of Memphis. The marriage of country hill music and rhythm-and-blues. Sun Records and all that. This is the most sacred of rock’s revolutions, the inception, and purist listeners to original rock-and-roll abound from coast-to-coast.

There are purists to other revolutions. Psychedelic fans see a particular type of free-form rock that came to be in the late sixties—especially around San Francisco—as their founding text. They may listen to XTC, Animal Collective, or the early Bangles, but only out of an association to that point in time. They’ve decided that this is the best example of rock music at its peak.

Others are between these two. They see the British Invasion groups as the pinnacle of rock. If a new group shows elements of The Kinks, The Beatles, or The Zombies in the song-crafting, they’re likely to be into them.

New interest in folk-related music (think “Once” and “Juno” for pop-culture examples) has Bob Dylan on the lips of kids in their twenties.

Each of these movements has their heroes, their revolutionary narratives, and their various offshoots. Each of them tries to make a clean break of things. Dylan railed against the canned love songs of the rock and roll era. The psychedelics wanted to prove that Americans could show those Beatles what for. And the Memphis sound, well, we’re told that closed the book on everything that was bad about American parents, like, ever.

But the truth of pop music (that’s what it all is, pop music) is something bigger than all this, something I’m only starting to understand. Pop music doesn’t make clear breaks. Sounds flow together. Eras in music feature contradictory elements. Think of the early seventies, when glam and singer-songwriter music lived side-by-side. Often, as is the case with The Beatles, who admitted to wanting to sound like Buddy Holly, new music comes from misinterpretation. Most importantly, the best musicians listen to a wide palette of music. Sometimes they reach into other eras, or other cultures, to gain new perspectives. They even listen to the music their fans associate with the old enemy, that stuff we’ve left behind to follow the new hero.

The biggest of these heroic narratives is punk. If you’ve ever listened to “alternative” rock, you’re probably a victim of the punk narrative. This one says that music between rock and roll’s formation and the late seventies, when the Ramones and Sex Pistols burst onto the scene, was a failed, flabby experiment in excess. Pure rock-and-roll is fast, short, and easy to understand. Punk saved metal from Led Zeppelin. It saved pop music from wimps like Billy Joel. It saved all of us from lousy stadium acts and prog-rock noodlers and made room for new wave, hardcore, and while we’re at it: rap.

It’s an easy story to believe. We’re reminded of the power of the punk myth every time someone puts together a rock history show for television. The punk look—black clothes, studs, pointy hair—is widely associated with rebellion, even courage, in our society. When saccharine groups like Blink 182 or Good Charlotte pump out an album, another group of unwary teenagers buys right into the direct connection between this stuff and the punk genre’s revolutionary narrative.

Big deal, right? The only problem I have with all this narrative-building, this belief in rock as a series of revolutions, is that once a listener picks their favorite revolutionary narrative, they begin to cut out other types of pop music. I certainly did. Before a few years ago, you couldn’t get me to listen to all kinds of things deemed uncool by the punk storyline.

On the other side of the spectrum, if we start to branch out and make new connections using our own taste in music—not the neatly delineated narrative—the diversity of our experience with music, and life, is multiplied. You can already see this at work in a lot of new small-label rock. Musicians, fed diversity by new Internet-based forms of listening, are starting to meld old and new sounds that defy categorization. Let’s see if we listeners can keep up.

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