I think Mike's questioning of hall of fame choices is legitimate, but it also points out that Rock & Roll is a bastard genre in the first place, stolen from the blues and feeding off anything that gets near it. It's also so commercially and creatively viable that very few performers escape its gravitational pull. I would no more object to Miles Davis' induction than I would that of Johnny Cash or Ray Charles. I view this all as a good thing and as an example of genre fluidity. My impression of professional musicians is that they often ignore genre labels completely and hear music without those preconceived notions -- its the studios doing the labeling and the producers looking for an identifiable genre tag.
As for Davis, I'd say he's being inducted on the basis of his 1968-1972 electronic period during which which time he was opening for rock bands, playing rock festivals and releasing hybrid work like his Jack Johnson sessions which was Davis' attempt to create "the best rock and roll band you ever heard." It's good stuff (although he's no Cash)
Any response, Mike?
6 comments:
I agree with what you say, Jim. My Miles post was a true question, not a renunciation.
What you say about Rock being a bastard genre is true--born from Blues, Country/Western, and Gospel--but "stolen from the blues and feeding off anything that gets near it," is a bit much for me to accept.
As Rock has evolved, the Blues's influence has always been there, but much Rock is as much about how far one can get away from the Blues as it is about how close one can co-opt its thematic and structural conventions.
Over the past 50 years, Rock has become enough of its own monster that it has its own generic elements totally separate from the Blues. Now, really, what defines Rock is the relentless backbeat driven by snare hits on 2 and 4. That is surely a relic of the Blues, but it wasn't a fixture of the Blues as it is the backbone of Rock. And in that shift, Rock has found the freedom to glean from every other genre, domesticating their elements into its mandatory beat.
I'll provide an example. When I taught 80's Glam Metal to my History of Rock and Roll students in London, I'd bookend the era between Ozzy Osbourne's first solo album/the first Van Halen album and Guns 'n' Roses's breakout, "Appetite for Destruction."
In the former albums, guitarists Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen dramatically departed from the blues-based dogma of Rock lead guitar. They blew everyone's minds as they introduced Bach into the Rock lexicon. Their solos were all classical, no blues. All of a sudden, as with any revolutionary genre, guitarists followed suit, and gone were the days of the Sabbath/Zeppelin blues-soaked songs. In came Motley Crue, Poison, Ratt, etc. Aside from lipstick, spandex, and hairspray, what held these Sunset Strip acts together was the classical influence on the lead guitar. The lead guitarists, even if they played the persona of Dumb Blond, were often very well-trained musical prodigies who knew everything about music theory. The market became oversaturated with this movement, and revealed an interesting post-Blues paradox: in Rock music, the headier the music, the dumber it gets.
The Blues's true impact in Rock is that Rock trades in the Blues's currency of viscerality, not Classical's intellect. Rock grew amemic under the influence of the Classical party-boys. It lost its soul. Then came Guns 'n' Roses.
GNR slipped into the Sunset Strip fold because, in looks and attitude, they fit in. Everything about their music, from Axl's voice to their songs' content and format, were regular enough. But then comes the guitar solo, and we hear Slash. In an era where the songs were polished and shiny and pretty and lacked substance, Slash's blues-based lead cleared the cluttered air with it's heart-wrenching, gut-busting, judiciously-selected phrasing. While all other guitarists were obsessed with showing how fast and complicated their solos could be, Slash slowed it down, played one note at a time, and played The Blues. And that's why GNR was such a revelation.
So that brings me back to The Blues. When Rock finds itself in trouble, the purists come out of the woodwork to bring it back home to momma. But what makes Rock so special is its dynamism, its constant straying from home, rebelling against the Blues. This brings out amazing subgenres and movements in Rock's name, which naturally get copied and exploited to exhaustion. And what makes Blues so special, is its perfect inertia. 12-bar cycles: 4 bars of I, 2 bars of IV, 2 bars of I, 2 bars of V, then 2 bars of turnaround back to I. It doesn't change. It's rigid. It's timeless. And it's revitalizing. It is Rock's Fountain of Youth, always springing the same pure stuff, so that Rock, with its exploratory impulses exhausted, can return home, drink from its waters, then get right back out to the contemporary wilderness and machete the shit out of it and scorch the Earth til its soil loses its fertility and dries up. And then back to the fountain. Rise, wash, repeat.
I don't think anything you say conflicts with the intent behind my "stolen from the blues ..." I just meant at the initial point of conception, not all that was to follow. I could have easily said "derived" instead, but the business practices of the time lend the "stolen" verb credibility.
I agree with your last paragraph strongly, in terms of blues being a source of revitalization for rock, at least historically.
Finally, you know more than i do on music -- no question -- but I think you're too hard on the sex pistols (Nevermind the Bollocks is an important album, not a fashion statement) and perhaps too kind to Guns and Roses, who I like (lots actually), but they hardly saved rock and roll.
NMTB is very important as a cultural artifact, not as the definitive punk rock statement.
And you are correct: GNR didn't save rock and roll, but only because Axl turned GNR into the same bloated act that Appetite for Destruction sought to, well, destroy. If GNR continued as a down-and-dirty blues-based rock band, Cobain would have been deprived the very conspicuous counterpoint in "November Rain." But instead, GNR crumbled under the weight of Axl's bloat and the assault of grunge.
NMTB is not the "definitive ..." because nothing is, not even the Ramones or the Clash. Music, film, literature is a process -- no album is definitive, except in subjective terms for a particular listener. Tarrentino said it perfectly in Crimson Tide when there was a fight on the sub over who did the best silver surfer, Kirby or Moebus, and Denzel says, anyone with any sense knows Kirby did the defintive Surfer. I laugh everytime I see this scene for the obvious reason -- John Buscema is the "defintive" Surfer artist.
As for Guns and Roses, etc., isn't it possible that Cobain and grundge spoke to its audience and the times better. I think because you understand the technical side of music so well, you underestimate the significance of the zeitgeist to rock and roll. It's like me praising Wells or Renoir to the exclusion of Fuller or Ulmer. Art is not just technique, it's reflecting the times and I'm not sure that Guns and Roses did that. I know I'm stretching on this, but does my point have any validity?
Jim, I am all about the zeitgeist. Haha. Seriously, though, yes: Nirvana spoke more to the time. That is absolutely true.
I don't speak about the technical aspects of rock at all. I look at it as a movement driven by viscerality. By how it taps into the listening public and shifts the culture. When talking about rock, there should never be anything technical to discuss. It's all the gut. And GNR was ALL gut in its initial assault. And as I said, when they took their eye off the ball and became another chunk of shit stopping up rock's bowels, Nirvana proved itself quite an able enema.
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