Ladies and Gentlemen: Welcome to the Rock State. The catch, if you're a Progressive, is that you're not on the guest list.
Rock charts a whole process, a whole society's decline into scenes and market babble. It's now just another convenient, meaningless, over-hyped word for point of sale.
Rock has piped the way to our current media debacle. It hymns the cash driven process whereby journalism has decayed to advertising copy. It's been Muzak to the photo-op, and click track to the spin doctor.
At what financial-mystical moment did the advertisers and consumer strategists zero in on a youth culture which was waiting to purchase its credibility?
How did anti-media posturing and communitarian sing-along, with roots in a Communist Party campaign to "create Songs of the People," get reworked to corporate promo?
Rock has become "Free Market" Capitalism's most sensational tool. Condom to condo; youth culture to gray panthers; it's a Rock sound track.
Who's doing the promo for the music, bands, publications, bars and youth marketeers? Rock "journalism."
Rock journalism is promotion pretending to be journalism. The payola, for the underpaid free-lancing Rock journalist, is T-shirts, CDs, and promotional items. As payola, it's pathetic, but these are Rock "journalists."
"People who can't write, writing about people who can't play, for people who can't read." Frank Zappa's remark also applies to a journalism whose practitioners have been reduced to advertising copy writers. The same journalists helped weld the shaky identity of a whole generation to an elitist cult of Rock stardom and purchasable authenticity.
From its beginnings, Rock journalism was ecstatic promo. It spawned the myths and clichés. Rock mutated to techno-commercialism and berserker merchandising.
What has been Rock's legacy?
Merchandising, for a start. It's the music of merchandising, from weapons systems and child care, to President Bill.
It's the backing track for lifestyle adverts pushing the "let's party" lobotomy. Rock fuels a bogus intellectuality represented by writers like Greil Marcus (see Lipstick Traces) -- what Chris Lehmann calls "hipster historicism." The ahistorical, self-dramatizing Dada amnesia of the grad school intellectual. Johnny Rotten as neo-Marxist.
Nostalgia. The 1950s and the 1960s in all their historical inconsistency and messy delusion repackaged as Oldies but Goodies.
A star system. Rock stars generate whole industries massaging their own legends and shilling for sybaritic moronhood. Stars are the ultimate moment in a process of commodification.
Understandably, people shy from the consumerist, opportunist hash festering at the heart of the Rock beast. It seems un-American in a country whose President made Fleetwood Mac the house band.
Think Clinton. Think Fleetwood Mac. Think Change.
It's the 24-hour-a-day canned audio to the desperate quest for Cool. Rock's Elder Statesmen, Dylan, Stills (et al.) have decomposed from hard-living, youthful idealists into jaded, jet-setting business drones with investment packages, shopping centers, ex-wives, and alimony rivaling the Danish GNP.
Dylan's 1960s anthems are now elevator music or Multinational commercials. The aging boy wonder is still thought to confer a spurious credibility. Was there ever a sadder tale than Dylan? From cutting edge to muzak; poet to hack, rags to riches in a single career. A pompous millionaire once inspired by an Okie Stalinist (Woody Guthrie) who died mute, penniless, and betrayed.
Remember that the Beatles were the marketing coup of all time. Ruthless manipulators of their own sham legend, they clawed their way out of dead-end Liverpool to millionaire status selling Love to the teen market. Not that Rock was ever much for credibility. Elvis was a volunteer drug informant and a lock-step careerist. But such is the power of Rock hype, he wound up on a stamp, a generational hero and national icon. Poor, sad, inflatable, drug-befuddled Elvis.
Rock, in fact, is the sound track accompanying the whole, degraded trek up the Information Highway to our media-present with its info-tainment, lifestyle pitches, Geraldos, Oprahs, Spielbergs, Murdochs, and MTVs. "Sex and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll" is aggressively mindless sloganeering but inspired ad-speak. Superb dummy down.
Rock consumers now define themselves through exposure to product. "I'm a Bud Light man." "I'm a Stones man." Vive la Difference.
Rock journalism is a fixed feature of the Life Style sections of newspapers and Give Aways nationally. More consumer promo pretending to be news.
For the Trib and the Sun-Times the Rock advertising dollars are just not there. The dailies may generate some local Rock coverage but their mission is tied to the endless caravan of commercially viable bands. Their generalist advertising is not aimed at the specialized markets of Scene think. For that you need the freebies.
Bob Greene's occasional Rock obsessions at the Trib are evidence of the music's enduring appeal to the professional, syndicated sentimentalists, i.e. columnists kiting careers on a halcyon past and an America that never was.
The "sources" for much Rock journalism nationally, like Billboard or Cashbox, are created by the music business. These are not sources, they are music business promo sheets pretending, like the Rock journalists who use them, to be journalism. America is now the land of virtual information. Rock fuels the Hip-ocrisy.
But if freelance Rock journalism has proven the slippery path to poverty, the same has not been true for the Give Aways. Just compare early versions of the Chicago Reader's music section with what it has grown into today. In its L.A. and Chicago versions, The Reader is undervalued at forty million dollars.
That advertising-driven Give Aways are seen as "journalism" is more than the triumph of free marketeering double-think, its been a sales bonanza. As the major dailies went under, the advertising driven freebies appeared -- with completely commercialist agendas.
Rock-inspired lifestyles mean millions in advertising dollars. Rock coverage and the Rock "Scene" (as bogus a creation as Contra "freedom fighters") are tied in new and exciting ways to business profit.
Scan the Give Aways: Milk (Milwaukee), Lumpen Times, Illinois Entertainer, New City, and Reader (Chicago), and Filth (San Francisco). The phenomena linking these publications and many of their advertisers is Rock centered lifestyle fantasy. Publications like these attempt, with varying success, to create their version of the Rock scene. Its the night-life industry; strength through merchandised joy.
Rock journalists are as uncritical as they are compromised and apolitical. The Rock music business has a well refined tradition of racism, fraud, and payola. And that's just the paid journalism. It can get even better down among the Give Aways.
Freebies promoting their version of the scene are tip sheets for youth culture hucksters. Clubs, bands, promoters, publications, and marketeers come increasingly to depend on the public's conviction that the world is divided into Scenes (Art, Rock, Culture, Film) and that the local Give Away will reveal where, when, and how much it costs. These are assumptions made, as one bar-owner put it, "On the way to a cash station."
As consumerist cleansing and scene think reshape places like Wicker Park, locally produced publications trumpet the scene while mobs of life style merchandisers, real estate developers included, descend to feed from the fiction. The Lumpen Times paving the way for Mid Town Bank? The Reader, Illinois Entertainer, New City et. al. were there first.
The Give Aways, and scene think alert the young professionals, i.e. well heeled Yuppies and DINKS who will purchase "artists lofts," and upscale housing financed by the banks and realtors. When the loft-living professional classes out number the Scenies, the scene will dissolve and wait to be rediscovered somewhere else. Those who can predict where the scene is going, or finance a new one, will reap significant profits. The hip realtor/developer subsidizes a gallery or two, by way of sweetening the pie. Reduced rents to a few culture carriers can lead to substantial profits down the road -- but first, you help the scene along.
Scenies and scene think are forms of prepaid advertising.
Pick up the Reader, New City, Lumpen, and Illinois Entertainer (etc.) and follow the hype as you chart the fortunes of yet another band, movement, art trend. Try the Reader web site should your attention falter. Do some comparative shopping.
The bands play the bars, the bars advertise, and the Give Away hypes. Scene-think sets in and with it come the scene-centered merchandisers. But there is a price: sheer monotony.
The endlessly recycled Rock story takes some basic forms: 1. The band interview. 2. The band breaks up. 3. The band reforms. 4. He/she/it leaves the band. 5. The band goes on the road. 6. The band signs a recording contract. 7. The band reforms under another name...etc. You get the idea; again and again and again.
Blow back?
At the same time the Lumpen Times are feeding you cover-to-cover youth culture merchandising, whether sound system, fashion, techno goodies, CD's, bondage and degradation artifacts, phone sex, or porn, they are proselytizing against the "Pig system."
"Congratulations. You have done your part in tearing down the pig system.... May the Man's depraved schemes be rubbed out by the brisk and vigorous motion of the workers' thumb." (Lumpen Times' "Pig System Analysis" issue.)
Pushing phone sex, kinky paraphernalia, pseudo avant-consumer lifestyles and scene-think while condemning the "depraved schemes" of the Man sets new journalistic standards, even for Chicago. Pig System? Smell the bacon in that Hackery. Teen Spirit ends at WalMart.
Without the freebies, advertisers and customers might wander, aimless and lost -- in a world without scenes. A world, if only momentarily, without sound-bite Progressive pretensions, commodified action, S and M apparel, sexist sales pitches and sniggering Anarcho-suburbanism. Music is "cool"; politics are "boring and theoretical." The anemic flatulence of neocon verbiage vying with market doctrine.
The Dummy Down is also about the teening of American consumer culture. Teens spend, wildly -- and teens rule. As they age, they bring with them (as "experience") the commodity world they've been force-fed: sitcom expertise as shared lore; suburban anarchism as politics; fashion fixations, and Rock. The Lumpen Times defines this world.
What about the Rock progressives? Is the Indie scene just a mini version of the larger scam? It's here that the point veers toward moot. Rock is now what bowling used to be. A costumed romp for millions of Americans. The national hobby. The Rock progressives come more and more to resemble pacifists at a massacre; Sisters of Mercy at a gang bang. They give the whole sordid operation a bit of credibility. It's the exceptions that rationalize the dreck. If there is contamination by association, the Indies are Three Mile Island.
The "Indie" alternative? The Baffler, with its ardent, careful anti-capitalism often expressed as cultural critique, is an Indie booster. The Indie cliche is "we can't be bought," but the knee jerk remarks about "not selling out" are a fixed feature of the hysterical justifications.
Passivity? Generation after generation of consumers getting their lifestyle kicks, CD's in hand, waiting in committed, passionate submission for the next Indie band.
Corporate industries like Rock and film (Time Warner, Miramax, etc.) are currently in the process of re-imaging themselves as Indie scenes. The Academy Awards are part of the process.
The self-congratulation, the franchised euphoria, all the backslapping awards night elephantiasis of business America (and Rock) is the best current evidence of the swindle at the heart of the Republic.
The backstage passes are all gone.
Your name does not appear on the guest list.
Long Live the Rock State.