Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  There are pundits who believe that the death sentence for CDs was passed when record companies let them be given away free with magazines and newspapers. This signified that CDs were worthless; and – hey presto! – they were. But amidst the downloads and streaming and dazzling array of Internet radio options, some consumers remain faithful to their old love. In another decade, it’s easy to imagine that the only viable CD releases will be expensively packaged, exhaustively curated archive collections from the vaults of Bob Dylan and his equally aged peers – until their admirers bow to senility at last, and their successors have to decide what to do with billions of utterly irrelevant, shiny, five-inch discs. Meanwhile, vinyl – condemned to death by the industry more than twenty years ago – has become the Red Seal 78 of the twenty-first century, conferring a reputation for good taste amongst its small but slowly growing coterie of admirers. Buying vinyl shows that you care – not only about the heritage of the medium, or the artwork, or the sound of vinyl itself, but about the notion of music as something to be cherished and valued.

  Sound is a key issue: hasn’t the history of recorded music been a constant search for clearer, bigger, brighter, more flawless, more thrilling sound? There were always diehards who mourned the loss of the 78 rpm single, in all its chunky there-ness, and despised the less visceral delivery of the 45 and the LP. Many felt the same when vinyl was replaced by cassette tapes, which tended to stretch and distort time and pitch; and CDs, which for all their sonic perfection had (especially in their fledgling years) a brittle, sharp, grating quality which seemed to cut into the eardrums and leave the senses in a strange state of enervation. One might dispute the result, but nobody could doubt that the aim of the CD was still a more ideal listening experience – free of surface noise, scratches, and the need to be regularly turning over the record. (Some of us still feel restless every twenty minutes, of course; the habits of one’s youth are hard to shake.) But the digital age, for all its joyous ease of access, and brain-scrambling choice of pleasures, has also – so many believe – stymied the previously ceaseless quest for sound perfection.

  As the first decade of the new century neared its close, increasing numbers of teenagers chose to access their music not via a CD player, or even an iPod, but from a mobile phone. They would congregate on street corners or the top decks of buses, blaring out a raucous, tinny sound almost indecipherable to adult ears as music, all of its bass sacrificed to piercing treble. This was music as a territorial marker, not an aesthetic obsession: it was a way of telling the outside world who you were, in the hope (usually fulfilled) that you would be met with sullen resentment from any adults unfortunate enough to stumble within earshot.

  Via the headphones, big and small, which are essential accessories for people on the move in the twenty-first century, music’s dynamic range faces a double process of compression – first by its conversion into digital files, then by the sonic failings of the equipment. The result is a pale facsimile of the sound that once issued from traditional loudspeakers.fn4 Computers, cellphones, digital players: all of them condense the wave formation of an original recording, with its peaks of high and low, into a narrow band. If that is what you are used to (or your ears are failing with age), then you will happily accept this strangled sound. In the recent past, indeed, major record companies deliberately set out to create these aural monstrosities, during the industry’s so-called ‘loudness wars’. Utilising the full dynamic range of soft and loud sound posed the danger that your song might be overshadowed by something with more consistent volume. Producers elected to make every recording appear to be equally loud. The palette of available sound was crushed into a mush of distortion, which was tiring to experience for more than a few minutes at a time. Here was music as blunt instrument; only a few steps removed from its use as an instrument of torture in twenty-first-century prison camps, where Islamic fundamentalists are exposed to ceaseless hip hop or death metal at deafening volume, as part of Western culture’s attempt to demonstrate its superiority even to the unbelievers.fn5 ‘These people haven’t heard heavy metal22’, explained an American psy-ops officer to the BBC in 2007. ‘They can’t take it. If you play it for 24 hours, your brain and body start to slide, your train of thought slows down and your will is broken. That’s when we come in and talk to them.’

  This psychological torture is merely an extension of the society we have chosen for ourselves, in which popular music is almost inescapable. So the music of today – or, rather, music in today – is both a permanent soundtrack to our lives, and utterly disposable; a way for us to describe who we are, which we expect to access at will, but no longer believe we should pay for. That is why all complaints about musicians ‘selling out’ to corporate sponsorship or advertisers are so misguided: if we aren’t prepared to pay artists (and writers, thank you) for their services, then how are they supposed to survive? We have arrived at the peculiar moment in history when people will queue all night in the rain to purchase a new phone; when ‘cool’ means carrying the latest technology, rather than an album cover bearing the faces of Jimi Hendrix or the Rolling Stones. But there is one medium in which music, and the notion of hipness, can still co-exist: one first imagined in the 1940s, which has now become a rite of passage for each fresh generation. In a world of technology designed to make solipsists of us all, music festivals turn us back, however briefly, into a community – enraptured once again, like our ancestors, by the euphoric catharsis of pleasure in which we can lose our identity and become as one. The most successful music of the twenty-first century has been designed to renew that feeling in each of our lives – our solitary lives, separate and yet eternally connected to our peers via the addictive ties of so-called social media.

  * * *

  fn1 A bizarre side effect was the transformation of Leonard Cohen’s subtle exploration of the thirst for sex and religion, ‘Hallelujah’, into a showcase for meaningless vocal pyrotechnics.

  fn2 It has long been a tradition for live albums to be overdubbed or sometimes even re-recorded in the studio, to disguise their sonic or artistic flaws. Now Auto-Tune is applied instead. For an example so blatant that it defies belief, compare any audience recording of the Beach Boys’ 2012 reunion on YouTube with their utterly note-perfect performances on Live – The 50th Anniversary Tour. Songs such as ‘Sail On Sailor’ and ‘Don’t Back Down’ suggest that the group had been replaced by automatons.

  fn3 One hesitates to imagine the feelings of a composer such as Jimmy Webb, arguably the most ‘classic’ and inventive practitioner of traditional values to emerge from the rock era.

  fn4 The prevalence of headphones threatens to contribute to an epidemic of tinnitus amongst young people, already exacerbated by the crushing noise of many dance clubs and live gigs. According to a survey in 2006, ‘listening at top volume21 [to headphones] for more than five minutes risks permanent damage’.

  fn5 Of course, those particular unbelievers – the most devout adherents of their faith – are often from societies which ban popular music entirely, as an instrument of the Devil, or the West, the two being more or less interchangeable. Ayatollah Khomeini first summoned Iran’s pop stars to a revolutionary people’s court in 1980, complaining that their music was ‘opium’; likewise the Taliban in Afghanistan imposed a ban on all musical instruments. By 2005, all recordings or performances featuring the female voice were ruled illegal by Iranian religious courts.

  1

  2

  COMEDY, FOOD, ART, social science, reading, history, TV, spirituality – even musical genres, such as country, hip hop, folk – all share one distinction. They have been the subject of one of the most jaded neologisms of the past two decades, by being described as ‘the new rock ’n’ roll’. Implicit in all these comparisons is the sense that the old rock ’n’ roll – the one that emerged out of the rhythm and blues scene of the mid-1940s, and became an all-conquering global culture – is dead, or dying, or irrelevant, or in some way stripped of its significance and power. Or
it suggests something more insidious: that rock remains a potent idea, a concept that can rouse individuals and crowds into a state of Pavlovian excitement – but not when it is combined with rock music. As an exhibit for the prosecution, consider the potency of a brand named Rockstar, and its connotations of glamour, dominance, success. The brand in question has earned all those qualities, but Rockstar has no connection with music or musicians: it’s one of the world’s premier publishers and developers of games for PlayStation and Xbox. Most notably, it’s the creator of Grand Theft Auto, a series that has revolutionised the marketing of action games. There is music in GTA (and cameo voice-overs from famous musicians) but it’s incidental to the action: the star of Rockstar is the player, not the rock or the rock stars.fn1

  Should we be mourning the death of rock ’n’ roll? Some would say that we are nearly sixty years too late. Elvis Presley’s first major hit, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, was released in January 1956. By May, America’s music trade papers were full of concern that rock ’n’ roll was growing stale or losing its bite. By September, the Daily Mirror in London could suggest that ‘Rock ’n’ roll is out of date – old-fashioned as aspidistras.’ Thereafter rock ’n’ roll’s demise was predicted or reported on an almost weekly basis. No wonder that defiant young songwriters penned anthems such as ‘Rock and Roll is Here to Stay’ and ‘It Will Stand’. They emerged from an era when rock’s prime movers had been conscripted or imprisoned or disgraced or even lost their lives. ‘Elvis died when he went in the army’, John Lennon famously quipped, and many assumed that rock had died with him. Aficionados of the original rock ’n’ rollers thought that the Beatles had killed their music; the Beatles thought that they were bringing it back to life. Since then, rock has supposedly been killed by disco, punk, synthesisers, hip hop and dance music; or mortally wounded by commercialism, corporate sponsorship, political compromise and the Internet (which has been allotted the blame for almost every social change of the past two decades).

  Yet sixty years after rock ’n’ roll became a commercial force, there is no more reliable means of attracting vast hordes of people to stand or camp in muddy fields at the cost of enormous personal discomfort and the best part of a week’s wages than to promote a rock festival – the bigger and more established, the better. Demand for tickets at events such as the annual pilgrimage to Michael Eavis’s farm in Glastonbury has never been higher, and audiences can now conceivably stretch from toddlers to their great-grandparents without fear of ostracism or social embarrassment. As Mick Jagger first noticed in the 1970s, rock ’n’ roll ‘perpetuates your adolescence4, for good or bad’. Back then, he was mildly embarrassed by his ability, as a privileged rock star, to extend his teenage habits into adulthood, whilst most of his peers were preoccupied with career, family and paying the bills. Now Jagger is himself a grandfather, still indulging his 18-year-old self, and his fantasy of adolescence remains a beacon to generations of concert-goers, for whom the Rolling Stones’ continued existence offers an escape from the terrifying reality of a planet bent on its own ecological destruction.

  There is a profound moment in any adult’s life when they find themselves no longer identifying with the young, but with the old – not with the 17-year-old novice thrown on to the pitch at a moment of crisis, but with the grizzled veteran who straps on his boots and drags his aching knees round the park for a final hoorah. There are similar landmarks in one’s appreciation of rock ’n’ roll3: the first time you realise you’re older than a favourite new band; ultimately, the day when it dawns on you that your original rock heroes are now older than your grandparents used to be when you were a teenager. Rock once divided the generations; now it unites them. That’s why veteran rock stars are routinely employed to provide the entertainment at events which are intended to command an all-age audience: the Superbowl, the Olympics, royal anniversaries. Their presence does not connote any of the rebellion or subversion which their music might originally have expressed: they are as tame and familiar as the Queen, or any of the elderly icons from our collective past.

  Music has an almost unrivalled power to bypass logical thought and retrieve the past. The opening bars of (depending on one’s vintage) ‘Take the “A” Train’ or ‘Tennessee Waltz’ or ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ or ‘She Loves You’ or ‘Whole Lotta Love’ or ‘White Riot’ or ‘Like a Virgin’ or ‘Wannabe’ can carry us back, whole and unimpaired, to the time when we, and they, were new. That ability to rekindle our distant past is what gives popular music its unique hold on our emotions – its almost sinister power to trigger nostalgia, even if the times we remember were not as joyous as our feelings pretend.

  Any music can carry this burden and unlock these sometimes false memories. But the cultural baggage of rock – its longevity and power, which are preserved by a vast industry devoted to their eternal care – marks it out from all of its predecessors in the history of popular music. Other genres and styles have held sway over a single generation, and then faded gently into cultural insignificance. Rock, in the widest sense of the term, is different: it has not only kept hold of its original followers, but swept each new generation on to (or under) the bandwagon. In the late 1930s and 40s, swing music was as dominant in the musical lives of young people as rock would be in subsequent decades. But when swing was superseded, only curious scholars of cultural history were added to its fan base, until decades later swing (like boot-scooting country music, and salsa) re-emerged as the soundtrack for dance classes. As music, swing belonged to its generation, and no other. Rock has been bequeathed to – or imposed upon – every single generation which has surfaced in its wake.

  The consequences have been startling, and sometimes surreal. Rock was born as the music of youth, its lyrical content stretching no further than the pangs and passions of adolescent romance, and the rebellion of teenage hormones. Bob Dylan and his imitators added extra dimensions to rock’s world, to the point where it became the vehicle for political protest and social satire, self-expression and self-questioning, confusion, turmoil and exhilaration. Throughout its history, however, rock expressed youth in preference to adulthood, even as its practitioners aged in front of their generation-spanning audiences. Those songwriters who first widened rock’s horizons in the 1960s have tentatively explored the ramifications of the ageing process – their youthful optimism paled by the imminence of death or the shadow of major illness. But few of their listeners want to be serenaded with tales of reduced mobility, sexual impotence or failing mental powers. Only Leonard Cohen, by treating age as some sort of cosmic joke, has consistently managed to extend his creative range with an unflinching eye for the ravages of time. Beyond that, the middle-aged-to-elderly rock audience has to cling to a handful of messages from the edge of the grave, such as David Crosby’s ‘Time is the Final Currency’ (from a man who has been flirting with death for decades), Tom Ovans’s sobering ‘Last Day on Earth’ and Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind album. ‘Nobody’s done a death album5 yet, or an album about death’, Marvin Gaye mused in 1976. ‘That’s something I wouldn’t mind doing.’ Maybe the opportunity was missed when Frank Sinatra chose to devote his final years to a gentle reminder of past glories, instead of the searing song cycle about senility which perhaps only he had the stature to carry off.

  Yet anyone witnessing rock’s statesmen dealing with their advancing years has to face their own inescapable passage towards the darkness. For every act which still pretends to live outside time (the Beach Boys singing ‘Be True to Your School’ in their late 60s), there is another making no effort to hide the passing of youth (Bob Dylan growling like the 80-year-old bluesman he’d wanted to resemble when he was 21). Rock stars can don wigs or wear hats to conceal their hair loss, and use plastic surgery or Botox to retain their youthful appearance. But only those who have protected and mollycoddled their voices for decades can hope to persuade their fans that they are what they used to be. In middle age, singers lose their top range, then their flexibility, then their power. By the time tha
t someone like Chuck Berry has to be helped on stage in his mid-80s, effectively unable any longer to sing or play guitar, one is left to wonder whether one is watching dignity, exploitation, or a chilling combination of the two. What we’re cheering when we see men and women performing in their 70s and 80s is their survival – and, even more, our own.

  Rock can’t exist as an entertainment genre on those veterans alone. Yet their shadow hangs over everyone struggling to make a living within its borders. Every art form has a limited lifespan, and a moment where it will simply not allow for any further experimentation or novelty. That is the point where it has to invite fresh influence from outside, or abandon itself to self-parody and imitation. What has helped to keep the concept of rock alive, and potent, is that it is fuelled by youthful energy and dissidence. Each influx of musicians can return as new to ideas and sounds that their elders regard as clichés, simply because, for them, they are new. That’s why a band such as 5 Seconds of Summer can reboot the apparently exhausted system of punk ebullience, as if the Clash, Nirvana and Green Day had never existed. Likewise the nu-metal explosion of the early 2000s, extending the tradition from Black Sabbath to Korn; while emo artists could offer modern teenage misfits a soundtrack, just as the Smiths and the goth tradition had done. The most static, endlessly renewed rock genre of recent decades has been the indie guitar band: a long succession of uniform outfits (two guitars, bass, drums) with identical appearance and influences have been set up by the shrinking rock press as this week’s saviours of music. It doesn’t matter whether their careers survive this initial exposure. All that counts is the fantasy that, week after week, rock is new and exciting, rather than repetitive and monotone. Novelty, such as it is, comes less from the music than from the lyrical perspective of a band such as Underoath, whose punk rock was fired not by juvenile delinquency, but by their righteous faith in the Christian gospel.