Rockism

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Rockism is an ideology of popular music criticism, originating in the British music press in the late 1970s or early 1980s. The fundamental tenet of rockism is that some forms of popular music, and some musical artists, are more authentic than others. More specifically, authentic popular music fits the rock and roll paradigm; it is made using the basic rock instrumentation of guitars, bass guitars and drums, and fits the structures of a rock and roll song.

1 Overview
2 Critiques of rockism
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Overview

Rockism is suspicious of the use of technology, from synthesizers to Pro Tools-style computer-based production systems. Rockism places value on the idea of the composer and performer as auteur; authentic music is composed as a sincere form of self-expression, and usually performed by those who composed it. This is as opposed to the notion of manufactured "pop" music, created in assembly line fashion by teams of hired record producers and technicians and performed by pop stars who have little input into the creative process, designed to appeal to a mass market and make profits rather than express authentic sentiments.

Rockism is a primitivist ideology; a subtext of rockism is that, at one time in history, they "got music right", and that all subsequent innovations have compromised this purity. (This golden age is often placed sometime during the 1960s or 1970s.) Critics of rockism assert that this vaunted "golden age" of pure, authentic music is a myth, and that popular music never was entirely free of the interference of commercialism, marketing and commodification.

Design critic and indie pop musician Nick Currie compared Rockism to the art movement of Stuckism,^[1] which holds (among other things) that artists who do not paint are not artists.

[edit] Critiques of rockism

Contemporary writers use rockism as a polemical label to identify and critique a cluster of beliefs and assumptions in music criticism. Rockism is therefore not a connotatively neutral term; as Ned Raggett writes, "You’re not going to find anyone arguing FOR [rockism] any time soon, or at least coming out and saying so—but that’s precisely because of the terms of the discourse."^[2] For example, some critics of rockism have alleged that it is a racist, sexist and/or homophobic ideology, in that the artists it privileges with the label of authenticity are predominantly heterosexual white males; the genres of music attacked by rockist criticism as less authentic than rock have included many black musical genres (hip-hop, R&B), genres associated with the gay community (disco, house) and pop music, where female performers such as Madonna (often charged by rockist critics with inauthenticity and trading on image over substance) have often found success.

Responses to the anti-rockist critique claim that these allegations are based on false assumptions and differing expectations. The rockist defense proposes a dichotomy between art and commerce in popular music, adopting the view that certain genres of music sacrifice artistic depth for mass appeal, self-expression for manufactured process. Some critics of the anti-rockist debate dismiss rockism outright as a straw man argument, claiming that a negative aesthetic judgment about an artist or genre of music does not imply a negative judgment about the genre's roots and cultural associations. Moreover, in response to Kelefa Sanneh's now-famous editorial "The Rap Against Rockism", which linked rockism to straight white male chauvinism, a letter to The New York Times points out, "[C]ountless figures in the rockist pantheon -- Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Patti Smith, the Pretenders, R.E.M. and Hüsker Dü, to name just a handful...defy that stereotype." ^[3]