Rock and the Pop Narcotic: Testament for the Electric Church

ArtForum, Feb, 1996 by Simon Reynolds

Carducci's beef is that rock critics have foisted their postcounterculture, left/liberal agenda onto their subject matter. Blinkered by ideological projections, and lacking a rigorous formalist definition of rock as music, they're unable to distinguish between rock and pop (a pejorative in Carducci's universe); they appraise music as though its essence resided in songs, storytelling, and emotional and social resonance. Carducci relocates music's meaning in sound, specifically the real-time interaction between "the players of a guitar, a bass and a drum kit." For Carducci, rock's sparks fly only via the combustion engine that is a band. Temporary configurations (the singer/songwriter plus backing musicians, or the producer plus session hirelings or machines) are tainted because pop's producer-led esthetic can have no access to the rock epiphany: "multidimensional simultaneity," a.k.a. "the jam," that "superheated nexus in performance where each musician, while playing his part in the material, hears and feels and anticipates the greater whole as it is being reincarnated."

But why are the people, as well as the players, moved? Carducci discounts as peripheral almost everything on which rock crits expend 95 percent of their wordage, i.e., "rebellion," "attitude," the singer's charisma and/or neurosis, etc. For Carducci, both the "politics" and the "spirituality" of rock happen through the music's kinesthetics. It's the frictional interaction of riff and rhythm, tension and release, that signifies. This is spelled out in "The Lowdown on Heavy," a section celebrating the lineage that runs from Muddy Waters through Blacks Sabbath and Flag to today's grunge-metal units like Soundgarden and Kyuss. Carducci analyzes the musical devices these musicians deploy to create abstract yet visceral sonic allegories of struggle and perseverance in the face of a "negative or trying context." Heavy rockers, he argues, "produce powerfully articulated and textured tonal sensations of impact and motion, triggering hefty (nondance) motor impulses in the listener."

Carducci is equally as good at defining what's not rock. It's not the "light rousing high" of pop metal (he's mordant on Van Halen's "meringue" of "liquid, insensate fret math"). It's not Velvet Underground and family, either, because VU had nothing going on in the rhythm section. Insisting that rock is "not identifiable . . . by sound (say, fuzzed-out guitars), volume or speed," Carducci also eliminates most thrash metal and virtually all British guitar-based music since the Jesus & Mary Chain, whose classicist rock 'n' roll imagery and feedback sheathed the most rudimentary, metro-nomic drumming. Generally, Carducci is quite the Anglophobe: his introduction lets loose the stinging aphorism, "Rock is dead in America about as often as it lives in England." After heavyweights like Sabbath and Zep, he claims, Brit rock lost touch with the blues source; Limey bands reverted to their innate state of rhythmic ignorance, resulting in postpunk guitar outfits that sounded more like "electric busking" than rock, and in synth-pop units with drum machines. Programmed rhythms are a definite no-no for Carducci; the barely perceptible inconsistencies and the deliberate inflections supplied by a hands-on drummer instill a tension that engages the listener's survival mechanism, whereas the repetitive beats of rap or rave let the listener trance out. Underlying this disco-sucks/rap-bites attitude lurks, I suspect, a white-U.S.-male fear of loss of self through dance. This in turn seems connected with the homophobic remarks that litter Carducci's text: abuse of England's "pink stampede" of Bowie-damaged synth-pop gender-benders is one of his milder outbursts.

Carducci's real bugbear, though, is America's bleeding-heart rock-crit establishment. In "Narcorockcritocracy!," a rambling 100-page-plus rant, he blasts the crits' cherished illusions about rock's innate political sympathies. Carducci's own allegiance is unclear, though his jibes at "Big Mother" (the welfare state) suggest his politics lie somewhere between libertarian right and punk anarchist. Yet he is a strikingly class-conscious theorist, and the social stratum with which he aligns himself is the one he deems most productive rock-wise - i.e., working-class/lower-middle-class males. Rock and the Pop Narcotic contains a caustic vein of antibohemian contempt for arty eggheads, middle-class ideologues, and other "mind groupies" who siphon off rock ideas and put them in the service of "assorted perceived solidarities: generational, cultural, political, social, class." Insofar as they appraise bands according to nonformalist criteria, these people are enemies of rock.

Carducci's sexual politics are more explicit, appearing to lie somewhere on a continuum embracing Sam Peckinpah, Robert Bly, and Henry Rollins: the same belief in rugged frontier masculinity, the same fervent work ethic. Compare Sam's and Hank's fear that if they stop working they'll dissipate with Carducci's attack on early-'80s Brit-pop's "anti-American, anti-macho, anti-work aesthete[s]," for whom "the very strength of the rock esthetic had become something to debase." Read between the lines and Carducci comes close to diagnosing rock as the prime symptom of a late-20th-century crisis of American masculinity: music as the agonistics of young men looking for somewhere to direct their surplus energy, now that it's not needed for manual labor or warfare.