I do not like rock music and here are four reasons why

I do not like rock music. Friends have already suggested this is the tip of some iceberg of insecurity and self-hatred or un-American brain activity I’m not dealing with, so I thought I’d write about it, get my predilections and hypocrisies out in the open.

What do I mean by rock, first of all? Does rock include pop? Is Grunge a rock subcategory? The Killers are probably rock, but is Radiohead? [ref]Pitchfork: @radiohead’s OK Computer was the last gasp of the rock monoculture: an incontestable, unrepeatable, and critically consecrated masterpiece of a genre that was too big to fail, yet too limp to preside over a new century. Picking up grunge’s challenge to macho rock orthodoxy, the bookish Oxford five-piece parlayed corporate resistance and righteous angst into an infernal assessment of mainstream conformism, petit bourgeois inertia, and cartoonish celebrity culture. See where it landed in our list of the 150 best albums of the 1990s at the link in bio.[/ref]

What about Amy Winehouse? Is rock “dead”, as so many have said at various times since its inception? Where’s the line between heavy metal and rock? Let’s say that by rock I just mean the thing that rock musicians make—the people who see themselves as rock musicians and actually want to rock. For brevity’s sake I will try to define and criticize rock at the same time by looking at what I see as its main characteristics, which for me are what’s wrong with it. Or with me! It’s not you, Rock, it’s me.

1. “Solo”: Rock is too individualistic

First of all, rock just seems too individualistic. I’m sure there are lots of exceptions, but the musicians often don’t seem to be playing with each other, or even hearing each other. Lead guitarists noodle the same pentatonic box regardless of the changes, regardless of something interesting the bassist suddenly wants to try, regardless of the underlying harmony. The drum just bangs away. All these rock stars!

I don’t profess to be great at listening as a performer myself, but the musical ensemble, the collaboration, the way that different musicians and different musical parts work together to summon this new thing, that’s like the most musical thing I can think of. Music’s deepest source of beauty. I guess I want the musicians to be submerged into the work in some way that rock does not often afford. Good music: Less self, more something else.

2. Rock is homogenized

Rock is white! I am suspicious of American musical forms that don’t have any black people. Or brown people. Or Asians. Or people from other countries. Now, classical music? Euro-chill? Ambient?: Those genres are fine. They’re Euro! [ref]Seems like Europeans got into metal—Michael Schenker, Iron Maiden, et cetera—but kind of stayed away from rock, saw something undiluted there. The Europeans that seem to like rock music the most are the Russians, which seems weird, and also like an indictment of some kind at this point.[/ref] They have French people in there or something. French Algerians, maybe.

I want diversity in music. The most rockin’ rock is the most homogenized. When I hear the tagline “real rock and roll”, I move further up the radio dial. And I don’t just mean some reflexive, liberal bromide about a rainbow of musical players here. There’s a deeper point about musical diversity.

Rock is proudly about sameness, whereas I think music is inherently about difference, about mixing and change and the relationship of sounds and forms against one another. Actually, I feel a kind of safety in difference and openness. Just as some feel that there is safely in numbers, some lower risk that your own difference will be spotted and ridiculed or deleted. And some better hope for connection. This, for me, is what evolution is about, this seeking and then internalizing difference as growth.

The musical form that makes a virtue of sameness doesn’t work well here. But again, it’s probably just me, some way I’m blocked from my own pleasure centers.

3. Rockin’ dudes: Rock is male

Better rock is thought to have more energy. More force, I should say. Male energy scares me—I’ll just say that. But I also don’t like force as a criterion for the quality of a music. Music doesn’t get better if you add more volume or force to its output. Of course I get excited and punch the air listening to loud music, to rock, rap, other genres. Not one week ago I broke into tears while jogging and listening to Bon Iver’s amazing song “Holocene”. (Is that rock?) Every time I hear Brandy’s “Sitting Up In My Room” or Daft Punk’s “Instant Crush”, I jump up and down in my own room. All the time! But you can add force to any musical form, John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” Parliament Funkadelic. Or Schumann. There’s something wearing and false about force as constitutive of rock and roll, however.

And men don’t dance, so force, in rock, manifests as dudes playing pent-up air guitar or beating their fists in frustrated accompaniment (see pic). I like what girls like. The Smiths. Jazz. Classical. Janet Jackson. Billie Holiday. New Wave. New Order. New Edition.

Now, heavy metal is an interesting case of force and maleness. My take on metal is that its focus on sexual energy and force got so theatrical, circa Whitesnake and Cinderella (and maybe under the influence of Europeans) that the pendulum punched all the way through manly maleness and homo-sociality into androgyny and Lycra tights and guitar-licking and fakeness. And I love it! I put heavy metal in the category of art for this reason, so I’ll talk about it next.

4. Schlock rock: Rock is bad art

The last reason I don’t like rock—and where all of this kind of comes together—is that rock and roll is, in my view, not good art. Or not good art anymore; it’s revanchist. It doesn’t seem to evolve and in fact makes a virtue out of remaining closed to innovation and experiment. “Real rock.”

Art is, obviously, a huge subject, and I’ll lose the thread and ruin things if I go too much into it here. But in the presence of real art, “authenticity” is moot, an irrelevancy. Style matters!, and it matters a lot more than some defiant insistence on truth of the real that dictates you should only play three chords. I look to Nietzsche for my metaphysics about art and living:

““…Giving style” to one’s character – a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

For me, theater is the paragon of artistic mediums. And that’s because theater shows us, more than most art, the separation of the artist from the work—thereby preserving the fallibility and humanity of the artist, on the one hand, and the contingency and “createdness” of the work on the other.

Heavy metal and New Wave seem creative and open in a way that rock does not, and it’s because they are a kind of theater; they know themselves to be about performance. They have irony where rock can be self-serious. In this way they are conversational. Twisted Sister was winking at us while they filed their teeth into sharp points and wore giant blond ringlet wigs and red lipstick. I want to sense that an artist is engaged in the process itself, in experiment, like how the The Tubes had an earlier career as weird art punks, just like Genesis.

Heavy metal bands made a project of self and gender, and that made me feel…more involved. And like things were open, like I was in the presence of art and not rock’s mere individualized, power-wielding catharsis.

Rock out: Summary

Beware of earnestness! Beware of “authenticity” and “three chords and the truth”. Over-earnestness sucks away all the energy. Give me the heterodox weirdos and their musical forms! When a music is experimenting, or conversing, like Twisted Sister did, when it deals with things on multiple levels, like the Beatles did, I feel more comfortable. Like there’s understanding. A shared project. Like we’re more open-ended, all of us.

These things I’m afraid of—monotony, homogeneity, dissolution, a lack of irony, a lack of play and collaboration, a lack of awareness—they come together in rock.

The two-colored-pen solution

Write with one color pen, then come back to highlight, review and doodle in another to get the most out of your notebooks.

I use my notebooks for both personal writing and productivity. I use them for everything, really: I fill them with little snippets and lines, insights and commonplace quotes, lists, longform, words, for clarifying my thoughts, for keeping myself company.

I often catch myself journaling rather than doing the harder, more concentrated form of writing that finished, published works demand, and that I set out to do in the notebooks. Or the tasks and dependencies that I need to track in order to make progress, whether that’s at work or in my personal life.

And this is where the problem with notebooks is. My notebooks are everything-notebooks. This means that I can’t and don’t review them enough. I don’t go back to them. They’re “write-only.”

When I do visit my old entries I can often literally not read what I’ve written days before, since my handwriting is so bad. Or I read the words on the page but they are dead to me, either the spirit of them, the thing that caused me to want to write them, their meaning, or the personal obligations therein. But why would I need to call Bob about another yard sign, I think to myself, or spend “at least 5 minutes upside down with heart below legs”. Who’s Bob?

Notebooks get valuable when you review them. We need review in our lives. Of our written works and everything. But how do we do that, when the words and the spirit in the notebooks are dead? Deader than things you read off the printer tray, even. Double-dead because you can see that they are your words and your obligations to self, but you can’t even recognize that self.

For me, one answer has emerged. It’s a thing I do to enliven my words, to re-participate in them. During the reading and not just the writing. I use a second color pen in my notebooks as part of a regular review process. Once a week, every few days. It gets me back into the spirit in which these words were written, into the things I thought were important. It helps me highlight and process, and pulls me back in in a way that has genuinely put my own best self back in front of me.

Interactive review on the cheap!

Two colored pens. For me it’s often black and then red. But not always. I write with my Pilot Precise V5 pen in a dotted graph hardcover journal, and I review and doodle in red, or in teal or some other very different color

The two-colored-pen review:

Highlights, of course. Reminds me.
Categorizes or calls out things in an area, like music or personal health, for grouping and scanning
Doodles, just to light the page up again, to touch the written word, mark the trail. Makes it more fun to review a third time, or a fourth
Provides status, like with little red checks that show progress

The hand-written word, as much as I’ve cherished it, as much of my life as I’ve given to it, is fading for me. I sense it may be fading for all of us. Fading in the blue glare of screens and scrolls, videos and loops and epic fails. And yet I don’t want to delegate all my writing and tracking to the screen. I believe in the pleasures and advantages of handwriting. And so this way to make the notebook more interactive but not more screen-like, to put more value into it by valuing it with review, has been a really big one for me.

This little habit has helped me connect the circuit of writing and reading again, and has made my notebooks more productive as sourcebooks for inspiration, organization, concrete writerly progress or durable clarity.

Isaiah Berlin’s “Crooked Timber” and the “Bent Twig” of Nationalism

Obviously, there’s a ton of new writing on politics. Thoughtful, anxious books and longform essays about the right wing, especially, about nationalism, authoritarianism. I’m just beginning Kurt Anderson’s Evil Geniuses, as one example, which documents the Right’s efforts, since the late 70s, to dismantle the New Deal and create distracting culture wars as cover. Robert Reich, whose books The Work of Nations, Reason, and others were formative parts of my reading education, has now written a book called The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It. And of course Jane Meyer’s amazing Dark Money was, a few years ago, the new standard in impeccably-researched, dark and incontrovertibly real accounts of Plutocratic moves to undermine American democracy and fairness.

These books look into America’s recent political past for explicit beginnings and sharp turns. Policies, manifestos. Think tanks. Secret meetings. They’re all there! Despite Anderson’s professed disinclination toward conspiracies, Evil Geniuses is absolutely persuasive about an organized, well-funded, secretive, bait-and-switch to lock in the power of corporations and the rich in the wake of late-60s progressivism and the schisms of the “Me” generation, bad wars, and bad actors in government.

What is happening? is the question we’re asking over and over now. This is not normal. Is it a Trumpocalypse, as David Frum has it in his book by that name? Is it something that’s always been here, for which Trump is just the most cartoonishly vivid and corrupt avatar, as Kurt Anderson seems to say in his earlier book Fantasyland? Is it something more fundamental, the ugly form of decadence that was predicted of late capitalism, like the critic Terry Eagleton describes in his book Materialism?

These were not the questions I had in mind when I went to re-read Isaiah Berlin’s book The Crooked Timber: Chapters in the History of Ideas. It had been so long since I’d read it, in fact, that I was taking it off the shelf as an escape, as one of those confident, anodyne syntheses of philosophy that would take my mind off the present, reconnect Aquinas with Aristotle or something like that.

I could not have been more wrong, and The Crooked Timber could not be a more eerily incisive analysis of the current situation. Though it was published as a collection more than 30 years ago, and though it focuses on what may seem like minor historical figures, like Joseph de Maistre (“Joseph de Maistre and the Origin of Fascism”), the clarity of Berlin’s analysis, the specificity of his historical subjects, and his analytical synthesis of rationalism, the romantic, belief and esteem bring this book right to the doorstep of our current crises.

The Crooked Timber is a collection of essays spanning Isaiah Berlin’s career starting in the late 50s, and connecting the themes of his political philosophy: History is concerned with the development of our faculties, of science and rationalism, of human as opposed to absolute truths (“Giambattista Vico and Cultural History”). Progress, moving in fits and starts, crests in the Renaissance, again in the Age of Reason and the rationalism of the Enlightenment. But reason has so many psychological pitfalls and frankly vengeful enemies that history is deranged by the emergence of good ideas at key points, like the French Revolution. New ideas arise and change culture; they are attacked. There are reactions, counter-reactions. Berlin says almost wistfully that “these collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are,” and yet the results of the collisions can be brutal, catastrophic. The Reformation, the Terror, the Counter-reformation. History simply is the expression of human progress, its angry suppression, its eventual reappearance.

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made,” Kant says in the quote from which the book takes its name. It’s clear that for Berlin absolutism, such as arises against ordinary human progress, is a real enemy—and a form that fear and suppression often take. Berlin deploys the Kant epigram not to criticize the idea of progress per se but to show how skeptical we should be of “straight things” like the religious orthodoxies, political utopias, and totalizing principles that are the bad guys in his writing.

Even worse and more deranging than absolutes, however, are the ideas that come out of the Romantic movement, which he sees as a “deep and radical revolt against the central tradition of western thought” that peaks in the second half of the 18^th century as Germany’s Sturm und Drang (“The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will: The Revolt against the Myth of an Ideal World”). For Berlin, the Romantic is the dethronement of reason by the will, whose poet is Friedrich “high demonic freedom” Schiller and whose philosopher is Fichte, the “true father of romanticism.” It is the replacement of shared truths with personal truths, the elevation of the artist over the thinker, and the irrational, emotional, and violent over the reasoned and hammered out. One’s own truth is something to be insisted upon, even if it’s wrong. This is the truly massive shift in western culture, and a bad one: the Germans, as Berlin has it, couldn’t keep up with their Enlightened French showboat Encyclopedist neighbors in the sixteenth century and so basically invented Romanticism, and with it the aggrieved blood-and-soil ideologies that became National Socialism and the new American authoritarianism 300 years later in a crooked but unbroken line.

Nationalism and populism come directly out of the Romantic, in other words, out of the particular and personal against the general. This is where Berlin’s writing is so prescient. As he says, “Nationalism is an inflamed condition of national consciousness which can be, and on occasion has been, tolerant and peaceful. [But] it usually seems to be caused by wounds, some form of collective humiliation.” As Berlin says, “to be the object of contempt or patronizing tolerance on the part of proud neighbors in one of the most traumatic experiences that individuals or societies can suffer.” In Berlin’s example, the Germans, lagging behind their European and especially their French counterparts during the Renaissance “discover in themselves qualities superior” to their neighbors, qualities based on “unexhausted vital powers”, deliberate provincialism and the rejection of learning and sophistication. Berlin describes this as a “pathological exaggeration of one’s real or imaginary virtues, and resentment and hostility toward the proud, the happy, the successful” (Italics mine). For me this is the beating heart of the book and the thing that makes it so extraordinary—and so timely: Aggrievement and shame are the real engines here! Fuck ideas, fuck fellow-feeling! Fuck level playing fields and “what relations between men have been, are, might be and should be.”

The uncanny relevance of this was really brought home to me as I listened to a recent “Trumpcast” episode with Virginia Heffernan and Ben Rhodes, writer and former White House staffer. Rhodes said the animating force of the far right in America this last decade has been disgrace. The hallmarks of the conservative agenda were so thoroughly repudiated by the spectacular failures of the financial crisis (deregulation) and the Iraq War that true believers were left with nothing but shame, resentment and vengefulness. Which puts us in one of Berlin’s convolutions right now, actually, one of those moments like the French Revolution that pit the rational against the aggrieved irrational in ways that almost can’t help but go crooked.