Can We Be Rock'n'Roll Without Rock?

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A few scrawled questions I found...

Is the avant-garde too po-faced and high-brow [to rock]? Is electronica too covert? Will it become the destiny of the excitable musical curators to end up curled around their coffee tables? Will the minimalists/pastoralists [cf BoC etc] end up blanding themselves out? Will experimentalism for its own sake let us go louder, or will we inevitably reduce ourselves (and is 4'33 really more exciting than a bunch of teenagers playing half-assed punk)?

To be honest, I think the last question is the most important- is it possible for something conceptual to be more alluring in terms of fairly instant gratification? Can we be moved in any way aside from the cerebral or contemplative?

― emil.y, Monday, 1 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

And another question- can I ever learn to make any sense?

― emil.y, Monday, 1 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Come on, the Blue Oyster Cult wasn't that minimal or pastoral.

I think my new Maryanne Amacher CD gratified me pretty instantly and intensely. And Alan Licht's "Polarity" was feeling pretty stomach-turningly creepy yesterday.

― sundar subramanian, Monday, 1 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

emil.y - I think your questions are good and you put them well - BUT... I'm not sure I understand you, for all that. (How can this be?)

The experimentalism you seem to be on about is, as far as I recall, a bore. Certainly every band at ATP = dud with hardly a single exception. So I'm not sure that they have the answer to anything.

'Rock' - or guitars, or whatever, can be 'conceptual'. Maybe we'd need to define 'concept', though.

― the pinefox, Monday, 1 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

hey edgar varese rocks !

― francesco, Monday, 1 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

i'm still never entirely positive that foxy isn't trying to rile us. "every band at atp = dud"?? so between autechre and derek bailey, mike ladd and television, afrika 70 and the sun ra arkestra, BoC and um...tortoise, you don't find a single arist of value?

i do have some answers to your question emil y that i will ponder more when i'm away from this desk in a few hours...but one of them would probably be pulling out my old hobby horse (::coughdancemusiccough::) that will more than likely send pinefox running back to mozzer. ;)

― jess, Monday, 1 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

>>> i'm still never entirely positive that foxy isn't trying to rile us. "every band at atp = dud"?? so between autechre and derek bailey, mike ladd and television, afrika 70 and the sun ra arkestra, BoC and um...tortoise, you don't find a single arist of value?

Yes, I do find a single artist of value: Television, who can roXoR good, as they say round here, despite not being great songwriters. I said 'with hardly a single exception': that's the exception. The others are clearly big time bores at best, unbearable for the ears (and other senses - cf. dreadful strobe lights etc) at worst.

― the pinefox, Monday, 1 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Rock is your shadow or a tarbaby, people's efforts to extricate themselves from it are very amusing. Anti-rockists are not just tilting at windmills, they're raving at the wind itself.

― dave q, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Well Said. anyone who is so afraid to be called or put in a category of rock and or roll is by definition anything but experimental, just a bit too anal if you ask me. Which, of course, you didn't.

― smarmy, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

For the first and only time ever, I quote Twisted Sister:

"You can't stop Rock!!!"

― Luptune Pitman, Tuesday, 2 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

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