Rock critics as 'Mouldy Modernists'

Becky Shepherd

doi:10.5130/portal.v8i1.1762

Abstract

Contemporary rock criticism appears to be firmly tied to the past. The specialist music press valorise rock music of the 1960s and 1970s, and new emerging artists are championed for their ‘retro’ sounding music by journalists who compare the sound of these new artists with those included in the established ‘canon’ of rock music. This article examines the narrative tropes of authenticity and nostalgia that frame the retrospective focus of this contemporary rock writing, and most significantly, the maintenance of the rock canon within contemporary popular culture. The article concludes by suggesting that while contemporary rock criticism is predominately characterised by nostalgia, this nostalgia is not simply a passive romanticism of the past. Rather, this nostalgia fuels a process of active recontextualisation within contemporary popular culture.

Highlights

Three prevalent questions determine the focus of this study
Rock Critics as ‘Mouldy’ Modernists consumption of music press publications (Laing 2006), of the existing modes of discourse on popular music—including the internet, radio, film and television—the contemporary specialist music press still operates as a ‘cultural intermediary’ (Bourdieu 1984) or ‘gatekeeper’ (Toynbee 1993: 290; Shuker 1998: 199) between the music industry, its consumers and fans of popular music
Rather than functioning as empty signifiers of pastiche within a contemporary context, the canon of rock music, rock music’s assertions of authenticity that typify the canon, and the role of the contemporary specialist music press as a champion of retrospectivity, remain a significant part of a popular cultural hierarchy that frames the aesthetics of popular music

Summary

Introduction

Three prevalent questions determine the focus of this study. First, why does rock criticism continue to tie itself to the past? Second, why does contemporary popular culture, of which the specialist music press is a principal cultural intermediary, propagate a fixation with canonical rock music and the narrative tropes of nostalgia and authenticity that surround the canon and its popular cultural significance? Third, how does the specialist music press generate retrospectivity in contemporary popular culture? There are several conceptual platforms from which to view and critique the continued maintenance of the rock canon and the general preoccupation with the past held by the specialist music press. The specialist music press appear to maintain significance by propagating retrospectivity, and maintaining the ‘myth of rock’s own ideological effects’ (Frith 2004: 35), which positions pop and rock music as binary opposites.

Results

Conclusion