When talking about liberalism’s much ballyhooed contract theory, it is easy to jump the gun and say with a reassured voice, ”Hey!  It’s such selfish piece of malarkey that it’ s not possible to see any socially redeeming aspect of the enterprise[1].”   

 

                One paragraph later and with even fewer commas, the problem of cyclical fatality in saying what was “good” and “bad” in rock n’ roll music (not to mention the breaking down of the name of the genre itself ) tends to push the average Joe (or Gladys) in the direction that makes Foucaultian analysis of societal construction feel far more true-to-life than the high minded optimism of Nietzsche.  Maybe a table at this point would help to illustrate the above.

 

Time Spent /mass acceptance	·         Number of albums sold	Kind of albums sold
“the underground years”: pubbing about, living out of a van, selling phone books	5, if anyone ever kept track. [2]	Recorded in someone’s garage on the nearest tape deck like thing
“Living off of,and like, royalty”	“Go ask the suits, all I know is it’s a BIG number, man.”	“It don’t matter man, they sold out.” (big glossy things using studios)

 

It seems by the scientifically ignorant table that we are stuck in some sense.    People/members of the obscure rock critic community laud the starving artist/underground music performer(s)  but when they actually succeed  in spreading the musical gospel they preach, they are then treated like trailer trash.  Or in the opposite situation where a record is commercially/critically popular the first time around, as in Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale[3].”

They had nowhere else to go because the two extremes force an immolation of potential growth and decline on the music simultaneously, leaving any further output to be commented on in retrospectives as an aside to the curse of “one hit wonderdom. ” However we do run into a problem in explaining the popular and critical success of non-one hit wonders, case in point the Beatles with the now-puffed-up-to-legendary-proportions Sergeant Pepper’s  Lonely Hearts Club Band  LP.   Personally I think a lot of its success has to do with the fact that the group in question was the Beatles, who for the most part, have stuck to the driving trends of pop/rock culture like a fly to fly paper.  The chronological placement of the album at the height of “flower power” silliness/idealism,  with its own referents to the emerging drug culture and its incorporation of the freak part of the stillborn hippy uprising (cue up “Within You Without You” for a good taste of that, followed by “A Day in the Life”), not to mention the fact that the Beatles were treated like the best thing since sliced bread were a shoe in for the LP to go gonzo on all contradictory fronts[4]. 

Few rock and roll bands that people remember without a great deal of archival investigation have been able to carry that out.  Why?

                Sit down nice and comfy-like and I’ll tell ya, which actually ties into what I started talking about quite nicely, too.   The Beatles through no fault of their own, except by their taking into consideration the forces that swirled and eddied around them and having a crack promotion staff in Brian Epstein (or at least until he died),  had managed in some strange way to not be regarded by the money toting, vinyl hungry public as corporate shills or distant artsy musicians or 4 people you’d never to care to meet in real life, but were seen as, gosh darn it, a part of the everyday cosmos like you and me .   In purchasing a Beatle product, be it Please Please Me or Let It Be, it was a confirmation that things were going in the direction the public unknowingly wanted to see themselves go in beforehand, and in releasing such socially (un)consious music a contract was fulfillled.  Which is why they have a lot more money today than people who assemble lamps for a living in Paraguay.

                So where does that put those bands who have more than one release in the vinyl realm who are critically successful, but for all (general) intents and purposes are really nowheresville?  Take the instance of bands like Love, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, Blue Öyster Cult, Hawkwind, and the Chambers Brothers.  These are bands you might have heard of on a rainy day trapped in a room with a person who has a record collection  and manages to scare people by humming a tune in an elevator which no one in suburbia had ever witnessed  bubbling through radio transmissions with Casey Casem among others as DJs.    These are bands who for some reason have longevity despite obscurity in a marginal sense, in that there is a critical mass (think science, not critical as in “that tie is too blue”) of people necessary to sustain any esoteric venture whose output is sufficiently offputting to radio station programmers,whose prediliction is that the average  person will tune in on  a constant basis  (of course, you realize that this excludes any explicitly contesatable material.  Think Elvis in the beginning, or even Chuck Berry to (white) southern radio programmers with their own biases common to the time[5]).  Here we have stumbled upon the stratification of the Rock scene for audients, so let’s  write it down before one of us forgets, shall we?

   · The Big Time:  People who aren’t your immediate friends and from disparate parts of the country (economically, socially, etc. speaking) know what you’re talking about when you exclaim to them in a flurry of enthusiasm, “MAN!!!  ________ is/are outa sight !!!!” It is also possible that they own at least some form of _____’s output or have been exposed to _____ via the free radio (people can be cheap in their musical library building you know), but given a luke warm response it is possible to surmise that they have it/acknoweldge it as “not bad”just because they a)  want to fit in to the prevailing trend ;b)used to be realllllllly into the band until they “sold out” and now chose to lock the memory of enjoyment away next to all that useful information about the periodic table of elements; c) bought it out of curiosity when ____ were still struggling from bar to bar, but didn’t really like it all that much once the illegal substance and/or alcohol wore off.

· The Small Time:  Only your immediate friends really know who they are because they used to listen to FM radio when it was “free form” and “underground.”  Due to sheer determination and having enough fans to buys tapes/tickets so there is gas money to get to the studio, the group produces a decent volume of vinyl so as to appear (to a person browsing through a rock “encyclopedia”) that they really made the scene at some time. In actuality, they merely provided at least an interesting backdrop for the side of the stage where the roadies and underlings hung out when sick to death of their big time employers. Or  it gave the disenchanted an out of the way place for ears to go when bored with the (insert past big timer/fad here), especially since they haven’t made anything in a loooooong time that was worth admitting to the ownership of.  It is better to set the context of something rather than do nothing at  all for the simultaneous events going along with it after all.  These are the bands that are called “quirky,” “eclectic,” “semi-underground (like many a basement).”

· The Underground:  You makes your own tapes and sells your own wares from bar to bar or (moreso than ever) over the internet.  Now the internet provides an interesting recourse in consideration of the past reliance upon 45, which hteh late 60’s/70’s turned into LPs as the media du jour.   Why ? Because you can download sound clips from “band sites,” not to mention forage for other informational tidbits about the band membership’s idiosyncracies (formerly known as “what’s your favorite ____?” columns in the Melody maker and NME).  After previewing and judging from the privacy of your very  own or college owned  computational device, you can (most likely) BUY a product over the internet for a fraction of the cost for CDs/Tapes in all those trendy horribly expensive “music” stores in the mall.  How’s that for asserting your consumer rights!!  

 

                Hmmm, I think  I made sense somewhere above. Let’s see if I can fish it out.   The biggest problem with rock ads of any sort be they popular or successfully obscure is that they all think they are putting out the best poop on the market for yon ears to jive to.   What’s so wrong with that?  Is it so terribly horrible for a musician to (gasp!) make money at his craft and still make stuff he/she/they might think is blanga?  Somehow a little voice from deep inside your flannel says “yes.”   This is a big problem.  Bigger than any of you might think.  It undermines the whole notion of contract theory with an isolated elitism, and a sick one at that.

 

                Isolational elitism is something that takes place when your assumptions about how you would act as a musician vary considerable from how you would act in trying to get a job at the local butchers or DIY store.    Evil, thy name is art.    A long time ago, in particular the Greeks, had stumbled upon problems of defiining terms in the philosophical tradition.   Beauty was one such ugly thing.   We all know the notable cliches, “Art imitates life,” “I may not know what art is, but I know it when I see it,” “art brings out beauty,” yadda yadda.   In the firstmost of the list, what the majority of thinkers that undergrad students in college learn about is that the Greeks thought about the “good life.”  From there it was a slippery slope in trying to come to terms with something actually being good. Art is one of those things people have wrestled with defining too.   So does that mean it might just be an imaginary thing?  For example saying ummm lets see,  te Mona Lisa is a work of art doesn’t do it much good either.   So what is it really ?  For one,  its something that we want to look at. OK.   But calling it art, using a lofty condescending tone of voice, means that it has some sort of extra special magical properties that makes it the sum of is parts.

This notion of art has plagued mankind for aeons.    It definatley doesn’t help rock and roll music much.   

 

 

Pop Quiz:

                Why do you like the song you are listening to right now?

 

Can’t answer it can ya?  At least not to any significantly academic level which would involve paragraphs and footnotes and parentheses.  That’s a good thing..