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strangledeggs · 5 years

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The Day The Music Dies: Rock And Roll's Iceage

Apparently I wrote this whole thing last year and then never posted it! I think it’s because I was second-guessing its actual quality, but it’s been so long since I posted here that I think I owe any hangers-on some piece of writing, so here’s my concert/discography review of Iceage combined with musings on the perpetual “death of rock and roll”:

July 8th, 2018 Recently, I’ve been reading a posthumous collection of the writing of 60s-generation rock critic Ellen Willis, “Out Of The Vinyl Deeps”. It’s been a fascinating read so far due in part to her intriguing perspectives on various musical acts from the 60s-80s and beyond - but also in part to the bizarre contrast her strongly rock-centric writing forms with a much more recent Vice article by Dan Ozzi I read that heralds (once again) the “death of rock”*. As tiresome as it is to beat this long-deceased horse, I think it’s worth exploring the reasons why Ozzi seems to think that rock’s “death” (which turns out to be more of a clickbait-trick, as he ultimately pulls a 180 to march out the equally-tired counterpart claim “It’s not dead, it’s just underground!”) is actually a good thing and the mistakes he might be making in his assumptions about where it might go next. And throughout this exploration, I’m going to try and weave in a narrative about Iceage, a “rock” band who came of age in this supposedly “anti-rock” era and whose recent modest success and continually developing sound seem to run both parallel to and against Ozzi’s narrative.

I’d argue that Ozzi’s first mistake is treating “rock” as a genre that exists in itself, rather than a tenuous category that’s been something of a moving target since its inception in the public consciousness. From the piece’s beginning, Ozzi notes the current chart dominance of hip-hop that increasingly eclipses even the most successful rock acts not only of our time, but even of previous eras. But why should we be treating these categories as separate? In truth, hip-hop is just a re-branding of the same type of music as rock, existing as mere subspecies on the pop music continuum (note that it’s “pop music”, not just “music” - that’s important, and I’ll get into it later). If this seems unintuitive, we could look to the past, which reveals how rock music only assembled itself out of the skeleton of American rhythm and blues of the 30s-50s and later gave way to soul, funk and all the other genres that would form the elements of hip-hop. Arguably, even the electronic music that now dominates the charts and hip-hop beats got its start in relation to pop and rock - just listen to the chugging rhythms of Kraftwerk and then notice how they were sampled on some of the earliest hip-hop singles by Afrika Bambaataa.

But we don’t even need to reach that far back, considering the evidence is right here in front of us: why would Rae Sremmurd name their single “Black Beatles” if they didn’t see themselves as existing on some kind of continuum with the legendary pop/rock band? “Hip-hop is the new rock” is more than just a catch-phrase - it’s a revelation as old as hip-hop’s genesis and can be demonstrated through the crossover success of Run-DMC and Rage Against The Machine, as well as the usual hallelujah’s that accompany mass cultural movements; compare Chuck Berry’s “Hail, hail rock and roll!” with Kanye West’s “Is hip-hop just a euphemism for a new religion?” Even the formal/technical details of the genres can be shown to be similar when broken down, but I won’t bore you with the details of this here. It’s clear that, like most “new waves” in pop music, hip-hop and rock share a symbolic status as emblems of “youth culture”, albeit as it has taken shape in different eras to different demographics.

Suppose, though, that this syncretism isn’t your kind of thing. You might think that, all formal and demographic similarities aside, rock is still noticeably different from hip-hop on an immediate level. And this is important to recognize, too: you wouldn’t ask a famous rock musician to suddenly start rapping or mixing beats; that’s decidedly a different skill set for what can reasonably be labelled a separate genre. So we’ll agree that on some level, rock is of a different breed, and therefore its “death” is something that can be talked about intelligibly. This brings us to Ozzi’s second mistake, which is his diagnosis of the kinds of pitfalls that befell rock, leading to its demise. Rock, he argues, currently suffers from too many “clone” acts, like the endless waves of “post-grunge” Nickelback-esque posers who are still trying to be the next Pearl Jam. He argues that rock seems to naturally follow this cycle in which the underground brings a new sound to the forefront (like grunge), then the new sound is diluted by commercialism and obliterated into blandness as a wave of imitators rush to try and ride the new trend to fame. And now, he concludes, rock will have something of an “underground renaissance” since the imitators will be less attracted to the genre; thus new sounds can abound in indie heaven without the fear of those nasty, co-opting sellouts**.

A nice story, isn’t it? Rock thrives as the underdog because creativity is stifled by commercialism. Only it’s not particularly true; I’d be interested to see Ozzi explain why, if his story is true, rock began as an intensely commercial genre in the 50s*** and remained such for the most part until its recent “demise”. Further, there’s something a little uncomfortable that’s implicit in what Ozzi’s claiming: I buy his take on EDM as a stagnant genre that largely exists to sell products, but does he believe the same is true of hip-hop? Because if so, he’d be flying in the face of most respectable contemporary music criticism. Modern critics have consistently been praising hip-hop as a wellspring of stylistic creativity and innovation for the last three decades, severely undermining the credibility of Ozzi’s narrative. And isn’t hip-hop just as full of uninspired imitators as rock? Why haven’t these profit-motivated trend-riders sunk the genre?

There’s another problem with this story, and I think it relates directly to the kind of revisionist historical trajectory that music sites like Pitchfork and Noisey have been trying to push for. Ozzi makes an interesting assumption in his “underdog” model that made me almost immediately suspicious of it: he seems to equate “underground” with “better”, not just as a relationship between stifling commercialism and the mythical “free artist”, but also as the inverse relationship in which this “free artist” is magically “better” the less bound they are to anyone’s restrictions. To which I will respond****: remember the 60s? The 60s, by many accounts (including many recorded ones), were a time of extreme musical indulgence by the era’s hippie bands. The “free artist” was fully unbound, at least temporarily...and make no mistake, some excellent innovation and music came out of it! But the “jamming” of the 60s bands also represents a kind of nadir in terms of gaps between the audience (critical or popular) and the artist. Even some of the most brilliant performers of the time became prone to some extreme displays of self-indulgence. Indeed, much of the “indie rock” crowd of the last decade still turn up their noses at the 60s for this reason, as do the post-punk and punk movements that predate them. Is the unbound artist always right? Even when this is the result?

But it’s not just the 60s that I want to point the finger at here; I believe there’s a profound hypocrisy going on within later underground movements right up to today, and I would even go so far as to claim that it’s often rooted in a subconscious elitism and racism. Keep in mind, as I develop the following points, that the “jamming” of the 60s had precursors in the blues and jazz that the often-white performers had based their own songs on. Consider that the self-indulgence didn’t disappear after the 60s, either: if anything, it was amplified into the new frontiers of “progressive rock”, which began to imitate classical structures - it’s more complex, see? Punk rock, as I have summarized in another article on its relationship to hip-hop, was largely a reaction to this newfound “refinement” of rock music; it blew a raspberry in the face of bands composing “symphonies” and (gulp) “rock operas”. But both punk and prog faced a common enemy on the charts: disco. While many of the biggest disco hits were by white performers, it was decidedly a “black” genre with its roots in the very black genre of funk. This is important, please remember it.

Whether or not we can credit punk with dethroning prog, disco outlived both and weaved its way into the “new wave” of punk-based rock bands that followed - if you don’t believe me, go back and re-listen to the B-52s and Blondie again. Synthpop and dance music rose up alongside it in the 80s, threatening to take the edge off of rock. Please note here that I only say this in relation to what are likely the perspectives of rock purists. A major part of the point I’m trying to make here is that a new class of rock fans who arose at this point in time, the “purists” who thought rock should be more about returning to what it was like in the 50s-70s before it was “corrupted” by punk and disco, are the ones who help bring about the genre’s downfall. As “rock” came to be associated more and more with the firmly established distorted-guitar sounds of everyone from Chuck Berry to Led Zeppelin, the nostalgic movement of those who wanted to Make Rock Great Again only grew. What’s really intriguing about this movement is how increasingly white it became, as black audiences embraced the new sounds of hip-hop and early house music in the 80s. Soon, the mainstream rock charts were flooded with a horde of Zeppelin imitators in the form of “hair metal”, an ultimately nostalgic and deeply conservative form of rock that sought to undo the perceived damage new wave had done to the genre.

But that’s the mainstream; that’s only half of the problem. While those who still cared about the position of rock on the charts were fretting about what was to become of the genre, those few die-hard punks who hadn’t given up their commitment to total disruption of everything were busy deciding on the answer to that very question. The underground post-punk movement effectively shaped the future of rock, as bands that played just under the new wave radar started incorporating a hodgepodge of bizarre non-rock influences including African music, electronic music, noise and even disco itself. But while this is a fascinating time for innovation in the genre, those who would romanticize it should note that it had an ugly side: for every band like the Talking Heads, who sought to assimilate disco and hip-hop into new hybrid sounds, there were several more pretentious acts who relapsed into prog as they fetishized the work of avant-garde classical composers. What’s really interesting here is that the developing “indie” scene at the time seems to have eaten it all up with equal aplomb; thus dull, ambient muzak and formless noise experimentation (which might normally have had little appeal beyond a select group of devoted acolytes) suddenly became a part of rock’s future DNA just as funk did - maybe even moreso.

As it turned out, this kind of omnivorous attitude led the indie scene down some strange alleyways. Of the various scattered subgenres that emerged to a wider audience in the 90s, one known as “post-rock” was among the most influential. It can sometimes be hard to precisely define post-rock as the terms has, in the past, occasionally been used by music journalists whenever they’re trying to describe a sound that seems to transcend the roots of “classic” rock, but I think post-rock-as-genre can be described in terms of some very specific features that have come to dominate its performers’ tendencies: typically, the songs are long, upwards of 10 minutes; they are largely instrumental, often entirely so; they are organized less like “songs” and more like…“movements” of, er, “symphonies”; the “compositions” (I suppose we’ll call them) tend to be comprised of “textures” rather than the more traditional pop elements such as rhythmic figures, riffs and lyrics - which is not to say it’s devoid of melody...however, the genre does seem to pride itself in its noisiness and “drone-yness”. In short, it seems almost as if post-rock is an attempt to re-cast the “rock band” ensemble as something akin to “high art” by associating it with elements of classical music, effectively trying to establish the genre more in line with the “modern classical” tradition than with pop music. Needless to say, it’s a far cry from punk’s witty mockery, though just as reactionary, I would argue.

Here, we reach the real crux of my argument: it’s interesting to me that my previous statement is actually something of a controversial claim. Today, the influence of this “dull muzak” and “post-rock” remains strong in the modern indie scene - stronger than it was at the time, quite possibly. Certainly stronger than hip-hop or disco’s influence. My suspicion is that this is the source of the elitism and racism I mentioned earlier. The elitism comes in the form of Ozzi’s (and the collective indie scene’s) strange assumptions that underground = better, which leads us to conclude that the ambient fluff that’s plagued post-punk from the start must be better, because it was never in the public spotlight, right? This also sheds some light on the strange persistence of the scene’s distrust of acts that describe themselves simply as “rock”, acts that don’t tag themselves with some subgenre as a sort of dog-whistle disclaimer: HEY, WE’RE NOT LIKE THOSE MAINSTREAM GUYS, WE’RE WEIRD! For such a long time, acts that were simply “rock” like hair metal (which, as far as I know, is not a genre by which the bands involved referred to themselves) were actually privileged on the charts and represented a new low for rock commercialism. Only now, this suspicion persists hopelessly out-of-context; hair metal died 30 years ago, and yet the new generation indie scene still finds it hard to congratulate a straightforward rock band like Wussy, who are in fact in the same financial shoes as the rest of the underground despite writing several album’s worth of songs better than most of what’s come out of it in the past two decades - all because they don’t put on high-art airs.

The racism becomes evident once you realize that the forgotten influences of disco and hip-hop are largely black genres. What’s more, the punk scene (from my observations) has done little to reach out to hip-hop: though rappers increasingly pay tribute to the rock music they were raised on, I see few attempts to try and get black hip-hop acts collaborating with an often-white punk scene. To some degree, I don’t blame them: when a scene consistently chooses white men who noodle aimlessly and atonally on unaccompanied guitars over you*****, why would you want to work with them? It’s almost as if the new tastemakers in rock have grown inexplicably cold to anything that doesn’t elevate them to some kind of status as avant-garde heroes, to anything that shows the slightest touch of warmth towards a wider audience.

Which brings me to Iceage. Iceage is a Danish band that made their international debut in 2011 and are best described as post-punk. They have risen into favour with precisely the type of scene which I spent the previous paragraphs interrogating, and though they’re better than many, they don’t quite escape its worst tendencies. But they do rock, and that has to count for something, doesn’t it?

Seeing as the band only has four studio albums out and has changed its sound significantly on each, I will give a brief overview of their discography here. A brief disclaimer should precede: I have listened to most of these albums only once from start to finish, so take my opinions on them with a grain of salt. That being said, I know what I heard and I know what I like. “New Brigade”, the band’s debut, is arguably their most successful. The single “Broken Bone” is a harsh post-punk explosion of clattering rhythms and guitars that seem to be scrambling to keep up with each other. “White Rune” is more militant and just as catchy, if not moreso. Elsewhere, the album is enjoyable, if a little bit sonically cluttered, but a burst of melody breaks through in the excellent closer “You’re Blessed”.

Seemingly attentive to the problem this clutter could pose, the band focused their sound a little more on the follow-up album “You’re Nothing”; here, the noise feels more artful and the tempos come closer to hardcore punk. Unfortunately, the focus doesn’t help the songs much, and few songs from it made much of a serious impression on me despite enjoying it in the moment.

By this point, Iceage had started to gain something of a more serious following, and their next album, “Plowing Into The Field Of Love”, felt like the biggest “event” of their career since the release of “Broken Bone”. Which is really a shame, since it’s by far their weakest - this happened to be the album where the band inexplicably succumbed to their worst “art rock” tendencies and many of the songs lack rhythmic vitality, drag and ultimately feel directionless. Still, it has what may be their best song on it, a surprise gothic country stomper called “The Lord’s Favourite”. And “Against The Moon” is one of the few exceptions where the band’s experiments with textures here pay off; it’s actually quite pretty (even when you notice that the full line in the chorus is “pissing against the moon”).

The group’s most recent album, “Beyondless”, is something of a return to form. The texture experiments feel more coherent, sometimes evoking jazz fusion, albeit without the virtuosic wankery. Plus there are real songs here: “Pain Killer” and especially “Catch It” are monstrously catchy, and the driving (and aptly-titled) “The Day The Music Dies” boasts a killer guitar riff and horn section. There are still some directionless passages, but otherwise I’ve found it to be their strongest since “New Brigade”.

Of course, the band could easily sink into post-punk anonymity if not for the conspicuous personality of its lead singer, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt. He screams, he roars, he rasps, he strangles these songs with the conviction of one truly dedicated to not giving a shit. It should here be mentioned how much this band improves live: when I saw them recently after the release of “Beyondless”, everything was amped-up energy-wise; a violinist joined the guitar for complementary leads; the riff from “The Day The Music Dies” approached a chugging Nine-Inch-Nails intensity; new rhythmic breakdowns updated old classics like “White Rune”; Elias brought his presence in the form of a suit jacket and his drunken(?) stumbling around the stage. Needless to say, the live show is the way to experience these guys. It’s very much rock, no matter what the critics might try and tell you, and if you love the genre and get a kick out of Elias’s scowling bitterness, it’s worth checking out.

I did, however, mention the band’s tendencies to succumb to some of the pretentiousness of their art rock peers, and such tendencies were not completely absent from the show. The most glaring flaw was the inclusion of new age harpist Mary Lattimore as the only opener. The sound didn’t fit in the slightest and I know I was hardly the only attendee who sat in confusion through it, waiting for the show we came for to really start. This kind of choice once again highlights the very kind of thing that threatens to sink rock as a genre: Iceage might be on the cutting-edge, but cut too deep and you might just slash your chances of reaching a wider audience. I don’t know if they were responsible for the choice of opener or if this was just some sort of label-mate touring deal, so I can’t assign blame properly here, but the choice is baffling either way and deeply reflective of the scene’s aforementioned elitism and racism. Especially the latter, come to think of it - if “Beyondless” contains obvious jazz and soul influences, why not get a black jazz group to join you if you wanted to keep the lineup eclectic? The band’s sound suggests the possibility of such a co-existence, but the faces at the show unfortunately suggest otherwise. It could very well be an unconscious racism, but it would still be nice to see white rock bands pay more than lip service to the black musicians they have always been indebted to.

Something about Iceage feels decidedly “unsafe”, which is an image many punk and post-punk bands have tried to project in the past. In terms of keeping the punk spirit alive, I appreciate this to some degree, but there are times I really do worry about these guys - not in terms of my own safety, but in terms of theirs. The “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide”****** has been a recurring theme throughout the genre’s history, and it feels eerily significant that the band performed at a venue called “The 27 Club” the night I saw them. Is there a suicidal impulse in the indie rock scene? I don’t just mean literally - there seems to be a kind of metaphorical death wish in the way these musicians tear out their roots. It’s if those who set out to play rock music don’t actually want to see the genre survive. Not everyone, I’ll grant! There are many great independent groups doing much to keep the music they love alive long past its presumed expiry date. But what to be done for those whose music suggests such self-effacement? And what to be done about the implicit racism that follows this? I’m not about to place the burden of “the future of rock” on Iceage’s shoulders, but it might be worth turning to some of their lyrics for closing remarks:

Performed an exorcism on myself,

Cited prayers and rites of deliverance,

Yet here I am, somehow still possessed,

The future's never starting,

The present never ends,

I left us both bombarded,

But I'm not here to make amends

*“Rock Is Dead, Thank God”.

**Yes, I’m exaggerating a bit here in terms of how he phrases it, but this kind of sentiment definitely exists and he’s not not feeding into it with this narrative.

***Hell, the Who made an excellent concept album satirizing pop commercialism in 1967!

****Not without irony - I was a 90s kid myself.

*****Based on a real show I witnessed. And no, this is not Sonic Youth I’m referring to - Sonic Youth has rhythm!

******Which, you might remember, was a song written by a man who died at 69 - it needn’t always be a tragic early end!

#Music #Music criticism #Rock #Punk #Music analysis #Rock is dead #Rockism

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