Recently, I've been obsessing over a word. Being that I dabble in words, that doesn't seem particularly odd. This word, however, threatened to overtake my very being. I studied it. I followed it. I probed it. I fretted over how it somehow applied to me. Eventually, I decided it was time I got some sleep, shaved, cleaned my apartment, returned my phone calls and e-mails, and put this destructive word behind me once and for all.
The word was rockist. And it was directed at me. It was lobbed with such force that I knew it wasn't high praise. Just the sound of the word is ugly: hard vowels bashing against the jagged rocks of consonants, its tail end a slow fuse into a spit. The t's main function is to ensure that the word cannot be mistaken for raucous, which, depending on who you are, may not be all that bad.
At that moment, I was unaware of rockist, although I was pretty sure of what it possibly meant, thanks to its first syllable: rock. This person was inferring that I preferred rock 'n' roll to all other forms of music. I was a music snob. But music snob doesn't have quite the power of rockist, which can be shouted during an argument and have the same effect as bitch or faggot. It's the difference between a boxing glove and a bullet.
Coincidentally, that month Harp magazine ran a Steve Hyden column responding to a Kelefa Sanneh New York Times piece on rockism from oh, about a half-year prior. According to Hyden, "If you fit the profile of a typical Harp reader, you probably are a rockist." Well, there's three bucks wasted. He quotes from Sanneh directly: "A rockist isn't just someone who loves rock 'n' roll, who goes on and on about Bruce Springsteen, who champions ragged-voiced singer-songwriters no one has ever heard of. Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher." Hyden argues that every genre has its ists: there's the countryist, the jazzist, and the rap-ist, although, unlike me, Hyden declined to hyphenate that last one. He signs off with "Of all the things ending with an ist, a rockist is among the least despicable to be."
Somehow, that didn't seem comforting. I decided to investigate further. I would regret this curiosity, for I was suddenly thrust down amazing, exhausting, exhilarating, and confusing new trails. Endless trails.
According to its Wikipedia entry (everything has a Wikipedia entry), the word rockism is rooted in the late-'70s/early-'80s British music press. Robert Christgau of the Village Voice wrote about its effects on the 1980s in a June 1990 summation of the just-passed decade. In the interim between then and now, the word has resurfaced from time to time, but, as of Halloween 2004, when Sanneh's piece originally ran, it's emerged fully from the verbal swamp to taunt and blindside a new generation of music critics.
The reverberations of Sanneh's column, The Rap Against Rockism, were instantaneous, thanks to the Internet. Music symposiums devoted entire workshops to exploring the word. Blogs championed Sanneh or vilified him in lengthy screeds that inspired even lengthier exchanges in comment boxes. The I Love Music Web board, a secret cabal of music lovers, analyzed Rap for the better part of a year, in multiple threads. Even today, rockist remains a preferred epithet among the nation's top wielders of the poison pen. It tends to be leveled, however, at their peers more than the music itself. And why not? It forces the condemned into the backpedaling Archie Bunker role, stammering, "Now, waidaminnit, dere, I'm not sayin' all dem pop singers is bad," while the accuser waits with the silent confidence of Lionel Jefferson, arms folded, eyebrow arched, smiling smugly as he watches his prey futilely struggle free. This is usually followed by a list of pop stars of whom the Bunker doppelganger approves. Which is usually followed by his tormentor's derisive snorts.
But what constitutes a rockist, other than it describes someone who isn't you? This is something no one can quite reach a consensus on, and there are so many fiercely intellectual frissons on this particular point-often invoking Jacques Derrida, father of deconstructionism-they may as well be head-spinning college lectures delivered at dawn to a classroom full of hangovers. By the end, you're not sure who you agree with, or who agrees with you, or why you're so concerned about it in the first place. It's just polysyllabic posturing, filling air with words and supposition. The ultimate question is personal: Do I listen to music for status or enjoyment? As for "Why do I prefer X over Y?" should I even care? Is the rockism debate worthwhile discourse or an attempt to turn music fandom into absolutism?
I don't know the answer to these questions. Musically speaking, I think we're all mutts. Our tastes are informed over time by the music we're exposed to by friends, family, the era's media, and other passersby. That's quite a variety of stimuli. Just in my own lifetime I've experienced hundreds of pop and rock permutations, and I likely have favorite artists and songs in most (I say "likely" because of all the genres and subgenres to which the critics still haven't assigned uniform parameters). In fact, my stock answer to the question "What type of music do you like?" is "Whatever I can get my hands on." I love music, and that's that. There is nothing more.
So the next time you want to call me a rockist, be prepared for a rebuttal involving an ist of my own. It begins with the letter f.
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