the vg-r collective

Rock rebellion

"Thanks for coming out tonight and not just downloading this," said Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn at the outset of his Calvin College concert last year. As usual, Cockburn packed a lot of meaning into a seemingly off-handed comment.

The music industry is in the midst of a significant downturn--in album sales, concert attendance and general cultural clout. Many would like to blame new technological music habits, but the industry itself is partly responsible for lagging interest in rock music. Looking at an even bigger picture, larger cultural trends are at work that speak to a much more sinister state of affairs beyond the industry's ability to save itself.

Indeed, major shifts in the cultural milieu have impacted popular music's role in society. Put simply, it is this: rock and roll is rooted in rebellion, but contemporary American culture seems to be so apathetic that we no longer have anything about which we feel passionate enough to rebel.

In order to understand the current state of affairs, it might first be helpful to briefly revisit some broadly sweeping themes throughout the history of rock music. The music grows out of, and was an immediate response to, the African slave experience. Slaves developed unique vocal styles, using call-and-response and note bending, and layered them on top of African rhythms, forming the foundation for what would become rock and roll--all the while subverting their oppression through music unlike anything European people groups had previously heard and lyrics that spoke to a broader, more real salvation than their oppressors could possibly imagine. This spirit has pervaded rock and roll ever since; it is a spirit that resists oppressive systems and speaks to more imaginative possibilities of human existence.

In fact, the history of rock music parallels the history of anti-establishment movements in the United States throughout the last century. In the 1930s, black sharecroppers began migrating north to escape the still-oppressive south and they brought the music of the cotton and tobacco fields with them. Guitar players like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf learned their instruments on southern plantations from the likes of Robert Johnson (who famously sold his soul to the devil in return for his talent) and then arrived in Chicago to amplify their guitars and transform their Delta blues into something altogether new and revolutionary: rhythm and blues. Again, the very sound of the music pointed to a freedom of spirit that the white power structure had difficulty accepting.

Of course, some white people recognized the liberating nature of this new music as a positive force, which eventually helped expand the rebellious spirit to other spheres. Elvis Presley started borrowing from African-American music in the 1950s to rebel against the staid and lifeless culture of his parents' and grandparents' generations. Teen culture was born, setting the stage for fights between parents and their children for years to come. In the 1960s, cultural and artistic movements reached an apical nexus as artists became the voice of a generation frustrated by corruption, racism and war. While Woodstock symbolized the epitome of the peace and love era, the free 1969 Rolling Stones concert at Altamont--where several died due to poor crowd control--marked its tragic and abrupt end.

As the college students of the 60s began getting jobs and starting families, their music culture followed, becoming more domesticated. Disco and heavy metal acted as anesthesia, seemingly in an effort to overcome the troubled previous decade. The forces that had seen the economic possibilities inherent in youth culture since its inception jumped at the opening and the corporatization of a rebellious medium took center stage.

But the rebellious spirit wasn't quelled quite yet. The 1970s saw the emergence of the punk rock movement, which rebelled against political and religious systems that excluded alternative narratives. The Sex Pistols attacked the "increasingly safe and bloated" rock of the era and called into question British nationalism; The Ramones directly challenged the rock establishment in the States, calling for "pure, stripped-down, no bullshit rock 'n roll."

Instead of being at the center of a mass movement as it had been in the 60s, though, the anti-establishment spirit had been pushed to the margins; mainstream rock and roll continued to move in a more corporate, commodified direction. As the United States experienced unprecedented prosperity and Reaganomics caught fire in the 1980s, music culture celebrated excess alongside economic ideology and the rebellious spirit was harder to hear. Guns n' Roses, Motley Crue and Van Halen exemplify the hedonistic atmosphere of the era, which fostered an industry more interested in making money than creating art. Historic highs in album sales--Michael Jackson's Thriller sold 33 million copies worldwide from 1982 to 1984--led to record profits, cementing a cultural shift in understanding the role of rock music. Music had become a commodity from which to profit instead of an artistic voice of generational discontent.

In the midst of all of the excess mirrored in mainstream culture, hip-hop was born and spoke to a starkly different reality. When Public Enemy talked about 9-1-1 (the phone number) being a joke in the early 90s, suburban middle-class America either ignored the observation through disbelief or were forced to recognize that life was not as it seemed for all Americans. Despite popular opinion, the problem of racism had not been solved by the 60s Civil Rights Movement. Hip-hop continued the African-American musical tradition of trying to wake up American society to institutional racism.

In the late 1980s, another new movement tried again to wrest control of the rock spirit from its corporate captors to reclaim its anti-establishment calling. Nirvana, with its lead singer Kurt Cobain, was the leading voice of the new movement that became known as grunge. Unsurprisingly, the spirit of grunge caught the ear of a culture tired of the packaged reality and failed economic trickle-down of the 80s. While grunge was able to subvert the industry in many ways, the system ultimately got the better of the movement. Indeed, few tragedies more potently demonstrate how systems carelessly destroy participants who attempt subversion than the career and death of Cobain.

Since Cobain's death, the rebellious spirit of rock and roll has, for the most part, lain dormant. The Boomer generation largely accepted the systems they once rejected, even fueling oppressive systems with the intellectual resources once used in attempts to dismantle them; their children have been raised accepting the excesses of American culture as "the way things should be" while turning a blind eye to the effects of excess around the world; and now current youth generations are so blithely oblivious to the workings of systems that they don't even recognize there's something to rebel against. Or, if they do see something to rebel against, they've been hardened by the experiences of previous generations and think the possibilities for change are so slim that they’re unable to motivate themselves to action.

The music created by and for these generations largely echoes this apathetic sentiment. Artists with enough popular appeal to capture the imagination of the masses are generally corporate creations built to appease the lowest common denominator, to sell the most units, and to make as few waves as possible in the broader cultural arena (unless those waves serve the purpose of marketing publicity). There are many artists challenging this dominant paradigm, but they haven't reached a critical mass. Radiohead, who formed in the mid-90s and subversively used the system to become one of the biggest bands in rock today, is perhaps the last example of a band with a large enough audience to act as both a reporter to and challenger of the current cultural zeitgeist; however, their critique has been, perhaps, too sophisticated for a deaf and blind culture in need of shouting and large, startling pictures.

We lose something significant, and profoundly Christian, as a culture when our music is no longer capable of drawing us in en masse, calling us to prophetic imagination and inviting us to change. Bono, the lead singer of U2 (the last of the rock stars?), described the redemptive, apocalyptic vocation of rock and roll during U2's ZooTV tour in the 90s:

To tell our stories, to play them out, to paint pictures, moving and still, but above all to glimpse another way of being. Because as much as we need to describe the kind of world we do live in, we need to dream up the kind of world we want to live in. In the case of a rock & roll band that is to dream out loud, at high volume, to turn it up to eleven. Because we have fallen asleep in the comfort of our freedom. Rock & Roll is for some of us a kind of alarm clock. It wakes us up to dream!

In our apathetic culture, we're no longer rebelling against systems of oppression and our music isn't waking us up to dream of the way things ought to be. Perhaps the insidiousness and ubiquity of systems has dulled our attentiveness, but we need to be awake to the musical voices invoking the anti-establishment spirit of rock and roll. We need to understand that these voices are crucial to the ongoing transformation of culture and we need to support them in their important work.

It is this larger cultural context that makes the issue of lagging album sales and swooning concert attendance much more of a concern. We're losing artistic voices around which we can gather to stand against the forces of oppression and commodification. In the name of individual preference and choice, we're losing the voices that have, time and time again, awakened us to the reality around us. And that needs to change.