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Rock N Roll

Most Read This Week Tagged "Rock N Roll"

Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock – The Definitive Band Biography of the 1970s Avant-Garde

Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion

Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You: A Memoir

Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation

Living the Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans

Eruption: Conversation...

by
Brad Tolinski

More most read this week tagged "rock n roll"...

Lists

Tattooed Love Boys

1,199 books — 3,324 voters

On The Road With The Ramones by Monte A. Melnick; Frank Meyer

That Old-Time Rock & Roll by Richard Aquila

rock 'n roll will stand

5 books — 4 voters

Over the Rainbow Board Book by Éric Puybaret

Music Inspired Picture Books

164 books — 8 voters

Get a Shot of Rhythm and Blues by Richard Younger

Héros oubliés du rock'n'roll by Nick Tosches

The Black Elvis - Jackie Wilson by Doug Carter

Rhythm'n'Blues

83 books — 3 voters

You're Making Me Hate You by Corey Taylor

PURE METAL & ROCK

32 books — 25 voters

The Most "Talented" Rock~n~Roll Lover!

52 books — 17 voters

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“ We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. ”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

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“ Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us--simpatico dudes that we are--while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time--while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works--but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosp Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us--simpatico dudes that we are--while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time--while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works--but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns. Rock-and-roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us--as damaged and anti-social as we are--might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can't. The song's too simple, and we're too complicated and too excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations, whetehr we want it to or not. Just because we're breathing, man. Thus, in the process of trying to play this very simple song together, we create this hurricane of noise, this infinitely complicated, fractal filigree of delicate distinctions. And you can thank the wanking eighties, if you wish, and digital sequencers, too, for proving to everyone that technologically "perfect" rock--like "free" jazz--sucks rockets. Because order sucks. I mean, look at the Stones. Keith Richards is always on top of the beat, and Bill Wyman, until he quit, was always behind it, because Richards is leading the band and Charlie Watts is listening to him and Wyman is listening to Watts. So the beat is sliding on those tiny neural lapses, not so you can tell, of course, but so you can feel it in your stomach. And the intonation is wavering, too, with the pulse in the finger on the amplified string. This is the delicacy of rock-and-roll, the bodily rhetoric of tiny increments, necessary imperfections, and contingent community. And it has its virtues, because jazz only works if we're trying to be free and are, in fact, together. Rock-and-roll works because we're all a bunch of flakes. That's something you can depend on, and a good thing too, because in the twentieth century, that's all there is: jazz and rock-and-roll. The rest is term papers and advertising. ...more ”
― Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy

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