ABSTRACT
Insistence on its own morbidity is rock & roll’s “strange necessity”: rock seemingly must believe itself dead if it is to continue to be what it has always been. Early rock & roll, later just “rock,” defined itself primarily as “not pop”: not Peggy Lee, not Mel Torme, not, despite his best efforts to the contrary, Pat Boone (his sublime late-career album In a Metal Mood notwithstanding). Having successfully, forcefully distinguished itself from its popular-music predecessors, however, as it entered its second generation, rock & roll faced something of a structural problem: What music do we rebel against now? One answer—an extremely unfortunate and destructive one, I believe—is that rock purists have come to insist on distinguishing “rock & roll” from all other popular musics that might reasonably be considered part of the rock formation, whether that music be called disco, techno, alt-country, or hip-hop. Lawrence Grossberg describes this as a kind of structural imperative:
It is an essential sign of the popularity of rock and roll that it constantly marks its difference from other musical cultures, whether popular or not. Rock and roll is, from its own side, not merely a subset of “pop,” and there must always be music that is not rock and roll. Such “other” music is “co-opted,” “sold out,” “bubblegum,” “family entertainment,” and so on. 1
