Yet the myth and the talk about rock that it shapes go on, utterly undeterred. Indeed, the myth of the primitive has hardened into the prevailing dogma of rock criticism and the rock business. Its influence is everywhere: in the obsession with gangsta macho and street cred; the subculture of tattoos and scarification; the working-class hero personae of the Boss and his aides de Mellencamp; the great white hope phenomenon of Caucasians like Paul Simon and David Byrne fronting bands full of brilliant but anonymous musicians from Africa or Latin America; or the claim that grunge is some sort of revelation.
Among rock critics, there's a rather strict primitivist canon that dominates. While subject to some variation, it always privileges the Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop, Neil Young guitar solos and Johnny Rotten and his ephebes, all of them prized for their unmatched savage intensity. Similarly, there's a lexicon--apparently burned into the brain of every Rolling Stone reviewer--of favored terms (e.g., "daring," "risky," "raw," "commitment," and of course the old standbys "in your face" and "on the edge") that revolve around the notion of primal authenticity.
Punk is a good case in point. According to the stock account, punk is both the essence and the greatest avatar, to date, of rock noble savagery. It is a violent, urgent return to authenticity at a moment when rock and rock culture have become almost hopelessly artificial, decadent and co-opted.
And indeed there is truth in this account. The myth of the primitive has helped shape what I and many others would consider several breakthroughs in rock: Elvis; Dylan and Hendrix in some important ways; the reemergence, in the late sixties, of some of the great bluesmen; the Sex Pistols. But rock enthusiasts lose sight of the fact that what enables such vision is a discourse; that is, a situated, provisional, culturally conditioned, politically constructed version of what counts as "true" rock.
And this discourse represents only one among many possible accounts of what counts as true rock. Just as any number of geometries, Euclidean, non-Euclidean, etc., may be generated from different axioms, we can construct histories and canons of rock from a multitude of starting points. We don't have to privilege authenticity as the fundamental principle; we might, instead, choose its seeming opposite, artifice, or some entirely different category. Or we might accept the notion of authenticity as fundamental to rock but not link its definition to the West's tired, racist myth of the primitive. Or we might use any number of other starting points and thereby construct canons of rock equal to, though different from, the primitivist one described above. More radical still would be the move to decenter the notion of canons and histories entirely. Most rock canons are some variation on the Great Man theory, a view which at its best is an oversimplification and at its worst presents history as People magazine.
But we do not have an environment where even ten, let alone a hundred, flowers bloom. As the rock business has become more and more conglomerated, the music more and more commodified, and the entertainment industry more and more competitive and technocratic, all parties, sensing that things are rather desperately up for grabs, strive to nail down what it is they value. The capitalists want a product that is predigested and premarketed and they need an easy slogan to slap onto it. The fans and the musicians want desperately to preserve some sense of rock as something other than a marketing phenomenon. Both groups seize, for different reasons, on the caricature of rock as the mythic primitive, and the Rule of One represented by this definition of rock becomes suffocating.
Furthermore, the primitivist discourse is riddled with contradictions. As it applies to rock, the discourse has been shaped, largely, by influential writers like Lester Bangs. Bangs' work is a paean to that elusive figure, the Pure Punk, the teenage Jesus of the suburban jerks6. Give me, says Bangs, a kid with two chords, a big amp and a bigger attitude, and I will move the world. And yet the language in which Bangs makes his call for primal authenticity is extremely literate, layered and ironic. It is, in important ways, highly artificial.
Next page: Authenticity Vs. the "Authenticity Effect"
