“Policemen in a row,” a “spike right through my head,” “the worry, the hurry of city life.” These are things apparently not intermediately unpalatable, but unpalatable tending toward the verge of Armageddon, such as to spawn immortal music.
Now, the question is begged as to whether rock and roll was essentially INVENTED in Britain. I see no glaring reason to contradict this, although the paradigmatic way I’ve ventured to this perspective is full of the basic depravity of black people’s hatred for white people, and for the electric guitar. [1] Black people simply don’t CLAIM Little Richard, Chubby Checker and Chuck Berry. You might as well pass them off to white people in the racial draft, like on Dave Chapelle.
Jimi Hendrix defects to Britain for formation of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Chrissie Hynde defects to Britain for formation of the Pretenders. The Blues Brothers import from Britain’s Spencer Davis Group for the number “Gimme Some Lovin’.” Rock and roll and America just never got along. Hell, they had a deliberate, awkward white boy “rock and roll” scene at CBGB’s in the late ’70’s, and all anyone can seem to do is erroneously call it a “punk” scene. [2]
And now we’re supposed to live in this “land of the free,” and intuitively the best way to do this would be to gather up all the best things we know — the things that have worked — and rely on the logics of these things toward continuing our society. So we keep seeing “policemen in a row,” we keep getting “a spike right through (the) head,” we keep getting bogged down by “the worry, the hurry of city life.” Yet, to an extent, these are all central components of society itself, purported to be evil, in all these songs.
So this is obviously nothing new: rock and roll as rebellion, as evasion of the insupportable status quo toward solace and completeness. It’s busting out of the sterile cell the world has made for you, Jimi Hendrix’s “plastic cage,” or of course Soundgarden’s “Rusty Cage.” [3]
Part of the question becomes as to whether such an earthly “nirvana,” no pun intended, can ever be communal, or shared — or if such a thing is purely a narcissistic pleasure, if you will, an endeavor for the functionally self-seeking. We own our minds to the extent that we own our music, but still, our coexistence is our primary condition. Religion exists as an ideal beacon for groups of people, and embodies a certain semantic, or ideological, tinge, which music may very well lack altogether, and ably neglect.
One particular difference between a Church service and a rock concert is the implication of the INTERACTIVE at the former — the idea being that the service goer feels an undeniable connection with the higher creator, and participates by way of the simple voiced rites such as “Amen” and “Peace be with you.” In this way, rock musicians are almost more deified than our buddy-buddy, everyman’s version of Christ. The culture of rock and roll seems to call for indulgence, rather than coexistent temperance.
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[1] See GZA’s line in “Protect Ya Neck”: “First of all who’s your A&R / A mountain climber who plays an electric guitar / But he don’t know the meaning of dope / When he’s lookin’ for a suit and tie rap that’s cleaner than a bar of soap.”
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[2] Of course, my dislike for the Ramones doesn’t hinder my hence opinion too much.
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[3] In a very curious case of an old guy imitating a young dude, Johnny Cash has prominently covered this song.