1.
Sometime early in the 2010s, “Rockist” became a borderline slur: music reviewers began to lob it at each to slander their opponents as snobbish, stagnant, out-of-date and out-of-touch. Among certain cultural critics, it became practically synonymous with “racist,” inasmuch as “Rockists” supposedly only prefer music gate-kept by an overwhelmingly-white establishment of elderly men. A part of me is sympathetic to these anti-“Rockist” screeds, for indeed a myopic insistence on a single, aging genre can indeed cut one off from so much other excellent music–especially from minorities, which our country has a long, atrocious history of silencing.
Yet like all sweeping terms, there are significant problems with “Rockist”. First is the fact that the biggest, most unapologetic “Rockists” I have ever met are Hispanic. It is the young Mexican-American men I’ve known who are the biggest fans of, say, Soundgarden, of Metallica, the White Stripes, the Strokes, who claim that Radiohead peaked with The Bends. Given how much of Rock ‘n Roll has been influenced by Ricky Valens, Carlos Santana, ? and the Mysterions, Suicidal Tendencies, Rage Against the Machine, and At The Drive-In, this shouldn’t surprise us. To stereotype “Rockists” as exclusively white is itself clumsily racist.
It’s also classist: Coastal elites and suburbanites may have long ago moved on from Rock ‘n Roll, but, having lived in the Midwest, I can assure you that most the middle of the country has most certainly not. And lest one dismiss that all as “Flyover” country conservatism, let us remember that Rock was first and foremost a Working Class genre, the music of the anti-elites. From Chuck Berry singing “Johnny B. Goode” to Little Richard out of Jim Crow Georgia; from Alan Freed broadcasting across rust-belt Cleveland to Elvis Presley emerging from Memphis, Tennessee; from the Beatles out of the Liverpool docks to Bob Dylan hitch-hiking from northern Minnesota; from Bruce Springsteen escaping the failing-factories of New Jersey to the Ramones trapped in Queens; from Black Sabbath in the Birmingham steel mills to Guns ‘n Roses running from Indiana to L.A.; from Jimi Hendrix out of rained-out Seattle to Kurt Cobain on the muddy banks of the Wishkah; from The Stooges’ Forgotten Boy to The Replacements’ Bastards of Young; from U2 in bombed-out Ireland to the White Stripes hailing from dying Detroit, Rock ‘n Roll has most often been identified with the Working Classes. Even when so many of these bands are of Middle-Class extraction (as with, say, Led Zeppelin or Queen), their most faithful audiences nevertheless remain found in the lower income tax brackets that dominate the middle of the country.
Which makes sense, given that these “Rockists” are often folks from hard-labor backgrounds who work all day with the power-tools of heavy-machinery, and then work all night with the power-tools of amplifiers and guitar-distortion–all in a quest to reclaim their humanity from a dehumanizing industry. It is no mystery to me why so many Hispanics are “Rockists” so-called–they above all are still entangled directly with physical labor, struggling to survive in an exploitative market system. We can map the rise and fall of Rock’s fortunes with the rise and fall of the Working Classes’ fortunes, as America has shifted from a Manufacturing to a Service economy.
This crucial shift may help explain that most petulant of “Rockist” boasts, “At least we play our own instruments!!” Now I will be the first insist that whether one plays or programs ones music is completely irrelevant to whether or not the music is beautiful; nevertheless, one can understand where a “Rockist” Working Class is coming from, how threatened they would feel to behold their skills and livelihoods rendered largely irrelevant by computerized machinery–as has already happened to the American Working Class at large. For the sad fact of the matter is that U.S. Manufacturing is not on the decline, in fact that sector has never been more robust–but the jobs no longer exist because it’s all automated now. Foreigners didn’t kill the factory jobs, computers did–and so the Working Class is naturally resentful of computers.
Likewise, with the rise of the DJ, human beings are rendered irrelevant to the production of music–just as human beings are rapidly rendered irrelevant to production generally. Even Hip-Hop at least requires a human voice; EDM requires no human presence whatsoever. One can easily imagine a computer algorithm programmed to write all our dance music for us, eliminating human input entirely. The dancers on the floor become subject solely to the whims of the machines, like some dystopic Matrix/Terminator nightmare, wherein the vast majority of world is rendered superfluous, disposable, excess population. It’s not just Rock ‘n Roll we worry about disappearing, but the human race entirely.
2.
On the plane recently, I rewatched “Rocky” for the first time since a teenager; the sequels got so increasingly cartoonish that it’s easy to forget just how bleak and depressing the original really is; we don’t even get to the ever-copied/ever-parodied training montage till around the 100-minute mark. I’d forgotten that the entire first hour is just a long, slow, slice-of-life vignette of a working-class wash-out with no prospects, no education, no access, no support, no real friends, no real hope. He lives on the filthy streets of a crumbling American city. He works as an enforcer for a petty loan shark, not because he derives any real pleasure from being a thug, but because he has no other economic options, and isn’t even all that good at it–his boss berates him for not breaking a guy’s thumbs as ordered. Boxing is his sole outlet for his endless frustrations, and he isn’t even particularly good at that either.
He’s selected for an exhibition match with the reigning heavy-weight champion of the world, not because this is a Hollywood fantasy, but quite the opposite: Apollo Creed offers this no-name a shot at the title solely as a coldly cynical cash-in on the eve of America’s bicentennial. The whole set-up is a tacky celebration of the “Land of Opportunity” that is nothing more than a crassly commercial mockery of the same, set in a recession-wracked post-industrial Philadelphia that bitterly mocks the very idea of American exceptionalism.
Rocky knows he’s not supposed to win, and he doesn’t–he lasts all 15 rounds with Apollo not to defeat or transcend the violently exploitative system that has ground him down (he knows he has no real hope of that), but to destabilize it, even if for only a moment. No matter how much the ridiculous sequels undercut it (to the point that by IV, he’s single-handedly ending the Cold War through his virtuous American fists), the original “Rocky” is surprisingly brutal. I went in fully expecting to cringe at how little this ’70s artifact would hold-up to the harsh light of adulthood; instead, to my surprise, I found this portrayal of one poor man’s attempt to carve out some small corner of decency in a fundamentally indecent world to be far more moving now than when I was a teenager trying to pump myself up for a test at school.
It all really made me wonder what an alternate-universe Sylvester Stallone’s film career could’ve looked like, one where he *didn’t* immediately devolve into a crude parody of himself. Because he followed the exact same trajectory with the Rambo movies: the sequels and their knock-offs are all jingoistic power fantasies, but the original, “First Blood,” I was shocked to discover is actually a harrowing portrait of a Vietnam veteran struggling with PTSD, of a man once again trying–and failing–to find a decent place in an indecent world. The script takes the usual swipes at those apocryphal “baby-killer!”-shouting hippies, but the film’s biggest villains are not bleeding-heart liberals, not the Viet Cong, but U.S. police officers and National Guardsmen (man, imagine how *that* would play today with the Blue Lives Matter crowd). Far from “respecting the troops,” these symbols of law and order instead hunt down Rambo as a “vagrant”, as an animal, with the same callous disregard that keeps the VA perpetually underfunded to this day.
Rambo sees right through the shallow, hypocritical rhetoric of “respecting the troops”, and responds the only way he knows how–and it’s not pretty. “First Blood” climaxes not in a righteous slaughter of Rambo’s enemies (though boy does he blow up a lot of cop cars), but with John Rambo a blubbering, balling mess, unloading to his old commanding officer about his friends killed during the war, how he used to handle million dollar pieces of equipment but now can’t even hold down a job. It is as far from the stoic ideal of the unflappable killing machine as you can get. It’s a genuine shame Stallone throughout the ’80s took the easy pay-day of playing endless satires of himself, when his true calling appeared to be portraying working-class angst amidst the betrayal of the American dream.
3.
Not too long ago I participated in that most perennial of American traditions: going to a baseball game with my Dad and brother. We saw the Mariners play in Seattle, as we had so often when I was growing up. The childhood nostalgia and the inherent traditionalism of the sport, paired with the intrinsic leisureliness of the spectacle, couldn’t help but put me in a reflective mood.
Specifically, about the leisureliness itself of baseball. The sport in fact rises in parallel with the U.S. Labor movement; “8 hours to work, 8 hours to sleep, and 8 hours to do as we please” was the rallying cry of the first American Unionists (so much less ambitious than their Socialist counterparts in Europe), who were understandably resentful of their 14-hour work days in horrific factory conditions. The factory owners themselves, of course, were less than thrilled with the prospect of 8-hour work days, and claimed to be battling “indolence, loafing, and laziness” among the Lower Classes with their punishing work days.
This rhetoric, in turn, prompted the factory workers to lay claim to “indolence, loafing, and laziness” directly as a form of political resistance, which they expressed by playing baseball–for there is no sport more laid-back than baseball. Most the time, you’ll note, the players are simply standing around, or leaning on the railing, casually waiting for things to happen. The most celebrated legends of baseball–e.g. Babe Ruth–are renowned for drinking, smoking, cramming down hotdogs, and walking leisurely around the bases. Baseball wasn’t just lazy, it was proudly so–it was the working man claiming his right to leisure. It is perhaps no accident that baseball rose to its highest prominence in American culture at the same time that the U.S. Labor movement achieved its greatest gains: the 8-hour work week, overtime pay, weekends, paid holidays, minimum wages, workman’s comp.
It is perhaps also not accidental that baseball has been displaced by football in the American psyche at the same time that the Working Class has been displaced. U.S. Manufacturing is mostly automated now; consequently, the U.S. Labor force has moved from a largely manufacturing economy to a service one. This point is integral: for in the days when factories dominated the U.S. landscape, men worked hard labor jobs–thus proving to others and themselves their own strength, virility, and masculinity–and baseball was thus how they unwound and relaxed on weekends.
But the majority of our jobs are no longer considered “manly”–our labor is now largely sedentary, service-oriented, with little chance to prove our virility, our masculinity. Fight Club, both the novel and the film, rose to prominence in reaction against an “emasculating” economy, as men fought in underground clubs to vent their pent-up frustration; however, it wasn’t fight clubs that arose in real life to give us vents, but American Football. The violence, the toughness, the sheer danger of the sport, gave U.S. males an outlet for their physicality that they could no longer find in their careers.
Yet with this key difference: it is largely a vicarious outlet! The athletes are all taking the hits for the spectators. The fans may shout and scream and cheer, channeling and venting all their pent-up energy after a dull work-week; but it is the athletes alone who are subject to all that horrendous violence. As has often been said before, football is a sport wherein 40,000 people who need to exercise more watch 22 men who really need a rest. Despite all the face-paints and colorful costumes and DIY signs to the contrary, there is no genuine camaraderie between spectator and participant in football.
By contrast, when one watches baseball, one is being leisurely even as the players on the field are likewise being leisurely! That is, we are all being leisurely together! There is this unspoken camaraderie across social classes at a baseball game, all claiming their leisure time together at once. The crowd may cheer at, say, a double-play, or a home-run, but otherwise we are chatting amiably with our neighbors, hanging out with our friends–the game is as much about us as it is about them. But in football, good luck trying to chat casually with anyone! If you’re not screaming the whole game through, then you’re doing it wrong, for it’s never about you, it’s always about them.
We are disconnected from the athletes we watch in football: we likewise no longer feel truly connected to our products (made in China), our clothing (made in sweat-shops), our food (harvested by migrant workers); we are a long way removed from our American agricultural and manufacturing past, wherein we could directly and easily trace where all our products come from. Nowadays we have to advertise certain foods as “locally sourced,” as though that were some strange, new thing.
The great popularity of baseball among Latinos is perhaps linked to the fact that they still work in physical labor, especially agriculture–they are still fighting for their right to leisure. (This agricultural-labor connection perhaps explains why our most famous baseball film, Field of Dreams, takes place on a farm, in a corn field).
We likewise all feel disconnected from our policy-makers, from our leaders, from the powerful; after slowly undoing the long gains of the Labor movement, CEOs now make hundreds of times more than their workers, far in excess of what they made in the hey-day of Unions (and of baseball). The recent rise of Bernie Sanders and (perversely) Trump likewise signals a deep and general resentment among working Americans, against a power-class that feels completely disconnected from their lived experiences.
We may still cheer on our favorite political parties, as we do our favorite football teams, but we do not feel like we are actually participating with them–in fact, the loudness of our cheers are usually in direct inverse proportion to our actual influence upon the actions on the field. It is perhaps apropos that your average MLB baseball ticket is reasonably affordable to a working man, while only the rich can afford an NFL game. Nor is it an accident that baseball has been steadily declining in popularity for years now.
In passing…
Acts 2:44-45 reads, “And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.” Likewise, 4 Nephi 1:3 informs us, “And they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift.” For that matter, Malachi 3:5 (one of the only scriptures to appear in both the Bible and the Book of Mormon) informs us, “And I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against…those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his right, and fear not me, saith the Lord of hosts”. When it comes to how we should be treating the working class, the poor, and the humbled, there can be little doubt whom the Lord prefers.
That is, we may all proverbially Rock ‘n Roll and head out to the ball game again in the Millennial day.