It’s only rock AND roll
Is the music of his youth a fading genre, Vaughan Gunson wonders.
NEIL YOUNG wrote that rock and roll can never die in his 1979 song Hey Hey My My. In the same song, he added, “it’s better to burn out than fade away”.
I’ve been wondering lately, four decades on, whether rock and roll may indeed be fading away.
I’m not sure about it. I might be wrong. It could be that I’m not looking in the right places.
But surveying a diverse pop music scene (that is, watching YouTube clips when I should be working), I’ve come to doubt the existence of contemporary rock and roll.
I can find plenty of old rock and roll, from Little Richard screaming “Tutti frutti, oh rootie / A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom” to Mick Jagger singing about dancing with Mr D (from the Stone’s 1973 album Goats Head Soup).
It’s not just Little Richard’s recent passing, however, that means those early songs aren’t living rock and roll. They can still be appreciated, but they don’t have the freshness or shock value they once had.
Rock and roll is best served raw, not overcooked by years of classic hits radio play. It’s the explosiveness of The Beatles’ She Loves You as it must have sounded on the radio in 1963.
It’s a spirit of youthful rebellion, a celebration of life’s effervescent energy which gets the instant attention — if you’re tuned to it — of heart, mind and ears.
It’s about being young and thinking you know it all, whether it’s about love, sex or politics. Or just what makes a good rhythm.
There’s joy, but there’s often also angst, a prickly dissatisfaction with the world as it is.
Rap often has the spirit I’m trying to communicate. You play a Public Enemy track, and the power, confidence and anger are there in spades.
That’s why the best rap found listening ears outside of the African-American communities in LA and New York. That energy is seductive when compared, say, with a song by Whitney Houston.
One way of understanding what rock and roll is, is to point to what it isn’t. That’s not to say a Whitney Houston song is bad music necessarily. It’s just doing something different.
It’s not doing what Nirvana did in 1991 when Smells Like Teen Spirit burst through. A student at the time, living in a dilapidated central Auckland flat, I truly identified with an authentic rock and roll song that spoke to my generation. This guitar-ringing nihilistic anthem with slurred nonsense lyrics was glorious.
Is any of this making sense? Will it help pinpoint the spirit of rock and roll still alive and well somewhere in YouTube land? Am I too old, too removed from the concerns and enthusiasms of young people to recognise it?
Maybe today’s equivalent of great rock and roll is being produced by video gamers. Or are my curmudgeonly instincts correct, and the boys are spending too much time on their gaming consoles to learn an instrument and start a band.
The only glimmer of the rock and roll spirit that I can see is coming from angsty, smart, young women in all-female bands.
Let’s face it, the history of rock and roll — with notable exceptions — has been dominated by the swagger, arrogance and misogynism of testosterone-pumped men.
It’s only right, then, that women might now define the rock and roll spirit. A new wave of feminism has inspired young women to say exactly what they think of the patriarchy and badly behaved men generally.
For a bloke, I recommend listening to British singer-songwriter Nadine Shah’s song Fool. The shock of recognition that you might be like the male character in the song she lacerates with cool nonchalance is kind of thrilling.
Somehow I stumbled on Goat Girl, a post-punk all-female band from South London. Their first album from 2018 crams 19 hard-hitting, often humorous songs into a tight 40 minutes. Lead singer Clottie Cream drones lines like these; “Creep on the train / Scum of lust in his brain / Creep on the train / I really want to smash your head in.”
It may be rock and roll, but I can’t fully identify with a band like Goat Girl. Their young lives aren’t mine. I can only recommend them to my daughter.
All that’s left is for me to play Bob Dylan’s latest album loud while doing the dishes. It’s titled Rough and Rowdy Ways, and in parts, like the song Goodbye Jimmy Reed, it surely is.
Faced with oblivion, the 79-year-old trickster is still producing, to these ears, an authentic rock and roll statement with the oldest of materials, the blues.
It’s not the future of rock and roll; it’s merely one man’s defiant twilight in a fading genre.