Evaluative Frameworks and Authenticity in Rock Criticism

This section surveys academic studies that examine evaluation frameworks and authenticity discourses in rock music criticism. This section explains how analysis of ‘high-art’

evaluative criteria in music reviews is not useful for my purposes; the extant literature in this field suggests that analysis of rock authenticity in album reviews is a productive means of explaining contemporary processes of distinction in (indie) rock criticism.

In “Producing Artistic Value: The Case of Rock” (1994) Motti Regev argues that rock music critics constructed a corpus of rock music “masterpieces” produced during three “authentic” periods of rock music (i.e., early ‘rock n’roll’, ‘the sixties’, and ‘punk’). Regev asserts that evaluation parameters employed by rock critics of the late-1960s and 1970s were influenced by “the traditional concept of art” (1994, 88). These parameters include the “ideology of subversiveness”, the “autonomous creative entity”, and “aesthetic genuineness”. Rock albums legitimized by critics often embodied an “ideology of subversiveness”, which he describes as “negation of and resistance to…conditions of existence, against anything

which is ‘square’, routine, expected…and conformist. In its sounds rock music expresses rage, alienation, anomie, anxiety, anger, fear” (1994, 91). This definition consists of an alternate ‘pop’ formulation which emphasizes “expression of immediate hedonism: love, sex, dance, consumerism and driving offer a relief from boredom and anxiety […], present[ing] fun and pleasure as a rejection of the ethic of work and restraint, and as redemption from it” (1994, 91). Furthermore, positively valued rock albums were often created by “autonomous creative entities” who wrote, performed, and often produced their own music (1994, 91-2), in contrast to, for example, early 1960s vocalists whose repertoire was written by Brill Building songwriters and produced by designated industry professionals. Lastly, rock critics often positively valued rock albums that embodied “aesthetic genuineness” (1994, 95-7); it

manifests itself in artists’ use of ‘electric sound’, ‘studio work’ (i.e., artful studio production and experimentation), ‘voice and lyrics’, and ‘stylistic eclecticism’ (1994, 95-7).

Regev’s study is one of the first to delineate and classify evaluative criteria employed by rock music critics. Regev’s analysis, however, is limited to three specific historical

moments of rock music spanning the late 1950s to 1980. Lindberg et al. point out, however, that while Regev places great emphasis on the centrality of high art parameters in rock music criticism, “folk authenticity was equally useful to attempts to set rock off from mainstream popular taste” in the 1960s (2005, 45). Furthermore, certain evaluation parameters are less prominent in contemporary rock music discourse; for example, distinguished popular music critic Simon Reynolds asserts that “the idea of pop as subversive” has more or less been abandoned in American rock criticism (Lindberg et al. 2005, 261).

A book-length study of rock criticism as a cultural field, entitled Rock Criticism from the Beginning (Lindberg et al. 2005), employs a qualitative, critical-historical approach. In this comprehensive study, Lindberg et al. construct detailed case studies of influential

American and British rock music critics and press publications from the early-1960s to 2005. The authors thoroughly investigate the historical contexts that underwrite changes and

developments in rock criticism discourses. For example, the authors contextualize historical antecedents of ‘serious’ rock, found in 1960s ‘counterculture’ rock publications such as Crawdaddy!, Creem, and Rolling Stone, by analyzing the influence of “folk authenticity” on 1950s Blues criticism in Melody Maker (2005, 92-8). They also explore the development of the ‘autonomous’ and ‘commercial’ pole8 in 1960s rock, which originated in discourses from 1930s and 1940s jazz criticism (2005, 89-91). Furthermore, the authors use Bourdieu’s field theory (see Bourdieu 1993, 37-40) to establish the position of each publication in the field of rock criticism based on the nature and scope of music coverage, advertisements, and

circulation figures. At the turn of the past century, for example, Wire magazine (UK) occupied (and still occupies) the ‘autonomous’ pole of the field, due to their small-scale circulation and non-commercial music coverage (2005, 325). Spin (USA) and The Face (UK), by contrast, occupied the commercial, or ‘heteronomous’, pole, based on the

prevalence of commercial advertisements and popular appeal of their music coverage (2005, 325-6).

The field of rock criticism has altered since the (relatively recent) publication of Rock Music from the Beginning (2005). At present, Spin’s website reaches nearly 700,000 monthly visitors (Buzzmedia 2012a); by contrast, Pitchfork currently reaches “a fiercely loyal

audience of more than 3.5 million unique visitors each month—with a nearly 30% increase in visits each year” (Pitchfork 2012). The authors do not include extensive analyses of online popular music websites or any mention of Pitchfork in particular (and understandably so

8. The contrasting terms ‘autonomous’ and ‘commercial’ are symbolic of relational field positions and are not meant to be taken literally.

since Pitchfork’s tastemaker status and brand cache did not fully develop until later in the decade). This thesis aims to fill this gap in the extant research and, most importantly, develop a scholarly approach to account for new developments in indie music criticism and value discourses.

Significantly, the authors argue that an “intermediary aesthetic” has come to define contemporary rock criticism, which they describe as follows:

To say that rock criticism advocates an “intermediary aesthetic” is to focus on a seminal feature of the field’s self-understanding: the common belief that the constant tension between…the “rock” approach that wants to situate the music in a context of social and/or aesthetic revolt and the original “pop” approach to it as part of a

consumerist lifestyle, is not only distinctive in relation to other cultural fields…but even productive for the music’s ability to register signs o’ the times and renew itself. It was vital to stress the opposition and set up “authentic” rock against “commercial” pop when the field was founded, but the construction felt increasingly problematic in the 1970s, and significantly it was a self-conscious return to pop that broke it up and ushered the field into its postmodern phase. (2005, 338)

Despite the erosion of distinct ‘high’ and ‘low’ categories of music production and

consumption, the authors argue that authenticity remains a primary legitimatizing strategy in rock criticism (Lindberg et al. 2005, 8, 44-8). They assert that since distinctions are still deployed with “some form of self-conscious ‘meta-authenticity’” at work – “whose markers may be subcultural”, causal historical explanations and theoretical references, or “originality as a central value criterion” (2005, 340) – “the ghost of authenticity still lurks in the

shadows”, despite “high/low hierarchies hav[ing] become jumbled” (2005, 340). The authors’ extensive historical research of rock criticism discourse bestows great authority to this claim.

Scholars of media and popular music studies continue to explore conceptions of authenticity employed in rock culture and criticism (Grossberg 1992; Frith 1996; Keightley 2001; Leach 2001; Weisethaunet and Lindberg 2010). Hans Weisethaunet and Ulf Lindberg

in “Authenticity Revisited: The Rock Critic and the Changing Real” (2010) analyze multiple forms of authenticity that function as indicators of value and meaning in rock criticism. These include folkloric “Authenticity” (2010, 469-71), “Authenticity” as self-expression (2010, 471-2), “Authenticity” as negation (2010, 472-3), “Authentic Inauthenticity” (2010, 473-5), body “Authenticity” (2010, 475-6), and “Authenticity” as transcendence of the everyday (2010, 476-7). Each form is described and contextualized historically in its use in rock criticism. In “Authenticity” as self-expression, for example, the authors explain that “truth is conceived in terms of the degree to which representation is taken to offer access to the inner worlds of an exceptional subject” (2010, 471). Weisethaunet and Lindberg trace this conception of authenticity to the “legacy of Romanticism and its notion of the artist as a creative genius” (2010, 471). Likewise, the ‘“Authentic Inauthenticity”’ paradigm emerged in the 1980s, following the aesthetic developments of 1970s glam rock, which “focused on play, [and] whose claim to truth lay precisely in the exposition of artistic identities as constructions” (2010, 474). The emergence of “Authentic Inauthenticity” coincided with a postmodern sensibility that became ubiquitous in the 1980s, embodied by performers such as Madonna and David Bowie (2010, 474).

Weisethaunet and Lindberg’s analysis of authenticity offers a pluralistic approach to analyzing value attribution in popular music criticism. While the origins of each form of authenticity are products of specific historical conditions, they are also amenable to

application in contemporary music criticism and are in dialogue with one another. Folkloric “Authenticity”, for example, can be used by popular music writers “to express the cultural values of any community” including “present strands [of rock music criticism] whose understanding of ‘authenticity’ is informed by identity politics, such as feminist…[and] hip- hop criticism” (2010, 470). “Authentic Inauthenticity”, likewise, is in dialogue with the

latter; it developed and emerged in reaction to traditional (i.e., romantic) notions of the “real” (2010, 474).

The authors caution that when examining authenticity one “should be prepared to meet a number of quite differing ideas and concepts” (2010, 465). The numerous conceptions they examine, however, need not be applied in a fragmentary manner. In “Reconsidering Rock” (2001), for example, Keir Keightley organizes rock’s “key structuring principles” into two primary categories of rock authenticity – namely, “romantic” and “modernist”

authenticity (2001, 131-9).9 Keightley’s authenticity framework includes characteristics of folkloric “Authenticity” and “Authenticity” as self-expression in the category of romantic authenticity (2001, 137). Similarly, modernist authenticity (Keightley 2001, 137) subsumes characteristics of “Authentic Inauthenticity” and “Authenticity and the Changing Real”. Furthermore, Keightley contextualizes romantic and modernist authenticity within rock’s historical, social, economic, and cultural development from the late nineteenth century onward. As “key structuring principles of rock”, they “have remained stable in the last three decades of the twentieth century” (Keightley 2001, 139).

In “Between Rock and a Hard Place” (2002), Kembrew McLeod provides a detailed content analysis of (oft-gendered) adjectives employed in rock criticism publications, including “Rolling Stone (1971-99), Crawdaddy! (1971-78), Creem (1971-89), and Spin (1985-99)” (2002, 95). These adjectives include ‘aggressive intensity’, ‘violence’, ‘softness’, ‘rawness’, ‘slickness’, ‘blandness’, ‘simplicity’, ‘personal expression’, ‘seriousness’,

‘vapidity’, ‘traditionalism’, ‘authenticity’, ‘commercialism’, ‘originality’, ‘formulaic

unoriginality’, and ‘sweet sentimentalism’ (2002, 97-107). Many of these adjectives surface

in Pitchfork album reviews, both directly and indirectly depending on the context in which they are employed. McLeod, however, asserts that many of the discursive dimensions in his study have been shaped by “1960s authenticist ideology” (2002, 107), which illustrates the long-lasting effects of authenticity as a legitimizing construct in rock culture.

Among the “positive” dimensions, we find resonance with Keightley’s romantic authenticity (e.g., simplicity, personal expression, traditionalism, seriousness) and modernist authenticity (e.g., originality, seriousness). The negative dimensions (e.g., blandness, sweet sentimentalism) are those which rock culture has historically assigned to ‘pop’ artists

(Keightley 2001, 109). While McLeod’s approach derives adjectival data from a large sample of reviews, the objectives of this thesis require a deeper contextual approach to analyzing evaluative practices in rock criticism. Keightley’s authenticity framework works best for my purposes; it facilitates analysis of the majority of characteristics explored in Weisethaunet and Lindberg (2010) and McLeod (2002). Other theoretical sources supplement Keightley’s framework, including insights from Andreas Huyssen, Simon Frith, Pierre Bourdieu,

Matthew Bannister, Wendy Fonarow, Simon Reynolds, and others.