Keightley — “Reconsidering Rock”

Author: Keir Keightley
Title: “Reconsidering Rock”
Year: 2001
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, ed. Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street)
Type: Essay

“Reconsidering Rock” is a chapter by the media scholar Keir Keightley in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street and published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. It argues that rock is better approached as a musical culture than as a genre, one whose distinguishing project since the 1960s has been negotiating “the ‘mass’ and the ‘art’ in mass art,” and that by displacing the corrupt features of mass society onto pop, rock shores up its own authenticity and autonomy while obscuring its status as a mass-mediated commodity. Its evidence is a history of the decades before rock’s emergence in the mid-1960s and of its development from about 1965, including the shift from singles to albums, and an account of rock’s values, among them two “families” of authenticity that Keightley calls Romantic and Modernist. Later books on John Lennon, Nick Drake and music marketing have applied that distinction, and one of them, Janne Mäkelä’s study of Lennon, found few stars who fit either category alone.

The chapter is the fifth in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, on pages 109 to 142.¹ Keightley, who took his MA at McGill University and his PhD at Concordia University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the John Logie Baird Centre in Glasgow, was then an assistant professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario.²

Keightley writes that while rock “is frequently treated as a musical genre, it is more useful to approach it as a larger musical culture,” one that “both encompasses and transcends various musical styles and genres.”³ He locates its defining predicament in what he calls one of the great ironies of the second half of the twentieth century: rock has involved millions of people buying a mass-marketed, standardized commodity, yet those purchases “have produced intense feelings of freedom, rebellion, marginality, oppositionality, uniqueness and authenticity.” Negotiating the relationship between “the ‘mass’ and the ‘art’ in mass art,” he writes, “has been the distinguishing ideological project of rock culture since the 1960s.”⁴ Rock, in his account, involves “the making of distinctions within mass culture”: it takes seriously music found in a commercial mainstream and sorts the music of value from the music that lacks it, and the rock fan’s preferences “will always embody ethical judgements” that weigh musical pleasure against ideas about the workings of capitalism.⁵ Which music counts as rock has changed. His example is the lounge or easy-listening revival of the mid-1990s, which “took what had been the mortal enemy of rock culture in the 1960s and 1970s” and made it the music of listeners who felt grunge had become too formulaic and too mainstream.³

The chapter’s first part surveys “the three decades leading into the emergence of rock in the mid-1960s,” with the industrial and cultural developments that played a role in it.⁶ Keightley ties the development of rock culture, from about 1965 to 1967 onward, to a shift from singles to albums “and an attendant shift in cultural legitimacy,” at a time when American radio was giving up network programming for local formats aimed at adults or at teenagers, a change whose most spectacular development, he writes, was the Top 40 format.⁷ In his account the emerging rock culture was nourished by the critique of mass society, many of whose elements folk music had refashioned, and folk “defined itself in its rejection of mass society and mass culture.” By the 1970s, he writes, that perspective “could be seen to have found its fullest expression in rock music and rock culture.”⁸

Keightley writes that rock’s “displacement of the ‘bad’” (the negative and corrupt features of mass society) into pop “serves to shore up rock’s apparent authenticity and autonomy. However, it also obscures rock’s own status as mass-mediated, commodity culture.”⁹ He also writes that rock’s own mass audience keeps elitist criteria from holding sway in it, so that for all its rejection of the trivial in mass culture, rock “possesses an equally important populism.”¹⁰

Within rock culture Keightley identifies “two broad families of rock authenticity,” which he calls Romantic and Modernist and presents as “tendencies rather than absolutes.”¹¹ In his table, Romantic authenticity tends to be found more in tradition, roots, community and populism, in folk, blues, country and rock’n’roll styles, and in sincerity, directness and “‘natural’ sounds hiding musical technology.” Modernist authenticity tends to be found more in experimentation, avant-gardes, the status of the artist and elitism, in classical, art music, soul and pop styles, and in irony, sudden stylistic change and “‘shocking’ sounds celebrating technology.”¹² The two tendencies, he writes, serve at once “to position rock against the mass pop mainstream and to create and organise internal differences within rock culture,” so that fans of one may dismiss the other as artificial or as simplistic.¹³

Later writers have applied the distinction to particular artists and to the music market. Janne Mäkelä, in John Lennon Imagined (2004), a cultural history of John Lennon as a rock star, wrote that in the field of stardom it is difficult to find performers who could be labeled exclusively romantic or modernist, though Keightley presents the two as tendencies, and that performers who deploy both more or less equally are often regarded as auteurs in rock culture.¹⁴ Nathan Wiseman-Trowse, in Nick Drake: Dreaming England (2013), writes that Drake is easy to place in a tradition of Romantic authenticity but finds the Modernist traits Keightley identifies on Pink Moon, in its minimal ethos and in tracks such as “Know” and the instrumental “Horn.”¹⁵ Daragh O’Reilly, Gretchen Larsen and Krzysztof Kubacki’s Music, Markets and Consumption (2013) sets out both kinds.¹⁶

Key contributions

• Rock approached as a musical culture whose ideological project since the 1960s has been negotiating the mass and the art in mass art.
• Rock’s displacement of mass culture’s corrupt features onto pop, which shores up rock’s authenticity and obscures its own status as a commodity.
• The development of rock culture from about 1965 tied to the shift from singles to albums.
• The distinction between Romantic and Modernist authenticity.

See also

• Performing Rites — Simon Frith’s 1996 study of value judgments in popular music
• Creating Country Music — Richard A. Peterson’s 1997 study of authenticity in country music
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music
• Pop as craft — the case for professionally written pop as a craft