Wait, hang on.. do I LIKE rock music?

[The Curmudgeon]

A quick scroll through my iPod would show that around 70% of it is rock music. The rest is made up of pop, a bit of dance, some funk and William Shatner. That's because I love rock music. Or at least, I thought I did..

This conversation is going back a bit to New Year, where over in Gran Canara we were sitting with friends at a bar we go to. It was "Rock Night" at the bar, and so instead of the usual chart shit being played they were playing, well, rock songs, and taking requests for anything you want to hear.

I'm sitting with a girl who is an old school rock chick. She wants to hear Metallica, Aerosmith, G n R, AC/DC.. y'know, all that stuff. So then I went up to request some songs and, well, a week long (for the record, very good natured) debate began.

The reason? I picked a song by R.E.M

"They're not a rock band." My friend said. "They're a pop band." A POP band? Seriously? And so it began, who was a "rock" band and who wasn't. My argument was that furious guitar solo's and all that are cool and all, but my favourite kind of rock music is alternative rock. Smashing Pumpkins, Arcade Fire, Blur, R.E.M, Pixies.. you know what I'm on about.

So what exactly IS a rock band, then? What constitutes "rock" music? I was given every genre under the sun to label bands like R.E.M and Blur (Britpop, pop, guitar band) but as for rock? Nuh-uh. She just wasn't having it.

This is a luxury I didn't have in any bar, but check this song out from R.E.M's 2008 (amazing) album, "Accelerate." Now if this isn't a fucking rock song then I clearly don't know what the genre is.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw6NOJoe1UU

The whole album is like that, and "Monster" is a superb ROCK album (and one of my favourite records of all time, to boot).

So I know I'm in the company of rock fans, so let me know your take on this. What exactly IS a "rock band"?

[trashcanman]

Wow. Bitchin' song. What are the qualities of the substance "rock" is named for? Hard and heavy. End of story. I'd consider REM and Blur "alternative" since they are bands fully capable of rocking socks, but as a whole their material is diverse and unclassifiable, which is how I define the genre. "Pop" is short for "popular" and to me entails a band that is mostly dedicated to deliberately making accessible music. The Beatles would be my example. "Rock" is probably one of the hardest to classify specifically because it is the most diverse genre of music possible, and encompasses dozens of sub-genres like punk, metal, industrial, alternative, and the like. People call bands like CCR, Skynyrd, and the Eagles rock, but their songs are primarily country-based. I laugh at one of my co-workers who terrorized us with an iPod consisting of nothing but terrible pop-country and she likes to brag that she "listens to everything". Naturally, I finish her sentences for her with "as long as it's bad country" and she defends herself by saying she listens to the bands I just mentioned, which always makes me say something like "that doesn't really help your case". It seems like any band that is good wants to be claimed by rock fans, but the Eagles are about as country as they come. I think it's the fact that they don't sing with an obnoxious fake hillbilly accent. So yeah, pinning down the term "rock" is kind of hard anymore. I don;t even use the term much. I tend to refer to specific subgenres when I describe a band, because people can't seem to agree on what "rock" means. To me, if it kicks you in the face and makes you want to bang your head, it's rock. But not all songs rock bands stick to rock songs and not all rock songs are made by rock groups so it's probably better to classify songs individually. I argues with a friend the other day about whether a song was punk because it was a ska band singing it. Ska, of course, being a very distinctive style , I thought it was insane to qualify a song that sounds like fucking Black Flag as ska just because most of the band's other songs used that style. Okay, I could meander on this topic all day so I'm going to stop typing now.

[The Curmudgeon]

You've actually given one of the best, most concise arguments on the subject since it began in Gran Canaria. Fucking wish you were there, man.

Way to nail it on the "pop" as in "accessible" too. I remember having a conversation with someone when I said the Raveonettes couldn't write "pop" songs because they weren't a "pop band", but anyone who's actually heard the band can agree they make some very poppy (i.e - accessible songs).

I did actually threaten murder that night though, when the discussion turned to Alanis Morissette, who WAS considered alternative rock. So R.E.M are pop but fucking Alanis is alternative??

I hear you on the country pop woman, though. I used to work with a woman who likes a type of music that I still sometimes define as "Wendy-Rock." Handsome lead singer - check. Safe, pedestrian lyrics - check. Songs about open roads, highways and love - check. Bon Jovi, Train.. you know the sort of thing I mean. Ughhh.

So yeah, rock is WAY too varied to pigeon hole and classify as one specific noise. Maybe in future they should just re-name it "Not the Usual Pop Shit Night".

[trashcanman]

Fun fact: this is Alanis Morrissette before she new alternative was a thing.





But yeah, I try not to be a label guy. Music is music at the end of the day and many of my favorite bands can't really be fairly compartmentalized. I don't know if you've ever come across metal fans arguing about whether a band is grindcore, death metal, thrash, speed metal, black metal, metalcore, progressive metal, etc, but it gets fucking ridiculous. Every single band does not need their own specific genre name to address minuscule differences. It's all goddamn metal. But Morrissette was never alternative. Putting angry vocals over a Chili Peppers jam one time doesn't make you Kurt Cobain.