What Makes Rock Rock?

What makes rock rock? Or should I say what made rock rock? Rock is dead. I think. I don’t know anymore. Intricacies abound in the daily phantasmagoria. Everything that constitutes life comes into focus. Ginger Baker in a frenzy of sticks and rhythm. There are days I can feel all the cells in my body subtly vibrating with cosmic cymbals. This is generally an indication that I’m pregnant with something fine and elegant, an embryonic opera swirling in a turbulence of light and darkness or elephants grazing together in the savannah of my private musings. The brain is a womb of musings, unending elaborations of Sein und Zeit. The labor went hard but the delivery was a success: a 9 lb. sonnet howling with magma and crystallizations of raw perplexity.

I’ve love to write about rock but I know very little about music, and having never played it, I don’t have a visceral sense of what’s going on. Writing about music is a difficult project if you know little about the construction of music. Of course, everyone, even the deaf, know something about music. It’s rhythmic, it creates vibrations, and it’s lively as a nest full of cuckoos. Unless it’s not. Unless it’s soft and reflective like still water in moonlight. A frog on a rock like a note on a sonata. The steady languorous rhythms of an albatross in flight, à la Peter Green.

Beethoven, who was nearly deaf, used a pencil in his mouth to catch the vibrations of the piano. He could tell by the vibrations the sound as it emanated from the string and permeated the wood.

Here’s what I do know: rock changed everything in my life. I remember the very afternoon it grabbed my soul and yanked it out of the dingy adolescent cell it was crouching in and let it loose as a Blakean angel. The song was “House of the Rising Sun,” sung by Eric Burdon. It had everything in it: New Orleans, a life of decadence and ruin seeking redemption in a desperate howl of epiphany and pain. It’s an intense song. It was the intensity of this song that grabbed me and shook me and made me turn into Arthur Rimbaud. Who doesn’t mythologize their past when they hear this kind of music? It’s different with a piece of music like Mahler’s Adagietto. This is what you listen to when you’re old and at the brink of something sublime. Mountain summit looking down. Lights changing and oscillating in movements across the long grass of the valley.

What makes rock rock is a strong backbeat, usually in 4/4 rhythm. It’s an emphasized offbeat. Unconventional, unusual. It hooks you with its off-kilter bravura. Going against the grain of what is expected. A sly contrariness leading you into a spirited confrontation with propriety. Propriety has its place. It helps people exchange ideas without killing one another. But it’s confining. It can be deadening. This is why rock and roll upset the world so much circa the early 50s, beginning with Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” in 1951, and culminating with Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” in 1955.

The most vigorously idiosyncratic drumming appears in the Beatle’s “Come Together.” Ringo was left-handed, and so the drumming is shaped naturally around that idiosyncratic style. I’ve watched several videos of drummers demonstrating the complexity of drumming propelling this zany song, and it left me feeling dizzy with its rhythmic intricacies.

The electric guitar is essential. Or is it? There’s no guitar in the Beatle’s “Eleanor Rigby,” or Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place.” That said, the electric guitar is pretty important. Bo Diddley wouldn't sound Diddley without Diddley’s Jupiter Thunderbird. It wouldn’t have a spine. It wouldn’t have Bo. It wouldn’t have Diddley. That diamond ring won’t shine. No mojo. No cocoa. No cat black bone.

Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” is mainly an E minor pentatonic with a bit of Dorian. The guitar work is lush and classical, serving a wistful melody with a heavy flavor of what the Portuguese call saudade. It opens with an acoustic guitar and builds into a powerful crescendo of fury and spiritual dilation. I think it’s much more moving than Zepplin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” I prefer Zeppelin’s more obscure numbers, like “Boogie with Stu.” The goofy Tolkienesque lyrics don’t really synchronize that well with the edginess and bite of an electric guitar.

And then there’s the most iconic beginning to a rock song in the Stone’s “Satisfaction,” the fuzz tone distortion produced by the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz Tone seemed perfect for a song about the eternal dissatisfactions of consumer culture.

I don’t know where rock is today. I’m almost 77. I don’t go to clubs. My auditory system couldn’t take it. I’ve experienced heavy hearing loss and as early as 1966 acquired a lifelong case of tinnitus. Most of my listening is done with a pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones. Sometimes I keep my hearing aids on, and sometimes I remove them. They tend to distort music. They have minimal effect on most of the rock I listen to, but completely destroy the more delicate sounds of classical music.

That said, going a single day without music is unthinkable. I agree with Nietzsche: “without music, life would be a mistake.”