As
a music patron and child of the 80’s, I stopped pursuing ‘new rock’
sometime in the 90’s. With
Jake Chisholm
and fifteen years later, I got a chance to ask, so
what are the new sounds of rock? Are they still sounding a lot
like the old? Or are the stations still just playing the old?
I
was
trying to catch
Jake Chisholm on whatever spiral he
was on in Toronto’s aging, youthful, swing-revival thing, when I discovered
that he’s not doing it anymore. He went independent or
alternative.
He plays rock.
Jake had a good thing going with
Jake and the Blue Midnights.
Him
and his baby-face band, in the
three-piece suits, put the jump back into jump blues during the mid
90’s, Toronto, Canada. The city lined up outside the Reservoir
Lounge to hear him play. He brought us back to Louis Jordan and
the pre-era of rock; a familiar sound fronted by a fresh young face.
But
the suits came off and
Jake decided to play his own music.
And for
Jake, this new chapter into rock
music is not a continuation of any kind of ‘revival.’
Jake
believes that rock is alive and well even if popular media doesn’t seem
as interested anymore.
He stated, “Rock musicians are musicians who have the balls to be
themselves, speak the truth about their experience no matter who’s
listening and always play and sing from the place in themselves that
only they can get to.”
As much of a cliché as this may sound from the lips of a rock musician,
Jake can attest, performing rock is
not about reviving old sounds or ideas; it’s about making the cliché
mean something again.
Jake is an example of exactly where
rock music is today. He stopped trying to take us back to where
we were and moved forward on his own.
Being familiar and safe
does not make it rock.
Rock music roots are political, social and individual. Toronto may
miss
Jake’s cute and snappy swing-thing
but it was inevitable that he begin looking to express something more
personal and original.
What is rock? From Doo-wop to Hip hop? From Little
Richard to Alice Cooper? Arguably, all a form of rock?
Or maybe rock was an amalgamation of all of them?
Piero Scaruffi
states, “I think rock is a music of synthesis, and therefore I still use
the term "rock" to signify a synthesis of styles, from electronica to
post-rock. This has inevitably become a federation of styles
rather than one monolithic style. It was already that way in the
1960s, when the Stones were playing blues music, the Beatles
were singing pop tunes, the Byrds were folk-rock, etc.”
“Eventually one gets to
musicians that play a music wildly different from Chuck Berry's,”
Scaruffi
continued. “But they owe
their existence to a socio-musical revolution that started in the 1950s
with rockers such as Berry. Thus, it's "rock". However, as the
sub-genres multiply and differentiate, we are in desperate need of a
better term.”
Piero Scaruffi is a
poet, historian, free thinker. He is most famous as a critic and
historian of rock music, on which he has been writing for over 20 years
for over 30 magazines worldwide. His most recent book on this
subject is
A History of Rock Music 1951-2000
(2003).
Whatever
mutation/evolution rock has undergone, all forms of rock music share a
disinterest in commonality. Rock came when media was
becoming very mass and the idea of the ‘individual’ was something
to be celebrated. Even when the Beatles
wore their own suits, Lennon wasn’t ripping his throat apart in Twist
n’ Shout because he wanted to settle for ordinary.
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Chuck Berry & Keith Richards |
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Wasim Muklashy
believes that, “rock is freedom without structure or judgment.
Rock itself grew from blues, R&B, and jazz, so it's not surprising (nor
is it discouraging) to see people recognizing its roots, especially in
this day and age in which most people are just looking for a quick fix
before moving onto the next. It's important to understand the
history of what you're doing and listening to, otherwise, you'll never
understand the future.”
Wasim Muklashy
is the editor in chief of
WAV magazine
as well as music editor of
Get Underground.com.
"In my opinion 'Rock' was, and still continues to be a form of music
that combines blues and jazz into one cohesive expression of energy,
passion, heart and soul," states Brother Anubis Re of the band
Cosmic Brotherhood of Ra.
“It has become dumbed down through the years by mass media, greed and
the corporate quest for the next big marketing ploy, but rock is still
there swimming at the bottom of the murky entertainment pool.”
Jake had an excellent start in his
music career. He had peer support, formal education and played
with some of Toronto’s most seasoned musicians such as Terry Wilkins and
Jeff Healey.
“Basically the intellectual side of my brain is fed by theory study,” he
commented, “but the rest and biggest part of my education comes from
fellow musicians and records. I think every musician, just like
any other person, is a stew of there own experiences.”
Being true to the heart of a musician, he wanted to explore those
experiences with his own sound and begin accepting a very simple and
obvious fact about music:
“I’ll never sound like anyone except me. But I
don’t consciously try to “authentic.” I’m not sure I even know
what that means.”
Jake’s new sound is no longer
backed by a full horn section or fronted by swing-dancers. The
Big Bang has fallen inwards becoming quieter and more reflective,
verging towards the psychedelic. His guitar’s plaintive response
to his deep voice carries a bit of a haunted sound. Although, the
sound and stories aren’t radically different from anything else we’ve
ever heard, they are his.
Despite rock’s many shoes, this is why it exists; this is what makes it
real. Our simplest human stories about love, anger or wonder are
carried and played by one more individual putting his fingerprint on
that universal vibration of harmony versus conflict.
All good rock music can be traced and have traces of the best of the
originals, but are personal enough to stand on their own ground.
Even the 80’s had a few unique gems and, as
Piero Scaruffi commented, a few
good gems has always been the standard harvest for rock in any given
season.
“Mainstream rock ‘sucks’ as much as it did in the 1960s,”
Scaruffi
said. “Alternative rock is
as creative as it was in the 1960s.”
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Poison |
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But of course, to each
his/her own. The qualifying rock from my youth (80’s rock) ranged from
the Clash to the Smiths.
According
to
Dave Cusick, “Good music is still
exhilarating and transcendent after adolescence, but many people find it
hard to hear of new music that they might like because they have less
daily contact with friends who can tell them about music, and their
lives become busier, making it harder to look for good new music.”
Dave Cusick runs the online, college
radio show
Post Modern Rock from Portland, Oregon.
“I coined the term Post Modern Rock about 4 or 5 years ago,” he
explained, “to refer to music that is truly alternative, rather than
Alternative with a capital 'A.' After all, what exactly is
Nickelback an alternative to, if it's getting played 35 times a day on
the radio? Modern Rock had been a synonym for
alternative for years, but since the definition had devolved so
badly, I decided that there needed to be a new term for good music; a
cut above the rest, that doesn't get a lot of exposure.”
But despite the 90’s
grunge era having its own gems, at this time I finally began preferring
the new sounds of House and Hip Hop.
The 90’s dealt an over-saturation of sound. Technology and the Internet
opened up a seemingly unlimited library of sounds and samples from
around the world. DJs and producers were selling mixes of old and
‘world’ sounds and making them new again. The goods, in these
genres, were familiar enough to catch us, but enough of a Frankenstein
mix to make it live on its own. Contemporary R&B, Dance and Hip
hop, having grown out of the DJ culture, were ripe to use these
resources of sound and electro-experimentation.
Lyric-wise, House was the urban gospel and Hip Hop, being so text-based,
was a better told story than the aging rock being served on the radio.
In the 90’s, the rock/alternative nightclubs had fallen to playing the
same damn songs for over a decade. What we forgot was that new
rock wasn’t being spun on a record or disc; it was being played live in
some dark corner of the city.
“I actually feel that today's best rock music is more adult than it was
in the 1960s,” said
Scaruffi. “Rock music used to be a
music for young musicians only because young musicians were the only
ones willing to experiment, and young listeners were the only ones
willing to listen to their experiments. This is still true to an
extent, but not as much as it used to be in the 1960s.”
Today’s rock musician must be a student of music; a balance of history,
experience and technology. Rock is not dead and needs no revival.
Like
Jake, rock is the desire to take
off the suits that other people want you to wear and bring down the
sound and the stories that are uniquely you. Passion, such as
this, is timeless. Methods for craft and distribution are not.
copyright
lyw October 2005
