Cooking Your Rock Song: The Secret Behind the RAWWKKKK!! Recipe (Part I)

Hello and welcome back to Hopped on Pop, and my first ever truly sequential series (yeah, the Newgrounds stuff doesn’t count), Eulogy for all the Rock Bands. Last week, I introduced the problem:

All joking aside, rock music just ain’t what it used to be. Sure, there are still plenty of rock bands playing and recording together today, but as a whole it’s not quite the dominant genre it used to be – the only bands with any sustained popularity have been hugely successful for quite some time now, like Pink Floyd, Pearl Jam, and Linkin Park. There are new bands but they tend to stay mostly underground, and the rock bands that do hit it big are not quite the loud ‘n’ proud bands of yore; instead of Nirvana and Blink-182, we have fun. and Mumford & Sons (more on this next week). Today I’m going to get a little bit into why that is, and what’s missing.

Before getting into the nuts ‘n’ bolts of things however, I also wanted to point out two major “music industry” obstacles rock music faces. First (I would like to thank my brother for this insight), new rock bands face stiff competition. I’m not talking about competition from the hundreds of thousands of acts on MySpace and Spotify; I mean from their predecessors. Legends like Led Zeppelin and The Beatles may not be as universally loved as they once were, but they will outsell more recent acts any day of the week. As a result, there’s a massive disincentive by record labels to sign someone new, because they will be competing with the rock gods for the rest of their lives and a day. And unless you truly love the music you’re making and it must be rock (that is, as long as you’re not getting into the gig just to be famous), that’s a strong disincentive for aspiring musicians too, to always be playing in the shadows of the legends.

The other thing is simply the economics of a band versus a one-man (or woman) act like Pharrell or Lorde. The former is a big investment and a far less efficient business enterprise, especially when bands can break up and lose members and such. The new ideal appears to be a sort of self-sufficiency – not unlike the old Renaissance Man who could hold his own in a sword fight, compose and recite lovely poetry, and competently debate philosophy, all without breaking a sweat – in which a pop star can write it, record, and perform it with minimal assistance or at most with touring musicians so he or she can be on stage showing off them fancy dance moves. I don’t know whether the math bears out this possibility, but it at least appears more cost-effective, and I’m sure that’s enough to deter rock artists or would-be investors even without the numbers.

But I digress: I made some vague grumblings last week about how Panic! seemed to lack showmanship in their performance of Bohemian Rhapsody, and I made some reference to how they reminded me of animatronics in the way they performed. So what was all that about, you ask? Allow me to demonstrate by way of example:

Showmanship

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins is the original showman; he puts all the famous glam rockers from decades later – Alice Cooper, KISS, and Marilyn Manson – to shame. He was the original glam rocker. Showmanship is one of the main things missing from modern rock, what with Story of the Year jumping and doing flips all over the stage and having a wild time. I mean yeah, it looks silly now, but they looked like they were having a good time and going all out for their shows.

As I said last week about Queen, if you look closely at that video of them performing Bohemian Rhapsody, you can see veins popping out from Freddie Mercury’s temples – he’s straining to give the best performance he’s got in him. I did get a hint of this inclination to “put on a show” at a recent Linkin Park concert, what with Chester’s powerful vocal performance and the neat ways in which the band has molded together and reworked songs to create a show in which you don’t know what to expect, rather than just giving us a showcase of several different songs. It’s a step in the right direction, at least.

Relative to other factors I’m about to discuss, I don’t know how big a point showmanship is, but it’s certainly worth mentioning. After all, the Beatles themselves knew how to put on a show in Hamburg. While that sort of performance got them in trouble in Germany, it followed them back to Liverpool, where their act was described as loud and electrifying. Nobody had seen anything like it, let alone Brian Epstein. It had the underground raucousness and energy of a night at the Cavern Club, brought into the mainstream by Parlophone. My point is this: the Beatles were a “pop rock” band, but what made them rock was the way they played it: whatever they played, they played it rawk.

I’m not saying rock bands today have to put on dramatic theater or do anything particularly shocking, but cripes, at least do something to get my blood pumping.

Harmonies

Then there are the harmonies of the classic rock bands. I pulled out a YouTube video to start off my explanation:

Take special note of what the musician in this YouTube video says about consonance versus dissonance. You see, one of the incidental effects of natural dissonance in a harmony (as opposed to intended dissonance), as bands like the Beatles would find, was the appearance of having a fuller sound. A-like so:

As you can hear from the track, there are contrasts in the notes each of the Fab Four sings in the harmony on the words “If I needed someone,” which is what’s meant by dissonance. You probably perceive that harmony, consequentially, as sounding “bigger” – it takes up a larger space in the universe of sounds recorded at that particular moment in the track.

This was as much a product of intention as it was a technological necessity; we didn’t have terribly sophisticated editing tools in the 1960s. Granted, George Martin along with Parlophone and the rest of the Beatles did invent automated double tracking (ADT), in order to simply copy & paste John Lennon’s voice seven times. I admit I don’t know much about the particulars about the technology, but harmonies themselves required multiple takes of different notes scratched over the same part of a vinyl record. Anyway, it was a product of intention too – people like big sounds, and so these dissonant harmonies involving all the singers at once were perfect to create something that felt fuller and more vibrant.

Queen were big fans of those harmonies too, but as you can imagine that took a lot of work and a lot of takes. It also meant a lot of compression of their sound (there’s a documentary out there called Days of Our Lives that goes into all of this stuff, check it out on your own time), so they were glad to have found an out in evolving sound editing technology. By the 1980s, the band could effortlessly copy and paste a single consonant harmony provided by a single singer. This was the result:

It sounds smaller, and less powerful, doesn’t it? The instruments themselves are pretty loud and ’80s-style anthemic, but that chorus harmony just isn’t there with the rest of it. The operative point here isn’t the fact of a harmony itself as being “missing” from rock music today, but the fuller sound. I’m told the latest in sound editing technology actually overcomes this problem specifically with respect to harmonies, but if that’s the case, then I think it’s time for a sea change in the composition and mixing of rock music itself. Rock is meant not to be merely “loud,” which is the central mistake behind the loudness war. Rock is about fullness of sound, and compression (as in the loudness war) is a lousy substitute.

Rock as Pop

There’s a common – maybe even nearly universal – misconception about rock music, which may even go to the heart of the problem here: rock music is not just about rebellion or saying “F.U.” to the establishment. It’s probably not even primarily about that. In a way, that’s a development brought along by the anti-war hippies and the punks. Arguably, rock music has only ever been about a good rhythm and letting your hair down (that’s not what I’m going to argue here though). Shockingly, that’s something pop punk actually may have gotten right.

To be fair, this is probably more of a chicken-and-egg question: whether what came first was rock music just doing its thing and sounding good, or concerned parents telling their children not to listen to that devil’s music, or kids listening to it anyway “because screw you.” Who knows?

But like I said, that’s not my next point. My next point is about rock music played as pop music or by pop bands. Because you see (thanks to a friend of a friend for this insight), one does not simply play “pop music.” One plays a “pop-genre,” such as pop rock, electropop, or pop R&B; the latter is what we most commonly think of as ‘pop,’ such as Justin Timberlake or Bruno Mars. Pop just means popular, after all; it’s not my fault people find a simple hook catchy. But that’s not always a blameworthy thing either, as artists like the Beatles and Green Day showed (isn’t it strange that we’re talking about the possible death of rock only a little more than a decade after the release of Green Day’s epic and super-successful rock opera?).

I will return to this in more depth next week; all that’s important to consider right now is that pop rock and rock revival are not mutually exclusive, and having pop rock ascendant is not antithetical to rock music being king again. More to the point, the mistake of some commentators – including the one who wrote Rock Music Sucks (linked above) – is insisting on there being some sort of separation, that a world of “merely pop rock” is a sign that “Rock Music Economy has collapsed.” What these writers really seem to be sensing is that even if pop rock – in its present, folksy/Jonas Brothers-y state – did dominate the airwaves and the music stores, there’s nothing new or nothing at all being said, and that’s what we’re worried about. As much as I hate to quote a Limp Bizkit song, this nugget really sums things up:

We need some rock, we need something that has balls;
We need something with substance, depth, something with soul, some edge, some passion, some power!
**** if it’s going to be mellow, **** man it had better have something, it had better mean something.

In other words, rock revival is meaningless if the music is hollow on the inside. It’s a shame that pop rock has become inseparably associated with that notion, but self-indulgent, cutting edge rock isn’t necessarily the answer either (especially because it risks being pretentious and esoteric in turn), at least not exclusively. For rock music to be truly “revived,” it will necessarily have to move forward evolutionarily, and at least someone or some band will have to be generally accessible enough to be massively popular again (that is, rock revival doesn’t mean much if there’s no one around interested in enjoying it). Some of the rock bands hailed as the greatest of all time were both, so it ought to be possible. Like I said, more on this next week, when we’re going to hash out whether rock is dead like this: