{"id":938,"date":"2007-10-22T15:27:33","date_gmt":"2007-10-22T19:27:33","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2008-12-10T16:40:09","modified_gmt":"2008-12-10T16:40:09","slug":"rock-s-new-honesty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/rock-s-new-honesty\/","title":{"rendered":"Rock&#8217;s New Honesty"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/njG7p6CSbCU?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><br \/>\nHere&#8217;s a quarter-baked idea, but it&#8217;s a busy day and I want to get it out there while the gettin&#8217;s good. Remember when rock was concerned with authenticity? Remember when authentic rock titans the likes of <strong>John Lennon<\/strong> walked the earth, or at least hovered above it as if they were actually putting some wear on the soles of their shoes? I do. <\/p>\n<p>I remember being about 14, catching up on my <strong>Beatles-infatuated boyhood<\/strong> to see where the band members&#8217; solo years led: cool album tracks that I&#8217;d missed during my early years of puberty and my last dash of dreams of being a major league baseball player. I&#8217;d been reading those Lennon interviews in Playboy and Rolling Stone, really concentrating on every word the coolest and most authentic member of The Beatles uttered. I recall being very excited to hear <strong>&#8220;Working Class Hero&#8221;<\/strong>. This seemed like a song I could really sink my teeth into. This seemed like a song that would speak to the me I thought would be cool to be!<\/p>\n<p>The first few times I heard the song I was disappointed. It was too slow. It &#8220;told&#8221; me rather than &#8220;showed&#8221; me. It sounded like folk music. It wanted to express anger, but I wasn&#8217;t feeling much of it. To this day I still find &#8220;Working Class Hero&#8221; a boring song. But Lord knows it strove for authenticity and grappled with issues of serving <strong>The People<\/strong>.<!--more--><br \/><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/UPPgeDhGzKY?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><br \/>\nI miss that sort of grappling in rock, and when I do hear it from the likes of Springsteen and earnest alt.country types, I&#8217;m often equally bored. Good idea, but difficult to pull off unless you&#8217;re <strong>John Fogarty<\/strong> in his CCR prime. Beside the boring Americana music that typically accompanies these sort of songs, the lyrics usually strike me as insincere, like so many of those <strong>John Mellencamp<\/strong> songs we typically balk at hearing.<\/p>\n<p>So <strong>Rock&#8217;s New Honesty<\/strong> is, in some ways, a good thing. Indie rock&#8217;s roots are heavily associated with college education. We&#8217;ve all come through the Working Class Hero mythology, and our artists may be more likely to make sincere works reflecting their middle class backgrounds and aspirations. <strong>Wes Anderson<\/strong> and his buddies aren&#8217;t pretending to give a damn about <strong>The Little Man<\/strong>, and that&#8217;s cool. Did the idealistic songs of the &#8217;60s and &#8217;70s that Lennon was grappling with really help anyone? The members of the <strong>Jefferson Airplane<\/strong>, for all their musical idealism and revolutionary rallying cries, probably couldn&#8217;t dress themselves without assistance. Maybe it&#8217;s better that we sing of what we know, but at what price? Is the trade-off the musical equivalent of Wes Anderson films?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s a quarter-baked idea, but it&#8217;s a busy day and I want to get it out there while the gettin&#8217;s good. Remember when rock was concerned with authenticity? Remember when authentic rock titans the likes of John Lennon walked the earth, or at least hovered above it as if they were actually putting some wear <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/rock-s-new-honesty\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[27],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}