Word: rocked
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...really like what a lot of them are doing anymore," says Perry Farrell of the cutting-edge Los Angeles band Jane's Addiction. "A lot of bands are willing to be commercial or a commodity. It's kind of like a drug problem. I think rock 'n' roll has money in its veins...
Peter Case, a wondrous songwriter and singer whose recent album The Man with the Blue Postmodern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar is good enough to carry like a talisman into the uncertainties of the '90s, sees the difficulty in broader terms. "Rock 'n' roll has just become a new form of Disneyland," he says. "The whole thing has got mythologized to the point where it's just a bunch of rubbish." Greil Marcus, who writes formidably on popular and radical culture (the recent Lipstick Traces), talks about the "suicidal nostalgia" surrounding a lot of contemporary music: "People have been sold...
...best of the music -- and the Stones made a fair portion of it -- blowtorches nostalgia away, enlarging the memory, terror and all. The music reasserts history, not sentiment, and makes the same tough demands on head and heart as more traditional literature. Says the writer and essayist Steve Erickson: "Rock displaced the impact of American fiction because it wasn't afraid to believe in itself...
...maybe rap is shaking and shaping different lives the same way. It has some of that same risky, visionary power. "Rap today is what lyrical rock 'n' roll was in the '60s," Neil Young says. "The message is really important, and it's a rebirth of language," says Peter Case. All right. History will see to that...
What's happened already, and a fair, far time ago, is still happening too. There was never any cardinal rule about rock -- that was its only cardinal rule -- and it can't be written off or knocked off because, from its sheer quality and audacity, it has persisted. No rules, no predictable half-life. Rock may have become Big Business, but it still has no set agenda and no fixed address. Lots of names, lots of labels, lots of styles, and by now lots of history, some of it even proud...