I wrote about masturbation and blogging the other day. But maybe it should have been about masturbation and blogging and music.
I don’t know if all music bloggers are introverts but I most certainly am. I have the ability to withdraw and when that happens what I want to do is write and listen to music. I want to deal with the world from a great distance.
And so does rock.
Rock appears to be sexually voracious but it is too intellectual, it is too in its own head, to be aggressive: it is always looking up your skirt. The big question about rock is how can an art form that gets laid so much be such a self-flagellating beast.
Take a look at Buddy Holly and Elvis Costello. Both of these artists were getting dropped by girls on enormous proportions. Both of them were alone in the end. For all the sweetness and smartness of Holly’s pop groove, he was, in the end, a harbinger of aloneness. Rock might have lots of love songs but it lives in lost love songs. It is about being a loser.
This might feel like a difficult concept to grasp so lets make it easier. Our greatest rock star is Lennon, and from “I’m A Loser” to “Help” from Arthur Alexander covers to Isley Brother covers, he was an introverted intellectual pretending to be something else. Look at his hero Chuck Berry, “Don’t let them take your heart away” is a tattoo of lost ness.
Which leads us right back to masturbation: to the pump it up, just the beat aloneness of Costello. We never forgave Costello because he GOT LAID IN THE END. We were him and then we weren’t.
The other Elvis was a tearaway Mama’s boy who morphed into the ultimate loner and final and most fitting rock star: fat, tired and barely past 40 years old he Johnny Bye Byed himself into the history books. As he swirled his hips and made the girls cream in his 20s within 20 years he was a wanker: he joined the living dead and then just the dead.
Why is rock such a pump into the hat masturbation?
The great rock dream is that it is a an everyman music: it is not for the winners, it is for the rest of us. At the heart of the punk rebellion was the desire to give it back to losers, where it rightfully belongs. Rock, the solitary, electrified, loud and lone form of sound, can be done by any one. It can be done by me if I want to do it. It doesn’t NEED a second party, or a band, or an audience for that matter: it is solipsistic to the point of narcissism if not nihilism.
Or, if you prefer, a perfect thing for jerk offs.
Rock, at its essence, it is alone. It is as solitary as writing in its own way. It is on the outside of everything. And on the inside. It is a masturbatory sound.