Can Rock Aesthetics Shock?
Has rock music exhausted all possible aesthetics since 1950?
Everyone started out dressing stylish, like Frank Sinatra.
Then they ditched the suit and tie and went rebellious, leather jackets, scruffy, wild hair, Mick Jagger, motorcycles. This gets taken to the limit by punk.
The Wild One aesthetic was soon tapped out, and everyone was wearing jeans, so the only shocking frontier left was sexual ambiguity. So you get glam rock, flamboyance, androgynous David Bowie, explicit references to homosexuality.
Quickly all the aesthetics became trite, and lose their ability to shock. TV shows like American Idol get their performers to try on each one in turn, and music videos show performers rapidly switching outfits and styles like mood lighting.
Hypothesis: it’s no longer possible for rock aesthetics to shock. Sure, you can stir up some outrage by showing up in blackface wearing a Confederate t-shirt and waving an Islamic State flag, but that’s hardly the same thing.
There are a few unbroken barriers: full frontal nudity, actual sex on camera, decapitation. But again, these are sort of stupid.
Idea: if the original rock rebellion was breaking away from the existing gatekeepers of culture and style and establishing new ones, then the only way to rebel today is to sit quietly at home and not do anything that can be commoditized for clicks and dollars by the Machine.
Everyone started out dressing stylish, like Frank Sinatra.
Then they ditched the suit and tie and went rebellious, leather jackets, scruffy, wild hair, Mick Jagger, motorcycles. This gets taken to the limit by punk.
The Wild One aesthetic was soon tapped out, and everyone was wearing jeans, so the only shocking frontier left was sexual ambiguity. So you get glam rock, flamboyance, androgynous David Bowie, explicit references to homosexuality.
Quickly all the aesthetics became trite, and lose their ability to shock. TV shows like American Idol get their performers to try on each one in turn, and music videos show performers rapidly switching outfits and styles like mood lighting.
Hypothesis: it’s no longer possible for rock aesthetics to shock. Sure, you can stir up some outrage by showing up in blackface wearing a Confederate t-shirt and waving an Islamic State flag, but that’s hardly the same thing.
There are a few unbroken barriers: full frontal nudity, actual sex on camera, decapitation. But again, these are sort of stupid.
Idea: if the original rock rebellion was breaking away from the existing gatekeepers of culture and style and establishing new ones, then the only way to rebel today is to sit quietly at home and not do anything that can be commoditized for clicks and dollars by the Machine.
@raggedjackscarlet recently nailed this one, I think.
Basic shock content seems to have been exhausted, yeah. Include metal and rap and we pick up both religion and race as sources of shock value. Judas Priest and Tupac found two of the last big sources of suburban pearl-clutching outrage. (Special credit to Eminem for taking misogyny and graphic violence so far that there’s not much room in that direction.)
Rammstein has made a career poking around the unexplored corners of traditional shock topics, but they’re resorting to giant mayonnaise-shooting dildos, music videos parodying real cannibalism, and lighting stuntmen on fire. I don’t think anyone is going to out-Rammstein Rammstein, they’d just end up looking like Metalocalypse.
(As for the blackface/ISIS example, Brad Paisley and LL Cool J already made the infinitely depressing Accidental Racist. Except somehow they weren’t in it for shock value.)
So… now it’s just Ragged’s point. Nightcore is low-status. Mathcore, like free jazz, is too damned hard to get into. And serious moshing is still dangerous enough to make commercialization tricky. So they might not be commoditized, but I don’t think they’re properly shocking.
I guess you could import Arabic music and freak some folks out that way? People are already swapping ISIS soundtracks, maybe it’ll catch on.
Basic shock content seems to have been exhausted, yeah. Include metal and rap and we pick up both religion and race as sources of shock value. Judas Priest and Tupac found two of the last big sources of suburban pearl-clutching outrage. (Special credit to Eminem for taking misogyny and graphic violence so far that there’s not much room in that direction.)
Rammstein has made a career poking around the unexplored corners of traditional shock topics, but they’re resorting to giant mayonnaise-shooting dildos, music videos parodying real cannibalism, and lighting stuntmen on fire. I don’t think anyone is going to out-Rammstein Rammstein, they’d just end up looking like Metalocalypse.
(As for the blackface/ISIS example, Brad Paisley and LL Cool J already made the infinitely depressing Accidental Racist. Except somehow they weren’t in it for shock value.)
So… now it’s just Ragged’s point. Nightcore is low-status. Mathcore, like free jazz, is too damned hard to get into. And serious moshing is still dangerous enough to make commercialization tricky. So they might not be commoditized, but I don’t think they’re properly shocking.
I guess you could import Arabic music and freak some folks out that way? People are already swapping ISIS soundtracks, maybe it’ll catch on.
lamecore
So
one place I think that shock rock still absolutely works is in reversing
the status quo - Body Count writing about white supremacy, Pussy Riot
protesting misogyny (and oligarchy and homophobia and a whole lot more).
There’s an LA band called Flattbush with a Filipino singer who acts like a racist caricature, jutting out his teeth and smiling widely and squinting and speaking with an affected accent before launching into songs about the abuses of imperialism. Le Butcherettes is fronted by Teri Gender Bender who sometimes takes the stage covered in (fake?) blood or who strips out of a greasy mechanic’s coverall into a bright red dress and tights and heels and then works herself into a sweating frenzy (a messy, ugly, intimidating frenzy, with her makeup smeared and her hair wild and stringy in a way that a lot of frontwomen won’t let themselves be seen) and singing about racism, misogyny, sex trafficking, and the brutal murders of women that go unsolved. Hell, Against Me! has become more shocking and confrontational since Laura Jane Grace came out than they were before because now her songs are harder to generalize to typical disaffected youth and are instead specifically a discussion of the experiences of a trans woman in a wider cis society.
So I guess what’s shocking (at least to me) is sincerity?
And the way I see this working *best* is when it’s musicians performing in a genre that isn’t any more shocking to the rest of the world than the genre as a whole, but when it’s specifically challenging to their audience.
Grindcore isn’t typically an anti-imperialist scene so Flattbush makes their own audience uncomfortable. Body Count is a heavy metal band that will play Copkiller or KKK Bitch to an audience full of white racists (metal is so, so messed up in so many ways, props to Body Count even though KKK Bitch is a pretty dang misogynist song). You’d think punk would be more welcoming to shit that shakes up the status quo but all evidence from the current Warped Tour/Dickies debacle suggests otherwise, which makes it all the more impressive when Against Me! plays songs about dyphoria at shows full of people who are pretty vocal about their rejection of safe spaces. A couple months ago I saw some dipshit in the pit grope Teri Gender Bender while she crowdsurfed literally as she was singing a song about the objectification of Latinx women. These artists are attempting to challenge their own audiences.
But the music wouldn’t sound any more shocking to your grandma than any other punk or metal or rock song.
Kiss and Alice Cooper and Ozzy are all fun to listen to but they’re cartoons. They’re silly, they’re safe (even though Cooper and Ozzy do sing about serious stuff from time to time).
I think we may have jumped the shark on shock rock when Varg Vikernes literally murdered a dude and burned churches because of Black Metal and Massive Shittiness. Like, you had satanic metalheads in Norway burning down 600-year-old churches and murdering their bandmates while wearing corpse paint. I don’t think you can get much more shocking than actual murder and arson (and I certainly don’t think that anyone should try to be shocking in the same way Vikernes did).
But, like, that was it for everyone. You had satanic metalheads burning churches and murdering people at the height of satanic panic. We know how far people will go, anything short of a cult suicide or a mass murder isn’t going to cut it (and hey, what’s that? Mass murderer Anders Brevik sent his manifesto to Racist, Genocidal Murderer and Arsonist Varg Vikernes because Vikernes’s music inspired him? Fuck it, the world is cancelled)
So I dunno. I like this direction I’m seeing with bands that attempt to shock fans of their own genres by challenging the expectations and beliefs of fans, but I think shock-rock as a genre is kind of cartoonish now. Rammstein sure is at any rate, as are all the oldie-but-goodies who started it. (Also, you have to credit the original if you’re talking about it, Screaming Jay Hawkins is the original shock rocker, the whole movement of shock rock, all punks, goths, and metalheads owe him respect)
****Sidenote, there is the shock-rock/shock-punk thing that grew out of GG Allin’s performances, which includes shitting on stage, throwing body fluids at or pissing or spitting on the audience, self-harm and cutting onstage, as well as nudity and like I’m pretty sure he fucked on stage at some point? Anyway, that’s a thing and I’m glad we’ve moved away from it because kept saying he was going to fucking kill himself on stage and jesus fuck, that is fucked up and it’s upsetting that his audiences facilitated his self destruction, christ, I actually like some of his fucking songs it would have been nice if he’d been able to get help instead of having an audience of people just waiting to see if tonight was the night he’d do it, that’s so fucking morbid.
There are still bands who cut on stage or hurt themselves and they make me extremely uncomfortable like please, maybe don’t with trying to make self-harm look cool or artistic or whatever, and also anyone who is reading this who is dealing with feelings of suicidal ideation or self harm here’s the US national suicide hotline number, call them 1-800-273-8255
There’s an LA band called Flattbush with a Filipino singer who acts like a racist caricature, jutting out his teeth and smiling widely and squinting and speaking with an affected accent before launching into songs about the abuses of imperialism. Le Butcherettes is fronted by Teri Gender Bender who sometimes takes the stage covered in (fake?) blood or who strips out of a greasy mechanic’s coverall into a bright red dress and tights and heels and then works herself into a sweating frenzy (a messy, ugly, intimidating frenzy, with her makeup smeared and her hair wild and stringy in a way that a lot of frontwomen won’t let themselves be seen) and singing about racism, misogyny, sex trafficking, and the brutal murders of women that go unsolved. Hell, Against Me! has become more shocking and confrontational since Laura Jane Grace came out than they were before because now her songs are harder to generalize to typical disaffected youth and are instead specifically a discussion of the experiences of a trans woman in a wider cis society.
So I guess what’s shocking (at least to me) is sincerity?
And the way I see this working *best* is when it’s musicians performing in a genre that isn’t any more shocking to the rest of the world than the genre as a whole, but when it’s specifically challenging to their audience.
Grindcore isn’t typically an anti-imperialist scene so Flattbush makes their own audience uncomfortable. Body Count is a heavy metal band that will play Copkiller or KKK Bitch to an audience full of white racists (metal is so, so messed up in so many ways, props to Body Count even though KKK Bitch is a pretty dang misogynist song). You’d think punk would be more welcoming to shit that shakes up the status quo but all evidence from the current Warped Tour/Dickies debacle suggests otherwise, which makes it all the more impressive when Against Me! plays songs about dyphoria at shows full of people who are pretty vocal about their rejection of safe spaces. A couple months ago I saw some dipshit in the pit grope Teri Gender Bender while she crowdsurfed literally as she was singing a song about the objectification of Latinx women. These artists are attempting to challenge their own audiences.
But the music wouldn’t sound any more shocking to your grandma than any other punk or metal or rock song.
Kiss and Alice Cooper and Ozzy are all fun to listen to but they’re cartoons. They’re silly, they’re safe (even though Cooper and Ozzy do sing about serious stuff from time to time).
I think we may have jumped the shark on shock rock when Varg Vikernes literally murdered a dude and burned churches because of Black Metal and Massive Shittiness. Like, you had satanic metalheads in Norway burning down 600-year-old churches and murdering their bandmates while wearing corpse paint. I don’t think you can get much more shocking than actual murder and arson (and I certainly don’t think that anyone should try to be shocking in the same way Vikernes did).
But, like, that was it for everyone. You had satanic metalheads burning churches and murdering people at the height of satanic panic. We know how far people will go, anything short of a cult suicide or a mass murder isn’t going to cut it (and hey, what’s that? Mass murderer Anders Brevik sent his manifesto to Racist, Genocidal Murderer and Arsonist Varg Vikernes because Vikernes’s music inspired him? Fuck it, the world is cancelled)
So I dunno. I like this direction I’m seeing with bands that attempt to shock fans of their own genres by challenging the expectations and beliefs of fans, but I think shock-rock as a genre is kind of cartoonish now. Rammstein sure is at any rate, as are all the oldie-but-goodies who started it. (Also, you have to credit the original if you’re talking about it, Screaming Jay Hawkins is the original shock rocker, the whole movement of shock rock, all punks, goths, and metalheads owe him respect)
****Sidenote, there is the shock-rock/shock-punk thing that grew out of GG Allin’s performances, which includes shitting on stage, throwing body fluids at or pissing or spitting on the audience, self-harm and cutting onstage, as well as nudity and like I’m pretty sure he fucked on stage at some point? Anyway, that’s a thing and I’m glad we’ve moved away from it because kept saying he was going to fucking kill himself on stage and jesus fuck, that is fucked up and it’s upsetting that his audiences facilitated his self destruction, christ, I actually like some of his fucking songs it would have been nice if he’d been able to get help instead of having an audience of people just waiting to see if tonight was the night he’d do it, that’s so fucking morbid.
There are still bands who cut on stage or hurt themselves and they make me extremely uncomfortable like please, maybe don’t with trying to make self-harm look cool or artistic or whatever, and also anyone who is reading this who is dealing with feelings of suicidal ideation or self harm here’s the US national suicide hotline number, call them 1-800-273-8255
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