Rock as a reflection of social and cultural change

How, then, should rock’s contribution to music history be judged? One way to answer this is to trace rock’s influences on other musics. Another is to attempt a kind of cultural audit. (What is the ratio of rock masterworks to rock dross?) But such approaches come up against the problem of definition. Rock does not so much influence other musics as colonize them, blurring musical boundaries. Any attempt to establish an objective rock canon is equally doomed to failure; rock is not this sort of autonomous, rule-bound aesthetic form.

Its cultural value must be approached from a different perspective. The question is not How has rock influenced society? but rather How has it reflected society? From the musician’s point of view, for example, the most important change since the 1950s has been in the division of music-making labor. When Elvis Presley became a star, there were clear distinctions between the work of the performer, the writer, the arranger, the session musician, the record producer, and the sound engineer. By the time Public Enemy was recording, such distinctions had broken down from both ends: performers wrote, arranged, and produced their own material; engineers made as significant a musical contribution as anyone else to the creation of a recorded sound. Technological developments—multitrack tape recorders, amplifiers, synthesizers, and digital equipment—had changed the meaning of musical instruments; there was no longer a clear distinction between producing a sound and reproducing it.

From a listener’s point of view too, the distinction between music and noise changed dramatically in the second half of the 20th century. Music became ubiquitous, whether in public places (an accompaniment to every sort of activity), in the home (with a radio, CD player, or cassette player in every room), or in blurring the distinction between public and private use of music (a Walkman, boom box, or karaoke machine). The development of the compact disc only accelerated the process that makes music from any place and any time permanently available. Listening to music no longer refers to a special place or occasion but, rather, a special attention—a decision to focus on a given sound at a given moment.

Rock is the music that has directly addressed these new conditions and kept faith with the belief that music is a form of human conversation, even as it is mediated by television and radio and by filmmakers and advertisers. The rock commitment to access—to doing mass music for oneself—has survived despite the centralization of production and the ever-increasing costs of manufacture, promotion, and distribution. Rock remains the most democratic of mass media—the only one in which voices from the margins of society can still be heard out loud. Yet, at the beginning of the 21st century, rock and the music industry faced a new crisis. The development of digital technology meant that music could now be stored on easy-to-use digital files, which could in turn be transferred from personal computer to personal computer via the Internet. The resulting legal and corporate disputes about new digital formats such as MP3 and services such as Napster reflected both new commercial opportunities (musical rights holders had visions of making money every time a song was downloaded) and fears (that their songs would be exchanged without any money changing hands at all).

Beginning in late 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America, Bertelsmann AG, and some artists sued Napster, an Internet company whose “peer-to-peer” file-sharing program allowed users to download music for free. Artists lined up on either side of the issue. In the end Bertelsmann became the majority owner of Napster, anxious to provide a fee-based service. But this was only the beginning of what became an ongoing process of both trying to prevent the free exchange of digital music (by extending copyright protection and pursuing both “illegal” Internet services and their users through the courts and by the use of different technologies of “digital rights management”) and developing new paid downloading systems (such as Napster and iTunes). So far, and despite iTunes’ commercial success, the record industry’s attempt to halt the development of the Internet as the source of free music has been unsuccessful, and more farsighted entrepreneurs focused instead on the development of new ways to make money out of music rights.

While the issues here are new, the story line is not. Again, an emergent technology has meant new commercial opportunities being explored and developed by fledgling entrepreneurs before being absorbed and reordered by larger corporations, though these are now as likely to be telecommunications or computer companies as they are music companies. Even more striking is how much the new ways of using the Web have drawn on rock practices. The many file-sharing services that followed Napster have similarly involved a global network of home “tapers” and have drawn on the rock ideology of DIY, community, and anti-commerce. Networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube were quickly adopted by rock groups and rock fans whose use of the new promotional possibilities became a model for other entertainment sectors. However the various legal and economic issues are resolved, rock music will certainly be central to 21st-century ways of doing things. Rock, in short, not only reflects (and reflects on) social and cultural change; it is also a social force in its own right.