| "...terms- 'pop' and 'rock' have long been loaded labels, made to mean
different things to different people. What's at issue is the opposition
authenticity/artifice; what's impossible is to make the distinction
stick." "In the USA roots and rural musics still have presence and a
rock Romanticism has developed...that celebrates the star as democratic
representative, speaking FOR the culturally dispossessed. Romantics in
Britain speak only for themselves, and seek, usually in vain, to state
their differences from everyone else." [p.74] |
| "Rock, then, unlike pop, was to be serious, progressive, truthful, and
individual, a cluster of terms whose significance lay in the Romantic
self-image of the 1960s art student, and it was to be hugely
successful." "If, as Iain Chambers suggests, British beat was the sound
of 'a male camaraderie, formed at school, on the street corner, at art
college or in a gang', then the art students fed into rock their own
account of gender difference, an account with certain misogynistic
tendencies (which were to be made obvious in 1970s cock rock). In part
these reflected the usual bohemian rebellion against domesticity and
the bourgeois family, the assertion that 'the artist' is, by 'his'
nature, stifled by family life." [p.90] |
"music-making was now only a means to an end; commercial and aesthetic
success were measure by the same criteria. Image, as Adam Ant, the
first star to make the move from punk to new pop, realized, was all that
he had to sell." "For the new pop acts it was not a question of making
good music then marketing it; it was skill in the sales process that
made the music 'good.'"[148]"The original idea of rock authenticity
came from a straightforward Romantic ideology of creativity. For the
1960s art school beat musicians, true expression was defined against
both bourgeois and showbiz convention, and 'rock' was differentiated
from 'pop' along the axes of passion, commerce and complexity."[p.145]
|
Simon Frith and Howard Horne Art into Pop, London:Methuen, 1988
|