If there was a moment when rock n’ roll can be said to have choked on its last rebellious yelp it was when the Black Keys and Vampire Weekend appeared on the Colbert Report for a "sell-out-off". Members of both bands were invited as guests for a debate about whose television commercial featuring their respective songs was better!
This is the scene you been seeing all your life
The one inside a dream you repeated every night
For 24 frames every second through the light
Projected through the screen you been paying for despite
What you see and what you hear, contrary to your sight
Everything you ever learned that you never had to live
Might've heard from a story teller medium
Pictures, words, scriptures to cinema script
writing a verse
However satirically this sketch was meant to be, it did represent a threshold crossed by a genre of music once heard, and indeed experienced, as revolutionary. Even through the 80’s and into the 90’s with bands such as U2, Bruce Springsteen, Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine, rock n’ roll was still somewhat unnerving to – and for lack of a better term I’ll stoop to clichés, but just this once! – ‘mainstream society’. (Hell, even Green Day put out a political album in the early years of the 00’s.) There was still an element of rebellion, of critique, of cultural challeng driving the music. And so it pained me to watch as a once potent force for social change became clearly and wholly co-opted by that self-same ‘mainstream society’ and its ethos of consumption, greed, and envy.
From this city emerges a new generation of babies
Who came out of the womb, glued to the tube
With plans and aspirations to prove beyond doubt
We are stars too, even if it's just cartoons
Just think for a second how much we've been conditioned
To root for the Doughboys, the O-Dogs, the Bishops
Sided with them villains, in spite of all they heeded
He said she gotta have it, she said she didn't need it
And even if she see it, she will probably not believe it
If it ain't bein' projected in a wide screen theatre
If it spins on a reel, it's gotta be real
But 'real' in real life just remind us of film
And now you saying something's like a movie when it's real
like a film's much realer than anything you feel
in a Cinemetropolis
The renewals that rock n’ roll has always seemed to manage from psychedelic to punk rock to grunge have always challenged conventional thinking, always pushed against the boundaries, always reflected the mood of the generation.
Not so much anymore.
They try to say we bad kids from the start
Grandchildren of Marx and Coca-Cola, yet quoting Godard
And you saying that everything is cinema since
the moving pictures in the center of your living room telling you shit
Like you’ll never be shit, walk away from all your dreams
Spark up, drop a lighter on a trail of gasoline
leading back to the vehicle you crashed before you came
Never looking back
Cut
Boom
End of scene
I listen to a lot of new indie/alternative/rocknroll music, and I don’t hear it anywhere there. There is no reflection of a world on the brink, of a society slowly collapsing under the weight of old institutions, old ways of thinking, old ideas; no reflection of the mood that I see all around me. There is no Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire, no Sid Vicious giving the world the middle finger, no Kurt Cobain howling his discontent at a world to which he does not belong.
We’ve been gunning for that hundred and some change
The flicks and the flickering flames that been going the same length
Doing battle with the powers that be
that’ll be no longer in position when the power’s getting seized
So cameras we got redirected from the poor
I directed for my people, Lino Brocka with the horn
When the brother yelled ‘action’ it wasn’t just for his act
‘Cause he wanted to see the masses get they asses out the door (get up)
My marvelous marksmanship is sharp, shit is hard
but we make it look not, we auteurs
The Godfather poster on the wall, 14
with a movie in my head, writing’s the next thing
So we shot y’all 35 millimeter rockstars
How about some hardcore senior to your sophomores
Flyer than a Concorde landing on your concourse
Rolling with the vanguard, burning down your arthouse
I’ve become distracted. I did not begin this post with the intention of debating the merits of artists selling their music for commercial purposes or on the lack of cultural relevance to the rock n’ roll being produced today. Yet, I’ve found it necessary to provide some context in which to present this week’s featured music because it was within this dearth that I stumbled on the Blue Scholars.
A hip hop duo out of Seattle featuring a Pinoy and a Persian, these guys are not only pushing the boundaries of hip hop with their beats, but speak to a society and a world that no longer seems to work, to a dissatisfaction and anger that certainly dwells within me and – be honest with yourselves here – within you as well. In the Blue Scholars and other hip hop artists like them operating on the fringes of the world of rap we find a desire for change – positive, evolutionary change.
Rock n’ roll may very well have run its course in terms of being more than another product for sale by the music industry, but while much of hip hop also seems to have lost anything even resembling rebelliousness, on the fringes, under the category heading ‘conscious hip hop’, there stills exists something of rebel movement.
If it’s spinning on a reel, it’s gotta be real
But 'real' in real life just remind you of film
And now you saying something's like a movie when it's real
Blade running like a samurai, killing himself
in a Cinemetropolis
So, to all you disillusioned rebel rockers out there, to all those who want a little something more from your music than what you’re getting, look out, look around, look local and support your local hip hop artists. The revolution will have a soundtrack, it just might not be the one we expect.
