"You can't blow up a school to disco music."
I had a weird fucking dream last night. I think it came about because I've been ruminating on a line I read in Roger Corman's autobiography a month and a half ago. The quote was from a director working for Corman named Allan Arkush who Roger had hired to direct a picture initially titled
Disco High. Arkush secretly brought in a little band from NYC called The Ramones to be the "disco" players at this high school. Two weeks before the shoot, Arkush approached Corman and broke the news to him.
ARKUSH
Roger, I've got to tell you: The Ramones aren't a disco band. They play punk rock.
CORMAN
What? The title's Disco High. Why can't they be disco?
ARKUSH
You can't blow up a high school to disco music.
After I read that, I realized that was an unassailable fact. You can no more blow up a school to disco than you can wear torn jeans and a t-shirt on a disco floor. What is
also an assailable element within Arkush's statement is that there is something inherrent in the nature of rock and roll that enables and/or encourages one to blow up a school (mostly in the metaphorical sense).
This brings me back to my dream that reconciles several elements I'd been half-heartedly thinking about in the past few months. The dream starts out with me in my high school auditorium full of my high school friends and peers. We're holding an assembly for the Oscars. They're at the high school and being hosted by my principal who in reality was a man but in the dream was a woman. Just like any assembly, the kids aren't hushed and attentive. They aren't going crazy, they just aren't all there. We clap when we're supposed to, but when the principal goes into her monologue about what the best actor award means in the grand scheme of things our attention drifts. The principal shushes, glares, but continues presenting despite everything. Then come the best picture category. She announces the nomination for
Rock and Roll High School, starring Francois Truffaut (not in real life). The auditorium goes apeshit. People can't scream loud enough for this film. Through the chaos, the principal screams that the assembly is hereby cancelled. Everyone back to class!
I'm in my basement talking to my high school journalism teacher and her husband who I've never met in real life. In my dream he's either a game show host (with wide, excited eyes, a tall forehead, and a mouth open in a perpetual smile), an astronomer or an astronomer with the qualities of a game show host. He is
not (underlined), however, a game show host who is an amatuer astronomer. My journalism teacher doesn't understand rock and roll, and she asks me to explain it to her. As I'm about to launch into my explanation of rock and roll my alarm goes off, and I had to get up to go to work today. Here's what I would have said:
Rock and roll is a music of aggitation. It's inherrent nature is anti-establishment. Since the term was coined, parents have always had a problem with "that kind of music". What is not rock and roll, however, is Elvis. The Beatles are not rock and roll. Ricky Nelson and The Everly Brothers are sure as hell not rock and roll. They are just primitive prototypes. Rock and roll is violence toward those that hate it
and toward those that love it. If you don't get an anxious feeling while listening to a piece of music, it isn't rock and roll. To that end, punk rock is rock and roll in its purest form. Rock and roll is not just anti-establishment. With its violence toward both its detractors and its followers, rock and roll's politics are anarchistic. Rock and roll is a grenade thrown into a crowd of random people, and it is also the consequences of and after the explosion. Why didn't Osama bin Laden just turn up the fucking distortion on his Fender? Because rock and roll isn't terrorism. It's anarchy, and there's a big difference. It's antagonism without cause or agenda. There was a movement in the arts in the late teens and early twenties in the 20th century called Surrealism. That is rock and roll. In fact, a surrealist once said that the perfect surrealist piece would be to open fire into a crowd of people. Sound familiar? The difference being that Surrealism is not an inherently violent movement. Aggressive? Maybe, but violence was not implicit.
There of course lies a problem in a capitalist society. To listen to the most popular rock and roll bands, you have (or had) to buy the album, buy a ticket for a concert or otherwise exchange legal tender to listen to something that, in its very nature, is anti-establishment (i.e. anti-capitalism). It should be noted that piracy is a form of rock and roll today.
This is by no means a complete explanation (or perhaps even a coherent one--I haven't read back over it and don't plan to) to define rock and roll. But basing your answer on what I've just said I pose this question: is there any way for a mainstream band to be rock and roll? Putting aside the standard "selling out" stigmas, are these bands not firmly within the establishment by being mainstream regardless or how that may or may not affect their artistic integrity? Can you name mainstream bands that are party for days, drink 'til your dead, Russian roulette, knife to the throat rock and roll?
D
PS - The reason why Francois Truffaut was in the movie in my dream was because the French tend to be theory revolters. That is, they get an idea into their heads, they discuss it in an intellectual forum. They become indignant. They revolt. See: the French Revolution. See:
The Dreamers. In all honesty, it really should have been Godard.
