When You Believe, They Call It Rock & Roll

Spoon @ Kings Theatre 6/16/2015
Rent I Pay / Knock Knock Knock / Don’t You Evah / The Way We Get By / Small Stakes / My Mathematical Mind / The Ghost of You Lingers / Satellite / The Beast and Dragon, Adored / I Turn My Camera On / Do You / The Fitted Shirt / I Summon You / Rainy Taxi / Inside Out / Don’t Make Me A Target / Got Nuffin // Outlier / Anything You Want / TV Set /// Black Like Me / You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb / The Underdog

I don’t need to tell you that Spoon are an excellent band and play very good shows for the 20th time. You either know this already from your own experience, or should trust me on that.

Spoon “The Beast and Dragon, Adored”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how rock music has marginalized itself by becoming convinced that it doesn’t matter anymore. This idea starts somewhere in the ‘90s, but really takes hold in the early ‘00s. It manifests itself in many ways – a majority of rock artists preferring to be niche than aim for a larger mainstream audience, bands embracing a retro pastiche sound with the implication that “it’s all been done,” musicians favoring electronic instruments and/or folky aesthetics because they want to distance themselves from “rock.” In some cases, these are logical artistic tangents, and an understandable response to decades of rock primacy. A lot of great music came out of this. Even the bands who really went for it and made ambitious work aimed for a large audience seemed to operate on the assumption that they were either working around rock as a genre, or that they were ultimately making music that didn’t “matter” as much as the rap and electronic music of their day. And for the most part that’s true. But here’s the thing: It might only have been true because they decided it would be.

There is no reason for the public at large to believe in art made by people who don’t believe in their own work. From the ‘60s on through most of the ‘90s, people who played rock music really believed in the cultural relevance of what they were doing, and that belief is crucial in making the audience agree that it is. It was corny to say “I believe in rock,” but lots of people said things to that effect, and totally meant it. You can mock that now, but regardless of what subgenre of rock we’re talking about, it’s all the same — it’s all built on the conviction that the music matters.

One of the smartest things I’ve ever read about rock music, or any kind of performative art for that matter, was a thing a pre-Sonic Youth Kim Gordon wrote in Art Forum about a PiL show in 1983: “People pay to see others believe in themselves.” It’s really as simple as that. When rock musicians, en masse, decided that the didn’t believe in their own genre, a lot of people who cared about self-belief moved on to hip-hop, a genre obsessed with self-affirmation, and EDM, which is about people coming together to will a transcendent experience into existence. And they embraced pop divas, who have all the same iconic swagger as the old rock stars. They paid to see different people believe in themselves.

“The Beast and Dragon, Adored” is essentially about this. Britt Daniel is one of the few notable rock artists of his generation who I think truly believes in rock music, and it shows in the soul of his performances, and his band’s refusal to either abandon the best and sexiest elements of classic rock or simply make the same old music with the same old sounds. When Spoon performs “The Beast and Dragon, Adored,” Daniel sings the chorus with great urgency, like this great epiphany in a song from a decade ago is still fresh in his mind. I think what he says here is the key to making great rock music, and great art in general:

I got a feeling, it didn’t come free
I got a feeling and then it got to me
When you don’t feel it, it shows
they tear out your soul
And when you believe they call it rock and roll

I don’t know if the world really needs rock music to ever be at the center of popular music. I’m honestly not sure if ~any~ genre can do that now, the way people consume music and think about genre is so different these days. But I do believe this: If rock musicians can learn to believe in rock again, the audience will follow.

Buy it from Amazon.