Rock: Rebellion’s Over… or Not?

Musically speaking, 2012 looks exciting, eclectic and already old. Those youngsters (and their parents) whose lives are soaked into rock are raiding toyshops in search of plastic bats to welcome Dr Ozzy, leading his Black Sabbath back from the (musically) dead after three decades. They will be in the good company of Metallica, who recently celebrated 30 years of guitar strumming, the highlanders Rolling Stones, who will eventually die on the stage, since it looks like they don’t want to come off, and (let the drums roll and open your mouth in astonishment) the Beach Boys, who will celebrate their gold jubilee. Four of the best rock bands from three different decades of the last century will try to rescue the rock world from anonymous calmness… how sad is that? Rock needs its grandfathers to amuse its children, because their toys are just cute little things that will bore cute little girls before you can say Johnny Cash.

Rock music is not boredom, it is passion, anger, pain, fun, decadence, love… but it is not boredom. The most exciting things in rock nowadays are dubstep, which is rock without its quintessential guitar, and indie, which is a recycling of Britpop, which was a recycling of indie… really pleasant indeed, but little to do with that visceral sober cocaine-like mood of perennial enthusiasm. You can either look back, and reuse the emotions of old songs, or look forward, and listen to something that doesn’t really taste like rock. The current state of music has been justly described by Keith Richards: "I hear a lot of rock... what happened to the roll?"

"I hear a lot of rock... what happened to the roll?"

Keith Richards

As rock fans we firmly believe that rock ’n’ roll will never die; being rock immortality axiomatic, the question is: why is it ill? Pathogens are multiple, and they are not even bad per se. Becoming a rockstar now is just another career opportunity, and a particularly remunerative one, if things work out. It is not a rebellious choice anymore, there are no more broke kids moving to the big city carrying only a guitar and becoming musical heroes, no more troubled souls who are ready to embrace low life conditions as long as they can scream in a microphone. In his autobiography Apathy for the Devil, Nick Kent defines Iggy and the Stooges as ‘soul business’; rock in 2012 is a huge business, but a soulless one.

What else is eating the soul of rock away? It might sound nonsense but one answer is: the ghosts of the past legendary rock decades. Truth is, from the cradle in the Fifties until as late as the Nineties with the death of the last angry kid Kurt Cobain, music was so spectacular, we cannot create anything good today without recalling what has been already done. After the turn of the century, Teenage Fanclub Norman Blake’s statement that “Any music that doesn’t sound like anything else in rock history always sounds terrible” is tragically real. For 50 decades it has been exactly the opposite, rock has always meant innovation, until to be new one must now be a little old. This phenomenon is called retromania and it implies that since you have so much to draw into you don’t really need to produce anything new. It is almost funny: consumerism is the engine of our society, but as much as creativity is concerned, recycling is the leading trend.

Even though looking at it from a distance this recycling of ideas doesn’t stop their consumption and waste. This means that within the music industry a product is put on the market, it arrives everywhere and then it is phagocytised faster than David Bowie changed style. There is no more time for heroes and timeless songs, at this music fast food all you have on the menu is tofu in hundreds of different tasteless recipes. This is another side of the matter: art is so democratic and technology is so advanced, that now anybody who is nobody can express his or her discussable creativity. What looks like progress has its casualties: replication and the emptying of meaning of culture. Back in the Sixties Andy Warhol declared that anybody in the future would have been famous for fifteen minutes. We must surrender to facts: each and every village idiot can show his dullness on a stage, but none, good or bad, has more than fifteen minutes to do it. And what all these village idiots lack are personality and the rock spirit, or put it in Simon Reynolds words “all these dressing-up games can be played without the degree of emotional investment and identification that characterised the era when rock was seen fundamentally as art or rebellion.”

Picture: Iggy Pop & Debbie Harry by Bob Gruen, 1977

Rebellion: isn’t that the core of rock ’n’ roll? From Elvis moving his hips wrapped in leather pants, to Bob Dylan going electric at Newport jazz festival, from Iggy Pop permanently bare chest on stage to Kurt Cobain crashing against the drum set, from the peaceful notes of Woodstock and Live Aid to all the flirtations with the devil (in the lyrics as in real life), the leitmotiv is disobedience, outrageousness, freedom. The characters acting in the great book of rock were not knights in shining armour, they were more outlaws or sometimes just bold kids, but they all stood up to denounce the world dirty affairs. They wanted to change the world and they did.

What makes a rock icon? The capability to go beyond the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and enter the real world. Gaining access to the Hall of Fame means that you changed something in music, that you are doing what nobody before you did, which is alone a great conquest. But today being avant-garde is more difficult, because people got used to everything, as Dame Vivienne Westwood reminds us. What can still be done is getting to the hearts instead of merely linger in the ears, touching the soul and shaking society. That’s what all that barking and howling around the Vietnam War was. That’s what Imagine and Blowing in the Wind are about. That’s what made them icons; that and incredible guitar riffs.

Many of the rock rebel songs were timely when they were written and they still are. Singing “I am an antichrist/ I am an anarchist” might not impress anybody in 2012, it might sound pretentious and repelling, but that’s exactly what we need. We need someone that rolls the old order into a paper ball and move people from apathy, like rock music did so many times. We need fireworks to change the world, not bombs, we need culture, not luxury, we need working hands, not smiling masks. We need guitars that sound like a Liberation Army, not like lovely lullabies (we need those too, but we already have plenty of them and they are not going to change the world). And most of all when we listen to music we need to ask ourselves the same questions that Lester Bangs asked Nick Kent in 1972: “What does this music say to your soul? Do these guys sound like they even have souls to you? What’s really going on here? What’s going on behind the masks?”

In the kingdom of music boredom there still are hopes. Joan Jett and Foo Fighters performing Bad Reputation at David Letterman Show still make us want to sing I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll, don’t they? And the fact that Abbey Road is the most sold vinyl record for the third year in a row is reassuring: is there anyone else in 2012 music scenario that deserves this success more than the Beatles? And in the end Lou Reed’s words still sound true and charming like a Fender bass: “the music gave you back your beat so you could dream. A whole generation running with a Fender bass...”

Is there anyone else in 2012 that deserves success

more than the Beatles?

Leather

Looking at the catwalks of S/S 2012, among smooth silk, soft chiffon and delicate lace, a fabric of less noble origins entertained us: leather. It certainly emerges as a must-have for next season, from Marc Jacobs’ fringed coat to Burberry’s turquoise trench, from Martin Margiela’s pencil skirt to Balmain’s hotpants, combined with chiffon at Chloe and contrasting silk at Bottega Veneta. Yet leather had to walk a long way before reaching haute couture, starting at the beginning of the Twentieth Century from specific working or leisure environments and gradually becoming a flag of outrageousness, until outrageous became chic.

Balmain S/S 2012

Long before being a rockers’ favourite, the tailor shop D. Lewis, LTD (now part of Lewis Leathers) was the first to customise motorcycle coats in 1897. The jacket appeared a decade later, and reached popularity in the 1920s, thanks to its resistance to time and cold wind. As early as the 1910s Dunhill and Harrod’s offered exclusive overcoats for motorcyclists and airplane pilots. Two World Wars helped to improve the technology of the material, which proved to be the most apt solution against high altitude cold and was eventually implied by ex-soldiers even after the conflicts end.

Leather as both uniform and motorcycle equipment was implied since the 1920s-1930s from policemen, who were allowed to wear them to ride Harley-Davidson or Indian motorcycles. But it wasn’t just the good policeman, the bad guy was wearing leather as well. After the Nazi, the bad reputation of the material was carried on by sadomasochists and fetishists, especially gay or lesbian, attracted by the erotic connotation of this second skin.

In the 1950s blue jeans and white ankle socks were considered alternative fashion. Since leather meant Hell’s Angels gangs, S&M and reminiscences of Nazi uniforms it’s easy to understand why the motorcycle jacket was so outrageous, and thus fascinating to teenagers, the new target market. From Marlon Brando in The Wild One, “full of alarming black-jacketed glamour”, to the schoolboys in Rebel Without A Cause, cinema and TV were asserting that leather was nonconformist. For the same reason it became a key element of a new music genre, loud, careless of social conventions and sexually explicit: rock’n’roll. Rockabilly singer Gene Vincent adopted the total look, then emulated by Elvis, creating the quintessential concert outfit for both rock stars and fans. Patti Smith, Jim Morrison and even the Beatles wore leather on and off the stage; Iggy Pop still does. Rock transformed from rock’n’roll to punk to hard rock to goth, but the core elements are still black leather and electric guitars.

Patti Smith in leather jacket (and nothing else)

In the late 1970s a rock subgenre became the soundtrack of the most rebellious of rebellion: punk. Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren sold garments inspired by fetish fashion, which appealed to the angry kids desirous to stand against society in any way possible. Particularly connotative was the black leather jacket covered with patches, zips, studs and spikes, a piece of the punk closet which survived the phenomenon itself. The Ramones, The Sex Pistols and The Clash lead the hordes of punks towards anarchy and self-destruction dressing the part of (anti)social demons in shiny black jackets.

Even more radical than displaying leather on stage was bringing it to catwalk. Yves Saint Laurent looked at the street for his A/W 1960  Beat Collection for Dior and his own A/W 1961 and the result of his research and creativity were green leather coats, buckskin ponchos and the infamous alligator jacket. Yves Saint Laurent looked at the street from the glamorous height of his salon, nevertheless the house of Dior deemed him too radical and dismissed him. However the 1960s revolutionary halo spread from Yves Saint Laurent and shaped leather into Courrèges’ red daisies on a white fur, Cardin combinations with metal and vinyl, Ungaro’s fluo creations, Paco Rabanne’s armour coats.

The last two decades of the Twentieth Century were a declaration of love for animal skin from mainstream fashion designers. In the 1980s Gianni Versace wrapped Diana Vreeland in black leather trousers, Thierry Mugler used it to disguise the body while Azzedine Alaїa saw it as a second skin. In the 1990s this material stimulated the imagination of enfants terribles like Miuccia Prada, Dolce&Gabbana and Jean Paul Gaultier, but it entered also the realms of elegance such as Valentino and Chanel by Karl Lagerfeld. In the Twenty-first Century visionaires like Galliano, McQueen and Viktor&Rolf moulded it into the shape of their dreams and now there are only a few designers who resist the temptation of leather.

John Galliano for Christian Dior A/W 2002/2003

The world evolves in two different directions: on the one hand it develops technologically, while on the other it researches the past century in prey to Retromania. Products belonging in our grandmas’ childhood will be displayed in extremely innovative shapes and fashion will follow this path, so be ready to wear a 1930s policeman jacket in neon animal prints and superlight material. You might be smiling at this image, exactly like Marlon Brando would be smiling at the thought that his rebel look has now become a classic. And it would be a tough, charming, sad smile.