Rock is not dead. However, rock showmanship just might be.
In “The Rocker,” which opened in area theaters Wednesday, Rainn Wilson (“The Office”) plays a drummer who, a la the ex-Beatle Pete Best, was booted out of an ’80s metal outfit just before they made it big.
Years later, still licking his what-might-have-been wounds, he gets a rare second shot from an unlikely source: his teenage nephew’s high-school garage band.
A good portion of the comedy, such as it is, in “The Rocker” is derived from the juxtaposition of Mr. Wilson’s Robert “Fish” Fishman — a late-20th-century relic who’s partial to all the cliches of excessive arena rock — with the typically more sedate demeanor of would-be contemporary indie-rockers.
Fish quickly realizes that, 20 years removed from the reign of Guns N’ Roses, his notion of what’s cool has been completely inverted. In short, the nerds have taken over.
Back in the real world, this is all too true — and, to this live-music addict, all too depressing.
It’s not, heaven knows, that I’m pining for the permanent return of Axl Rose. Not all rock showmanship is created equal. Yet since the very beginning — since Chuck Berry duckwalked; since Mick Jagger strutted; since Jim Morrison exposed himself; since Iggy Pop mutilated himself — rock stardom has been synonymous with charisma, for better and worse.
Today, however, such behavior has become highly suspect. It has come under the same acidic mistrust and scrutiny that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have brought to bear on traditional journalistic etiquette, and for a similar reason: Young people are … so over that stuff.
As with everything else these days, the changing media landscape is playing a big part.
It turns out that the technology-driven upheaval that we keep reading so much about hasn’t merely (merely!) triggered a radical change in the way music is delivered and sold. No, there’s a paradigm shift happening right now, and it’s actually shaping the psyches of musicians themselves.
In a sharp piece for the fashion section of the New York Times in 2006, Guy Trebay noted that the new paradigm impacts how rock musicians dress. “In an era of music careers created in the democratic nowhere of MySpace, where the members of hot bands dress as if they were office temps,” he wrote, “the days of the rock show as spectacle and the rock star as circus star are unquestionably numbered.”
Along similar lines, Boston Globe music critic Joan Anderman said recently that the same phenomenon is profoundly affecting musicians’ self-image.
Writing about the “incredible shrinking frontman” of rock, she speculated, “No doubt the rise of indie rock has chipped away at rock’s mythology and helped create a humbler breed of star, one who feels free, even compelled, to identify with the masses.”
She mentioned specifically Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn — oddball frontmen who genuinely seem as uncomfortable with high rock heroism as Elvis Costello successfully pretended to be. (Although all three, in their different ways, can be quite captivating.)
Mr. Yorke, Mr. Tweedy and Mr. Finn are not outliers; as the New York Times fashion piece suggested, they’re becoming the norm.
Why is this bad news?
Because it takes the energy and larger-than-lifeness of, say, a Bruce Springsteen to translate rock ’n’ roll — which should rightfully be confined to rooms not much bigger than a club — into a language that makes sense in an arena or stadium.
If Coldplay’s Chris Martin is the best we can do in this department, then we’re in trouble.
Forget about spectacle for a moment. There’s nothing intrinsically commercial or gauche about great showmanship. The punk rock explosion of the ’70s was in part a reaction to staid, workmanlike, flannel-laden bands like the Eagles. Intensity and theatricality were essential to selling the neoprimitive musicianship.
Showmanship can turn a great performance — nothing routine about it, to be sure — into one that’s vividly memorable, even life-altering.
At the risk of sounding offensively glib, I look at the preening of the late Freddie Mercury, the overcaffeinated jiving of the J. Geils Band’s Peter Wolf and the scarves and swagger of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler as analogous to the wildness and abandon of great Protestant preaching.
Whereas, today’s indie-rockers are more like celebrants of the Catholic Mass, in which interchangeability of priests and the predictability of rites go to the very heart of the exercise.
U2’s Bono — who would know — wrote in a surprisingly compelling introduction to an edition of the Book of Psalms: “I stopped going to churches and got into a different kind of religion. Don’t laugh. That’s what being in a rock ’n’ roll band is. Showbiz is shamanism; music is worship.”
I don’t know about you, but when I’m at the “church” of rock ’n’ roll, my vote is for the tent-show revival.
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