Here to stay

I'm in Massachusetts, visiting the suburban Boston office of my employer on a business trip. This morning I drove into town to go to morning zazen at the Cambridge Buddhist Association, and on the way back to my hotel in the suburbs I turned on the radio. To my pleasure, I hit upon WZBC-FM, the Boston College radio station. They were playing a bunch a great jangly indie rock, and it reminded me of two things.

The first thing was that rock and roll is proving to be an immensely flexible genre, and because it's so flexible, it's still alive after fifty years. I'm not talking about the simple blues progressions that have been adapted into countless songs, or even the verse, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus structure that is so endlessly adaptable from song to song.

I'm talking about all the different parts or options that rock songwriters and musicians have to choose from, and the sum that is greater than all these parts. There are the classic rock instruments -- electric guitar, bass guitar, drums -- and other instruments that sweeten the mix, like organ, tambourine, harmonica. There are the classic vocal conventions of lead singer and backup chorus, coming from gospel. There are the conventions of solos, riffs and percussive instruments, coming from jazz. There is the beat, coming from r&b. There is the shouted or screamed vocal co-developed by Americans and the British. There is the convention of the singer-songwriter, invented by Woody Guthrie and confirmed by Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan. There is the wonderful choral effect of the band's total sound, an effect first produced by big bands and jazz groups; that's what the record producer contributes.

And finally there is the notion that the single unit of rock and roll is not the song -- that is, the product of the songwriter -- but the recording. The product of the song plus the band plus the production.

None of this is new, but my point is that rock has many, many conventions which, taken together, are what make a rock and roll recording rock and roll and not jazz or r&b or folk or "Sing, Sing, Sing." No single record has all of the elements. But a record has to have a critical mass of them or it's not a rock record -- it's folk or r&b or something else.

So I'm immensely cheered when I hear some good, new stuff. The kids are still playing with this toy invented by their grandparents' generation! They're working within the genre, deepening and expanding it, and it's still not played out.

This discussion leaves out hip-hop, a genre I do not claim to understand or like (although that new Eminem song "Without Me" is stuck in my head like a bad cold).

And the other thing I was reminded of was my friend Stephanie. My ex-lover Stephanie, who is now dead. In her college years, she was a night-time DJ at WZBC. More about Stephanie in the next post.