Rock music is not simply a style of music. It is an alternative form of civilization. It follows modes and norms different from those that characterized previous musical styles. Perhaps it is the beginning of a new civilization. Or maybe it has no longevity and represents only the dying of the civilization that came before it. It does not adhere to any coherent philosophy or ideology. However, it does display four non-trivial tendencies:
It is the music of youth
It is highly sexual
It is performative
It is working class
Youth
Before 1960, rock and roll was treated as music for teenagers. No self-respecting adult took it seriously. See the 1956 movie Rock, Rock, Rock! for a good example of this. See early chapters of Diana West’s 2007 book The Death of the Grown-Up for a history of parents taking their children’s lead in musical preferences. The culture of rock music is one of children who do not look to their elders for leadership and of elders who wish to remain perpetual children. Allan Bloom devotes a chapter to rock music and its attendant social trends in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind.
No rock musician or band became famous for work done after the age of 30. While some managed to produce new material of merit in their later years, this is always a later development of a style or persona that had first been established in youth.
Jazz musicians in the 1940s shocked audiences by performing in their “street clothes”, meaning they wore ordinary suits and ties instead of tuxedos or the special gold lamé suits that big bands wore on stage. The intent was to demonstrate that there was no separation between the musician’s stage persona and life offstage. Rock musicians have taken this process of dress code degradation several steps further.
Performance
Musically, rock music is an adaptation of blues. But stylistically, it follows certain conceits first established in the American folk music scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
While blues songs have a performative element in them, blues singers did not feel a need to blur the line between the characters in their songs and their own public persona. Howlin' Wolf might sing about being broke and his woman leaving him. But after the show, he made bank, paid all his musicians and took his share home and led a comfortable middle class life with his wife and daughters. His wife was also his business manager. He also wore a suit and tie on stage.
Not so the folk singers of Greenwich Village and other satellite early hippie locales. Woody Guthrie, Dave Van Ronk, Pete Seeger, and Odetta presented as if they had just blown in to town and were singing in exchange for a warm cup of coffee and place to lay their weary head. Buffy Sainte-Marie tragically took this blurring of fact and façade too far and reinvented herself as a Cree Indian.
This blurring of public and private life escalated further in the rock music of the 1960s and was promoted by movies like A Hard Day's Night and Help!. If you were as famous as the Beatles, you could not admit to having a normal home life. The image of the “rock star” metastasized further in the 1970s with the famously wild touring life of performers like Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin. It got even crazier in the 1980s with the subgenre of heavy metal and bands like KISS and the solo career of Ozzy Osbourne. To be a rock musician meant wearing leather clothes, engaging in outrageous behavior, staying up late doing drugs, not planning for tomorrow, being the antithesis of the stable middle class order. To get a good night’s sleep, to pursue a healthy diet, or to show up to rehearsal on time meant risking losing that special magic that gave you an edge in your performance and songwriting. Or so you had to make things appear.
This overblown emphasis on the authenticity of one’s outlaw status persisted in the gangster rap of the 1990s where rappers like 2Pac, Biggie Smalls, and Niggaz Wit Attitudes felt compelled to convince audiences that despite their worldwide commercial success as entertainers, they still returned to the hood each night to deal drugs in the street and shoot people for a living.
Working Class
Early rock stars like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash were not only working class, but performed and recorded in unapologetic southern accents. The early association of rock music with a spiritual geographical location somewhere between Texas and Appalachia persisted for over a decade to the point that one almost had to adopt such an accent to sing such music authentically.
The Beatles, the Who, and the rest of the “British invasion” bands of the mid 1960s broke the southern U.S. chokehold on the genre, but they were no less working class. The British bands incorporated British music hall traditions and other elements of British working class culture into rock music. Finally, in the late 1960s, a distinctly northern U.S. rock sensibility emerged in Michigan with bands like the Stooges, the MC5, and Grand Funk Railroad. And it was no less in-your-face working class than its predecessors.
In the 1970s, some upper class tendencies began to emerge in the rock world. Foremost in this trend is the Pink Floyd, who met as architecture students at the London Polytechnic. Bands like the Floyd and later prog-rockers like Genesis, Yes, King Crimson, and the Soft Machine, attempted to elevate rock music to a more serious level, on a par with classical music. This subgenre became known as progressive rock. By the end of the 1970s, it encountered ferocious pushback from the working class youth of south London. Bands like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and Siouxsie and the Banshees consciously set out to return rock to its primitive and unpretentious roots. This subgenre was known as punk rock.
Over the years, bands as different as the Pretenders, the Kinks, and the Fall all proudly kept working class sensibilities prominent in the rock world.
Sexuality
Objections to the sexual nature of rock music are as old as rock music itself. The music itself is strongly sexual in its rhythm. The theme of the lyrics is almost by default the intoxicating effect of eros. Another common theme is violent protest in the manner of a young man attempting to assert himself with public displays of amoral defiance of the standing order. The way the music is performed is overtly sexual both in the contortions of the male performers and the reactions of young female members of the audience.
The energy of rock music is that of young male aggression. And yet some of the most successful leading men of rock like Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Prince have been decidedly androgynous.
Where Are the Female Rock Stars?
The dynamic of rock music from the beginning has been that of young men asserting themselves in public to gain sexual attention from young women. And the success of this dynamic has led to more men wanting to be rock performers. All of this should make obvious the answer to the question so often asked in rock circles: where are the women?
The first true female rock star was without a doubt Janis Joplin who took the rock world by force at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. She didn’t just sing the vocal part of the melody line, she gave her soul to rock with every breath. An unhappy and unstable person with substance abuse issues, Joplin was given to incoherent rambling. Much of what can be known of her thoughts and motives comes through her conversations with talk show host Dick Cavett. Cavett and Joplin clearly had mutual respect for one another. He was able to ask her questions to which she replied with short but revealing answers. When he asked her what she thought about when she sang, she seemed genuinely surprised by the question and replied: “I just sing.”
In another interview he spoke of the female groupies male rock stars enjoyed and asked her if female rock stars similarly had male groupies. She answered: “Not near enough.”
Janis Joplin didn’t just die of a drug overdose like many male rock stars of her generation. She died lonely in a way that it is hard to imagine that Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, or Keith Moon did. Female rock performers clearly lack the incentive male performers have of using fame to increase their sexual opportunities. But that is not the only reason there have been relatively few female rock stars.
The Disincentive Problem
Women rock performers also have the disincentive of having to put themselves in the limelight and assert their sexuality in a masculine way. Janis Joplin lived to sing the blues. It was probably the only time she was not self-conscious. But the sexual framing she experienced coming on and off stage and in public must have been unbearable. This is likely why she dressed in such unusual and ill-fitting clothes and colored wigs.
Appearing on a fashion runway in a swimsuit or even posing naked is also making oneself into a sex object, but in a distinctly feminine way. This is something many women do if given the chance. But the rock performer is a masculine sex object. Many men would not feel comfortable doing this, and precious few women are up to it. Janis Joplin was the first woman to attempt it and it clearly took a heavy toll on her.
In the final quarter of the 20th century, a number of successful women rockers have emerged such as Chrissy Hynde, Siouxsie Sioux, Joan Jett, Joan Armatrading, Suzanne Vega, Linda Perry, PJ Harvey, as well as lesser-known but notable talents like Poly Styrene, Sylvia Juncosa, and Texacala Jones. Some women just love to rock and roll and neither the absence of sexual incentives nor the presence of sexual disincentives will keep them away. But they all must deal with this problem in some way.
Wendy Melvoin describes how she got around what she calls the “f**ability” issue while playing with Prince & The Revolution in the 1980s:
My being a woman on stage gave him license to be more androgynous and be more in touch with his own female energy and I got the permission to be in touch with more of my male energy because I wanted to be more of a counterpart to him. He wanted me to be more of a counterpart... So we both got what we wanted out of it. I got to be a musician and not think of myself as a woman, but I was a woman on stage playing against this guy who was this total androgynous character.
You have to have a certain amount of f***ability, being a woman first and not a musician. And I didn’t have access to that part of myself and didn’t want to have access to that part. I didn’t want to lead with: ‘Oh, you think I’m f**able enough so I know I’m going to be good.’ And I was OK with the way Prince saw it.
Rock music is a young person’s game, but the sexual disincentive for women rock stars becomes particularly acute as they age past youth. As Chrissy Hynde memorably put it:
Don't harass me, can't you tell
I'm going home, I'm tired as hell
I'm not the cat I used to be
I've got a kid, I'm thirty-three.
At the ends of the spectrum Joni Mitchell has aged to attain a larger- than-life almost aristocratic status while Sandy Denny could not adapt herself to life as a non-youthful female star and suffered a similar fate to Janis Joplin.
Enter the White Stripes
In 1999, just as rock fans might have thought the genre had reached the end of its natural life, Jack and Meg White released their debut album The White Stripes. This is hard electric blues, channeling Son House, Robert Johnson, and John Lee Hooker. Straight back to the sugar shack, turned up to eleven. Like the punk rockers, they reject the previous several decades of evolution in tastes. Like Tom Waits, their lyrical universe seems to exist in a time warp trapped sometime before 1960. This will be the first of six studio albums and a highly successful career as a touring live band. It turns out the world is still hungry for blues authenticity.
And there are only two of them. Jack plays guitar and sings. He doesn’t just sing. His voice almost self-destructs with pure blues expression, like Janis Joplin. His guitar playing alternates between a heavy metal sound and slide guitar. You might think it’s overdubbed, but he does it that way live, too. And Meg plays the drums. Man, does she play the drums. Like a cross between Moe Tucker and John Bonham. She’ll play a few bars like an American Indian drum circle or a Scottish drum line, and then break into some syncopation or shuffle. Sometimes she doesn’t play at all for a while or just ticks the cymbal or rim of the snare, and then comes back in with a vengeance. The band has no bass. But Meg isn’t really the rhythm section anyway. She’s more like the stage designer, deciding which of Jack’s vocal and guitar parts deserve a particular accent. It’s like she’s playing a set of aural spotlights. The percussion never sounds like something in the background.
Wasn’t rock music supposed to have a bass? And yet there’s no noticeable lack of bass range. It’s likely a combination of Jack hitting the low strings on the guitar in isolation from the melody combined with Meg’s heavy use of the kick-bass drum. They also do a lot of doubling.
Jack brings a heavy working class Detroit Catholic ethic to his stage persona. He hasn’t left the parish and could go back to being an upholsterer’s apprentice if this music thing doesn’t pan out. He is hulking and physical, but like a proletarian, not like a rock star who has use of a personal trainer. And he works hard, on stage and off. He is John Lennon’s working class hero, bringing a blue-collar vision to the rock festival crowd. He’s not the white wanna-be blues singer like in the movie Ghost World. Blues is his natural idiom.
And Meg stays behind those drums. She rarely sings along and she never speaks. Her slight body rocks gently from side to side as she hits the traps hard over and over again. The look on her face is silent and mysterious, even when she silently mouths along to Jack’s lyrics. The crowd loves her. There is palpable audience excitement whenever she plays some unaccompanied fill. Jack wrote her a two-minute song called In the Cold, Cold Night. The crowd goes wild when she emerges from behind her drums to take the microphone and sing it. Other than that, Jack walks her out to her drums at the beginning of the show and walks her back at the end, holding her hand. For a lot of the show, they seem to be facing each other, playing to each other.
In interviews she rarely speaks and when she speaks she’s barely audible. Jack talks a lot, but Meg has a look on her face almost like she’s bored. It’s like she’s thinking: this is OK, for now... The Whites are tight-lipped about their personal life. They started their career as a married couple but divorced soon after their first album. It was almost certainly Meg’s idea to divorce, almost certainly her idea to continue performing as a couple after the divorce, and definitely her idea to quit in 2007, effectively dissolving the band forever.
Which brings us back to the question of women in rock. Although Meg White was “only” the drummer, she is clearly one of the great rock stars in an era where there are hardly any rock stars left. Despite her shy and gentle behavior, she is clearly an object of sexual fascination and admiration for both men and women. She never wears revealing clothing on stage. She never dances. She just walks out holding Jack’s hand, plays the drums with calculated ferocity and sensitive precision, and walks off stage again with Jack. She doesn’t employ any of the stratagems used by other female rock performers. She’s isn’t gay or masculine-looking. She doesn’t wear bizarre make-up. She doesn’t dress provocatively or like she just walked out of a thrift store. She doesn’t have any visible tattoos or piercings. How does she do it? She just plays loud aggressive music AND maintains a glamourous celebrity aura AND presents as an old-school feminine woman who keeps her mouth shut.
The winning formula has a lot to do with the White Stripes’ working class affectations. If they played more artsy fare it would not work. And it has a lot do with the fact that there are only two people on stage that are known to have been married to each other and still effect all the body language of a loving couple. This is why they can never have a bassist. Any third musician would destroy the dynamic. Jack is the hard-working working man, still church-going in his mannerisms. He uses tough language, but not profanity. Meg has a slightly more middle-class air. She’s actually from Gross Pointe. She’s low-key almost slumming it with Jack. She’s rebelling by becoming more traditional. He’s her strong man. She gets to be a sexy rock star with millions of crazed fans and she doesn’t have to be lonely or neurotic — because Jack is there. He is her buffer, her cover. He is her... husband, at least for performance purposes and rock music is always performative.
In half a century of rock music no one ever thought of using a husband as a front like that. Yes, there have been a number of performing rock couples: the Mamas & the Papas, Jefferson Airplane, ABBA, etc. But no woman has ever before fully wielded the full violent sexual energy of the electric blues like that, basking in the glamour it bestows, while also enjoying the protection of a man so that she emerges unscathed and unaddled by the psychic carnage that has destroyed other women of rock. She looks eerily serene as she plays, like a good wife behind her pots and pans. Audiences love it, and this is the 21st century. To modern men she’s the long-vanished girl next door. To modern women she smiles like she knows something they could only guess the meaning of.
And yet even the great Meg quit the business before age became an issue. She has disappeared from public view never to return. Her fans miss her profoundly. Jack went solo and has been in a number of other bands, but has not enjoyed the success he knew as half of the White Stripes.
Probably because rock music has always been so associated with anti-social and anti-traditional forces, it never occurred to anyone that a traditional homebound married couple could be rock stars. It was always assumed that being married diminished your rock star bona fides. But for the White Stripes, the traditional young married couple persona enhanced their sexuality and their working class image. It’s such an obvious and natural move. But it had never been before.