Rock and roll-- If I Can't Have You...?

The other day a classroom teacher neighbor asked me what I’d been playing loudly in my room b/f our meeting. “Gawd, was that Kelly Clarkson, Jack?” she inquired incredulously. It wasn’t. “It’s this Swedish pop singer Robyn,” I said, embarrassed. My dear work mate is a indie rock queen of idolatrous proportions. She’d heard Robyn or heard of her, I didn’t catch which, she responded w/out the tone of derision directed at Clarkson. Was the new tone of respect b/c she’s European, I wondered? Some cache unavailable to an American Idol grad, from Texas, no less? It was a small exchange that was ended by the arrival of everyone else for the meeting. But, as is often the case when something hits me wrong in conversation, I replay it over and over later, pondering what I coulda woulda shoulda said. These are a few notes to that effect.

I think I understand her general antipathy. As winner of American Idol’s first season Clarkson is the epitome of crass commercialism. She’s made at least one movie I stumbled on once and watched long enough to tell you it looked like an Old Navy commercial, an AI sponsor. Her weight fluctuates wildly, perhaps from periodic coke and pop tart binges, two other major AI sponsors. She appears on Oprah. Yeah, American Idol is one big fat schmaltzville, no doubt. I can’t sit through the show. Still, mining the golden oldies songbook is not such a terrible thing per se. The Rolling Stones’ “Time Is On My Side” is kind of schmaltzy, too. Once and awhile they do a Smokey Robinson or Dolly Parton proud. (Check out David Archuleta’s “Shop Around,” for instance.) I get how being too commercial can be like wearing too much makeup: it can mask over any humanness, leaving only a glossy caricature. But, really, Clarkson has humanness in abundance. She is more than AI schmaltz. One of the interesting aspects of her career has been her struggle to find her own voice apart from producers and industry flack. Like her weight she’s a little all over the place; messy. And what ab “Since U Have Been Gone,” really? A pop song so irresistible that indie stalwart Ted Leo had to cover it.

And as it happens, I have heard Clarkson’s latest, All I Ever Wanted, a couple times now. Truth is, so far it feels like it is less than the sum of its parts. There’s some edgy riffage ala “Since U Have Been Gone.” There’s Kelly’s ain’t-no-Mtn-high-enough voice stretching beyond the horizon. There’s angsty sentiments aplenty (“I Don’t Hook-Up” will get picked up by some for the title alone). There’s some Pat Benatar-esque toughness and some Abba-esque harmonies and some Stevie Nicks-ian ethereality. But it sounds like all the parts were recorded in separate takes and don’t gel when heard as a whole, not only betw songs but w/in a given song.

That’s after a couple of listens, anyway. But one song, “I Can’t Have You,” I adore, and I’ve been playing it semi-obsessively for a week. I love this song b/c it is what I will call rock and roll. What I mean by this is several things. Let me explain.

First, that it is danceable; it has a beat you can dance to. Not like disco (this is not an update of the great Yvonne Elliman/BeeGees song by the same name) or world beat, although both have more to do w/ rock and roll than most indie rock. The beat in “If I Can’t Have You,” and rock and roll, is steady, insistent, slightly forced. Anyone can pick it up, and no one is going to lose it, just as Chuck Berry would have it. Rock and Roll rhythms are like that: more pushy than seductive; more train-kept-a-rollin’ forward motion than funky polyrhythms. I’m not saying a rock and roll beat can’t be sexy but it doesn’t beat ar the bush; it’s enthusiastically blunt, no need for foreplay. The Beastie Boys first album is rock and roll. King Sunny Ade’s Synchro System, while great, is mostly something else.

Another thing ab rock and roll is that it has to have something rough ab it: gnarly guitar riffs, stomping beats, swaggering non-singerly voices, etc. Something rough and unpolished sounding. Examples abound, from Chuck’s “Around and Around” to Blondie’s “X Offender” to Biggie’s “Mo Money Mo Problems” to LCD Soundsystem’s “Tribulations” to The Shaky Hand’s (yeah, indie rockers can rock and roll, too) “We Are Young.” The reason for this is buried deep in rock and roll myth. The roughness is the sound of the democratic spirit at the heart of rock and roll. It’s what Pete Townshend was getting at once when he said rock and roll was playing your song, dancing in the rain, w/ a broken guitar. The genius of rock and roll is the inexplicable joy, the emotional grandeur, created by such simple, crude, humble means. Its expression might possess elements of the classic tragic hero (noble everyman faces confusing, trackless world) but I don’t want to go there right now. The important point it that its virtuosity is always circumscribed by an element of roughness. It sounds hifalutin but it is at least in part a very simple, physical, tactile thing. Rock and roll has to have that rough feel.

In Clarkson’s “If I Can’t Have You” roughness is in almost every part of the song. The brrr in Clarkson’s voice feels country in a song that is frantically citified. All the electronics are turned up to “11”; they sound purposefully distorted. The buzzing guitar-like opening riff is catchy. The heartracing keyboard fills in the chorus are thrilling. The production sounds like kids plugging in their Radio Shack synth and duct-taped 808 and rocking out like fiends. The sound reminds me some of Rihanna’s “Disturbia” and recent Britney Spears and might be part of some vogue (or should be!) production sound I am not familiar w/ but it is very rock and roll. Kelly Clarkson is not just a glossy commercial pinup in this song, anyway.

Finally, another thing about rock and roll is there’s rock and roll and then there’s great rock and roll. It’s not all the Clash. And not all the Clash is “great” rock and roll. And, BTW, the Clash were a commercial stunt from the gitgo. (And I’m not ab to try to define “great” any more than I’m gonna go into the cathartic tragedy stuff of RnR at the moment.) Still, while this combination of uptempo danceability and tactile roughness that I’m calling rock and roll is by no means the only sound or kind of music I like it’s been a touchstone since I can’t remember when. Sure, sometimes it’s only rock and roll, Frat house party music, Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” or Plastic Bertand’s “Ca Plane Pour Moi,” but I like it, indeed I do. The notion that all commercial music is a glossy inhuman shil is no more credible than my contention that too much indie rock is mopey misanthropic trustafarianism. Kelly Clarkson’s “If I Can’t Have You” rocks! You paid for your Vampire Weekend album too, no? But is “If I Can’t Have You” great rock and roll? Maybe. But whatever gets you through the night. (Or pumped up for meetings at work!)