Fire up the Shoesaw* or "What is Rock n' Roll?"

People are always asking me, "Are you only about Rock n' Roll?", or "Do you only work with artists who play Rock n' Roll?".

The answer is emphatically NO...but it's also emphatically YES.

To truly answer it, we must first ask another question: How does one define Rock n' Roll?

Is it Bill Haley rocking around the clock, or Chuck Berry celebrating a teenage wedding? Is it "Crimson and Clover" and Iron Butterfly? Is it Elvis? Is it ZZ Top? Is Rock n' Roll made with a guitar (or two), a bass, and a drumkit? or can it be made with two turntables and a microphone? Is it the cold, clinical precision of Kraftwerk, or the sloppy mishmash of Titus Andronicus? Is Chuck D one of the most Rock n' Roll people to ever spit verses into a mic? Is Richard D. James one of the most Rock n' Roll people to ever make semi-creepy ambient noise? Is it pop music, is it undergound? Does it lift you up or does it drag you to the depths? Uptown, midtown, downtown--old-school, new school, mid-school?

I could go on forever, but I'll stop here to say that the answer to all these questions--for me--is YES. Rock n' Roll is all these things and much much more.

To me, Rock n' Roll is anything made originally, with emotion, by someone who cares deeply about music and about connecting with people. That's it. Pretty simple, right? Well, yes...and, again, no. There are many "rock" artists today that I would consider to be spitting in the face of Rock n' Roll as I know it every single time they step into a recording studio (they shall remain nameless for the purposes of this posting as I respect all of your opinions on the matter and, while I would love to discuss it in person, I don't want to start any internet arguments). Conversely, there are many artists who are doing extremely interesting things with instrumentation that most would never consider to be Rock n' Roll--and I think that that's totally Rock n' Roll (again, names withheld, for my own sake).

Rock n' Roll is messy. It's clean. It's hideously beautiful, and beautifully hideous. It's iconoclastic, it's tried-and-true. It's what you feel in your heart when you get a boot in the head. Late nights, later mornings, PA's, headphones, blown-out car speakers.

I saw a band once called Dead Orchestra. The lead singer summed it up perfectly when he said to a sweaty and half-deaf audience:

"It's all Rock n' Roll to me."

At TRx, it's all Rock n' Roll to us...

TRx
--n

*props to Lionrock (and wherever that sample came from) for the title to this blog