RIMINI MEETING PREVIEW

Is It Only Rock'n'Roll?
Among the many exhibits, one is dedicated to the desire that generated one of the most misunderstood genres of music, which captures the fracture of modernity: "At once a flirting with idolatry and a cry for help directed at the sky." The curator explains the inspiration behind it.

by John Waters

In the beginning was the cry. The cry of the first baby. The cry of the first baby’s mother. Later, there was the cry of the grown-up baby, now a slave in the plantations of America’s deep South, hollering to his brother at the other end of the chain gang, heart to heart. Eventually, out of the mud of the Mississippi, came the Blues, which merged with Negro spiritual singing and country music–itself the offspring of Irish folk songs, far-traveled in the hearts of starving immigrants fleeing famine at home–to form what we now call rock, or rock’n’roll.
And now? Coldplay, U2, and Mumford and Sons, crying out of this modern moment about what it is to be a man in a world which sees only man’s doings. Amy Winehouse giving voice to a plaintive plea for love before dying alone. And always, in the foreground, the shadow of Elvis, whose spastic dance brought it all together in the back of a Memphis shop.
What do these stories mean? Are they mere accidental developments in the random searching and stumbling of mankind, or something more?
This is the story that the exhibition, “Three Chords and a Longing for the Truth,” to be staged at the 2012 Meeting of Rimini, will seek to excavate.
As the curator of the exhibition, my job is to guide it to some kind of judgment, but with a light touch. In part, the idea is based on my own experience of growing up with rock’n’roll as a soundtrack to my life. But since this is an experience I share with millions of others, it must become more than an opinion. Therefore, I have many collaborators, whose perspectives may be like my own or quite different. Together, we hope to make a statement out of which others may achieve a moment of recognition.

The nature of captivation. Is it possible that a song on the radio can transmit the longing for “something beyond” of one human being–the writer/singer/musician–through time and space, to the heart of another, the listener? How might this work? How common is it? Is it an exception or something everyday? Through the paraphernalia of the world’s most fashion-obsessed business, through countless wires and connections, underneath the surface qualities of hipness and attitudinizing, can we still hear the desire of the artist–for something that is almost always unstated–retained and communicated? Some people say that these are silly questions. It’s only rock’n’roll, after all. But is anything “only” what it seems to be?
Latter-day pop culture has contrived to “forget” that the roots of most of our contemporary musical forms emerge from traditional forms which stretch the true note between the muddy deltas of human habitation and the glittering firmaments above. Outwardly reduced to “show business” and “entertainment,” the holiness of the song is therefore forced inwards into a closed circuit, a communicating and receiving that becomes mistakable for something else, and capable of being denied in its true nature. The exhibition will seek to show that this reduction is unsuccessful and that the core communication, “heart to heart,” between the artist and the listener, continues to occur.
The exhibition will demonstrate and celebrate the presence of human desire as the fundamental driving force of the music that continues to captivate the young and the no-longer-young, using examples of songs and artists spanning the total history of the medium, especially those artists who, having been the frontiersmen of the medium, have remained among the greatest modern performers of all time.
The public conversation tends to treat rock’n’roll with a degree of condescension: odd and loud noises in simple constructions to divert the young. Media coverage emphasizes lifestyle, pose, fashion, hipness, and excess. Whenever there is talk in the mainstream conversations about the music and what it may signify, it tends to be misleading as to what is really present in the words and notes and rhythms that so captivate the young. Indeed, very often, the nature of the attraction, because it is implicit to those involved, is rarely described in its full intensity, and therefore subject to crude misunderstandings from the outside.
But our exhibition will take as its fundamental starting point the idea that, for more than half a century now, for vast numbers of young people, the nurturing of human desires in public culture has been assisted by a deep and abiding interest in music that has emanated from a particular combination of traditions. The central question will be: if it is true, as Giussani tells us, that desire is always a good thing, what does this mean for us in considering the challenge of the influence of rock’n’roll in modern culture? Because if what Giussani says is indeed true, it becomes clear that what attracts the young to this music must bear some relationship, to begin with at least, to the true source of human longing and to the nature of human destiny.
The aim of the exhibition will be to show that, contrary to the impression given by the idea of “the devil’s music,” rock’n’roll is a medium which seeks to, and frequently succeeds in, transmitting the most fundamental sense of human desire between artist and listener, heart to heart, even if this often occurs through a culture and industry that appear to be inhospitable.  It will seek to trace this journey from the origins of the music right to the present-day practitioners like Coldplay, U2, and Mumford and Sons, who adhere to this original impulse but without seeking to draw attention to what they’re doing.

Two conflicting ideas. The hybrid that is modern rock’n’roll offers a most appropriate metaphor for the interaction in modern societies of the secular and the sacred. The exhibition will seek to show how, in spite of cultural hostility, the medium of modern popular music has in some instances become modern culture’s most unlikely vehicles for the religious dimension of man. For in the very best of the music is something that goes beyond the ostensible content, something disproportionate that might be said to conform to St. Thomas’ definition of sadness: the “desire for an absent good.”
Thus, there will be two diametrically conflicting ideas at play in the exhibition: on the one hand, the impulse that drives the human being to write a song of love or longing; on the other, the tendency of man-created systems to exploit all things for purposes which are inimical to the human chances of penetrating reality in a true way. In modern popular music, both of these phenomena can be observed hand-in-glove. Thus, perhaps more than anything else in our time, rock’n’roll captures and feeds off the contradictory, dualistic nature of modern life–at once a flirting with idolatry and an exhalation of something greater; an assertion of human self-assurance and a cry for help directed at the sky.