Normalize👏Songs👏About👏Rockin'👏

A call to arms. But first, a eulogy.

Where did it all go wrong?

The 21st century is the only one I’ve been alive in. I have no world to compare this one too. It’s all I know. Speaking to people who have seen two¹, there’s a shared belief that this is the lesser half. Perhaps that’s just their development-arresting nostalgia fogging up their rose goggles. Maybe something happened to them. It’s possible they’re just stupid.

But I’m not just stupid. Why do I feel it too?

In my 26 years, I’ve had a good time. A very good time. But not the Good Times™; despite any evidence to the contrary, there persists an impression that those are gone forever, and that I never got to bask in them. Surveillance, smartphones, Snapchat, and sin bins have rendered us a trembling, wet dog of a people, and only real people can create the Good Times™.

When did they bow out? Short of her first 47 days, I’ve seen the whole millennium. Was it on September 11th 2001, a day as clear as this one, when two airliners thundered into the Twin Towers, killing thousands of fathers, mothers, wives, sons, and daughters? Or 17 months later, on March 30th 2003, when America declared plans to kill Middle Eastern innocents by the million? Or November 21st of the same year, when comic-succubus Richard Curtis spoon-fed the world his tepid diarrhoea, Love Actually?

No, no, and (somehow) no again. The Day The World Stood Shite - some of you might be shouting at your screen now - was August 14th, 2006: the birth of Nickelback’s hit single, “Rockstar.”

Let it be known now: this is not a hit piece on Chad “The Foot” Kroeger and his toe-headed hoser-cronies. Loathing the ‘Back in the big ‘26 is a lamentably pathetic pastime. Like hating Justin Bieber or space hoppers. If you do, you’re a Japanese soldier cowering in the jungle, no idea his country surrendered decades ago. It’s gone. It’s over. Let it go. They can’t hurt you anymore. And frankly, you should have never enlisted; Nick-B had some jams, and in a time of post-post-post-post-irony, their too-dumb-to-be-pretentious brand of soft-hard-rock is refreshing.

They were huge for a reason and, at least here in Britain, they were never huger than they were off the back of “Rockstar.” You couldn’t move for it; the radio, on television, in movies, and adverts for sofas. For what felt like a hundred years, citizens aged 1-101 were enjoying, then enduring, the omnipresence of a big, stupid rocker about being a big, stupid rocker. It was everywhere. When it left, it took everything with it.

You see, dear reader, there once existed a noble tradition in popular music: rockers who wrote rock songs about rockin’. From 1970-1989, the world was feast of girthly delights.

”I Wanna Rock”, “We Rock”, “We Will Rock You”, “Let It Rock,” “Let’s Get Rocked”, “Rocker,” “The Rocker”, “Rock The Nations”, “Rock The Casbah”, “Rock You Like A Hurricane”, “Can’t Stop Rockin’”, “Keep On Rockin’ In The Free World”, “Rockin’ All Over The World”, “Rock You All Around the World”, ”Rock ‘N’ Roll”, “Rock ‘N’ Roll Band”, “I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll”, “Rock ‘N’ Roll Dreams Come True”, “You Can’t Stop Rock ‘N’ Roll”, “You Can’t Kill Rock ‘N’ Roll”, “It’s A Long Way To The Top If You Wanna Rock ‘N’ Roll”, “Rock ‘N’ Roll All Nite”, “Rock ‘N’ Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution”, “I Know It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll”. ²

I like it, like it, yes, I do.

These are more than songs. They are revolutions against the universe’s laws. By capturing the life-affirming power of rock twice, they manage to be themselves and more. They are, first and foremost, rock songs, but also tributes to rock songs themselves. It’s rock to the power of rock. Rock^Rock. A perfect equation.

”Rockstar” is no such song. It appears to be, but it isn’t. Rather than being about the majesty and power and euphoria of rockin’ out, Chad luxuriates in the spoils alone. Not once does he mentioning journeymanning on the toilet circuit purely for the love of the game. It’s all jet planes, tour buses, king-size tubs, and a bathroom he can play baseball in³ - to our ‘rockstar’, these are the things that matter. We can’t be mad at Chad. He’s just a widdle cornball, and by gum he’s good at it. Billy Gibbons, who does the spoken-word parts and is in ZZ Top, however - straight to the naughty step. There’ll be no Xbox tonight. I am very, very disappointed in you.

It was too late, and the misunderstanding was too profound; by the time “Rockstar” exited the charts by crashing its Rolls into the hotel pool, the damage was done. There would be no more Songs About Rockin’. Things were already slowing down (thanks, Kurt), but “Rockstar” was the thousandth paper-cut in the camel’s back. Chadicus flew too close to the sun, melting away his wings of denim and leather. The world had had enough rockin’ for one lifetime. The Canucks didn’t so much as kill the mockingbird as wring its neck and bludgeon it against the garden wall until its blood saturated the soil and drowned the berry shrubs below. August 2006 onwards, we’ve had less than bones to chew on; there has not been one hit Song About Rockin’. Rocking’s PR is in the toilet. We traded this life for misfortune and lame. We cut our hair, and shed our good names.

I mean, honestly, what have we had? I don’t mean in the underground, where the spirit of (and love for) The Rock⁴ has never once blinked⁵. I mean out in the sunshine, where the world can see it. In 2017, we got another song called “Rockstar”, this time by Post Malone, again about being a rockstar and not about rocking. Two years later, The Black Keys released an album called Let’s Rock. Great moxy, but these guys wouldn’t know the first thing about Rock if it smeared them into A Hard Place. Then, this year, we got a 2-minute eye-roll from art-pop cause célèbre Charli XCX called “Rock Music” - an irony-poisoned ‘rock song’ that does more to damage the good cause of Rockin’ than a tribe of Arctic Monkeys. Two decades and that’s we all have to show for it. If she wasn’t my wife, I’d shoot her.

And I’m not out of touch. I’m quite aware that there is no shortage of songs that rock. Year in and year out, countless bands with distorted guitars and big drums release great records, big and small. Trouble is, the ones about rock don’t rock, and the ones that do aren’t about it, and the ones that rock about rock live under them. For reasons that are hard to quantify, the Venn diagram has no crossover. The space between these worlds is white-hot with potential going untapped. Until it is, things will always be unstable. That’s what we’re all feeling.

These are divided times. Whether it started with 9/11 or the Iraq War or Love Actually, there’s no question about it - we are atomised. We die without human contact, yet we avoid it like it kills us. Our food is made by nobodies and delivered by slaves to hermits in bedsits. We drive and park our move-boxes outside the work-box, where we work our eight hours in a smaller box, before going home to stare at the pleasure box. Cutting off our uncles over the odd blue comment, disavowing our children over the odd prismatic flag. Strangers have never been stranger. It makes the hate easy. You’ll groan if your neighbour asks you to take out their trash while they’re in hospital, before buying the actual trash of a pop-girlie who wouldn’t pour acid on your face if it was on fire. The only time we look one another in the eye is to decide where to throw the sand.

This petrifies rocking. One can rock alone, but it’s best enjoyed in company. It’s about resistance, and resistance means people. Rocking demands we cut loose. That we allow ourselves to be seen and judged and lionised and shamed. Stage-diving is selfish, mosh pits are brain-dead, and there’s no way of making air-guitar look cool. It’s why we do them; therein lies the test - can you make an ass of yourself? Once you do, you learn how fun it is. So fun, you might just want to sing about it.

Except we don’t. In the surveillance age, we only forgive these moronic acts if they’re performed under a sickly smear of “irony”. For it to be cool, it has to not really be happening. We can’t sincerely admit to enjoying the thing, even in the act of enjoying it. It must always be a joke. We can’t love all the way.

It’s suffocating, and it mustn’t carry on. Songs About Rockin’ may be our only salvation. They are, by definition, unifying; every single person who likes The Rock can listen to a song about the magic of The Rock and be on 100% the same page as everyone else. Nobody listening to “I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll” feels a centigrade less warmth to the craft than Joan Jett herself; in the moment that she sings the central line, her and we are one and the same. When Queen promise to rock us, there’s no one around who ain’t game. When Dee Snider proclaimes “[he] Wanna Rock”, we only hear him because we wanna too.

The only way out is through. We must revive this most honourable pursuit. Musicians of the world, you have six months. Then the rules change. In 2027, things will be different. We will have a moratorium on ‘meditations on fame’. We will process 0 traumas. We will say nothing of the state of our world. We will not use our platform. Instead, we will plug in our face-melters, crank up the gain, and set phasers to ‘Riff’. We will double-up our bass drums. We will star-jump over our power-sliding friends. We will rock ‘n’ roll all nite⁶ and party ev-er-y day. We will, for the first time this century, enjoy being alive.

Gimme an “R”. Gimme an “O”. Gimme a “C”, and, if it’s not too much trouble, a “K.”
What’s that spell?

1. Always the 20th and 21st. At least, so far.

2. I did not include Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You” because that’s a pop song about rock. Nor did I include “Cats In The Cradle”, as that’s a rock song about Pops.

3. The song also features one of my favourite lyrics in all of music. When listing his demands, Chad mentions getting “a front door key to the Playboy mansion.” This implies he wants to go there when it’s empty. He’s not a pervert; he just wants to use the jacuzzi, unbothered by Pamela Anderson’s iconic tits.

4. When I say “The Rock”, I am not talking about Dwayne, or that Michael Bay film. I am talking about The Rock.

5. Aussie egg-punks STERÖID released the finest album of last year exploring exclusively this topic. It’s called Chainmail Commandos and if you have even one gram of fun in your blood, you’ll do yourself a favour and crank it.

6. We will spell it like that.