A disclaimer: What I’m about to say is as much a confession as an accusation. Please read it as an admission of my own shortcomings rather than a critical indictment of all the things you love and hold dear, and as mostly a joke. I won’t be responding to any hate mail, anyway, so don’t waste your time.

Here goes: There’s nothing less interesting to me in popular music, historically, than the “boy with his guitar” shtick. From The Rolling Stones on up to The Strokes, nothing excites me less than the attempt to “rock,” whatever that means—I have never really been able to discern what rocks from what is just the sound of guitars shrieking—or to keep the essence of rock “alive” by making music that authentically “rocks.” I think it’s safe to say that most people who are reading this have already made peace with the notion of “rockism” and the discourse surrounding it, so I won’t rehash that. But there it is; I’ve said it. I don’t like a lot of music that, if you ask almost anyone in the world, is, vital “classic” rock. I don’t believe in rock for rock’s sake.

I have often chalked this up to being female, and thus unable to relate to what must be some kind of innate rock instinct. I’ve thought that perhaps the rock impulse is related to other aggressive drives I wouldn’t possibly experience, like the one that makes people want to hunt animals for sport. Whatever it is that makes Mick Jagger seem like a decent musician, I’ve imagined, will someday be found, localized in the same part of the brain where synapses are wired for watching football, eating salted, cured meats and drinking domestic beer out of cans. This is, of course, the same part of the brain where they’ll find the desire to listen to Houses of the Holy and that first Radiohead album. It’s probably also the same part that makes Jessica Simpson look attractive rather than like a severely botched post-op trannie who fell into a vat of bleach.

Even more difficult than not caring about how hard music rocks is that I don’t like the inverse, the “boy with his guitar who doesn’t want to rock you, just sing some pleasant tunes” variation on the classic rock shtick, either. There is something that I find more deplorable than, say, Audioslave’s brand of post-cock-rock on Viagra, and that’s flaccid acoustic folksy emo ballad rock. (This means you, Bright Eyes and Sufjan Stevens.) “Indie rock” seems to differ from classic rock only in the degree to which it falls prey to self-indulgence. Just sleeping with fewer groupies and refusing to sell a lot of albums won’t make you immune to my contempt, skinny little rich boy.

What complicates these feelings, and makes them a slippery basis for musical debate, is that I don’t dislike all music that relies on the guitar to provide the majority of its instrumental substance. I don’t even hate all music that takes on its own rock prowess as an explicit theme. I love Raw Power, see, but I don’t think it’s any more “powerful” than that hook in Kylie Minogue’s latest single. I can hear the outcries now. This brings me dangerously close to “popist” territory and I want to avoid dredging that up, too.

Don’t get me wrong—I do believe that there’s good rock music out there. Some of my favorite music is by rock bands and features guitar prominently. The Chameleons’ “Perfume Garden,” for example, is a rock song wherein the guitar is desexualized, stripped of any phallic association, and ethereal guitar effects are almost used as another instrument to evoke that nostalgic-for-childhood feeling. Josef K’s shimmery guitar work on “Fun ‘n Frenzy” provides structural support for the song’s melody but never takes over as sole narrative element. The Swell Maps’ “Midget Submarines” swaggers and snarls, pointing to garage rock history without trying to secure its own place in the rock canon by propping up its own credibility on the back of its influences.

I’ll leave you with a far from apt metaphor to sum up my position. As the inverse of rock, indie rock is just the flipside of the same coin. There are other forms of musical currency, aren’t there? It’s time to stop relying on rock as the gold standard.

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