Sam Lipsyte "The Rock" (in the journal Radio Silence, Issue #1)

Tuesday Round-up of Everything, Week of 8/5, Post #1:

Sam Lipsyte "The Rock" (in the journal Radio Silence, Issue #1)



Without doubt, the find of the week--month? year?--for me is the journal RADIO SILENCE, which celebrates and juxtaposes and recontextualizes literature and rock and roll in light of each other. And then lights both on fire. The only problem I see for this whole endeavor is that the first piece in the first issue may be the last word on this subject. The apotheosis.

Think I'm hyperbolizing? Smashing my keyboard-guitar before the song even starts? Suck on this:

"Rock. It's a dumb word...You could always ascertain what rocked and what didn't. Things rock in the context of what they promise to do and how they betray that. A band cannot hold anything back. It must give everything, and fall short. It's really only one moment, maybe two moments in a show, or a record, that seize you. The rest if procedure. 'That rocked,' you say, and people think you're half-kidding, grasping onto an adolescent, meaning-blasted phrase to express your admiration for a few seconds of electrical noise that vouched for your arrested adolescence. Bullshit. 'To rock,' as opposed to something as infantile as 'rocking out,' is the most severe and adult of enterprises. Most people are too childish to rock."

Whole piece here, for free, if you sign in.

Sign in. This rocks.
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Published on August 05, 2014 13:02 Tags: glen-hirshberg, music, radio-silence, review, rock, sam-lipsyte, true
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