From Lilian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia, published 1969 - as rock prognosis (progrockgnosis?) goes, this is pretty good, foreseeing the ability of listeners to remix tracks.
Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia is an odd book to read now.
As an encyclopedia, it's fairly useless; the biographical entries are really short. I suppose at a time when there was no readily accessible repository of information about pop music, it must have been useful just to have all the records by an artist listed.
What makes it worth reading now is
a/ Roxon's turn of phrase, the stray perceptions and slivers of humour that peep through the fairly functional nature of the tome.
b/ as a period document. Like the more historical books that came out in that sudden first surge of rock publishing (1968-1970 - it went from there being no serious books about rock to over a dozen, almost overnight... prior to that the only studies of pop and youth culture were sociological, usually with the Problem of Today's Generation framing), the Rock Encyclopedia is interesting for what's included and what's excluded.... entries on things that proved to be transient in the extreme.... entries where the contemporary commentator can be forgiven for having no idea that the group or sound would have far more legs as a historical phenomenon than could have been suspected at the time.... and then just absences (nothing at all on ska, bluebeat, Jamaican pop).
Here's another entry that is date-stamped but an intriguing read for those interested in electronic music and future-pop.
The fact that Lilian's surname was Roxon is freaky - like she was fated to write about rock.
She died tragically young, in 1973, of an asthma attack, aged just forty.
Speaking of tension (carrying over from my comment on your SOPHIE post) - would-be prognosticators about tech and art never seem to be sure if the result is going to be more human involvement (remixing and 'Sunday producers', in this example) or less ('machines will be programmed so that combinations of different sounds will be left to chance') - probably because they're unsure if more or less human input would be good, or necessary (the current AI pitch - 'decenteralized, democratic control' by users of gigantic purely statistical confabulators of other people's data run in energy intensive industrial centers for the benefit of a tiny class of wealthy men - seems to be some kind of absurd climax to that)
ReplyDeleteNever heard of this book or Lillian Roxon for that matter but I am already fascinated by it / her writing style. I'm going to find a way to get a copy.
ReplyDelete