Fact or fake? Couldn’t make it up
When Rock Fiction briefly flared, it planned an authoritative encyclopaedia of a fantasy world
OVER A decade ago, I launched a website called Rock Fiction that intended to combine both prose writing which integrated musical threads into a fictional fabric but also a catalogue of plausible artists and bands who never existed beyond the crevices of my mind and outside the realm of those webpages.
But the aim was, like all good writing of the imagination, to construct a convincing unreality that print fans with a pop sensibility and an interest in the idea of a unified musico-literary environment would recognise and enjoy. Readers could well be ravers, writers might easily be rappers, rhymers could be critics, DJs could turn out to be journos.
It tacitly made the point there was an inter-connection between words on the page and sounds on the stage: classic novels and epic verse might inspire songwriters, fantasy rockers and ancient blues heroes could be the starting point for groundbreaking novels.
After all, the Jazz Age had spawned its own literature, the Beat Generation had been obsessed with the radical stylings of bebop, folk had sparked Guthrie and Fariña to pick up the pen, psychedeliac typists such as Kesey and Wolfe, Thompson, Southern and Didion were like hip rock scribes, punk triggered a wave of basement poetry and gutter novels, club culture buzzed on the short stories of the Chemical Generation, hip hop snapped its own literary shtick and Nashville cradled a thousand cornfield fables.
And, as if to confirm this hunch about the value of intertextuality between the two different art forms, in the interim major figures from the world of popular music were awarded versions of the biggest prizes in the literary universe: Dylan’s Nobel prize and Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer!
The net project I conceived back in 2010 was fun but all too time-consuming to have much more than a few weeks’ life. I briefly revive it here, because there seems some logic, I hope, for a newsletter called Rock and the Beat Generation to have an interest in something called Rock Fiction. You can read a little about it below and even visit what still exists of this internet resource…
Rock Fiction is an alternative history of rock’n’roll, a speculative re-telling of the frontline mythologies and buried back-stories that enliven the narratives of popular music.
Its creator is Simon Warner, a writer, broadcaster and lecturer who teaches Popular Music Studies at Leeds University. He is interested in the interface between rock and literature, notions of the factual and fictional, the autobiographical and the novelistic. Why do we never consider a lyric fact or fiction? Or a poem for that matter?
Why do so many of the greats of rock culture – from Dylan to Lennon, Ray Davies to Patti Smith, Joe Strummer to Kurt Cobain, Joni Mitchell to ani difranco, Michael Franti to Ryan Adams, Chuck D to Pete Doherty – align themselves with the literary?
Furthermore, why do we think of rock’n’roll’s passage as one so often built on myth – from Robert Johnson to Jim Morrison, Woody Guthrie to David Bowie, the Rolling Stones to Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin to Jimi Hendrix, James Brown to Prince.
But Rock Fiction steers clear of conventional wisdoms, sidesteps the received notions and, instead, interweaves those constantly combative components, the real and the fantastic, the credible and the unbelievable, to construct a counterfactual history of the music we love.
For more, visit: rockfiction.wordpress.com