Week 16: The Black Keys - El Camino (2011)

"To me, this award means a lot because it shows that the human element of music is what's important. Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that's the most important thing for people to do. It's not about being perfect; it's not about sounding absolutely correct; it's not about what goes on in a computer. It's about what goes on in here [the heart] and what goes on in here [the head]."

-          Dave Grohl, accepting the award for Best Rock Performance at the 2012 Grammy Music Awards

Considering how often I bitch about music not having enough emotion or authenticity, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of you were starting to wonder why I don’t actually post actual rock music. Aside from The Woods and The Moon & Antarctica, I’ve barely even discussed rock genres in a direct manner. Most of what I have said about such music is in historical or comparative terms, and I’m sure that can be vaguely infuriating to those of you in the audience who are asking yourself why, exactly, I don’t try to enjoy myself a bit.

Aside from the fact that I’m English by blood and therefore utterly incapable of true joy and/or happiness, there’s the simple fact that my self-imposed limitation of new bands (post-90s, basically) and new albums (post-2000) has drastically limited my options for good old-fashioned rock music to discuss. As Dave Grohl inadvertently demonstrated at the 2012 Grammys when his excellent speech (quoted above) was cut-off by an LMFAO song, reducing him to hollow yells of “Long live rock n roll,”, rock has been largely irrelevant to modern pop music for a long time. For proof, look no further than the competition Foo Fighters had for Best Rock Performance: “Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall” by Coldplay, “Down By The Water” by The Decembrists, “The Cave” by Mumford & Sons, and “Lotus Flower” by Radiohead, none of which I would unflinchingly label as ‘rock’ music.

Let’s compare each to Grohl’s speech. Both Coldplay and Radiohead make heavy use of synths in the songs in question, and some effect has been applied to Chris Martin’s vocals for sure. As for Radiohead, I like “Lotus Flower” but there’s no way in hell that’s a rock song. The Decembrists song, while honestly quite good (I skipped The King Is Dead completely, and that seems to have been a mistake, honestly) has very heavy bluegrass and, as always, folk elements. You could call it alternative rock, sure, but it seems like a greater stretch than the Grammys would have had back in the 90s. Ditto to “The Cave”, which is remarkably similar to what The Decembrists might sound like with less people, slicker production, and some of those Queen-style vocal overdub choirs.

Rock has always had a vague definition, but that definition generally includes, at the very least, electric guitars, distortion, loud vocals, and heavy percussion. I may not particularly like “Walk”, but it certainly fits that description. It even uses that whole quiet/loud dynamic that Grohl probably learned from Kurt Cobain, who learned it from Black Francis, who himself probably learned it from baroque music (it was called terraced dynamics back then, in case you were curious).

The fact that I don’t like “Walk”, which was apparently the best rock song of 2011 (because the Grammys are indisputable as well as infallible) points to the reason why I don’t post much in the way of rock music here: I don’t really like modern rock. What that really means is that I don’t like the Foo Fighters, who are destined to be remembered in the same manner as Elvis, Chuck Berry, Nirvana, or U2: as the defining rock musicians of their particular era. I don’t have an issue with it, as I genuinely respect how Grohl has managed to keep chugging along in a pop scene that is as distant from his style as humanly possible, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

I hate myself for saying it, but I tend to gravitate more towards music to the left of the dial when it comes to rock. Nowadays anyway; my childhood and early teens were spent purely on the radio, exposing to my unimpeachable classics like “Drops of Jupiter”, “Superman (It’s Not Easy)”, and “Desert Rose”, all of which are technically part of the rock genre, simply because they aren’t dance, rap, or alternative. Buying those three albums also convinced me to abandon CDs entirely for about 5 years, but that’s a different story altogether.

The last big peak for mainstream rock in terms of quality, spunk, and ineffable coolness, was the garage rock revival scene of the early-00s, otherwise known as the period of time where you could start a conversation with a complete stranger just by humming the bassline to “Seven Nation Army”. Much like grunge, the garage revival gave rock fans a good year or so of smug superiority over everyone else, and allowed Jack White to climb his way into the tiers of rock superstars (not just everyone gets to play guitar with Jimmy Page and David Evans).

The only other band to have truly survived that scene (no, not The Strokes) was The Black Keys. The main reason for that survival is probably the indisputable fact that the band has steadily improved over their entire career, both commercially and, to my knowledge, critically. Their critical reached its peak with their most recent album, El Camino; in spite of its practical invisibility on year-end lists and award shows (it was released December of 2011 which means it basically got counter as a 2012 album by the music industry, which also robbed it of getting put on any year-end lists or getting a Grammy; see also The XX's debut) it's been widely hailed as a kind of Hail Mary from the fading rock world.

Fittingly, The Black Keys serve as a kind of bizarro-version of The White Stripes. Although both bands have only two members, The Keys are less deliberately minimalist than The Stripes; you could be easily forgiven for believing the former is made up of at least three members, and they, in fact, typically tour with two other musicians to fill out their live sound (The White Stripes pointedly didn't, sticking with their pure duet).

The Keys also have a much stronger blues and classic rock influence than Jack White's band, with the former element popping up most notably in the Chulahoma EP, a tribute to blues musician Junior Kimbourgh. The classic rock influence, meanwhile, is all over El Camino, from the ZZ Top-influenced title to a blatant copy and paste of the riff from Tom Petty's "Mary Jane's Last Dance" to "Little Black Submarines". Although Grohl and the Foo Fighters share some of that influence, The Black Keys seem more freewheeling, arguably because they aren't a band with any truly obvious ambitions.

It's in that bizarre populism that The Black Keys have the closest resemblance to the punk and garage movements that they're supposedly reviving. In spite of the fact that they've toured several arenas by this point in their career and have appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone for their big interview, I can't help but view them as down-to-earth, likable fellas (much like Stillwater, come to think of it). This might be because, unlike the other big modern rock bands of today, The Black Keys have managed to achieve ubiquity without really polishing, or even changing, their sound. It's enough to make you wonder why this album, exactly, managed to achieve such a broad appeal.

Some of that easy acceptability can be attributed to the success of their last major single, "Tighten Up", and its host album (Brothers, which was recently certified Platinum by the RIAA), but a large part of this album’s success is likely down to its simple quality. In discussing why music from the outside of the norm gets popular, many critics tend to ascribe success to environmental factors rather than the album in question. Descriptors like “rebellion”, “Alternative”, and “unusual” get used with abandon, often overshadowing the one truly fundamental quality to such albums: that they’re simply good.

While music that ascribes to whatever the chart’s flavor of the week is can often coast off the familiarity people will have with their music (see: the last years of disco), music that comes out of the college or alternative circuit generally has to rely on sheer quality to break through into the charts. The classic modern example is, of course, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, which made it to number 1 on the charts through its own brutal power (Geffen famously denied having much to do with it, saying they didn’t even have time to get their marketing plans started).

I have a testy relationship with radio at best, so I can’t claim any real knowledge about how much El Camino and its three singles (“Lonely Boy”, “Gold On The Ceiling”, and “Dead And Gone”) got rotated. In an ideal world they would have been played even more than “The Cave”, the closest thing to rock I’ve heard on Top 40 radio outside of Adele songs (yes, really), but I doubt that’s the case. Feel free to argue against that if you like.

Taking that as an assumption, I’d argue that El Camino is one of the few mainstream rock albums in recent years operating more as an album than as two singles surrounded by filler/single-hopefuls. While throwing a song in to a playlist may not be particularly impressive for the listener, as an album El Camino builds upon itself and keeps its mood and style going in a way that simply doesn’t get done in the single focused radio realm. The fact that it manages to do that while maintaining variety, some manner of edge, and an earthy quality is impressive, and why I hope that this becomes the face of modern rock.