Culture  /  Comment

The Cruel Truth About Rock And Roll

A lifelong fan reflects on how sexual exploitation is part of rock's DNA.
Rogelio A. Galaviz C./Flickr

Loving rock and roll requires engaging with a terrible reality, one that the music itself has not solved and sometimes helped its fans to forget. It's this: The real erotic freedom many women, and young people in general, have experienced through rock and roll is always partial and precarious. As great as it feels for a girl to let the noise and rhythm surge through her body, that body still moves within a world where others wield all kinds of weapons to contain you. And they may do so even if they're great artists, "good" guys, even legends. They may do so even if, unlike the clearly amoral Kim Fowley, they mean to do their best.

It's crucial that the truth that Jackie Fuchs has raised, truth that keeps resurfacing, not be turned against young women. Society needed rock and roll partly because the fact that young people are sexual had been kept under wraps in ways that stigmatized the very people whom moral arbiters meant to protect. But young people are also insecure in so many ways: in their minds, in their social status, in their very bodies. Becoming aware of their vulnerability necessarily changes what we can accept within the wondrous spaces that music can build. The painful knowledge of that tenderness, so easily misused, is what I carry around within my mind as a lifelong fan of loud guitars and the heat they generate — a woman who was once a high school girl getting felt up in the bathroom of a Seattle all-ages club by a local bass player who abandoned me when I almost threw up a White Russian all over his red New Wave pants. My free will put me in that bathroom. I know the rush of feeling sexy and young and wanted. I know what can come next.