Rating wars

Who rocks, who rots, who rules

by Douglas Wolk

Ronald Thomas Chettle

"Imagine spending a year and a half to get a B+ from some asshole at the Village Voice. Fuck you. I don't need you to tell me I'm good." Ranting about music critics and one particular system of rating albums on his live Take No Prisoners (1978), Lou Reed had a point: no matter how it's done -- with numbers, letters, stars, or Alternative Press's old five-finger system -- ratings are a potentially cruel and sometimes callous by-product of reviewing an artist's work. They're also an intensely useful tool, both for magazines and newspapers that have less and less space to review each of the escalating number of CDs that hit stores every week and for music consumers who are confronted with the same flood of new releases and just want to know which ones are worth their time. Like it or not, people want to know who rocks, who rots, and who rules.

That's the ingeniously simple solution to the music-rating problem proposed on the new CD Rock, Rot & Rule (Stereo Laffs, Box 1530, Woodbridge, New Jersey 07095). The disc is a recording of a semi-legendary 1997 radio interview (from East Orange's WFMU) with one Ronald Thomas Clontle, author of the book Rock, Rot & Rule: The Ultimate Argument Settler. As Clontle explains, he's assembled a music guide that does away with complicated grading schemes by providing an easy-to-grasp list of who rules, who rocks, and who rots. The Who, Puff Daddy, Everclear, and Black Uhuru, for example, "rule," and so do Madness ("they started ska, so that automatically gives them rulership"). Ratt, Nirvana, and Guided by Voices "rock," as do the Beatles (who would rule, he explains, but "they had a lot of bad songs"). Kansas and Mary J. Blige rot, along with David Bowie ("too many changes") and Stereolab ("there's no guitar").

The ratings in Rock, Rot & Rule were arrived at by surveying customers who came into the coffee shop where Clontle works in Lawrence, Kansas, though he claims to have conducted additional polling on his travels. "I went abroad," he tells radio host Tom Scharpling, then corrects himself: "Not abroad, but to Florida, where my grandmother lives." And when Scharpling begins quizzing Clontle about individual bands, the conversation sails off to the ionosphere.

"Shonen Knife?", Scharpling asks.

"Refresh my memory," Clontle responds.

"Kinda Ja . . . uh, I guess you wouldn't know them."

"Jazz? If it's jazz, it rots."

"So jazz as a medium -- "

"Well, there are bands that have jazz elements that I would put in the `rule' category. Like Yes."

Inevitably, the phones start ringing. Listener after baffled listener asks what Clontle means by one aesthetic outrage or another and suggests that he get his facts straight by, say, consulting the Trouser Press Record Guide. Clontle tries to defend his absurd position by asserting, over and over again, that his book is "the ultimate argument settler": you can say what you like about Neil Young, but the fact is that he rots -- that's the will of the people.

Ronald Thomas Clontle is, of course, an invention (as is his book, though the radio show documented on the CD really did happen). In real life, Clontle is Jon Wurster, long-time drummer for the Chapel Hill-based indie-punk band Superchunk. There are a couple of in-jokes on the disc for those who know that -- notably a jab at Our Noise, the dreadful Jeff Gomez indie-rock novel named after a Superchunk song. But Rock, Rot & Rule's larger comedy of errors is based on the universal tension between the artist's need to create, the observer's need to rate creations, and the fan's need to dispute the ratings. The arguments the callers raise with Clontle are almost exclusively over his dubious grasp of the facts (i.e., Shonen Knife are Japanese, not jazz). He's repeatedly criticized for the obvious shallowness of his musical knowledge. But, unlike Reed, none of Clontle/Wurster's call-in detractors takes issue with the validity of rating albums in general, or even with Clontle's three-point classification system. Maybe they know that the danger of a real Ultimate Argument Settler is that half the fun of music -- or any other kind of art -- is in arguing about it.