The interview was informative. It was not pompous. Nor was it overly polite and hence not boring. It didn’t make a big happy consensus family of the music-art scene which the interviewer and musician intended to address. Neither the musician nor the interviewer exceptionalised the subject of rock music and the contemporary ventures that the field tends to attract, both observing how connected music is with other kinds of art practices and the machinations of contemporary capitalism. As a piece of discursive knowledge, I’ve retained more from the interview in question than all the other chapters and essays I read that year.

The musician used the term rock dog with some critical tact, like a candid take on what goes on and how what’s going on isn’t always shredding and bad-arse, however much the authoritative idiom-manufacturers say it does, taking for granted that you agree. I guess to shred and be bad-arse it helps if certain contextual things are aligned, plugged in, at play. The slippery business of having the attitude and knowing how to shake it seemed implicit in the argument. Further, the rock dog knows intuitively the gains and loses that have come before, as too the systemic barbs of cliché. The rock dog doesn’t go in for staving off boredom as a simple end in itself, the rock dog’s moment is defined by how uniquely effective its disruption of boredom and predictability (as defining symptoms of the relative cultural bloc) are expressed and interpreted.