The sociology of rock and post-rock has been based on three concepts: the star, the sound, and the scene.So, Simon, remind me again who coined the phrase "post-rock"? "You can run, but you can't hide" etc etc, heh heh.
What's interesting is that someone in 1968, practically at the birth of the thing called "rock", could already have been thinking in terms of what had already come next, and just goes to show that the seemingly instantaneous fracturing/fragmenting of musical genres isn't confined to South London and/or the Aughties.
(I am, as you have gathered, making it my business to read, or re-read, all of Ellen's New Yorker columns. They are uniformly excellent. Period pieces, sure, but from an unusual source - not the usual hippie-centric pot-driven reveries/ranting of Rolling Stone, nor the POV of "The Man" a la, say, Time Magazine, but, rather, appearing in a curious place inside of the establishment with an editor who had enough nous to have someone writing about a particular artform who actually knows something about that artform As It Is Happening, and not merely observing from the comfort of their glass box. Or whatever. (See also Pauline Kael, the magazine's film critic at that time.))
