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Archives
Looking back |
Dick Clark was called the eternal teenager; the guy who never aged. He was called that right up until he pulled the plug on Bandstand and quietly distanced himself from rock and roll. Somehow, Kurt Loder, already looking more world-weary than Clark in retirement manages to deliver the latest news about the Spice Girls with a relatively serious expression on his face. I'm amazed any time I read about a '90s band under the byline of the some rock scribe I've been reading since high school. It all makes me wonder how long is a life in rock and roll. It also makes me wonder how long is the life of rock and roll. I've been absorbed in rock music for 30 years, and for the first time I can imagine an end to it for me. Each week, new releases used to be my treasure trove. Now I've lost interest. I still find a few great new records each year, but they've gotten fewer and further between. The effort discovering requires has become a case of diminishing returns. A part of me is ready to let it go, to stop paying attention to releases, signings and especially trends. I used to dismiss old baby boomers that swore that nothing worth a shit came out in the '70s...'80s...'90s... Nonsense. I knew better. Great records come out every year, and any student of the art form will recognize them. Yet now even I wonder if rock and roll hasn't run its course. Sure, first-rate songwriting like that of Ben Folds or Freedy Johnston that incorporates a rock and roll vocabulary will always be find its way to me. Songwriting of that caliber transcends fashion as long as it avoids exploiting it. The rest of this year's fair was just so much trodding the same old ground. There is just nothing that's new and good. I feel like I've heard it all before, and what I haven't heard just sucks. I've always rejected any suggestion that the youth of the late '60s and early '70s were imbued with any special character traits. The social milieu in which they dwelt was a fluke of demographics combined with several accidents of timing. An enormous generation took their swings at a time of unprecedented middle-class affluence, education and opportunity. Then this generation, with its social conscience raised by these advantages was threatened with eminent destruction by the war in Southeast Asia. At the very moment in its development when rock and roll had to become more interesting musically, it passed into the hands of a generation that wanted to reinvent the world. The notion that they could comes not from their greater commitment to the future, but ironically from the very environment from which they rebelled. It's from their position of privilege they formed the illusion they could build utopia. The result, large numbers of creative young people that believed they spearheaded a movement produced a hell of a lot of great music. Subsequent generations didn't lack their vision, merely their illusions. Cynicism, the natural outgrowth of the failed promise of the Woodstock Nation, is thin gruel on which to nourish art. But it played for a while, a good long while. The '70s and '80s saw a multitude of artists that made post-hippie bad attitude an appealing source of catharsis. Now, all the irony and angst sounds like a broken record. I no longer want my MTV. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm becoming my own worst nightmare; too old to rock and roll. I used to harbor a theory that everyone thought the best music was whatever they heard when they were 19. That's certainly when rock and roll had the greatest influence on my life. I think we embrace music with a fervor at an age when it comes to us as the first mass-communication we recognize as coming from our peers. It's not school, church or family-based. It seems separate from the straight media we see. Then it becomes the soundtrack of our youth; coming out of car radios, at school dances, at parties, in bars, live in clubs and at concerts. The popular songs of today are not woven into the fabric of my life. There's no way that some 25-year-old philosopher is going to fire my imagination at 37 like one could back then. Even if that weren't so, no Marilyn Manson or 311 track I hear 20 years from now will carry me back to that great trip to the supermarket in '97 I'll never forget. No music I hear at this age can ever be a permanent bridge back to the days when I burned with the fire of youth. Maybe I'm a snob. Maybe I just can't relate to the concerns of people just realizing for the first time how life's gonna be. I don't expect them to grasp my world. So I'll mine the past, listen to triple-A radio to keep a hand in and my ears open. Maybe rock and roll will throw off sparks again. That'd be great. I'll still stumble across a half-dozen great new releases each year. They'll give me the same rush I've been getting since I was eight years old. I'm finding it easier to imagine rock and roll tied to a specific era, like beat poetry, impressionist painting, the Victorian novel and bebop. I don't enjoy predicting the end of rock and roll, but I don't see the future in it. Perhaps I lack vision. I've been reading a lot of discussion of why CD sales were so miserable in '97. I've never been one to give to much credit to the consuming public, but maybe people are just getting wise to the emperor's threads. I know I'm prone to fits of pessimism and grandiose pronouncements. I'm probably all wet, and maybe 1998 will be an amazing year for rock and roll. Here's hoping. Keeping an open mind, that'll be my New Year's resolution.
Michael Newman writes music reviews for the Topeka Capital-Journal.
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