Rock is Dead, They Say

Rock is Dead, They Say - I'm going to start this with an invocation. "Lord - I'm starting this at 5AM. I hope it makes sense by the time I'm done".

So it's 13 days until the Springsteen concert. So - beyond being merely a great time, why does it matter to me at all?

I was talking last night with a friend of mine. 20 years ago next month (oh, shut up) we came to St. Paul to see our mutual idols, The Who, at the old St. Paul Civic. Bear in mind, we were both from North Dakota, so when we said it was the best concert we'd ever seen, we had roughly nothing to compare it to (I'd seen Molly Hatchet the previous fall, but that's only because I ran a spotlight. Most painful $35 I ever earned).

This, of course, was the beginning of the Eighties, one of the most vibrantly creative periods in music. Punk, so said the legend, had kicked music out of its seventies slumber; in the Seventies, the charts were dominated by dozey fossils like the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt, and bands like Dire Straits and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and the Police were considered vaguely subversive; by 1983, the chart positions had flipped, and the vaguely subversive was mainstream. The second British Invasion was just kicking off, with Big Country, the Alarm, and especially U2 all just starting to make inroads in the US. The Cars and Elvis Costello had gone from edgy to old school, already. Prince was young and provocative and hadn't progressed through the icon, wierd guy, and little black Elvis stages.

When I worked at an oldies station in the early nineties, the program director quantified what I'd already figured out qualitatively; "People tend to be most attached to the music that was in vogue when they reached their own sexual maturity". Yes, of course that explains, partly, why I still have a soft spot in my heart for Stiff Little Fingers and Cactus World News and Southside Johnny. I always figured there was something more to it than that.

Marketing? Sure, it could be. I graduated from high school a couple of days before MTV started cablecasting. I shared in the first first generation of the McDonaldization of pop culture. And as a hipster (by the local standards, anyway) at the time, I was both "above it" (if only in my mind) and inevitably immersed in it.

But for whatever reason, I was like the protagonist in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, the part John Cusack played; I came up with top five song lists to set off virtually eveything in my life. I still have them, scrawled into notebooks that are still stashed in boxes in my basement; little lists of musical tokens to crushes or categories of emotions or girlfriends or the sheer anticipation or joy at finally leaving my hometown.

The story from there on is probably familiar to everyone that's made the transition from "hipster" to "daddy". I didn't keep up with the latest albums (Albums! I didn't even buy a CD player until 1996!). I fell behind on my favorite, but not quite A-list artists (I haven't bought a John Mellencamp album since, er, 1991, or a U2 disc since Achtung, Baby).

Fast forward...er, slow forward, to last night. My friend, with whom I came to the Big City to see The Who in 1982, had been thinking about seeing them again at the Target Center next week. "But after Entwistle died, it's like, three days later, they're on the road again!...It's like it's all about making money!" And my friend and I both know that it's always about making money, we didn't just fall off the turnip truck, we've both been in one kind of show biz or another. But the cynicism of it struck him. "It's been nine years since Pete Townsend released an album of original stuff - it's all been repackaging old material!".

...the way that the Sex Pistols' current tour struck me. Yes, they're touring again - with Glen Matlock on Bass (since Sid Vicious is still dead). And the crowd seems to be a bunch of, ahem, late-thirty and early-forty-somethings, going through the motions in much the same way that they did 25 years ago, spitting and spraying beer onstage - in much the same way as people at concerts for the latest incarnations of REO Speedwagon or Styx or Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Moody Blues soldier on into infinity, bolstered by waves of faceless sidemen, playing to people who still wave their Bics or yell for Freebird like they did the the seventies.

I could be a curmudgeon and grouse about how music today doesn't mean what it did - but that wouldn't be true. It does. To anyone who needs a channel for their hyperactive adolescent emotions, it's still right there, more than ever, marketed directly at id-level. Music today bores me stiff, mostly - I haven't seen a band I liked since Marah, and that's been two years now.

And yet, I'm looking forward to the Springsteen concert, only 325 hours from now, like I'm 19 and wired on emotion, again.

Sure, Springsteen is one of few artists that has managed to "keep" well. But it's more than him. It's me. And it's us - or, more to the point, the "us" that feels the same way.

Which is what it's about, I think, more than the band or the music they play.

In our wired, crowded-yet-decentralized world, community is a hard thing to find. Some never do. And yet I've found it; the community of beer-soaked post-adolescents at the Replacements; the brotherhood of wry, isolated true believers at Richard Thompson gigs; the international order of the earnest watching the Alarm.

And, probably, the eternal throng of those of us who still plug along but realize that "it ain't no sin to be glad [they are] alive" - indeed, are lucky they didn't die "before they got old" (I wonder if that line embarasses Townsend these days?), two weeks from last night.

The musician matters. The community that gathers around the musician - as temporary, illusory or intoxicated as it might be - matters more.

Posted by Mitch at September 17, 2002 07:09 AM