Last week, the noxious Barack Obama wheeled out crusty rocker Bruce Springsteen to help celebrate the opening of his library, an appropriately awful building that looks like a concrete fungus or a brutalist tribute to Peyronie’s disease. The Boss has been at it for nearly a half century and looks it, with that kind of elderly facial tightness you get from a dowager on her seventh facelift. He reminds one of those human-skin warning signs staked out to scare mute humans away from the forbidden zone in the original Planet of the Apes. Appropriately, you probably don’t like Bruce Springsteen unless you were around to watch Charlton Heston on the big screen.
And that brings up the subject of today’s column – whatever happened to rock? I don’t mean rock ‘n’ roll in the sense of Chuck Berry or the like. I mean the kind of masculine guitar-based music that people of our generation – most of us late boomers to Gen Xers – grew up listening to back in an era when the local station would unironically announce the 10th month was “Rocktober” and throw down a super set of Guns N’ Roses.
Oh yeah, those were the days. Now, those of us who rock are not all the same. There are various species of rock. Among the sects are the heavy metal guys, the classic rock guys, and the guys like me, alternative rock guys who grew up in Southern California listening to KROQ, 91X, or San Francisco’s legendary The Quake. The last station is what changed me – I was parking cars for Dollar Rent-A-Car at SFO, and every once in a while, you’d catch one with an FM radio. At the time, I was treading water in a miasma of ponderous blah rock. I mean Def Leppard, Pink Floyd, that sort of thing. Yeah, I know they have their charms, but they weren’t doing much for me. So when I got lucky enough to get a car with an FM radio, I’d search around, and I found The Quake over Christmas vacation in 1984. It was a revelation.
I heard something I’d never heard before, a noise coming out of the speakers that blew my mind and then blew it again when I found out it was generated by Johnny Marr’s guitar and not some kind of keyboard synthesizer. “How Soon Is Now?” by The Smiths was like nothing I had ever heard before. And then the DJ spun the thumping, rollicking “I Will Dare” by the Replacements off their legendary album Let It Be, and my mind was positively blown. I dumped all my sludge rock albums and never looked back.
They say the music of your youth is what stays with you, that you never really change after your 20s, and that’s kind of true. I still go back to the well on 80s alternative rock, whether it’s Hüsker Dü or the Jesus and Mary Chain or The Clash. And others of my generation go for their own thing, whether it’s the metal of Mötley Crüe or the grunge of Soundgarden or the light dork rock of Bon Jovi or the painfully lame sonic onanism of Springsteen, whose appeal is entirely lost on me. But it’s still rock. We rock. Our generation rocks.
But there’s no more rock. Rock doesn’t exist anymore as a viable major genre. You’ll find it on the oldies circuit, playing Indian casinos, and county fairs. In rock’s place, you’ve got country. It has guitars and drums, too, and it’s sort of like rock in the sense that it has guitars and drums, but it’s definitely its own thing. A lot of people like it, and I’m not going to disrespect them. Some people like seafood, and I don’t understand that either. But it isn’t rock.
Then there’s rap and hip-hop. I don’t even know what to make of those genres. It means nothing to me and does nothing for me. People start talking about Kanye West – I think that was his name about 15 names ago – and I’ve got no idea what they’re talking about. You could literally play every song he ever wrote, and I’d just sit there, shaking my head, saying “Nope, never ever heard of it” – and if I played the best of the Psychedelic Furs, which would take a while because they rock, I’d get the same response back.
Now, I’m not trying to do the old man shouts at clouds thing about how those kids and their music make no sense, but the fact is that the kids’ music makes no sense, at least not to me. And I’m sure I could return the favor. If I cranked Joy Division’s tune “Love Will Tear Us Apart” to a kid today, unless he was some sort of Goth who went out of his way to look for jump-off-a-bridge music, I would probably get the same kind of blank stare back that I would give if someone played me the latest ballad by Cardi B.
Why did rock die? What happened to it? The same thing that happened to a lot of our culture, and when I say “our culture,” I mean our specific late boomer/Gen X suburban culture. Kids don’t drive around in Trans Ams anymore. They don’t cruise up and down El Camino Real (Sam Mateo in da house). They don’t go to bars. Hell, they barely drink. And sex? That’s right out the window. Look at our spiraling birth rate – when rock was around, we were worried about preventing pregnancies.
Rock was a key component of that. Rock is a uniquely masculine type of music that was perfect for the majority white youth culture of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. But that culture doesn’t exist anymore, not the way it did when we were coming up. Minorities play a significantly larger role in the culture. As a percentage, instead of being about 80% of the youth, the kind of suburban white kids who ruled youth culture are now about 30% or 40% of it, maybe. And there’s another thing: sexual roles. Rock music was about studs in jeans, cranking tunes, pounding brews, and trying to get some action. But what was normal masculinity 40 years ago is toxic masculinity today. Women play a significantly different role in the culture. Sure, there were women rockers – I love me some Go-Go’s and my Bangles, but they were novelties. I’m not trying to disrespect them – again, I dig their music – but they were far outside the norm. The norm was a guy with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, a Jack Daniel’s bottle within reach, and a guitar rocking the rafters with its riffs. Most kids today probably get a note from their doctor saying they’re not allowed to listen to loud music because it might make them feel unsafe.
It’s sad because rock music is cool, but equally important, rock music symbolizes something. It symbolizes rebellion over conformity, fun over finger-wagging, and awesomeness over the kind of mediocrity we see all around us today. Rock was then what conservatism is now – a middle finger to a bland, oppressive, and obnoxious cultural elite.We can’t let rock die, but sadly, it’s on life support. I’m going to do my part. In the spirit of unity that will bring together all the threads of rockdom, because everybody from every denomination of rock likes The Who, I’m going to crank “Baba O’Reilly”
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