the old man and the C-minus: aging rockstars and the closing music-fan mind Oct 20 '03    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Music The Dirtchamber Sessions, Vol. 1 by The Prodigy From $11 Jersey Boys [Original Broadway Cast Recording] by Original Broadway Cast From $8 The Bottom Line I recommend buying General Music, but treating General Music Reviews, including mine, with intense suspicion. Slate, an online magazine that often answers the question “What would Time and Newsweek be like if they weren’t trivial and stupid?”, posted a really horrible article about R.E.M. the other day: trivial, stupid, and mean. ( http://slate.msn.com/id/2089925/ ) To its arguable credit the author (Chris Suellentrop) maintains an ironic distance from his stupid claims, but here’s the article’s question: “Are R.E.M. an over-the-hill nostalgia act?”. Now, in this specific case, the question itself is preposterous, narrowly American. Reveal, R.E.M.’s latest, was the best-selling album in the world for two weeks running, and has sold more copies worldwide than any of their prior albums. Several European friends have explained to me that “E-bow (the Letter)” and “the Great Beyond” – singles that marked R.E.M.’s commercial death in America – were exactly the singles that propelled them to worldwide stardom. So the question is dumb, because an act whose current songs are its most popular is, by definition, not a nostalgia act. But if the question hadn’t been stupid? The offensive part was the answers. They are a perfect example of the hostile double-standard. Albums in which R.E.M. changed its sound are derided as “renunciation’s of R.E.M.’s rock band status”, or if that doesn’t work, as “midlife attempts to reclaim it”, or if that doesn’t work, as “attempts to combine both approaches” (a midlife renunciation of the renunciation of the renunciation of rock?), or as “failed art-rock”. On the other hand, if they don’t experiment, they will produce a “mimicry of their best work, one that’s unsatisfying because it’s an imitation”. Or: Joe Jackson, in his (quite interesting) autobiography, says fans still regularly rush up to him and say that “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” is a fantastic song, the best thing he’s ever done. “Is She Really…”, in case you don’t know it, is a whiny, primitive guitar-pop hit he released back in 1979, sounding quite like Elvis Costello did back then; it still gets nostalgia radio play. Since then Joe Jackson has recorded two more albums of whiny, marginally less-primitive guitar-pop; a bop/jazz record; albums of Latino music; moody multi-genre soundtrack music; an adultly-composed failed-sellout pop album; two attempts (the first I think a dud, the second brilliant) to merge classical music on even terms with pop, rock, and electronic dance music; a symphony; and a smart, character-driven album about New York City that weaves all of his Latino, jazz, and classical expertise into pop form. Even if “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” really _is_ his career highlight – which to me is ridiculous, but even if – how could hundreds of fans not realize how incredibly insulting it is to tell Joe that? How could they see “You were worthwhile when you were 23, old man” as praise, and not a punch in the gut? Elvis Costello is a similar story, although at a more famous and respected level. Many critics, though few radio stations, were happy to welcome Brutal Youth (in 1994) and When I Was Cruel (2002) as triumphant “returns to form” recalling his sarcastic, bratty late-1970’s debut, and a fair number were willing to defend other recent moves like the elegaic pre-rock pop of All This Useless Beauty and the Burt Bacharach collaboration Painted from Memory. What’s missing, though, is the brigade that will suggest that Elvis Costello’s career peak is _now_: that perhaps over time his gift for melody has strengthened, his lyrics have become less judgmental and more interesting, that he’s gone from vague stylistic appropriations to true understanding and use of pop’s history. Now, to show my cards, that happens to be roughly my own opinion. My favorite of his albums, 1989’s theatrical and kaleidoscopic Spike, was the first Elvis Costello album to be generally treated as proof of his decline, and I think his “returns to form” kick his original form’s behind. But what if I didn’t think that? There’s still a huge, proven market for grandiose pop arrangements or for small, intricately-crafted tunes; in theory there’s no reason Elvis C. couldn’t be selling millions to the people who purchase Phantom of the Opera, or Norah Jones, or Celine Dion, any of whom might realize not only “This is what I like”, but “This is a much better version of what I like”. And yet, it’s inevitable that he won’t sell those millions, nor will he force his old fans to re-think. *************** There are exceptions to this rule. Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Neil Young, all of whom were established legends by the end of the 1960’s, are able to get older and older while still having their music treated as art: Dylan’s Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft even won their years’ editions of the Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics’ poll. Even for their era, they’re exceptions: no one has taken seriously new work by Paul McCartney or Page & Plant or the Kinks for decades now, even if they’ve liked it. Even David Bowie, after recording two commercial pop albums in the eighties, has been condescended to ever since: every weird or adventurous move greeted with an “Aww, how cute! He’s still trying!”. So what makes Dylan and Reed and Young different? Well, here’s what I can see: they play simple, folk-influenced music, and their voices were already craggy and shot-to-hell before they were 30. Johnny Cash gets the same treatment. Critics talk a lot about “authenticity” and “honesty” and “bullheadedness” in discussing them. They come across, that is, as artists able to make music for decade after decade without learning anything. It’s the true honest music of the earth: it’s a pagan thing, you wouldn’t understand. But it’s an sixties-pagan thing. Dan Bern and Richard Shindell would be the obvious young inheritors of that craggy storytelling agelessness, yet they have no standing to begin with: they’re fairly well-known in folk circles, and nowhere else. Tom Petty, a seventies’ child, never stopped reusing the same basic chords, and my favorites of his albums (Full Moon Fever and Wildflowers) came more than a decade into his career. He fell out of favor by then. One other exception, who debuted in 1973, should be mentioned: Tom Waits, who first sold platinum with 1999's the Mule Variations. Waits became far _more_ popular and respected with age. Two oddities about him stand out: one, his music was very conservative for his first few albums, and got steadily more radical over his career. No one had made an album like Bone Machine before 1992, and its bleary, percussive, distorted fervor was hard to miss no matter how casually you tried to listen. Second, his voice is even more broken and ruined than Bob Dylan’s. He’s the salt ore of the earth, dusty and rocky, and you’d break your teeth pouring him on your popcorn. *************** So do I really think we’re missing much, in cutting loose the oldsters and setting them adrift at sea? Yes. I totally include myself here. If Robyn Hitchcock’s 15th album Jewels for Sophia is my new favorite of his and my new favorite album of 1999 – both true – I’m that much more bothered by how close I came to never owning it. I already owned a lot of Robyn Hitchcock albums. Here was one more, and the general reaction, even among those Hitchcock fans who knew it was there at all, was “oh, look, here’s one more”. I waited two years to buy it (the $1.99 price tag makes sure I don’t forget), and I put it on with low expectations, and heard it three or four times, enough to confirm “Yep! He’s still Robyn”. That I pulled it out again this year, and gave it a real chance, was sheer luck. He has a new album out this very month, and it’s all-acoustic, mostly just him and a guitar. I don’t think the format suits him, so I might not buy it. I’m an idiot, but a culturally-approved one. Robyn’s music hasn’t changed much over time: he experiments, but within a constant radius. Jethro Tull might be a better story: for more than thirty years they have refused to duplicate themselves, and a constant core of Jethro Tull-ness has remained even as their sound has undergone a number of transformations. Non-fans are most likely to know them from their 1971 folk-metal album Aqualung: classic-rock radio still plays “Aqualung”, “Locomotive Breath”, “Cross-Eyed Mary”, and “Hymn 43” (the one about “If Jesus saves, well he’d better save himself/ from the gory glory seekers who use his name in death”). Before the seventies were out, the band – which had started as a sort of blues band – had tried two peculiar albums each with one long song spread over two sides (Passion Play is deeply, deeply bizarre); a soft acoustic-guitar album; and three albums updating Renaissance English folk dancing as a form of progressive rock. Those renaissance albums, I think, are excellent, but their audience had already shrunk by something like 90% from their chart-topping days, and that was just the beginning. They spent the early eighties incorporating synthesizers into their sound, in place of Ian Anderson’s customary flute solos, and made one concept album about medieval knights and another concept album that was a Cold War spy thriller. Their audience, once millions, shrunk to the mere tens of thousands. Admittedly I don’t think their eighties’ work was all that good. Maybe Ian needed his odd concepts to help him write, but it helped him to write just competently, and by his own admission he didn’t understand synthesizers at all. But after that I think Tull’s eighteenth and nineteenth albums – the warped blues-rock of Catfish Rising and the subdued but epic Roots to Branches – are among the best work they’ve ever done. I also think Ian Anderson’s two recent solo albums (the Secret Language of Birds and Rupi’s Dance) are excellent, remarkable not only for the new orchestrations Ian’s mastered – accordians and string quartets and jolly acoustic guitar – but because Ian taught himself, well past the age of 50, how to play the flute “correctly” after discovering that he’d been using formally wrong methods his whole life. His new playing is beautiful. The problem is not that most people, or most Tull fans, disagree with me. The problem is that most Tull fans don’t know the recent work even exists. There’s no chance to recruit new legions of fans, because rock’s gatekeepers, at radio and the magazines, associate Tull with songs written more than 30 years ago. I’m also told a-ha have made seven or eight albums, each better than the one before, but let’s say that’s true: outside of Scandinavia will it matter? Of course not: a-ha’s job was to make “Take on Me”. Assume that they’d mutated so radically that … oh, who sings beautifully enough? … that Radiohead’s Kid A had actually been made by a-ha. Would Kid A be hipster gold? No: Kid A would never have seen American release. Minds would have been shut. ************** What can we, you and me, do about this? On a cultural level, perhaps nothing: I know the limits of my impact. As individuals, though, we can do our best to keep faith, to not pre-judge. Even artists we’re sure we _don’t_ care about might be worth some fraction of our attention. Sure, Ani DiFranco’s transition from white folkie to acoustic jazz funkstress is honestly disconcerting even to many of her open-minded old fans, but that should mean that people who hated her early granola stuff might love her now. Maybe you’re one of them. I love Rush’s Presto, a beautiful and polished work of late-eighties pop with thoughtful and empathetic lyrics; but when I say this, people think of Geddy Lee’s falsetto shriek and Neil Peart’s Ayn Randian mythos, even though Rush had long since left both behind for a pleasant tenor and an honest interest in people. Of course Rush lost some of the people who loved the 13/8 time signatures and the yowling and “By-Tor and the Snow Dog”. That’s natural and proper. It’s wrong that they gained so few new fans to replace them. So just remember: people change, and that’s not a euphemism for “they start to suck”. In this year 2003, Train and Matchbox 20 have made pretty good radio singles: I’m probably a lot more surprised than you are. Metallica have made a record in which they borrow a dozen ideas they don’t understand even slightly, and which they’re obviously having a wonderful time mis-adapting: I won’t quite say their new album is good, but I’m smiling along with them, because when have they ever smiled before? My friend Andy thinks Fleetwood Mac have just made their best and most interesting album ever; I’ve never really been a fan of theirs, but if I see Say You Will cheap, I’ll find out if it’s time to become one. The world is only as wondrous a place as we let it be. I don’t think we should let that be much of a limitation.

Read all comments (50)|Write your own comment

Write an essay on this topic.