Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
A baby boomer rock critic condemns his generation's insistence on lionizing the burned-out bands of their long-lost youth.
Aug 22, 2001 | Ah, the baby boomers. If we're not hearing about how great their teens and early 20s were, it's how much better, how much more important their music was than any that's come since. They've even built a museum in Cleveland to house the rotting relics of that long ago era called their youth.
Granted, the '60s were a critically important and fertile time for rock music. The only thing resembling a mainstream rock revolution we've had in the last 30 years are punk's brief flirtation with fame in the late '70s and the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't "grunge" movement of the early '90s that was largely a Black Sabbath rip-off anyway. Other than the success of bands such as Radiohead and Tool, the so-called n| metal movement is the only thing even resembling rock music currently on the mainstream cultural radar. Rock radio is full of bands like Limp Bizkit, Staind, Slipknot and Linkin Park, bands who look as though they'll have the shelf life of a watermelon and seem just about as important.
But each generation of rock fans has its own cultural battles to fight. For the baby boomers, many of whom seem to think that rock died along with their youthful ideals in the early '70s, well, they've been shelling out big bucks to try to relive their glory days by watching aging warhorses like the Stones; the Who; Clapton; Crosby, Stills, Nash (and, recently, Young) and Jefferson Airplane/Jefferson Starship/Starship, an ongoing joke that hasn't been funny since the '80s, dust themselves off and limp onstage once every couple of years for a tour or release another remastered box set with new liner notes and some old photos.
Although these bands regularly fill amphitheaters and concert halls, it would be unfair to say that all boomers are happy about the never-ending nostalgia carnival. Chief among the dissenters is John Strausbaugh, editor of the Manhattan weekly New York Press, who thinks that these acts (to paraphrase what he says about the Rolling Stones), are "Not a rock band anymore, but a handful of middle-aged men, acting as a rock band."
The rock of the '60s gave voice to the emerging youth culture just as much as it churned out kick-ass tunes you could dance to. As with many American social/cultural movements, however, it was only a matter of time before the marketplace learned the lingo and co-opted the rebelliousness of rock. Strausbaugh is careful to point out that the bands that made it big at the time weren't necessarily the revolutionaries they've been marketed as -- rather they were primarily guys who wanted to rock, make money and ingest as much as they could in the shortest amount of time. The sociopolitical ideals were there, sure, but to a large degree it was the first generation of rock critics, writers such as Greil Marcus, Stephen Holden, Robert Christgau and Peter Guralnick, along with magazines like Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy! who attached their own countercultural agendas to the music.
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