Rock and Roll, R.I.P: Reflection on the world's worst music
Tyrell., R. Emmett Jr.
"Rock and Roll, R.I.P: Reflection on the world's worst music" 2002 TOUR BY R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. When, at the end of the first winter of the first...
...By then—that is to say by the 1980s and early 1990s—most Americans had tired of the evolving rock repertoire...
...The Cold War was ending...
...In the late 20th century, as consumer products became cheaper, much improved and easier to return for a complete refund, a consumer mania arose from the anti-commerce wing of the progressive camp...
...Still the pontificating rockers wailed on about the politics of their youth, asking such poetic non-sense as Where Have All the Flowers Gone...
...Rock & Roll's apologists make great claims for the music's power to heal and edify, but it is murder on the physique, the central nervous system and all vital organs...
...Both the consumerists and the hypochondriacs had gained great influence over public policy, though quality products and good health were arriving on the scene quite independently of their exertions...
...It would never happen again on MTV...
...He was sorry...
...They were flattened...
...It is surprising that the nation's health nuts and consumer busybodies have missed all this...
...I have in mind the consumerists and the growing number of hypochondriacs within the progressive ranks by the 1970s...
...The nostalgics among them had settled down with the rock on the oldies stations...
...He provoked both the clergy of his day and the civil authorities...
...Joe Namath, star of the New York Jets...
...Most look like small-time pornographers...
...Rockers do not dance...
...Crosby died of a heart attack walking off the 18th green, his last words being "That was a great game of golf, fellows...
...There was a liver transplant in the 1990s and, by the way, in 1980 a drug-trafficking conviction that carried with it an eight-year sentence...
...And the communism, about which the rockers were always ambivalent, was being revealed from documents found in Soviet bloc archives to be as brutal and subversive as the anti-Communists had insisted...
...Rarely noted during the rock era is the fact that few rockers deposit more than a handful of songs into posterity's ear...
...Even its claims to moral uplift are suspect, if police records are to be believed or the various public statements from the rock singers' shrinks and swamis...
...for instance: their drug overdoses, delirium tremens, one-car accidents and head lice, which are merely the most notorious of their misfortunes...
...Frank Sinatra, rubbing it in with songs such as My Way until 82...
...is at work on a book taking the measure of the 1960s kids in power in the 1990s and beyond...
...Phillips' Summer of Love hit song, San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair), performed in the touchy-feely voice of Scott McKenzie, his collaborator, had been flowing from oldies radio stations for over three decades and persuaded increasing numbers of graying, fattening 1960s youth that they had been part of that historic summer, though most had not...
...Meanwhile, many of his contemporaries who had engaged in what we might consider the rougher trades lived on: Jackie Stewart, the former world-champion Grand Prix driver...
...Let OSHAs bureaucrats loose on the rock industry and the resulting compilation of job-site disasters, job-related injuries and untimely deaths might trigger immediate congressional action...
...Later, at the turn of the century, when rock entered its penultimate stage with what I have called "Excremental Rock" (ER), both the American Medical Association and local public health authorities had reason to object...
...Berlin's repertoire contained songs about white Christmas, blue skies and God Bless America...
...The consequent news stories would set the attorneys general of every state in the union to action...
...The preachers saw right through this new crowd's goody-goody claims to brotherly love and gentleness...
...Simultaneous with an OSHA investigation might come revelations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...
...Given a congressional mandate and ample resources, OSHA might have forced thousands of rockers onto the unemployment rolls or into job-training programs for aspiring employment as, say, carnival freaks...
...So, too, did hypochondria, which was equally ironic...
...Tipper Gore had written a book critical of rock, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society...
...Phillips had developed addictions to various drugs, among them cocaine and heroin...
...By Renaissance standards he was what we today might call "a regular guy...
...Yes, Rock & Roll's typical skinny, guitar-strumming bad boys paid a high price for their art after wailing before audiences of disturbed youths and nostalgic Yuppies...
...and remember how expeditiously government put the asbestos producers into bankruptcy along with many corporations only distantly related to asbestos...
...Miss Squeaky Fromme, presidential stalker...
...Rock & Roller Jerry Lee Lewis might have married a cousin, but he never murdered one...
...The Rolling Stones in late middle age were still singing their angry songs of three decades past, conveying excitement but looking a lot worse than Irving Berlin or Where Have All the Flowers Gone is an anti-war song, but I have always liked to tell confused Gen Xers that it is anti-vegetarian...
...No response would be possible...
...Of course, his life was a nightmare for Blue Cross and Blue Shield...
...and when he did conk he looked older than Methuselah...
...Not many rock singers can make that claim...
...Neither the songsters of Tin Pan Alley nor any of the aging saloon singers ever performed wearing leather pants that strangled the genitalia...
...The death rates among rock singers almost certainly surpass those of asbestos workers...
...The rock singer, after all his illnesses and organ transplants, usually expires with little to show for his suffering...
...This popinjay from the pontification period of Rock & Roll had died at age 65—nine and a half years short of the average life expectancy for a white male...
...1560-1613), who left hundreds of compositions and was far more the "rebel" than McLean or even Phillips and Dylan...
...Yet none of her allies joined her, not Gloria Steinem, not Ralph Nader, not even former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, Rock performers who have lived into middle age have spent an inordinate amount of time in the emergency room, on the surgery table and in all kinds of arduous therapies...
...Healthier working conditions might be found at an asbestos plant located in a nudist colony than on stage at a Who concert, and the asbestos workers would certainly have prettier bodies . . . but I digress...
...Rock from the 1960s and 1970s hung on mostly because its early audiences continued to listen to it and moon over their lost youth...
...Rock's greatest performers frequently have died young, usually horribly, and after acquiring large numbers of bad habits and fishy associates...
...It was 1989-1990, and there stood the balding, corroding rockers from the 1960s and 1970s sermonizing from behind their guitars about all the old causes, peace, protest, the environment, organic foods...
...So, the preachers' perseverance was not rewarded by fame or following...
...When the "Hip-Hop" group known as the Coup promoted itself as having "a strong anti-capitalist bent," it had little appeal beyond university faculties...
...Admittedly the preachers were fogies and provincials, but there could have been an alliance forged with certain types of progressives 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 by those who flocked to the rockers' "concerts...
...As for the other rockers, their songs remained the songs of the young rebel, the young idealist, the Bohemian headed for an adulthood that was to be lived with therapists and swamis and trips to rehab...
...According to his most recent biographers, Dylan did his aging alone, in darkened motel rooms, his youthful defiance narrowing into the squint of a bitter old man...
...The general public ignored them, and those Americans of a progressive frame of mind felt repelled by them, fearing, perhaps, that they were but another variety of McCarthyism, or militarism...
...1k SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 45...
...And in the mid-1960s, when Rock & Roll entered its highfalutin phase of pontification and metaphysics led by Phillips and such Bohemian moralizers as Bob Dylan, the preachers remained in full holler...
...William Galley, controversial GI...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...How would one of thesepatheticos hold up under the Hon...
...It appeared in 1987, but soon her husband, Al, had cast his eye on high office, and she deserted the ranks of the rock critics...
...To their early charges of lechery, godlessness and general primitivism, they added treason...
...All were proper gentlemen, exemplary fathers and husbands, contributors to the United Way, but the anti-tobacco politicos had cooked their geese...
...True, Dylan in his late fifties produced one album that reflected some of the experiences of middle age and aging, Time Out of Mind...
...The Coup demonstrated precisely how nihilistic rock had become by the 21st century...
...The exiguity of Rock & Roll's output is not typical of all American popular music...
...REFLECTIONS ON THE WORLD'S WORST MUSIC OCCASIONED BY THE ROLLING STONES' 2002 TOUR B Y R . E M M E T T T Y R R E L L , J R. When, at the end of the first winter of the first year of the 21st century, John Phillips, the Mamas and the Papas' Irving Berlin, expired, those members of the 1960s youth generation who had remained hooked on his music felt an understandable pang, though they were well into middle age...
...Perry Como, spry until 88, and even the bibulous Bing Crosby, upright until 73—and what class...
...He was loud in public, drank to excess even in daylight and murdered both his first wife and—with excessive force—her lover...
...possibly he had simply passed out...
...One of the Gershwins lived to be 87 without ever taking a public position on red meat...
...And what a delightful spectacle Capitol Hill could create by hauling rock's concert promoters and agents before duly convened nationally televised hearings...
...Their ancient lyrics could not account for the Internet, sex and drugs that led not to bliss and peace but to AIDS, and teenagers swaddling themselves in explosives to be detonated before unsuspecting civilians—no Buddhist monk opposing the American presence in the Vietnam war had ever thought of that...
...What mattered to influential Americans as the 20th century was going aglimmer was less the word of God and more the word of The New England Journal of Medicine...
...In fact, the entire rock repertoire when compared with other forms of Western music is quite small, comparable I estimate to that of the Balkan gypsies of the Drina Val-ley.* Clearly, the repertoire from any of the great periods of Western music—from the Baroque, the Classical and even the hot-blooded Romantic period—towers above therockers' puny output...
...but ordinary Americans did not need a preacher to tell them that Grunge was imbecilic...
...In concert they continued to sing thesongs they sang in their twenties...
...HAZARDS TO YOUR HEALTH That Americans of a progressive frame of mind never joined forces with the anti-rock preachers was a bit of good luck for Rock & Roll...
...Their intense remonstrances were unnecessary...
...No Gen Xer has ever doubted my story...
...Phillips' obituaries got me to thinking that both might have been impressed had the preachers merely cited rock's insalubrious life style and high mortality rate...
...Many of its songs are agreeable—hut only for a limited number of hearings, and the hypocrisy that has enveloped the rock culture cries out for exposure along with the rest of the hokum of the 1960s generation...
...Shortly, as rock's pontificators became guitar-strumming foreign policy critics, a famous bumper sticker became popular: "America, Love It or Leave It...
...As for Phillips and his fellow pontificating rockers, they wailed the same "peace" songs long after the Cold War had been concluded, not by the pacifism they prescribed but by the resolve of a much-derided anti-Communist president who, incidentally, grew up with the songs of the now-expiring saloon singers...
...They treated its singers and its songs as a holy noise...
...By contrast, the lovely songs of Tin Pan Alley did not need hype or politics...
...Perfectly sensible people with no axes to grind have scrutinized Rock & Roll through the years—both its star performers and its fans—and come to recognize that Rock & Roll is a very unhealthy art form...
...Later marketers of the 1960s made these claims, but Lt...
...Surely, their commando groups, the anti-tobacco and the anti-nuclear lobbyists, have known about rock's mortality rate...
...Much less could the pontificators account for a frat rat in the White House and Democrats scurrying for the political center...
...Galley was living proof that the claims were bunk...
...Muhammad Ali, the former heavy-weight champion...
...Jimmy Hendrix, dead at 27...
...He really was a prince, the Prince of Venosa, yet he usually went by his first name...
...They are lovely in themselves...
...His 1960s voice had been broadcast on the "oldies" stations for decades, and when it rang out in its perfectly preserved youthful impetuosity, it triggered in many of the aging 1960s indigene the fantasy that they were Forever Young...
...That, too, was one of their anthems...
...By the end of the 20th century rock's pontificators had been abandoned by the unrush of history...
...Many Yuppies along with their children were persuaded by the hype of the 1960s to identify with this politicized rock, though relatively few Yuppies had ever participated in the politics, and their children knew no more about the politics of the 1960s than they knew about the politics of the 1860s...
...He only served 30 days...
...UnfortunateSEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 41 who have developed proven track records in cultural politics...
...In concert Phillips could barely tap his feet to the music...
...Early Rock & Roll was only mildly outre...
...ER made its debut with the general public in the first weeks of the 21st century when the president of MTV, Brian Graden, had to apologize publicly for the exuberant performance of a hitherto unknown ER group, the Shower Rangers...
...John Phillips, composer of the Summer of Love's national anthem, dead, gone...
...During an MTV taping they were understandably nervous, and the result was loose stool that unfortunately splattered on two fans in the front row, teen-aged girls in designer dresses...
...Yet for many 1960s indigene there was no irony...
...The rockers sang the songs of boastful brats and "pissed-off" adolescence...
...Cass, a woman of immense girth, and—unusual for a rock artiste—some humor, died of a heart attack, too, but after choking on a ham sandwich, which given her bulk was purely superfluous...
...The longevity of the rock star compares unfavorably to that of any previous category of American popular entertainer including tightrope walkers...
...What hope would the ponytailed rock impresarios have under such circumstances...
...But otherwise no organized group showed much interest in denouncing rock, even in its last truly horrible phases...
...Moreover, the Summer of Love, such adolescent debaucheries as Woodstock and the anti-war protests featuring rock's pontificators were sedulously promoted by the marketers of the 1960s as historic events, comparable to the fall of the Bastille or the Potato Famine...
...Phillips' stunning demise vanquished the first fantasy, for though his mellifluous voice preserved on the oldies stations never changed, the singer himself had aged horribly...
...Even I was not immune, and to me the Mamas and the Papas had begun to sound like grocery store music halfway through the first Reagan administration, which was a long time ago...
...Though, on second thought, the anti-fragrance militants might side with the odoriferous rockers...
...44 T$E AMERICAN SPECTATOR • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 a style and dash that left the rockers looking like forlorn mullahs abandoned on an Afghan shelf...
...Bearing in mind the clerics' knack for fundraising, they might even have thrust a hand into the pockets of their progressive allies leaving them with less swag to spend on their other more dubious strokes of "activism...
...The Beatles' George Harrison lived to a respectable 58 (one year longer than the 19th century's Ludwig van Beethoven), albeit for most of his adult life he was in semi-retirement...
...At any rate, my overall point remains, to wit, through all the years of rock's cultural hegemony, the progressive camp has harbored large numbers of individuals who should have been as hostile to Rock & Roll as The progressive camp harbors large numbers of individuals who should have been as hostile to Rock & Roll as the next hill-ape preachers and could have been vastly more effective...
...From the moment Rock & Roll's first superstars gained national prominence, America's fundamentalist preachers denounced them in sweating, ululating, hip-swinging dramatics from the altar that could put one in mind of the Rock & Rollers them-selves, save that the clerics carried no guitars...
...As a historian whose specialty is American elites, I have come to the belief that the preachers should have framed their denunciations of rock not in terms of public morals but in terms of public health...
...Porgy & Bess fetches audiences that were not yet alive when it debuted in the 1930s...
...Truth be known, by then he was a grizzled old bird and had trouble holding his water...
...Janis Joplin, dead at 27...
...Furthermore, the suave musicians from Tin Pan Alley or Broadway usually lived with I mention the Balkan gypsies to emphasize the universality of my musical tastes, a universality that does not close its ears to rock...
...Their audience, now middle-aged, some wearing toupees or hair coloring, others anxiously adjusting their hearing aides—all yearned for a faraway adolescence—days with a full head of hair, week-ends with a full keg of beer...
...In view of Rock & Roll's many apparent health hazards, another valuable government agency would be the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia...
...The preachers agreed...
...The hayseed preachers probably did suffer what the sociologists call "status anxiety...
...Thus we come to another of rock's deficiencies...
...The health of those in the audience was not much bet-ter...
...Jim Morrison of the Doors, dead at 27...
...They shrilled over the more chaste black performers such as Little Richard...
...Musicologists are even turning up a commendable pile of musical scores from the Renaissance, where sanitary standards were probably even lower than those maintained within rock culture...
...Years later when rock entered its final phases, the poetry of Phillips and Dylan being replaced by the grunts, shrieks and whines of what was called "Grunge," "Heavy Metal" and "Punk," the pulpits of jerkwater remained defiant...
...Essentially, it was cheerful, energetic, and at its most lascivious, nothing more than an occasion for mixed-sex dancing...
...That was an anti-war song, but I have always liked to tell confused Gen Xers that it was an anti-vegetarian song satirizing the time in the late 1960s when a mob of crazed vegetarians gorged themselves in the flower beds of Hyde Park...
...They received occasional fleeting support from outside allies, as when the Anti-Cruelty Society roused itself against a rock evolution involving the disembowelment or decapitation of live animals to guitar accompaniment on stage...
...Sinatra sang to aging loves and life's changing seasons...
...And with the economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s, rock's anti-capitalist message was doomed...
...Clearly the preachers had overreacted...
...Think of it...
...OSHA would find a lower life expectancy among the Grateful Dead, the Mamas and the Papas and the Who than in any asbestos plant ever heard of...
...Samuel Fna, do you now own or have you ever owned a pornograph...
...Perhaps not so well known are the concert attendees' high incidences of tuberculosis, sexually transmitted diseases, fungus, halitosis, body odor, reproachable manners and, of course, the rock fans' signature affliction, head lice...
...Remember the baleful spectacle of the tobacco executives standing before congressional inquisitors led by the Hon...
...Yes, as sociologists have observed, there was a marked similarity between the style of America's rustic men of the cloth and that of their targets, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis...
...The music of such cosmopolitans as the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter and the rest survive because the songs are almost always better constructed and feature more timeless lyrics than those of Rock & Roll...
...Much as earlier groups had incorporated biting the heads off chickens into their acts, the Shower Rangers had incorporated their own personal bowel movements into their...
...It was all fornication and false gods to them...
...For some of the young men and women of the generation it seemed to take the place of religion...
...More evidence of the bunk was the existence in 1967 of thousands of members of the Future Farmers of America and thousands of Young Republicans and virginal girls who would never dream of smoking a cigarette in public...
...Yet objection only came from rural Vaticans...
...Fantasy was one of the hallmarks of the 1960s: the fantasy of endless youth, the fantasy that the Summer of Love had captured an entire generation...
...The general public's indifference was understandable...
...The preachers' prayers would be answered, and the nation's elites would have reason to treat the Bible with the same awe they reserve for The New England Journal of Medicine...
...A cradle-to-grave cigarette smoker would have enjoyed a healthier life than Phillips and would have easily outlived such other victims of the rock lifestyle as Keith Moon of the Who, dead at age 31...
...Rock & Roll, R.I.P...
...Graden stepped in to clean things up...
...As the music moved from its early phases to its intellectually pretentious, or worse, its philosophically nihilistic phases, it admittedly became hard to take...
...That is what we skeptics could call a "win-win" situation—less rock, less activism...
...As an adult who tired of Rock & Roll before the age of 30, I would have welcomed the nuptials...
...They thundered at Presley and Lewis at the outset...
...LONG LIFE 6 PROSPER...
...For them it is deodorant that offends...
...anything more energetic might leave him in a wheezing heap...
...The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia, despite his group's irony-layered name, made it to age 50...
...The Coup was a long way from Presley and even from Phillips...
...Tony Bennett, still croonSEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 43 ing into his mid-seventies...
...The music was occasionally pensive, but the reality of Dylan's aging, as with so much beneath his fake surface, was not quite grownup...
...Finally, Gesualdo, unlike say Madonna or the singer Prince, never dreamed up bogus titles...
...and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, dead at 27 despite yoga and meditation (at least he called it meditation...
...the Hon...
...So much for the second fantasy that all 1960s youths were dreamy participants in the Summer of Love or even adepts of Rock & Roll or Peace & Freedom...
...A rock troubadour from my youth was returning to dust, but for me there was consolation...
...Tin Pan Alley never had hyped like that...
...Nonetheless, whatever one's role in the 1960s and what-ever one thought of Rock & Roll at the time, the music did figure ever larger in popular culture as the generation aged...
...Waxman, "Mr...
...The rockers' predecessors from Tin Pan Alley or Broadway frequently produced more enduring "hits" than any rock star, Bob Dylan being among the few exceptions...
...The persistent broadcasting of San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair) has depended on ideology and the nostalgia of aging 1960s indigenes pining for their long lost youth...
...guess you would call them gigs...
...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 Phillips, the pontificating composer of rock madrigals to "peace" and "protest," hardly made it to retirement age...
...One might have expected the American Psychiatric Association to issue learned critiques of Grunge artistes and of the musicians of Heavy Metal and Punk...
...Among singers, even the saloon singers of an earlier generation, though bereft of the late-20th century's medical wonders, achieved greater longevity...
...Jerry Brown, existentialist presidential candidate...
...Time Out of Mind's most salient emotion is not melancholy but bewildered bitterness...
...Most had been following the more traditional hum and drum: summer jobs, summer school, acne treatments...
...This point could have been made to telling effect had the right alliances been made against rock...
...Irving Berlin died at 101, smoking cigarettes, missing few desserts and sparing us the diatribes against mom and dad...
...First would be that agency that has been so effective in scotching so many other commercial endeavors, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (and rock even in its anti-capitalist phase became obsessed with mammon...
...At least temporarily she had joined the fundamentalist preachers in alarm over the direction rock had taken...
...In a very short order the rock industry would be as bankrupt as the asbestos industry...
...The environment was improving...
...Imagine Jerry Garcia in a pas de deux or Dylan doing the cha-cha...
...Those who have lived into middle age, such as Phillips, have spent an inordinate amount of time in the emergency room, on the surgery table and in all kinds of arduous therapies...
...Considering the public health consequences of Rock & Roll, the exorbitant costs of concert tickets and the shoddy quality of concert souvenirs, the hypochondriacs of the progressive movement and their allies, the consumerists, had plenty of grounds for complaint...
...Their children did much the same, taking particular interest in such "oldies" as the Grateful Dead...
...Dean Martin, the boozy bon vivant, sipped scotch and smoked unfiltered cigarettes to the venerable age of 78...
...Who knows, Al's next campaign might be decided by constituents of Grunge or even someday ER...
...the next hill-ape preachers and could have been vastly more effective...
...Along with the sickliness and high mortality rate within the rock culture, there is another uncelebrated fact that bears mentioning...
...I have in mind the well-documented calamities suffered ly, the apology did not appease the lawyer of the foul-smelling teenagers, Gloria Allred, a leading feminist attorney...
...All Americans have heard of the aforementioned pathologies, psychological disorders and traffic incidents...
...There were also government agencies that the preachers might have enlisted in their campaign against Rock & Roll...
...Henry Waxman of California: the smartly suited executives, their right hands upraised, swearing to tell the truth...
...A pensive mood becalmed them...
...Sinatra did in middle age, a fact that might have been noted by reviewers of this fall's tour...
...whose sanitary concerns are legendary...
...Doubtless other government agencies could document the exorbitant prices paid by concert-goers for tickets and souvenirs, along with the other paraphernalia, some of which is manifestly unsafe and almost certainly contains environmental pollutants...
...The Revolution had never come...
...Nonetheless their opposition to Rock & Roll never ceased...
...Far less celebrated is the Renaissance romantic Carlo Gesualdo (c...
...What is more, the wife was his first cousin...
...Even the theorists of the anti-fragrance movement must recognize that rock gives offense, particularly in concert on a muggy day without air conditioning...
...Not surprisingly, the artistes of Tin Pan Alley and of Broadway lived fuller and—once again—healthier lives, usually sparing us the pontifications that began with the era of Phillips and Dylan and steadily evolved into the morally superior grunts and bathroom noises of their 1990s successors...
...Just days before the September 11, 2001, attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the Coup's Web site featured a promotion for its latest album Party Music, showing members of the group pressing a detonator with images of the World Trade Center exploding behind them...
...The Renaissance musician might have suffered plague and periodontal disease, but many turned out quite a lot of music compared to the out-put of the modern rocker...
...The only nationally organized opposition to rock and its epigones remained the rustic clergy...
...A marriage of consumerists and hypochondriacs with America's Bible-thumpers strikes me as a natural combination...
...Surely the CDC has accumulated an abundance of sickening data on rock concert clientele and on rock stars...
...Cass Elliot (second and least healthy of the Mamas and the Papas) dead at 32...
...The 1960s rock pontificator Don McLean was lifted into the empyrean of rock legend on the basis of but two songs, the syrupy American Pie and the interminable Vincent...
...His heroin addiction was so severe that it caused circulatory problems that almost led to the amputation of his hands...
...It did not take the aged Rolling Stones' sweating and heaving this fall to tell us that history has passed rock by...
...They drank cool martinis, wore well-tailored suits and could dance...
...rock almost never developed songs for grownups...
...Rarely does the survival of their songs depend on an aging Yuppie's nostalgia...
...The actual destroyers of the Pentagon and the World Trade Center lived in caves, which is about the civilizational level to which rock had descended by 2001...
...When rock began to turn toward the aesthetically ugly, most Americans simply stuck with cheerful, energetic oldies...
...They probably greatly esteem the armpit aromas and smelly feet for which every rock star is renowned, even the females...
...Waxman's probing questions: Quoth the Hon...
...He was no longer young on the day his clock stopped...
...Life expectancy and general health were rapidly improving to the point where the greatest health problem facing Americans was not how to live longer lives but how to die before becoming an uncomfortable assemblage of pipes and plastic and artificial organs...
...Not surprisingly, rock's earliest critics were those who might perceive this holy noise as competition, that is to say, the old-time, gospel-spouting clerics of the American hinterland...
Vol. 35 • September 2002 • No. 5
