ROCK’N’ROLL HOBBY CLUB

When I tell people I'm in a "Rock'n'Roll" band, it makes me feel better about still playing music after 15 years of missing the mark. "Rock'n'Roll" doesn't really exist anymore, on the popular music landscape, and young bands that dress themselves as such and aspire to it seem a little foolish and one-dimensional. Saying "I'm in a 'Rock'n'Roll' band" makes me feel like I've got some sort of esoteric, anachronistic hobby, like loom-weaving or scrimshaw. Really I say it just to make the preceding years of failure seem like intentional self-parody.

But I don't think "Rock'n'Roll" is important anymore. In 200 years, people will look back on it, and music history is going to date the entire Rock’n’Roll enterprise: "from 1950-2000". Its become something else and it doesn't have a mass market anymore. Now, you might be saying "hold on, I saw Bruce Springsteen this year and it was great" or you’re stamping your feet and pointing to Kings of Leon, the Hold Steady, Mastodon, Grizzly Bear, Arcade Fire, or whoever as keepers of the flame. But that’s just hold-over glory of a long career and the new obsessive hobbyist niche, respectively. I'm not saying that people aren't making decent music anymore or aren't making "Rock'n'Roll". Its just different - I'm sure Lester Bangs could put his finger on it, if he were alive, and he would have the nerve and vocabulary to do it. But in short: its not “popular” culture anymore, its niche culture. It’s like going to the museum and watching PBS.

"They forgot the roll and they only kept the rock. The roll’s the whole damn thing dude, the rock is nothing, deal with it, the roll is king. Unfortunately most cats don’t get behind the roll." – Keith Richards

When I was young, The Rolling Stones made a comeback –Steel Wheels album and tour, remember? They were in their late 40s at the time, and I remembering reading an article asking “are they just too old?” Now its twenty years later and we still have to see Keith Richards’ increasingly concave chest through an unbuttoned, faux-pirate shirt. They’re essentially a cover band of themselves. I wish they would leave us with legend and music and our imaginations; retire, buy islands, collect mansions. I guess that would probably cut off their access to Brazilian models and teenage waitresses, though.

This is old news, but it still boggles my mind and pisses me off ten years on: The Rolling Stones successfully sued the Verve over the four notes of a muzak version of their song “The Last Time” that were sampled in “Bittersweet Symphony”. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – and "The Last Time" is from a point in their career when the Stones owed everything to black American blues and R&B musicians that they certainly never paid – are credited with writing "Bittersweet Symphony". I’m not really a Verve fan, but that’s cruel and sad. It disappoints me as a Stones fan, and as a fan of the cut-n-paste, influences-on-your-sleeve aesthetic that they helped create in the 1960s that truly defines Rock’n’Roll. I bring it up because it reminds me that The Rolling Stones, of all people, don't get Rock'n'Roll anymore. Richards shrugged it off, like they didn’t understand, calling it “some serious lawyer shit.” The money the Stones get from that legal action probably equals a single coin on the Scrooge McDuck-style money pile they each have on the estates they bought from inbred royalty. For perspective, remember that somebody pointed out that the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Dani Califronia” sounds exactly like Tom Petty’s “Last Dance with Mary Jane”? Tom Petty’s response was “a lot of rock & roll songs sound alike”. Thank you, Tom Petty; that is the correct response.

“Rock’n’Roll” and “Popular Music” were once synonymous. Rock’n’Roll was a beautiful, dumb, funny pastiche of influences and aspirations; these days Popular Music isn’t really that at all. So I personally prefer to indulge – when I’m not building box kites – in Rock’n’Roll.