The Passion of a Waning Age

For the past couple of years, I have been writing these occasional comments on music and culture, subjects that matter to me, dissing a healthy array of rock gods along the way, from Henry Rollins to the Beatles, and I barely made a ripple amongst the small group of friends who read my blog, other than the occasional exhortation to keep up the good work. But let me cast a jaundiced eye on a professional baseball team, and the bats of Hell break loose. I got a couple of choice emails, one of which I responded to, and before I know it, I am being labelled a "fag" by a U.S. soldier currently serving in Iraq, and our once friendly debate is being compared to the Troubles by an Irish pub owner in Chicago.

Now that the storm has passed, what bothers me is not the reaction to the Cubs blog but the fact that none of my comments about culture or music could stir a similar furror. Maybe it’s a sign that we live in an age of distraction, where the trivial takes up more and more of our individual and collective energies. Or maybe my friends and readers don't get excited about the same stuff I do. Or maybe folks just really love their baseball.

Until I wrote about the White Sox and the Cubs, about the only truly down-and-dirty comment I got in reaction to this blog was from an old cohort, who told me to quit being a self-indulgent Baby Boomer, which were truly fighting words, as I wear my antipathy pinned to my sleeve against that most obvious of generations. I blame it for laying waste to any sense of intellectual complexity in our country, replacing it with an obsession for the visual, a mental cul-de-sac it backed into around the time most of its greatest minds were dropping acid and staring at blacklight posters in their dorm rooms, Pied Pipers leading an entire generation to misconstrue its vapid selfishness for an actual philosophy.

I will note that I was born in 1961, which in some circles may put me on the tail end of the Baby Boom, but us So Cal beach kids grew up hating all those fucking hippies, most of whom were invaders from other parts of the country. We witnessed first hand their vacant lives in their condos up the smoggy boulevard from the beach, wooing ladies in their Jacuzzis with their Cuervo Gold and their fine Columbian. Fuck them. I’m Gen X and proud, if you must label me in that kind of way. Beach punks never were and never will be Baby Boomers. We are an antidote to that disease, thank you very much.

A couple of weeks ago, Melissa and I went to see the National with a buddy from work. It was a great show. As I’ve stated on an earlier post, their songs have a lyricism reminiscent of the great rock poets, like Leonard Cohen minus the unweaned self indulgence, and while the National have borrowed heavily from the clear, harmonic guitars of the early 80’s, in particular pioneers like Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner, they twist these sounds into something new, with a dual guitar counterpoint, a Thin Lizzy of the New Wave, and then throw in some soaring melody lines on the violin for good measure.

I know that I’ve become a bit of a curmudgeon in my middle age and am particular about how the crowd around me reacts to a band. The alchemy between musician and audience is a somewhat random thing, a gift of the musical gods, and I don’t quite get the new rock crowds, making a big display of how hard they are rocking out one minute and then texting on their cell phones the next, or running off to get another beer, or shouting small talk amongst one another, seemingly oblivious to the music around them until it suits their needs, like a video game on pause, or perhaps a part of real life that they would just as soon Tivo over. Well, I’m sorry, I did not want to Tivo over one minute of that night at the Vic, and so it was odd hanging with those kinds of people.

One explanation is that small scale, underground rock has gone mainstream, attracting its fair share of guys with MBA’s slumming for the night and girls trying a different flavor than their normal singles bar vanilla. I actually find this a reassuring idea, in that the more exposure folks have to good music, the better.

However, I also think that music has become background fodder for a lifestyle, to be tried on and then stuck back in a dark closet when you’re done with it for the evening. Back when I was in college, even the guys who liked Bruce Springsteen REALLY liked Bruce Springsteen. If the Boss was going to play a four-hour show at the Sports Arena, these guys would be standing for the entire four hours cheering him on, and they would talk about little else for the next several days.

Music was a passion for most kids my age. I found the most interesting facet of Allan Bloom’s dyspeptic “The Closing of the American Mind” not all the hand wringing about the decline of Western letters but Bloom’s near-incredulous description of how much popular music meant to his circa 1980’s student, writing about this attitude with scrupulous detail, like he was constructing a travelogue on the rites of passage among a cargo cult in Papua New Guinea.

At some point in the past twenty years, music has gone back to its status as just one of many entertainment and cultural options, and Bloom, while I’m sure he would have plenty of other issues with them, would at least not be confused by the attitude of the current batch of college kids towards “popular music”, as I believed Bloom called it, because that musical obsession is now only shared by a relative handful of oddballs. The huge crowds at events like Lollapalooza and the annual Pitchfork Festival bear witness to the music’s popularity, but I don’t think the intensity my generation felt when first going to see the Clash or the Birthday Party is there.

A symbol for this regression is the revival of Kiss, a fact which I find hard to believe as, other than “Detroit Rock City”, there really aren’t any good Kiss songs to revive. Even when they were young, the band’s stage presence consisted mostly of Simmons’ tongue calisthenics and Paul Stanley’s chest hair. With mediocre songs and no moves, no wonder they resorted to face paint. Kiss is rock music for people who hate rock ‘n roll. But for some odd reason, a lot of 20-somethings take to them, in the same way they take to Boston, and Foreigner, and 80’s hair bands, and even Air Supply, anything with enough camp to stand out, to remind them of an innocent age when gawky white guys could do embarrassing things on stage and yet be wildly popular.

When the kids at Lollapalooza cheer Iggy Pop, when young women swarm on stage to French him and grab his crotch, it melts the cockles of my rock ‘n roll heart, as here possibly the greatest musical presence of the last 40 years is finally getting his due. But then I wonder, are the kids rushing the Stooges stage at Lollapalooza the same ones who sang to Quiet Riot songs at the bar last night, the same kids who paid $60 to see Gene Simmons do tongue pushups and roll his eyes like a stuffed animal? Does this new generation know the difference between Iggy’s real outrage and these other types of mock outrageousness, between a phenomenon and a puffed-up pussy? My guess is that some do and some do not, and in the end the best hope is that it is the smarter ones and the ones who care about music with the same passion that me and my friends had back in the day, it is these smarter, passionate members of the next generation who will be the ones writing the history of our waning age.

Here’s to them.