I'm not much for deep thoughts on here, but one has been bugging me lately, so I might as well write it down.
I've been reading about the decline in CD sales for the past few years, and I've watched it, as the Tower Records stores on Broadway and in Lincoln Center closed. I've also read the reasons given by the RIAA, none of which ring true to me. As far as I can tell, the RIAA is doing what all monopolists do, which is to protect its control of scarce assets at all costs without paying attention to what's really happening.
Which is what? It's not all piracy. The music industry has survived all of the technologies which were supposed to kill it. Piracy isn't the problem. I think what's happening is much simpler and much more basic. I think that rock and roll, the dominant musical form of the past fifty years, has run its course.
If you put aside all of the 'I'm in love'/'She broke my heart'/'I want to party all night long' songs, which are a constant, the social and political thrust of rock and roll, which came of age in the mid 1960s, seems to me to be a victim of its own success. The social mores which rock and roll attacked have fallen by the wayside, and while we don't live in the utopia which some envisioned during and after the Summer of Love, we live in a country which is much more socially tolerant and open than it was. Legalized discrimination is mostly a thing of the past, and the social institutionalization of that prejudice is, IMO, fading. The restrictive sexual mores of the 1940s and 1950s are certainly gone, and we are much more willing to talk about the other "dark" sides of life some social conservatives wish to ignore. The Vietnam was was ended, and most of the country has now regained it senses with respect to the disaster in Iraq. I actually see the frantic conservative backlash against the changes wrought in the U.S. since the end of WWII as a sign of the success of those very changes, the last desperate gasp of a generation and a mindset which will quite literally be dead in twenty or thirty years.
But I think that's only half the battle. I think the real problem for rock and roll is that the symbols used by the musicians to signify freedom and rebellion against the social norm have all been normalized and co-opted themselves. There are tattooed and pierced corporate lawyers who ride Harleys on the weekends. Skateboarding, once a dangerous sport practiced by punks and losers on the fringes of the culture, is now a multi-billion dollar a year industry filled with professional athletes. The fact that these athletes are covered in tattoos and jingling with jewelry doesn't detract from that fact they're as co-opted and corralled as was the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, surrounded at all times by lawyers and publicists and image consultants. And so any group which points to these symbols as evidence of an outsider status, or uses them as a tool with which to question the standing social order, only points back to that order. Skateboarding these days is about as rebellious as being an accountant, and riding a Harley just means your Wall Street firm gave you a nice year-end bonus.
Beyond this, the behavior of Zeppelin or Keith Moon, once so shocking, is now barely worth a raised eyebrow. If you're the child of a baby boomer, there's a chance your parents have done more drugs and had more sex than you have. With the gradual acceptance of twelve step programs and rehab facilities into our national conversation, and the willingness to see drug addition for what it is, drug- and booze-fueled behavior is no longer a stand against the Man, but merely the sign that someone has a problem they need to face. Trashing a hotel room does not mean you're channeling the spirit of Rimbaud. It means your lawyer will make a lot of money negotiating a settlement with the hotel chain and you will make a sheepish PSA about the problem of addiction.
Or, put more simply, all that shit is now boring. And boring is the death of any art form.
That said, what's next? Where does the next social earthquake come from? I don't know. Certainly not rap and hip hop, which is a commodified as a Gap ad. Between 1998 and 1990 Public Enemy released two albums which are, I think, the highest point of hip hop's ability to combine artistic and commercial success, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet. But Public Enemy's strident brilliance gave way to gangsta rap, which provided an easy to use template for both artists and record companies to latch onto. Once set, the form commidified quickly. Punk, officially dead since 1987, has finally been rendered safe by Green Day and friends and now gets spit back as pop-punk, a term unimaginable twenty years ago.
I don't know where the next Big Thing is coming from, but I think I have seen the end of the Last Big Thing. Motor's off, and I'm just waiting for the wheels to stop spinning. I'm just wondering how it will end. Will rock morph into something else, something new and frightening and full of promise? Or will it be supplanted by something I can't imagine and end up like the Rat Pack in those famous ad-libbed concerts in Vegas, basking in the limelight and unaware they're singing at a funeral?
