As rockers either die or keep slogging themselves onstage, the grandiosity of their entire enterprise begins to show itself to be an illusion

The saying about coincidence being God's way of remaining anonymous came to mind as I came across the headline "What Happened to Rock Music?" this morning. Obvious clickbait for a guy like me, if you have read / listened to the post immediately under this one.

It's a piece by New Republic news editor Alex Shepherd and, while it's drenched in the left-of-center cultural presumptions to be expected from such a source, gets its basic conclusion right.

Pared to its essentials, it's a collection of short reviews of several memoirs by aging-boomer rockers that came out this year: Mike Love, Bruce Springsteen, Robbie Robertson, Phil Collins. Shepherd compares and contrasts the tones and styles of each. The common thread he sees emerging from their sum is a defensiveness about how history is coming to define them, an underlying message along the lines of "I'm more than what former colleagues have portrayed me to be!"

The question of how each writer-musician bumped up against the cultural context of the period of his greatest impact is also dealt with. Mike Love's rift with cousin Brian Wilson seems to have really been catalyzed by the late-1960s shift from institutionalized trappings of American adolescence (surfing, hot rods, girls and hamburger hangouts) to musical and lifestyle experimentation in uncharted territory. For Collins, it was emerging as a post-Genesis star in the "unhip 80s," about which Collins maintains a "sense of humor."

At least from Shephard's overview, it seems that Springsteen's sense of where he fit when he burst onto the 1970s had less to do with the tenor of that decade than with an ethos he picked up at age seven and which continued to inform his growth as a rocker ever afterward:

Here’s Springsteen writing about Elvis’s debut on The Ed Sullivan Show:

THE BARRICADES HAVE BEEN STORMED!! A FREEDOM SONG HAS BEEN SUNG!! THE BELLS OF LIBERTY HAVE BEEN RUNG!! A HERO HAS COME. THE OLD ORDER HAS BEEN OVERTHROWN. The teachers, the parents, the fools so sure they knew THE WAY—THE ONLY WAY—to build a life, to have an impact on things and to make a man or woman out of yourself have been challenged. A HUMAN ATOM HAS JUST SPLIT THE WORLD IN TWO.

Springsteen’s memoir runs hot, as it should, given his penchant for marathon four-hour shows. 

This is the essential problem of rock. It "runs hot." It's essentially a mode of expression geared toward a particular window within a human lifespan, and that window occurs before the halfway point of an average lifespan. During that time, hormones are coursing with their initial fury through the individual's veins, and the question of where the self fits into the larger scheme of a societal landscape that of necessity must be ordered somehow or other first arises (telegraphed by Holden Caulfield at the onset of the 1950s). The individual hasn't much grasp yet on the overall sweep of history (which, when or if eventually studied, shows us that nothing is new under the sun, and that cultures and countercultures nave been colliding all over the globe throughout our species' existence), and hasn't yet grasped that there might be reasons to observe and care about how dear old Gramps sees decades of choices affecting the trajectory of his life. What the teenager is left with is his or her feelings.

The confluence of cultural factors was perfect for giving birth to rock and roll. Technology had given us the solid-body electric guitar, which, because it turned the strings' vibrations into pure electronic signal, could be an overpowering, not to mention rudely raw, voice in a musical ensemble. Mid-50s kids were the first adolescents in human history to have sufficient spending cash in their pockets to be full participants in consumerism. Intellectual attention was being heaped on them, from Norman Mailer's essay "The White Negro" to the 1944 examination of the adolescent sociopathic personality Rebel Without A Cause, which was indeed the inspiration for the 1955 movie of the same name.

So here we have a man well into his own 60s, Bruce Springsteen, still basically driven by the all-encompassing thrill he experienced that night in 1956 when he saw Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show. He, and much of his generation, have maneuvered through the world in the intervening decades driven by a countercultural impulse, a basically leftist sense that there is some kind of "establishment" to be brought low by the nobility of the New Human's feelings.

Seeing no need to avail themselves of the aforementioned lessons of history, they come up against, say, the eternal differences between male and female and conclude that it is some kind of conspiracy of inequity, or they see sprawling industrial operations encroaching on the pristine state of pure nature  and do not stop to consider the astounding advances in human comfort, convenience and safety that have arisen therefrom.

No, they throw fits. They institute gender studies programs at universities. They stage exercises in moral preening like the Dakota Pipeline protest.

Shephard also makes mention of an event that occurred last year:

And then there was Desert Trip, derisively and accurately labeled “Oldchella,” the mega-concert featuring Dylan, The Rolling Stones (who incidentally released their first good album in three decades in 2016), Paul McCartney, Roger Waters, The Who, and Neil Young. In one respect, Oldchella was a fitting jewel in the crown of 2016: a testament to rock’s decaying influence.

You have to ask yourself, seriously, who the hell would bother with the time and expense of attending something like that? And why? 

In a postmodern world where forms of entertainment are pretty much infinite, who is motivated to go to a festival headlined by icons from a half-century ago?

Old-timers have been featured at a lot of contemporary festivals for some years now, with Young, McCartney and others having appeared at Bonaroo, for example. This gives us some glimpse into who considers this a worthwhile investment of resources. There is a swath of the now-approaching-their-forties people who, having heard all this music on their parents' stereos growing up, and having been regaled with Springsteen-esque recollections of the Ed Sullivan Show and how it changed everything, regard these figures as so towering that any chance to see them in person before any more of their deaths occur is not to be missed.

One more noteworthy point about Shephard being the author of the TNR piece is that he basically falls into the demographic depicted in the paragraph above, and therefore gets some of the finer points of these figures' impact a little inaccurate. Particularly in the paragraph in which he enumerates the musicians who died in 2016, he indicates a skewed understanding of the significance of a few of them. (Leon Russell, for instance, would be more properly described as a ubiquitous Southern California studio presence who took his Oklahoma sensibility wherever he went than a mere "weirdo visionary".) Granted, he is presenting his list with an eye toward brevity so as to move on to larger points he wants to make, but it bolsters the point that rock, fairly uniquely among history topics, is treated differently by those who "were there" than by those who subsequently developed an interest in it. And I'm really over the meme about "taking nonwhite music and sanitizing it for white audiences." Such shorthand leaves out essential chunks of the story.

But, for all the admittedly brilliant performances and compositions, for all the drama of the melding of soundtrack and actual tumultuous events (think the Stones playing "Gimme Shelter" as Meredith Hunter was beaten to death with a pool cue right in front of the stage at Altamont in December 1969),  and for all the power that comes with the sheer volume that was only possible from the dawn of rock onward, it's not hard to make the case that rock as an unprecedented game-changer in human history is a wildly overblown concept.

It was basically a hissy-fit, because, as P.J. O'Rourke has explained, "we didn't want to clean the bathroom."