There is a long list of reasons why I havent updated the journal recently. This list begins with "Con" and ends with "Edison". And in between there are other non-electricty related reasons inlcuding "Being in a play" "Training for/starting a new job" and "Fighting with my landlord". And if all those things werent enough, Im now leaving for New Hampshire. Thats right, in case you didnt get the memo, Im leaving for three weeks to tour with the New England Shakespeare Festival. Tommorrow I leave for that theater mecca of Deerfield, New Hampshire and I will stay there until August 14th, pursuing fame, fortune, and probably scabies. I also hopefully will finally at long last be able to determine for myself which state is New Hampshire and which state is Vermont.
Im very excited.
But the point of this story as it relates to you is that I might be out of commission for a while. I know I will have internet access while on tour but I dont know if Ill have any time to write. Its a shame because I have a lot of things Id like to discuss with you in a semi-humorous and self important manner. But I dont know if this will be possible until after the 14th.
And whle Im on the subject (or not on the subject as the case may be) if you see anyone walking around in a Con Ed uniform, punch them in the face for me. Seriously, the Queens blackout made the transit strike seem like Christmas. Who is the head of Con Ed? Michael Brown? And let Bloomberg know he's lost my vote. If he can even run again that is.
Okay enough with that. On to the rejected columns.
What rejected columns you ask? The two I'm about to give you. They were two colums written for other sites but rejected by those sites and so now they end up here. Well one's more of a list than a column, but whatever. Theyre both rejects.
Anyway, If I dont talk to you again have a great early August. And Ill be back soon with great new stuff. I promise. (Wilmer Valderamma consider this your warning.)
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How The Name Of The Band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Would Be Different If It Had Been Named By Specific Other People
P. Diddy: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (Remix)
Lil' Jon: Clap Your Hands Say YEEEEEAAAHH
Ice-T: Clap Your Hands Motherfucker
Dolly Parton: Clap Yalls Hands Say Ye-Haw
Phillip Glass: Clap Your Hands Clap Your Hands Clap Your Hands
Jewel: Clap These Hands Which Are Not Yours They Are My Own
Marilyn Manson: Chop Off Your Hands And Sacrifice Them To Satan
Sufjan Stevens: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!!! or The Strange Tale of the Moving Hands and the Resulant Exclaimations of Those People Involved
Prince: &
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The Disembowelment of Our Heroes
A few short years ago we all experienced one of the greatest tragedies in our nation’s history. At the time we all agreed that Hollywood should never try to make the events of that day into a film. But now they have. And I for one say it’s too soon. The wounds are still too fresh. The emotions still too raw. And for some of us, like myself, the pain and grief such a film would cause would be too much to bear. Because I, like so many others, lost a loved one that day. My brother was aboard that flight. And it is in his name I say we must prevent Hollywood from tainting the memory of that day with the stain of commercialism. We must stop them from tarnishing the legacy of the heroes aboard that flight. We must stop their blasphemies and lies. We must stop Snakes on Plane.
See, lost in the hype about Snakes on a Plane is the fact that’s its just another in a long line of movies Hollywood has made to exploit and profit from real life tragedies. In that way it’s just like Schindlers List.
Only instead of Nazis there are snakes.
And instead of the Holocaust it’s an airplane.
But that doesn’t make it any less real. Or any less tragic. I mean those weren’t just an ethnically and culturally diverse group of stereotypical one-dimensional characters aboard that plane. They were real people. Real people who fought back against those snakes. And my brother was one of them.
He was a brave man. A noble man. A courageous man. A man who ultimately had his bleeding entrails ripped out of his body by motherfucking snakes. And he deserves better than to have his heroic deeds and good name sullied with the stain of Hollywood commercialism. We just can’t trust Hollywood to do his story justice. I mean, even though his last words he said to me over the phone were “I’m getting my entrails ripped out by motherfucking snakes” it is impossible and irresponsible to try and guess what happened aboard that fateful flight. But has that stopped Hollywood from doing so? No! They have no respect for anything. Look at their casting choices for example. Samuel L. Jackson? As a hero? Anyone who has ever seen a movie knows that black people can only be villains, drug dealers or wise all-knowing narrators. But a hero? I don’t buy it. And Julianna Margulies? She’s too closely associated with her unforgettable and iconic character from ER to ever be believed in another other role. Her presence in the film will surely shatter the audience’s suspension of disbelief. It’s a shame to see her agree to be in such garbage. O, how the mighty have fallen.
But alas, despite all of my qualms with the film Hollywood will not listen to me. So that is why I ask you to join me and boycott this exploitative film. Together we can make sure it never sees the light of day. Sure you can stand by and allow it to be released, but it’s a slippery slope my friend. Today its snake on a plane, tomorrow it’ll be hamsters in a Honda Civic. And soon no animal/form of transportation combination will be sacred. And the memories of all of our country’s greatest heroes will be forever tainted. So stand up against this exploitation and this shameless commercialism.
Don’t even think.
Just do it.
Friday, July 28, 2006
Monday, July 10, 2006
Rock Is Dead, Long Live Rock
Almost exactly a year ago I got Kanye West’s Late Registration. I remember listening to it for the first time late one night in the subway station after work. I still remember hearing "Heard ‘Em Say" for the first time and just being amazed. And then after it finished "Touch the Sky" came on and I was even more amazed. They sounded like nothing else I had ever heard before. So original, so fresh, so incredibly good. And as I sat there listening the realization hit me. Rock is dead. Kanye has killed it.
Another story: About a month ago Dave Chapelle’s Block Party came out on DVD. I had seen it in theaters but watching it again on DVD I felt a vibe I had missed the first time around. It reminded me of something; something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The love and positive energy, yet passion and activism seemed familiar in some way. And then a few days later as I was rewatching No Direction Home I realized where I had seen that before. The rock festivals from the 60’s. Newport, Monterrey Pop, Woodstock. Only this was our generation’s version. The difference was that these weren’t rockers, they were rappers and hip-hop artists. And one of them was Kanye. But he wasn’t alone. He was part of a movement. Kanye hadn’t killed rock, hip-hop had.
Now people have been declaring rock dead since almost the minute rock was born. There’s the famous speech Lester Bangs gives William Miller in Almost Famous about how rock in its last throes. And that was set in 1975. But much like Cheney’s assertion that the Iraqi insurgence was in its last throes, reports of rock’s demise were greatly exaggerated. Now sure, rock’s golden age was done by the late 70’s. It was in a slow but steady age of decline. And there was a moment when disco legitimately threatened to killed it off entirely. But even at the height of disco - 1977 the year of Saturday Night Fever - great rock was still being made and consumed by the mainstream. That year saw the release of such classic rock albums as The Clash, Never Mind the Bollocks, Bat Out of Hell, Rumours, Marquee Moon, and My Aim is True. The next year traditional rock albums The Cars and Van Halen each sold more than 5 million copies and launched two major careers. That same year The Rolling Stones and Blondie took disco and successfully integrated into their sounds while still making hit music that was clearly “rock and roll”. Along with The Cars, Van Halen, and The Clash the late 70’s saw the emergence of a host of other iconic and groundbreaking rock acts including The Ramones, The Police, The Talking Heads, AC/DC, Bruce Springsteen, The Sex Pistols and many more. And sure the 80’s have long been considered less than stellar years for rock, but hair metal dominated the early years of MTV and U2 was arguably the biggest musical act in the world. Sure there was Prince and Madonna and Michael Jackson but they were more isolated artists than part of any musical movement or trend. During all of these years when rock was supposedly “dead”, other than disco, (which even in its heyday was largely derided) nothing had come along to challenge rock’s supremacy as the dominant and most popular form of mainstream music. While people were declaring that rock was dead, there was still important, relevant, and groundbreaking music being made by rock artists and it was being played on the radio, consumed as part of the mainstream culture, and selling millions of copies. Rock was shooting off in different directions, but punk, post punk, grunge, and the like were keeping the soul and essence of rock alive and ensuring that it was still in some form the dominant force in mainstream music. It might not have been as good as it once was but it was still very much alive.
Fast forward to 2006. There is only one rock album in the top ten and only two in the top twenty. Of last year’s best selling albums, only two of the top ten were rock albums. This is better than the year before though, when only ONE of the top ten best selling albums was a rock album. Albums are doing better than singles though. Of the top ten songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart none of them are rock songs and of the top twenty only two are. This still is better than the Radio Airplay chart though, where none, NONE, of the top twenty songs are rock songs. This is probably largely due to the fact that there are less than twenty modern rock radio stations left in United States, including NONE in the nation’s largest market New York City. There are now more Tejano music stations than there are rock stations in the United States. And to make all of these numbers even more bleak, nearly 20% of all rock music sales over the past four years have been concentrated in the hands of four acts – Green Day, U2, Coldplay and The Killers. And Green Day and U2 are both comprised of guys over 40 years old. If rock today isn’t dead, I don’t know what dead is.
So after years of people crying wolf about rock’s demise, why is it now finally time to start actually crying? How did we get to this place? What happened?
Well, hip-hop happened.
Throughout history, art and music have grown and changed and evolved. And popular tastes have grown and changed and evolved right with them. Two hundred years ago, “classical” and opera were the dominant forms of popular music. Then it became big band and swing. And then Tin Pan Alley and crooners like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. And then rock and roll hit and somehow everyone thought that it was the be-all and end-all of popular music. That nothing would ever supplant it. But as anyone who knows anything about history and human nature could have told them, that was an absurdly ridiculous idea. Eventually something else would come along that would be more popular, and rock would fade into the background, becoming a popular form of music, but not THE popular form of music. Much like jazz or blues or country it would still be a vital music force with a large following, but it would not be the dominant type of music in term of sales, airplay and/or cultural significance. And sure enough that is exactly what has happened right before our very eyes. For 35 years rock reigned unchallenged at the head of the music table. Of course there was “pop”, but pop isn’t so much a type of music as a title to assign to music that has no “type”. Pop is after all simply short for “popular”. But then in the mid-90’s as the last real rock movement – grunge - was dying off, rap, the young upstart, started to pull even with rock in terms of sales and popularity. The mid-90’s for me were spent in junior high and if your junior high was anything like mine (Im sorry) then hip-hop was by FAR the preffered and most popular type of music. People that liked rock, at least in Texas, were seem as somewhat weird, and troubled. The first song I knew all the words to was "Ice Ice Baby" and I think its safe to say I am not alone in that regard. Nearly all of my junior high memories are attached to rap/R&B songs, as are, I would wager, most people’s my age. Whereas we associated rock with our parents, rap was OUR music. It had loads of profanity, violence, and graphic descriptions of sex. It was dangerous and rebellious. It was fresh and exciting. It was the common denominator in my ethnically and finically diverse junior high and high schools. Even the people who listened to rock were familiar with rap, whereas the inverse was definitely not true. And this is where Block Party comes in. Rap is a uniting force and a legitimate social movement like what rock was in its early days. And most importantly to our multi-cultural world today it is something that everyone can and does listen to. Not to generalize, but rock will never be fully embraced by the majority of black, Hispanic and other minority groups. It doesn’t speak to them like rap does, which is understandable. But white kids are all familiar with rap as it represents the rebellion, youthfulness, and good times that rock used to. And sure rap is largely seen as being about bling, blunts and bitches; but what is rock and roll linked to if not sex and drugs? And underneath both stereotypes there is much artistic relevancy in both types of music. This is where where rap has succeed where other challengers to rock's throne have failed.
For years rock was able to hold off rap because it was still far artistically superior. The playing field began to level out in the 90’s but rock was still able to produce important, classic, big selling works like Nevermind, OK Computer, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Ten and countless others. But as the new millennium dawned, hip-hop began to take over. Since 1998 only twice has a rock album won the Pazz and Jop year end critics poll and one of those was an album deemed so uncommercial by its label that they refused to release it (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot). And the other one was by Bob Dylan. In that same span, a rap album has come in first four times. And in that same time period, only once has the first place single not been a rap song.
So clearly rap has caught rock artistically. But is it artistically superior? Well here’s where I start getting the angry letters, but I say yes. And this is where Kanye comes in to back me up.
First though let me say that in many ways rock is doing better artistically than it has in a very long time. In terms of the amount of exciting, fresh new music being produced, rock is quite healthy. But a closer examination tells a different story. For all this great music being produced how much of it isn’t clearly derivative of someone (or “someones”) else? But who is Outkast derivative of? Or Wu-Tang Clan? Or Kanye? And sure there are truly original rock bands, but how much are they selling? When was the last time you heard a rock song and thought simultaneously “I’ve never heard anything like this before” and “this song is gonna be a huge mainstream hit”. "Float On" and "Take Me Out" come to mind but not a whole lot else. But I got that feeling twice in the first two songs off Late Registration. And that’s just one album. So sure there is great original rock music being made, but if a tree falls in a forest and non one is around does it make a sound? Well not a sound like a tree in a crowded forest makes. And rap is that crowded forest. Kanye was not only nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy the past two years, and not only did both of those albums win the Pazz and Jop as the most critically acclaimed album of the year, but they both were among the best selling albums of their respective years. They both spawned multiple instant classic hit singles. They spanned ethnic, age, gender, and national boundaries. How many current rockers can say the same about their first two albums? And the past 10 years have seen the rise of countless artistically relevant rap superstars other than Kanye. Jay-Z, Eminem, Outkast, Missy Elliot, and Lauryn Hill could all legitimately be called superstars who also are among the very best at what they do. Name a rock act that has released their debut since 1996 about whom you could say the same thing. Coldplay and The White Stripes - that’s about it. And Coldplay has more haters than Kobe Bryant. (And don’t tell me The Strokes, because as great as they are I don’t know of a single person who bought their latest album. And if I as a 20-something living in New York City don’t know anyone who bought their album, then you can’t say that they are superstars by any stretch of the imagination.)
And that’s what’s most troubling about rock. While rap seems to be churning new stars out of the woodwork, rock has only been able to create two superstar bands in ten years. Most of the biggest bands in rock have been around since the 80s (U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers) or the early 90s (Pearl Jam, Green Day, Radiohead) and are getting old. And no one is coming along to replace them. And with rock radio dying out and record labels signing fewer and fewer rock acts every year, there’s little hope on the horizon.
So where is rock headed? Well it will never completely die. There will always be a market for rock and great rock songs will always find a place in the national consciousness. In the past few years rock bands like Evanescence, Fall Out Boy and The Killers have all released hugely successful CDs. (Although notably all of them have yet to release a follow-up). There will always be a market for rock and great rock music will still be being made when we are 80. But as rock’s old guard dies out something dies with it and that is its spirit. It gets me thinking that in our accelerated age maybe art forms only have a life span as long as their founders. Because in many ways rock has run out of places to go and has started to double back on itself and eat its young (or in this case its “old” I guess). If you need proof, look no further than the biggest rock song of the moment, "Dani California". It’s clearly a recycled version of Tom Petty’s "Mary Jane's Last Dance". Pretty much everyone agrees on this. Meanwhile look at the hottest hip-hop song of the moment “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley. (And if you want to say it’s not a hip-hop song, well Cee-Lo is a rapper and Danger Mouse is exclusively a hip-hop producer so I fail to see how you could call it anything else) What other song in the world could you even remotely compare it to? None. When I listen to old rock albums from the 60s and 70s like Blonde on Blonde or Pet Sounds or Abbey Road or Dark Side of the Moon, I try to imagine what it must have been like to live back then and hear those albums for the first time and to have never heard anything like them before in your entire life. Well that’s what rap is like NOW. Listening to The Marshall Mathers LP or Speakerboxx/The Love Below or Late Registration for the first time recaptures what it must have felt like to listen to those classic rock albums of the 60s and 70s for the first time. And like rock back then, hip-hop is still young, and still has places to go. Like early rock, it has started incorporating other types of music. There is jazz/rap, soul/rap, disco/rap, techno/rap, country/rap and of course, rock/rap. Most things in rap today you can find equivalents or parallels for in the early days of rock (Speakerboxx/The Love Below is The White Album, Cee-Lo is Van Morrison, The Marshall Mathers LP is John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, etc.) Watching Block Party is like watching Woodstock. The sense of community, of passion, of being able to change the world is all there. All the things that rock stood for in its infancy can be found in rap today. I think its safe to say that rap IS rock from 30 years ago. Rock today may be dead, but hip-hop is just getting started. It is the new rock. It has picked up rock’s soul and made it its own. So mourn rock’s demise, but at the same time rise up your glass and gimme a cheer. “Rock is dead, long live rock!”
Top 3 & 1/2 of the Week:
1.) Smoothies
2.) Cee-Lo
3.) John Hodgeman
3 & 1/2.) Realizing that "Mr. Blue Sky" is a take off on Paul's part of "Day in the Life"
Thought of the Week:
Friday the 14th is the birthday of your favorite online journal author. You should buy him a present. Like a life.
Another story: About a month ago Dave Chapelle’s Block Party came out on DVD. I had seen it in theaters but watching it again on DVD I felt a vibe I had missed the first time around. It reminded me of something; something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The love and positive energy, yet passion and activism seemed familiar in some way. And then a few days later as I was rewatching No Direction Home I realized where I had seen that before. The rock festivals from the 60’s. Newport, Monterrey Pop, Woodstock. Only this was our generation’s version. The difference was that these weren’t rockers, they were rappers and hip-hop artists. And one of them was Kanye. But he wasn’t alone. He was part of a movement. Kanye hadn’t killed rock, hip-hop had.
Now people have been declaring rock dead since almost the minute rock was born. There’s the famous speech Lester Bangs gives William Miller in Almost Famous about how rock in its last throes. And that was set in 1975. But much like Cheney’s assertion that the Iraqi insurgence was in its last throes, reports of rock’s demise were greatly exaggerated. Now sure, rock’s golden age was done by the late 70’s. It was in a slow but steady age of decline. And there was a moment when disco legitimately threatened to killed it off entirely. But even at the height of disco - 1977 the year of Saturday Night Fever - great rock was still being made and consumed by the mainstream. That year saw the release of such classic rock albums as The Clash, Never Mind the Bollocks, Bat Out of Hell, Rumours, Marquee Moon, and My Aim is True. The next year traditional rock albums The Cars and Van Halen each sold more than 5 million copies and launched two major careers. That same year The Rolling Stones and Blondie took disco and successfully integrated into their sounds while still making hit music that was clearly “rock and roll”. Along with The Cars, Van Halen, and The Clash the late 70’s saw the emergence of a host of other iconic and groundbreaking rock acts including The Ramones, The Police, The Talking Heads, AC/DC, Bruce Springsteen, The Sex Pistols and many more. And sure the 80’s have long been considered less than stellar years for rock, but hair metal dominated the early years of MTV and U2 was arguably the biggest musical act in the world. Sure there was Prince and Madonna and Michael Jackson but they were more isolated artists than part of any musical movement or trend. During all of these years when rock was supposedly “dead”, other than disco, (which even in its heyday was largely derided) nothing had come along to challenge rock’s supremacy as the dominant and most popular form of mainstream music. While people were declaring that rock was dead, there was still important, relevant, and groundbreaking music being made by rock artists and it was being played on the radio, consumed as part of the mainstream culture, and selling millions of copies. Rock was shooting off in different directions, but punk, post punk, grunge, and the like were keeping the soul and essence of rock alive and ensuring that it was still in some form the dominant force in mainstream music. It might not have been as good as it once was but it was still very much alive.
Fast forward to 2006. There is only one rock album in the top ten and only two in the top twenty. Of last year’s best selling albums, only two of the top ten were rock albums. This is better than the year before though, when only ONE of the top ten best selling albums was a rock album. Albums are doing better than singles though. Of the top ten songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart none of them are rock songs and of the top twenty only two are. This still is better than the Radio Airplay chart though, where none, NONE, of the top twenty songs are rock songs. This is probably largely due to the fact that there are less than twenty modern rock radio stations left in United States, including NONE in the nation’s largest market New York City. There are now more Tejano music stations than there are rock stations in the United States. And to make all of these numbers even more bleak, nearly 20% of all rock music sales over the past four years have been concentrated in the hands of four acts – Green Day, U2, Coldplay and The Killers. And Green Day and U2 are both comprised of guys over 40 years old. If rock today isn’t dead, I don’t know what dead is.
So after years of people crying wolf about rock’s demise, why is it now finally time to start actually crying? How did we get to this place? What happened?
Well, hip-hop happened.
Throughout history, art and music have grown and changed and evolved. And popular tastes have grown and changed and evolved right with them. Two hundred years ago, “classical” and opera were the dominant forms of popular music. Then it became big band and swing. And then Tin Pan Alley and crooners like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. And then rock and roll hit and somehow everyone thought that it was the be-all and end-all of popular music. That nothing would ever supplant it. But as anyone who knows anything about history and human nature could have told them, that was an absurdly ridiculous idea. Eventually something else would come along that would be more popular, and rock would fade into the background, becoming a popular form of music, but not THE popular form of music. Much like jazz or blues or country it would still be a vital music force with a large following, but it would not be the dominant type of music in term of sales, airplay and/or cultural significance. And sure enough that is exactly what has happened right before our very eyes. For 35 years rock reigned unchallenged at the head of the music table. Of course there was “pop”, but pop isn’t so much a type of music as a title to assign to music that has no “type”. Pop is after all simply short for “popular”. But then in the mid-90’s as the last real rock movement – grunge - was dying off, rap, the young upstart, started to pull even with rock in terms of sales and popularity. The mid-90’s for me were spent in junior high and if your junior high was anything like mine (Im sorry) then hip-hop was by FAR the preffered and most popular type of music. People that liked rock, at least in Texas, were seem as somewhat weird, and troubled. The first song I knew all the words to was "Ice Ice Baby" and I think its safe to say I am not alone in that regard. Nearly all of my junior high memories are attached to rap/R&B songs, as are, I would wager, most people’s my age. Whereas we associated rock with our parents, rap was OUR music. It had loads of profanity, violence, and graphic descriptions of sex. It was dangerous and rebellious. It was fresh and exciting. It was the common denominator in my ethnically and finically diverse junior high and high schools. Even the people who listened to rock were familiar with rap, whereas the inverse was definitely not true. And this is where Block Party comes in. Rap is a uniting force and a legitimate social movement like what rock was in its early days. And most importantly to our multi-cultural world today it is something that everyone can and does listen to. Not to generalize, but rock will never be fully embraced by the majority of black, Hispanic and other minority groups. It doesn’t speak to them like rap does, which is understandable. But white kids are all familiar with rap as it represents the rebellion, youthfulness, and good times that rock used to. And sure rap is largely seen as being about bling, blunts and bitches; but what is rock and roll linked to if not sex and drugs? And underneath both stereotypes there is much artistic relevancy in both types of music. This is where where rap has succeed where other challengers to rock's throne have failed.
For years rock was able to hold off rap because it was still far artistically superior. The playing field began to level out in the 90’s but rock was still able to produce important, classic, big selling works like Nevermind, OK Computer, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Ten and countless others. But as the new millennium dawned, hip-hop began to take over. Since 1998 only twice has a rock album won the Pazz and Jop year end critics poll and one of those was an album deemed so uncommercial by its label that they refused to release it (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot). And the other one was by Bob Dylan. In that same span, a rap album has come in first four times. And in that same time period, only once has the first place single not been a rap song.
So clearly rap has caught rock artistically. But is it artistically superior? Well here’s where I start getting the angry letters, but I say yes. And this is where Kanye comes in to back me up.
First though let me say that in many ways rock is doing better artistically than it has in a very long time. In terms of the amount of exciting, fresh new music being produced, rock is quite healthy. But a closer examination tells a different story. For all this great music being produced how much of it isn’t clearly derivative of someone (or “someones”) else? But who is Outkast derivative of? Or Wu-Tang Clan? Or Kanye? And sure there are truly original rock bands, but how much are they selling? When was the last time you heard a rock song and thought simultaneously “I’ve never heard anything like this before” and “this song is gonna be a huge mainstream hit”. "Float On" and "Take Me Out" come to mind but not a whole lot else. But I got that feeling twice in the first two songs off Late Registration. And that’s just one album. So sure there is great original rock music being made, but if a tree falls in a forest and non one is around does it make a sound? Well not a sound like a tree in a crowded forest makes. And rap is that crowded forest. Kanye was not only nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy the past two years, and not only did both of those albums win the Pazz and Jop as the most critically acclaimed album of the year, but they both were among the best selling albums of their respective years. They both spawned multiple instant classic hit singles. They spanned ethnic, age, gender, and national boundaries. How many current rockers can say the same about their first two albums? And the past 10 years have seen the rise of countless artistically relevant rap superstars other than Kanye. Jay-Z, Eminem, Outkast, Missy Elliot, and Lauryn Hill could all legitimately be called superstars who also are among the very best at what they do. Name a rock act that has released their debut since 1996 about whom you could say the same thing. Coldplay and The White Stripes - that’s about it. And Coldplay has more haters than Kobe Bryant. (And don’t tell me The Strokes, because as great as they are I don’t know of a single person who bought their latest album. And if I as a 20-something living in New York City don’t know anyone who bought their album, then you can’t say that they are superstars by any stretch of the imagination.)
And that’s what’s most troubling about rock. While rap seems to be churning new stars out of the woodwork, rock has only been able to create two superstar bands in ten years. Most of the biggest bands in rock have been around since the 80s (U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers) or the early 90s (Pearl Jam, Green Day, Radiohead) and are getting old. And no one is coming along to replace them. And with rock radio dying out and record labels signing fewer and fewer rock acts every year, there’s little hope on the horizon.
So where is rock headed? Well it will never completely die. There will always be a market for rock and great rock songs will always find a place in the national consciousness. In the past few years rock bands like Evanescence, Fall Out Boy and The Killers have all released hugely successful CDs. (Although notably all of them have yet to release a follow-up). There will always be a market for rock and great rock music will still be being made when we are 80. But as rock’s old guard dies out something dies with it and that is its spirit. It gets me thinking that in our accelerated age maybe art forms only have a life span as long as their founders. Because in many ways rock has run out of places to go and has started to double back on itself and eat its young (or in this case its “old” I guess). If you need proof, look no further than the biggest rock song of the moment, "Dani California". It’s clearly a recycled version of Tom Petty’s "Mary Jane's Last Dance". Pretty much everyone agrees on this. Meanwhile look at the hottest hip-hop song of the moment “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley. (And if you want to say it’s not a hip-hop song, well Cee-Lo is a rapper and Danger Mouse is exclusively a hip-hop producer so I fail to see how you could call it anything else) What other song in the world could you even remotely compare it to? None. When I listen to old rock albums from the 60s and 70s like Blonde on Blonde or Pet Sounds or Abbey Road or Dark Side of the Moon, I try to imagine what it must have been like to live back then and hear those albums for the first time and to have never heard anything like them before in your entire life. Well that’s what rap is like NOW. Listening to The Marshall Mathers LP or Speakerboxx/The Love Below or Late Registration for the first time recaptures what it must have felt like to listen to those classic rock albums of the 60s and 70s for the first time. And like rock back then, hip-hop is still young, and still has places to go. Like early rock, it has started incorporating other types of music. There is jazz/rap, soul/rap, disco/rap, techno/rap, country/rap and of course, rock/rap. Most things in rap today you can find equivalents or parallels for in the early days of rock (Speakerboxx/The Love Below is The White Album, Cee-Lo is Van Morrison, The Marshall Mathers LP is John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, etc.) Watching Block Party is like watching Woodstock. The sense of community, of passion, of being able to change the world is all there. All the things that rock stood for in its infancy can be found in rap today. I think its safe to say that rap IS rock from 30 years ago. Rock today may be dead, but hip-hop is just getting started. It is the new rock. It has picked up rock’s soul and made it its own. So mourn rock’s demise, but at the same time rise up your glass and gimme a cheer. “Rock is dead, long live rock!”
Top 3 & 1/2 of the Week:
1.) Smoothies
2.) Cee-Lo
3.) John Hodgeman
3 & 1/2.) Realizing that "Mr. Blue Sky" is a take off on Paul's part of "Day in the Life"
Thought of the Week:
Friday the 14th is the birthday of your favorite online journal author. You should buy him a present. Like a life.
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