Time to put them to sleep? Death to Nostalgia, Part 2
If there was little to no notice of the landmark 60th anniversary of The Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February, at the very end of the month there was another unremarked anniversary related to the extra day in the leap year. On 29 February 1968, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band became the very first rock album to win Album of the Year at the Grammys. One would think the various Beatles history sites I used to follow on Facebook would have made more of these anniversaries.
My best guess as to why they didn’t is it just doesn’t do to talk about how old so many of our mainstays of popular culture are, at least not anymore. I find it enormously telling of our declining culture that the two biggest pop music stars hyped in the media, Beyoncé Knowles and Taylor Swift, have been around nearly 30 years and 15 years, respectively. So much for youth culture. As for bands, the only one I hear about is the nigh 30-year-old Foo Fighters, featuring everyone’s favorite rock ‘n’ roll grandpa, Dave Grohl.
Which reminds me, the 30th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death on 8 April was also largely passed over by the media. The end of Cobain and his power trio band Nirvana was a seminal moment in the last active decade of pop culture. I suppose the powers that be would rather we were not reminded that Nirvana was the last new band to get large numbers of young white men inspired to play guitars and drums, the last band to mean anything to the culture at large.
Again, I wonder how long people will be listening to “classic rock,” that is, the music of the 1960s through the 1990s. The teenagers of the 1970s are now entering their 60s. That means the teenagers of the 1960s are already in their 70s and closing in fast on 80. If there’s almost zero regard for the nascent rock of the mid-to-late 1950s, it’s probably because the great bulk of that generational cohort died off.
Meanwhile, the teenagers of the 1980s are in their 50s, while the teenagers of the 1990s are in their 40s. The teenagers of the post 9/11 emo/screamo years are in their 30s. Of course, the culture died with the 20th century, and while bands like My Chemical Romance are doing well on their nostalgia tours, they’re not nor will they ever be as big as, oh, say, Paul McCartney. Indeed, one shudders to think bands like Good Charlotte, that had some traction on the radio in those last days of the milieu, are now nostalgia acts. Perhaps the very last, come to think of it.
Our popular media, which used to be largely oriented towards the “youth culture” of the 80-year-olds still touring now, refuses to let its favorite pets grow old. A few years back two 50-something-year-old women, Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, were selling their post-menopausal sexuality at the Super Bowl halftime show. At least they still look presentable, as opposed to the thing of horror Madonna became. Still, what are these people still doing around? And then there’s Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.
Anything new that’s out is the most grossly sexualized hip-hop/rap performed by fat black women with straightened hair, and I suppose that’s the future. Country will still be around, but it will become more and more niche as its supporting demographic dies out.
Open mic nights are probably one’s best bet for hearing something truly fresh. As book publishing became easier to do for those not associated with the Big Four publishers, the underground is the place to look for something not written by some upper middle-class twit with pretensions towards Deep Thought. Talk about dead nostalgia—does anyone care who John Updike was anymore? Does anyone even know who he was, or what his Rabbit series of novels meant in an age when magazines were relevant?
It will take maybe a couple of more decades, three more at the very far outside, but the time is coming in which all the music of 20th century enjoys the same irrelevancy. I haven’t made any deals with Bob Dylan’s Supreme Commander, so I don’t expect to be still kicking around at 80, but to think I’ve lived long enough to see “that noise them young people like” become the comforting anthems for today’s all-too-slowly dying away elderly!