What rock and roll meant

What it was and why it died

Dear T,

Even though he choked on his own barf, to me, Bon Scott is the epitome of rock and roll culture.

The man just looked healthy. Not in the way the gym rats do, though: I mean he had a gleam in his eye and he sang with a wicked smile and he looked like he could work on a fishing boat, or on a missile cruiser, or hell — even a pirate ship. He gave the impression that he could survive and even thrive in prison.

Looking dirty only added to his charm. He wasn't even dirty in the sense of grime or wrinkled laundry: the man just had body hair, and busted jeans, and was full of sex and double entendres. To me, this is what rock and roll meant, at least for a while.

We don’t know exactly when rock and roll died, but I believe it entered the hospice sometime in the 90s. We didn't know it at the time, because the radio was just full of great stuff during those years. But the fact is, it was on life support. It didn’t matter that Nirvana wrote better songs than the Beatles — John Lennon had his brains blown out for him and Kurt Cobain blew his brains out himself. They were all blowing their brains out whether they painted the ceiling or not. The 60s and 70s were a time to kick ass. The 90s were a time when the rock stars were getting their asses kicked.

You could tell because in the 90s rock stars started singing about their problems. Not in the country music way, where a man’s car dies on the freeway and his dog leaves him for another dog. I mean a man singing about how he “has issues” instead of just making problems for everyone else (compare Radiohead's “Creep” with AC/DC's “Live Wire,” or “TNT”). In the 70s they were banging teenagers and doing piles of cocaine and burning down hotel rooms and getting into fist fights. And if you pay attention to the lyrics, you can see the rock stars of the 90’s were still dangerous in many ways — but most of them weren't okay anymore. They were hurting badly, and starting to sing about it.

This was the end of rock and roll as we knew it. It wasn’t just fun anymore. It certainly wasn’t winning. It wasn’t even that bull-in-a-china-shop feeling. It was pathetic.

When you don’t “have problems” because you ARE the problem

By the time Gerard Way sang “I'm not okay” we already knew it. Almost none of them were okay. Maynard from Tool wasn’t okay. Jon Davis from Korn wasn't okay. Billie Joe wasn’t okay and Chester Bennington wasn’t okay and Chris Cornell wasn't okay and Layne Staley definitely wasn’t okay. And by the tail end of the 90s almost nobody entered the field like Metallica did, fists swinging. The game was over. First they weren’t okay, and then they weren’t dangerous anymore. Now we don’t have any rock stars, and if we have pretenders, they’re all little boys: whitewashed and plastic-wrapped to sell poppy tunes to little girls. If you want music for a real man — that is, for somebody who’s healthy and kicking ass — you have to go back almost to the 80s. And even by the 80s, rock was becoming a mere caricature of what it was in the 60s and 70s.

I’m not saying it’s okay to behave like they did in the 70s. People behaving like they did in the 70s ruined the kids who ruined music in the 90s. And in fact, I think this is why they lost touch with rock and roll in the first place. What we saw from the Boomers was that weird combination between being richer than anyone ever before and feeling the world could blow up any moment — a luxury and youthful exuberance in the face of a missing God and an all-too-likely nuclear winter, which killed off hope and tempted you, in one way after another, to sha-la-la-la-la-la live for today. A total about-face to the so-called family values.

And when you abandon children, or you break them, it turns out sometimes they grow up and sing about how you broke them. That was the whole gist of Korn and Linkin Park and Everclear. The Kings of Leon were probably the last good band to ever show up with fists clenched and giant balls. And where did they come from? Tent revivals in the The Bible Belt, three of them born to a traveling Southern pentacostal preacher, and a mother who ran worship service.

In the end, the whole rock and roll movement was like jumping off a cliff. For a while it felt like flying. And in the end, there was nothing left to do but to crash. Americans still idolize the men in free fall — but if we were better men we’d pity them.

Yours,

-J

P.S. A question might be asked here: what appeal could rock and roll have for a person like me — a man supposedly motivated, on a daily basis, by genuine Christian feeling? Do I really envy Bon Scott in any way — a man who sang Highway to Hell over the whole world, and almost immediately, like a dork, met the God he mocked face-to-face? Is this cool? Or did he forget his real place in the universe and live like a clown?

The fact is, despite connection with the God of the universe being the most beautiful and necessary thing in the world, something with which the witch-doctors in the music industry pale in comparison, sometimes — let's be honest — being the “good guy” makes you feel like kind of a weenie. Simply put, Christians have taken the sex and the danger out of being one of God’s men. And if you think that’s not how we’re supposed to be, I ask you to consider Abraham, Moses and David — each of whom had multiple wives and a confirmed kill list.

I suspect other cultural and spiritual factors might be at play. All evil, of course, is a perversion of some natural and originally good impulse; and I believe rock and roll appeals to things we were all born to chase, but get muddied and even ruined by our chasing them the wrong way. For instance, having random women look at you that way from the front row — the feeling that you're a sex object, and worth admiring. Or looking strong, like you're good for a fight. Or being independent, and free-thinking, and not somebody's patsy.

I suspect a good part of rock and roll’s appeal comes from its being a poor-man's substitute for the feeling of real power and liberty. As most of us are aware, there are only a few rock stars in the world and an interminable slew of wanna-be's. It thus appeals most to men on the bottom-end of the spectrum: especially a man too-far alienated from money, combat, and the decision-making tiers of free-enterprise — say, a fully-domesticated wage-slave.

This man rarely makes his own decisions at work and is rarely allowed to stand up for himself — especially not with violence. He’s hen-pecked by his boss all day and knows it; neither a king, nor a post-high-school sports star, nor a captain in the Navy. This man, too keenly aware of his littleness and his dependence, needs something to make him feel a little free, a little dangerous; to give him that you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-do I'm-on-top feeling. So what if he’s not the leader? At least then he feels like he’s not a follower. A cheap substitute, in the end, for being in charge of anybody else and being good at it. A beta male’s disguise as an alpha-on-the-sidelines.

This kind of man, a man modern society is profuse with, with no easily-discoverable talents, with no apparent outlet for his anger, or for his enterprise, or even the ability to make a woman really look up to him — a young man, usually, with some spirit in him, and some desire for self-esteem — he pays $12.99 a month for a Spotify account, and catches a bit of Bon Scott's energy, his swagger, his bravado; and he copies and pastes it onto himself by channeling the diabolical vibrations behind the rock star. In other words he becomes on the inside what he was incapable of becoming on the outside. That's why every music scene has its costume; and why no really successful adult — outside the music industry itself — is ever caught wearing one. A true believer in rock and roll is a modern day eunuch trying to get his balls back.

Thus when rock and roll became “I’m not okay” it lost its original purpose. It was already for people who weren’t doing okay. The magic was that it could make people feel for a second like they were. And the moment it took its mask off, after ten years of guys like Korn whining

This place inside my mind
A place I like to hide
You don't know the chances
What if I should die?

A place inside my brain
Another kind of pain
You don't know the chances

I'm so blind

and then Linkin Park howling

Crawling in my skin

these wounds they will not heal

No amount of screaming and “metal” could make up for how pathetic even the heroes looked. It should come as no surprise, then, that the last rock genre to be named and publicly accepted as such was Emo. It was the moment rock lost its unspoken appeal — and died choking on its own vomit.

*Not everybody who vibes with rock and roll is a poseur. Like with drinking, there are people who use it as medicine, and people who just want to party. And there are only two kinds of people who play Bad to the Bone out loud unironically. One of them is really silly. The other one is really scary.

**There was a Boomer celebrity, a while back, who went on air sometime in the 90s and said of the 60s, we didn’t know it was just music.

This is one of those cases where getting older means unlearning. She lost touch with the zeitgeist and forgot it really happened — as if it was her belief in Santa Claus, or that moment you realize your po-dunk pastor isn’t actually a Holy Man.

But it was never “just music.” Good music is never just music. Plato even said, back in the Bronze Age when they were banging their heads to the lute, that

when the style of music changes, the old forms are discarded, and this leads to a change in the character of the state, because the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling the most fundamental political and social conventions.

When she was young she saw it for what it was: a transfusion of energy and an outlook on life. Each genre wasn’t just a mood: it was a philosophy and a lifestyle. It was the expression of youth in a frequency, passed on, via subwoofers and high voltage, from one electrified soul to another. Rock and roll could only be “just music” to the burnt-out, to the morose, to the elderly. It was life to the rest of us. At least until that moment we turned the car key backwards, and we trudged off to punch in to work.