RE: It's Rough Justice

"No, you just stopped paying attention."

Indeed I did, mostly because there was nothing left to pay attention to. The Stones have always nurtured that bad boy rocker image. It was the epitome of cool in 1967. However, there is nothing sadder than watching someone who is pushing middle age try to act like a hoodlum teenager. Watching someone who is old enough to be someone else's grandfather (and probably is) do that goes all the way to pathetic.

"Rock lyrics have always gravitated toward political commentary."

Actually that's not really true. In the fifty-plus year history of rock and roll, it has only been since the late 1960's that political commentary has crept in. Even at that, only a small percentage of the lyric content is political. The majority of rock and roll libretto, what little of rock and roll is left, is still concerned mostly with "baby I love you I can't live without you why are you so mean to me let's have sex."

But that brings up something I have been thinking about lately. Bear with me for a moment while I set the wayback machine to 1967. I was there, I remember it. During that time, 1967 to 1971 roughly, the politics of rock and roll were pretty much tied up in the Viet Nam war. The whole hippie culture that grew up around rock music in the late sixties was not all that politically motivated. Most of us thought that Dylan was cool, but incomprehensible. We loved the music put out by the Buffalo Springfield (predecessors to CSN&Y), but the political content was kind of a bummer. The same with Joan Baez. Jimi poked at our cozy perceptions of ourselves and Janis just wailed the blues. Jim Morrison was an alcoholic, self-involved, boring punk who spent most of his time puking on his audience or exposing himself to teenage girls. The British bands were awesome because they brought hard core Delta and Chicago blues to white, suburban teenagers.

Keep in mind that most of the Rock and Roll artists of that time had their musical roots in the 1950's. The social order they were deconstructing was rigid and narrow-minded in the extreme. Their main message was, "Relax a little, enjoy life, enjoy your fellow human beings." Politically, the popular culture of the late 1960's was far more libertarian than socialist. And the people and the message of the time were strongly pro-American. We thought some in America were taking it in the wrong direction, but we still thought the American idea was the greatest in the history of the world. However, in the permissiveness and radicalism that was the sixties, the socialist/collectivist elements which had hovered in the cultural background since the 1930's moved in and established themselves on the college campuses and in the hippie culture. That planting took about ten years to mature. Just long enough for us to get over the abomination that was disco. It wasn't really until the 1980's that rock and roll as a whole took on the hard edge of social conscience. And now, the political content of what's left of Rock and Roll has the hard edge of Bolshevism, a far cry from the application of freedom to a repressive and intolerant society. It also has has an ugly, anti-American shadow, nothing like what the 1960's were all about.

Meanwhile, Sir Mick just wants to cause a ruckus to get you to buy his record and come to his concerts, hoping all the while you'll fail to notice that he's now eligible to join AARP. And it continues to be true that attempts to wrest profundity from the depths of popular culture is a pointless exercise in futility.