Life and Life Only: Just Not That Cool

When it comes to music my generation just ain't that cool. We have some good bands and maybe a handful of great ones, but really... they're not that cool. Sure I like Foo Fighters and I have been listening to My Morning Jacket before they were featured in the movies “Elizabethtown” and “The Lookout,” but I'm not exactly sure how the future will paint them if they are at all.

Case in point: you can't go a day watching television without hearing a Zeppelin song selling a car, someone using a Janice Joplin song, or even an investment firm referring back to the summer of love. There's also “Rockband” and “Guitar Hero,” games designed for my generation of slacker wannabes who, while incredibly gifted with hand-eye coordination from years of Playstation, just don't have the communal idea of creating a garage band itself. I guess that if you can't get your friends to help you form a band you might as well grab a plastic guitar-shaped controller and try to play along. Let me know how you do on “Thunderstruck.”

There's no one central reason why we're just not that cool. Some could reason that technology has killed music. While you can promote your band on MySpace there's about a million others of you. Technology has made more types of music available as opposed to 40 years ago when you had to have serious drive and passion just to make it through the Studio system. Now, any balding white guy with the right software on his laptop can cut an album in his apartment (see also: Moby). “Studio production” technology has affected music as well. Would Brittany Spears sound as good if she wasn't performing to a synthesized beat?

Or maybe it's the magic and mysticism of a time I never knew; “the good old days.” There's something fascinating about listening to someone say, “Mick Jagger and the rest of the stones dropped by my farm and did some acid in 1967.” “I remember that night: the Fillmore, 1968.” “Me and David Crosby had to go rescue Neil Young from a jail in Alabama thirty minutes before the concert...” “I woke up in bed with Grace Slick.” “I was at a concert in New York helping Jim Morrison stay on stage while he was completely drunk and falling everywhere.” The best that my generation can hope for is, “I helped knock over a corner store with Maroon 5 because they were low on Red Bull.”

Rock music, especially in its infancy, seems to have this aura of youth, rebellion, love, and change. Or at least it's marketed well that way. And while we have classic rock music stations playing the same 8 songs by the Eagles, Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the rest every day, at least they're being played. I'm not so sure that 10 years from now anyone will still be listening to Puddle of Mudd, Default, Staind, or any of the others.

I've mentioned technology as a culprit but really it's just collusion. We can blame the RIAA for forcing bands to put out albums that are slated to be big sellers right out the door instead of fostering good music. We can blame a culture wrapped up in the one-hit-wonders of the past two decades to bother listening to any full album by the “wonders.” We can blame studio “de-regulation” or the fact that the Internet has made music more accessible but snows us under with its mediocrity (your MySpace band probably sucks). Or we can blame our culture which seems to promote making a buck over making educated expression.

Aside from some catchy riffs and a lyric or two, there's nothing cool about the music of now. Rap/RB/hip-hop speaks of money, power, and fashion but little substance. Country music has not only infiltrated the pop scene as it has for the last 30 years but now sounds like rock music from the late Eighties. As for Rock music it sits in a quagmire of lyrical retardation waiting for something to happen as if it will catch the cultural throne again and rule. Until then it ceaselessly churns out ballads.

Gotta go. I'm going to raid the liquor store with Nickelback.