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This Just In: Old People Hate New Music
“I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it,’ and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary to me. It’ll happen to you…”
- Abe Simpson, “Homerpalooza”
Truer words have never been spoken by a yellow, saucer-eyed, FOX-owned cartoon character. I think of the above quote every time I see one of those “Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Dead” articles in the mainstream press. You know the kind I’m talking about—wherein some legendary geezer takes up too many inches harrumphing about the lack of quality tunes floating around out there in the ether. One of these very articles popped up last week, matter a-fact, on CNN.com, under the panic-stricken headline: “What Will Save Rock ‘n’ Roll?” Apparently rock ‘n’ roll fell down a well and the Green Lantern is out of town.
In this seemingly unnecessary story, E Street Band guitarist “Little” Steven Van Zandt plays the Homer Simpson role, literally citing the sucktitude of today’s rock ‘n’ roll as the reason the record industry is sinking faster than the Lusitania (“Who are we kidding here? Nobody’s buying records? Because they suck!”). Modern rock’s suckiness, the apparently computer-illiterate Van Zandt claims, can be traced to the fact that this generation’s musicians are eschewing the time-honored tradition of playing cover songs in bars (so’s they can focus on original material, the bastards!) and ignoring the importance of ripping off the popular rockers who came before them. Seriously. Quoteth Steve:
“[Rock ‘n’ roll] is a craft that has to be learned. There are things you learn by listening to great records, copying heroes.”
Is this a sly admission that the riff from Springsteen’s “Badlands” was indeed stolen from the Who’s “Baba O’Riley?” Wow. I appreciate you finally owning up to that one, Steve, but I’m still not accepting an apology from anyone but the Boss himself.
It should be noted that this entire CNN piece, penned by Todd Leopold, was borne out of a speech Van Zandt gave at South By Southwest this past March. Entitled “A Crisis of Craft,” the Austin tirade found Little Steven targeting today’s crop of guitar-slingers for putting artistic integrity above rock ‘n’ roll’s ultimate purpose (to make the working class dance) while simultaneously making the process of writing and recording an album sound about as much fun as working on a turbine engine assembly line. Again, to wit:
“… Once upon a time, it took an army of very talented people to make great records. Writers, singers, musicians, producers, arrangers, engineers, and now, you have to do it yourself? No wonder everything sucks!”
Methinks he forgot to mention the coke dealer (and the fluffer).
Hey, Little Steven, do you think perhaps the reason you think all these new bands and young people and the MTV suck “major moose cock” is because you’ve been playing guitar for BRUCE FUCKING SPRINGSTEEN for over 30 years? Aside from being the absolute epitome of the blue-collar bar musician you rhapsodized about in your little speech there, Bruce is only one of the greatest songwriters/singers who ever lived. How often does anybody get a chance to even sneeze on someone as smart or profound as that guy, let alone put a band together with him and attempt to carve out a career? How can you be objective about any other musician in the entire universe when you’ve been the right-hand man to “Born in the U.S.A.” and “Thunder Road” for four fucking decades?
Seriously bro, your band played the Super Bowl this year. The goddamn Super Bowl! I don’t see how you could accurately judge anything going on in music outside the Jonas Brothers right now. And don’t gimmie no baloney about your “underground” radio show. Playing records by the Woggles and the New York Dolls doesn’t make you Steve Albini.
Alas, Van Zandt is not the only grumpy, delusional codger in this irritating article. S-Curve Records founder Steve Greenberg casts a wicked finger at technology for allowing shitty musicians to succeed. Says the other Steve: “Today, relatively untalented and uncreative people can actually make rock ‘n’ roll music that sounds kind of decent. And I think that kind of fools people and causes people to be lazy.”
I hate to shit in your soup here, Steve, but relatively untalented and uncreative people have been fooling record buyers with rock ‘n’ roll music that sounds kind of decent for decades. Where were you when Neil Sedaka, Styx, Poison, Dokken, Vixen, Asia, Bad English, Ronnie & the Daytonas, Veruca Salt, Jesus Jones, Creed, Staind, Everclear, Hot Tuna, Pat Boone, the Spin Doctors, the Gin Blossoms, the Association, Dramarama, Silverchair, Bow Wow Wow, Jimmie’s Chicken Shack, the Romantics, Nickelback, and Herman’s Hermits were tearing up the charts? I mean, the M.O. of popular music on the whole is pretty much to fool people into buying uncreative crap that sounds decent.
By the by, some of the acts on Greenberg’s S-Curve label include Tom Jones (yes, that Tom Jones), Baha Men (yes, those Baha Men), and Tinted Windows, the rock “super” group fronted by Taylor Hanson. Take that for what it’s worth.
Look guys, I get it. I’m 30. I don’t understand half the “new” bands out there today. Emo still seems pretty fresh to me, despite the fact I’m 99 percent sure it died the moment those photos of Pete Wentz’s junk hit the internet a few years ago. I secretly fear any young band that catches my fancy are the poseurs of their scene. Ultra-pierced dudes with Nostradamus beards and Cuban-style revolution hats alienate me, as do spunky female aggro-rap acts featuring distorted Speak ‘n’ Spells. American Idol is bullshit, no one I talk to these days has any idea who Mojo Nixon is, and the timeline of my record collection abruptly ends around 2003.
Yet, I can admit I’m turning into a conservative, set-in-his-ways fogey. I can also recognize that just because I dislike or can’t identify with a specific piece of art doesn’t necessarily make it sucky or bad (the Mona Lisa fails to give me the squirts, but I can’t think of anyone on the planet—myself included—who’d call Da Vinci a “hack” who “didn’t do his homework”). I’d rather have someone come at me with something (relatively) new and hate it than have a thousand watered-down Ramones/Nirvana/Beatles/Who/Elvis/Dylan/Sabbath/Hendrix imitators begging for the attention of my cobweb-laden teenage memories.
Whatever happened to respecting something for its ability not to sound like everything that came before it? You know, uh, originality? If certain people didn’t skip out on years of playing Journey and Zep covers to drunks in Sac City on Tuesday Double Shot Night at CC McFarty’s, we probably wouldn’t have bands like Radiohead or the Flaming Lips or Melt-Banana or TV on the Radio or Bob Log III or Primus or [INSERT HIP NEW BAND I’M TOO OLD TO KNOW ABOUT]. I like to dance, but way more often I like to have my recessed plebian mind blown to the outer rings of Saturn by frontier-exploring genre benders.
C’mon guys. Stop being all crotchety just because the White Stripes haven’t released anything in two years. Jack and Meg are still alive. It’ll happen. Just give it time.
Tags: Steven Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen, CNN
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40 Comments
hehehehe… funny stuff.
You rock, man. Crawdaddy, you also rock. This quote made my day:
“I like to dance, but way more often I like to have my recessed plebian mind blown to the outer rings of Saturn by frontier-exploring genre benders.”
basically pointless …
and your ignorance shows
Two outta three ain’t bad. Thanks, fan and Tom!
Two artists ,the Beatles and Dylan ,knew about every good song (how to play it) that came before them.Check out the chord structure on the broadway tune,”Til There Was You” from their first album.It’s genius ,and they deciphered the magic of it and 1000s of other great songs and incorporated it in their own songs.I’m missin it if it still happens..Playing those learned tunes in Hamburg 8 hrs a night 7 days /week for 2 years didn’t hurt either. But yeah ,this is beating a dead horse.
Attn Hot Tuna fans:
I had a feeling my inclusion of HT in the grouping of relatively untalented and uncreative musicians would be somewhat controversial. Obviously there’s some bias here regarding each and every one of those names. There’s probably at least one Vixen fan out there who’s ready to have me drawn and quartered.
Anywho, Hot Tuna to me has always been just another one of those dingy 1970s blues rock bands that simply exists and pumps out bland, generic, beer-soaked riffs to no end. If I’m gonna go for that kind of thing, I’ll take Grand Funk or BOC over HT any day. I mean, compared to Tuna’s parent band, Jefferson Airplane, they’re pretty expendable, I feel.
Of course, I could be, as many have suggested, ig’nant. Anyone who wants to send me some free Hot Tuna, contact the editor here and I’ll give those boys a second chance.
D Watson – I appreciate you coming to the defense of poor Neil Sedaka, but anyone strongly associated with a sound named after a giant building cannot by definition be considered rock n’ roll. As for Pat Boone, he literally took rock n’ roll songs and sanitized them for white, church-going audiences. To me, that’s a war crime.
I don’t see it on here anymore, but earlier there was a comment calling this piece “inane” and “offensive.” Perhaps the Comment Overlords deleted it. At any rate, I thought up this response in the shower, and it’s too good, I feel, to go to waste: what I think is inane and offensive is Little Steven getting up a music festival primarily for young, upcoming bands and announcing that all new music “sucks major moose cock.” That’s kind of like shitting on your grandparent’s couch when they invite you over for tea.
This is just nuts. Let me uncurl my arthritic fingers from my social security check long enough to add that my music collection basically terminates around 1995, with a few exceptions such as Collective Soul or Edie Brickel. Somehow I think that age has much more to do with this than any perceived lack of musical quality I just don’t “get” a lot of today’s music, end of story. However I have caught myself boogying right along with stuff like Wide Spread Panic, so all is not lost, imho. This too, shall pass
they all suck compared to Steppenwolf!! Sorry, but you know its true and yes.. the Airplane was a much greater band than Tuna ever was.
The author’s premise seems to be that you must be an old fart if you complain that most current music sucks (which it does) or if you are limiting your art by disregarding all the genius, culture, tools and techniques that came before you. Any great musician has influences who were initially idols and heroes- in fact- they were teachers. Today, we have no respect for learning, teachers, history- which is why people can’t write, spell, create decent music, and are so shallow. Better to be a whining old fart than an ignorant young fool.
I can’t recall when Hot Tuna tore up any charts, but the were and remain an excellent band.. And Tom Jones made some excellent records, and occasionally still does. Just because it popular music doesn’t make it bad. The writer of this article negates his own argument with his ignorance. Here’s my advice to you: shut the fuck up.
Well, there’s some ring of truth in what you say, and then also the sense that you have not been truly present for that much live music.
There’s pop and there’s live music, though they do often overlap. Hot Tuna was a sign of what you are missing to me also. I’m no Tuna fan, but you just can’t put pickers in the same list as pop unless you really aren’t that musically aware.
Bluegrass, for example is what it is and is not mental. It’s something that works and that people like to do. It’s not new and won’t ever be. Those who can’t or don’t know how to be present for live music will always miss that kind of thing, while getting excited about what’s the new and improved product offering. We all love a fresh perspective, but it’s not what I’m getting from you. More of a mental thing.
I suppose that’s what Lil Steven (not a fav of mine either) is saying. If you’re not truly and deeply experienced down to your dancing bones with live music, then your sense of music as an artist or a critic is handicapped. What’s stood the test of time on porches and in bars and going back to tribal circles works on basic levels that good musicians must find and love and carry in their DNA in order to belly up to the bar. That only comes from listening and feeling and physically knowing the old paths that have stood the test of time.
Still, I agree. I ‘m sure there’s fantastic new music coming out all the time, no doubt.
Little Steven needs to come home to Asbury Park and see that new music is alive and well with many great new bands all over the Jersey Shore.
Colie Brice
ASBURYMUSICIAN.com
Steve – the intention of that listing wasn’t to target a bunch of “pop” bands, just bands I think are overrated. But fuck it, at this point, Hot Tuna might be coming to my apartment. Forget I said anything about your precious Jef Air side project, America!
Scratch “overrated” from that last comment and drop in “kinda generic and not outstanding.” Maybe that’s the same thing.
Jeez. I picked the wrong day to quit sniffing glue.
Read the Little Steven speech from SXSW in its entirety.
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2009/03/22/sxsw-day-three-little-steven-and-rocks-crisis-in-craft/
Attn Mr Greene. Listen to Hot Tuna’s album, Phosphorescent Rat. It’s a whole ‘nother animal.
I can relate to people who say they don’t like the “it” of pop music anymore. The crappy production values of today have a lot to do with the use of the drum machine in an un-schooled way: first pattern out-the-box, put it on repeat and turn it up in the mix. Sometimes the tunes have a different beat-feel-percentage that what the drum machine is playing. It sounds like sledgehammers used to pick flowers. Witness the stiff, scary, update of “Killing Me Softly” of a decade ago. The crude lack of rhythmic sensitivity is well illustrated.
Who are you? I doubt I’ll ever ready Crawdaddy ever again; having read such an inane, erroneous and disrespectful piece as this.
I think Mr. Greene has a point, and also relates that he himself does not understand certain music these days. Perhaps read beyond the title.
He’s and old man!
I am 60 and there is still good muisic out there. He just forgot what its like to be 18 – 25.
I like Van Zandt. But he does sound like a crank when he makes this point.
I listen to his Sirius/XM station a lot. The station has a feature called “the coolest song in the world this week,” where they pretty much hype a song from some new album. And waaaaay more often it should, that song is on Steven’s Wicked Cool record label. Hello, conflict of interest.
Still, he strikes me as a good guy and he’s done an awful lot for rock and roll.
Before you can write a great song you have to know what a great song IS. You don’t get that by being an ignorant know-nothing.
Great music will always be made, some of it will be new. Most of it will be utter crap. Search out ‘Sturgeon’s Law’.
I have to agree that most of what passes for popular these days sounds like too many drugs were consumed in the over engineering of it. It used to be called ‘overproduced’. Who am I to argue? My record collection ended about 1992 and now I listen almost exclusively to things I find on the internet because radio, which was the prime source for spreading new music, ceased to hold any interest for me since 1993. Clear Channel, anyone?
I find that as I get older, my tastes have become more specific, more focused. I absolutely could not listen to the Bay City Rollers, guns, threats or otherwise. I do find that great quality music, be it Dylan and the Beatles or inknowns like Aussie band, Died Pretty stand the test of time, which is pretty much true of all great music. I can stand listening to Bach and Mozart time and again, because the music works. Madonna and her ilk won’t last much longer than the marketing machine that pushes it.
Pioneers and visionaries will influence others long after they are gone, posers never get it.
Steve is right.
“[Rock ‘n’ roll] is a craft that has to be learned. There are things you learn by listening to great records, copying heroes.”
So many bands are just handed stardom right out of the gate these days. And then they fade within 3 records.
They don’t build an audience and they don’t build the ability to perform live.
Sorry you were offended by the truth.
Hey, leave Hot Tuna out of the schmaltz list, they can pick ! ! ! They always satisfy and come off as REAL people….
While I never owned a Hot Tuna album I loved them live. Jorma Kaukonen is one of the finest rock guitarist still alive and he is still putting out wonderful albums. I have a number of musician friends that wish they could play bass like Jack Cassidy.
Neil Sedaka was one of the great Brill Building songwriters and Pat Boone never ever claimed to be a rock and roller. The James Greene article actually validates what Little Steven said. Younger musicians are just emulating the emulaters instead of appreciating the roots of rock music.
Little Steven’s weekly broadcast (also on the internet), Little Steven’s Underground Garage, seems to divide between seminal original rock ‘n’ roll, great power pop and garage rock from ever since, and new stuff by straight-ahead but creative bands with original ideas. Plus he notices women and minorities.
Sure, he can be annoying – my peeves are gangsters and Rat Pack references, which have nothing to do with it. But he gives us not only coolest record of the week but a Freak of the Week from history and lots of cool obscure facts that I never knew even though I was born in 1953, which illuminate the spirit of rock.
He doesn’t need our respectful talk or our approval of his tastes. But just listen to the man Sunday nights! It’s just plain dopey to say that he hates new music or genre-bending, or is in any way conservative or stodgy. He’s cool.
mofro, derek trucks, mule,panic,g.love,DBtruckers,etc to many to name. music is great now!
anything that inspires this many comments proves that rock’n'roll is indeed, alive, in some form or another. yay for Little Steven for waking people up and yay for author
First time I’ve seen the ‘new’ Crawdaddy. Sorry folks but Steven is right. Hot Tuna no good? It is evidenced the author knows little of which he speaks. Guess I haven’t missed much.
Tobie Keith’s God Love Her and Trace Adkin’s Marry For Money are pretty damn good rock songs!!
I think Van Zandt is wrong and Greenberg is right (and I love Bruuuce). There is plenty of great music out there but you have to work to find it. So what…it’s always been that way. The mainstream always sucked and it’s even worse now. Check out Midlake, Turin Brakes, Eli “Paperboy” Reed, Howlin’ Rain…and plenty more that have been toiling for years: Blue Rodeo, Radiators, Paul Weller, Richard Hawley…there’s tons of great music but “FM” radio has been co-opted and no one with originality can break through anymore. Music lovers just have to work harder….I’m 54 by the way and have always dug new music.
The White Stripes and the author of this article both suck!
The Association’s best stuff is unimpeachable, astounding, deliriously beautiful. The epitome of the California sunshine stuff so much in (theoretical) vogue these days. Spin “Goodbye Forever” from their eponymous album and give us a ring when you’ve come to your senses. Good call on Veruca Salt though…
james, check out The Association’s “Goodbye Forever” from their epnoymous (sonthenege image on cover)l.p. Unoverrateable. Good call on veruca Salt though. But basically, van Zant is right. Your rebuttal is just as predicatble and empty s his statement. The only difference is that his statement is true.
The delivery system most “old guys” were used to was the LP. Every 15 or 20 minutes, you had to get up and flip the album to play the other side,a small investment that had a great return. When CD’s came along, all of a sudden, albums in many cases doubled in size,a larger investment with a much smaller return. Rock n Roll is not a drive in window where you can just supersize everything on demand. Did we expect too much? It seems to me that the new delivery system helped corrupt the intent of music being a viable source of entertainment. Now it’s just another source of entertainment. There’s plenty of great new music out there. You just have to wade through tons of crap to find it. Most folks don’t have the time,willingness or energy to do it. Little Steven has a valid point. A solid foundation starts with the basics-always has, always will. I don’t think old guys hate new music-it’s just become work locating it. And we all know how much fun work is, right?
Thanks for giving me something to write about! :D http://diarrheaisland.blogspot.com/2009/06/crab-v-crab.html
That picture with the article is awesome
The Association? Seriously? They’re one of the greatest musical groups ever to grace this Earth. You, sir, are a fool!
No, I’m not old at all. I’m 21 and still think current music sucks. Music in the early 00’s (2000-2004) was better – no Lady GaGa, no Miley Cyrus, no Jonas Brothers.