What’s with all the handsome grandsons in these rockband magazines?
And what have they done with the fat ones, the bald, and the goateed!?
– Silver Jews, “Strange Victory, Strange Defeat”
While unpacking my wife came across some back issues of Venus Zine that we’d not gotten around to reading. Flipping through Issue No. 33 from Fall 2007, I zeroed in on Amy Schroeder’s feature “What Happened to Revolution Girl Style Now?” – a kind of state of the union on women in rock circa these foul years of withering and diminished potential. I was particularly struck by the frankness of Kill Rock Star founder Slim Moon’s assessment of rock in the late aughts; “I think boring bands and artists are dominating the industry, and most of these boring bands and artists are male.”
Lately, I’ve been a bit down on rock and roll as a form that can remain vital and meaningful into the near future. There’s such a business as usual vibe to so much radio programming and rock journalism and band forming. And it’s not just a corporate initiative. Even at the individual amateur musician level, there’s an acceptance of “rules” about the right and wrong way to be in a band. Heck, I’m a fairly obnoxious member of a popular musicians message board, and almost daily I read posts by folks who see rock as this normalized world where one must have a certain look and certain gear and a certain worldview to succeed. Of course some folks are more in favor of the current state of things than others, but no one doubts the “reality” that rock and roll success is for the pretty people who follow the appropriate trends.
One article of faith in the “established view” of rock and roll is that the Rolling Stones are supremely ugly mothers – grizzled zombies hideously deformed by years of drug abuse and R&B jive. You know what I mean – the sorts of Jay Leno monologue crapola about performing in wheelchairs and their tour bus being a gigantic hearse. Basically, the Rolling Stones are treated as a creepy punchline because they haven’t done as expected and grown old gracefully. They helped establish the template for all the “boring bands” that Slim Moon was decrying in the Venus piece, but their very longevity makes them unboring and unsettling.
I think one aspect of the Stones’ growing creepiness (the creepiness that makes rock critics and the audience at large refer to them as undead, leering corpses) is that they are a band whose appeal is rooted in sex. This is, after all, a band who as dirty old men in their twenties gave us the nasty ode to statutory rape that is “Stray Cat Blues.” The Stones catch a lot of flak because they, as unrepentantly gnarled rock and rollers, force us to confront the uncomfortable realities like impending mortality and randy granddads.
Years ago as an undergraduate, my British Romantics professor Dr. Loudon mentioned the Rolling Stones as an example how young artists make their names by celebrating their virility and then spend their middle ages watching that virility slip away. He specifically mentioned the Stones’ best later work being that where they try to once more jumpstart their primal urges for a final go around. (I think he was referring to “Start Me Up.”) I won’t go into the whole romantic sex = death equation here because I caught some blowback regarding my cursory treatment of Blake in the last blog about Dylan and Obama and prophetic speechifying and murder ballads. Still, I think that it’s fair to say that a good deal of the Stones’ later work has been about getting the juices flowing.
The opening shot on Voodoo Lounge is titled “Love is Strong” and kicks things off with the unsubtle
Love is strong
And you’re so sweet
You make me hard
You make me weak
It’s no “Viva Viagra!” but you get the picture. The very next track “You Got Me Rocking” weighs in the power of a particularly vital love object to revive dwindling potential –
I was a hooker
Losing her looks
I was a writer
Can’t write another book
I was all dried up
Dying to get wet
I was a tycoon
Drowning in debt
Hey hey
You got me rockin’ now
The album’s title Voodoo Lounge prompts me to think of totems of potency like the gris-gris bag or the mojo hand or the John the Conqueror root. And given how often the Stones like to reference Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, I’d wager those allusions were lurking somewhere behind their conceptions of “voodoo.” This is a record about reclaiming one’s mojo by any means necessary. Heck, “Suck on the Jugular” even seems to muddy the waters between vampirism and sexual hedonism.
This is a record about old men wanting to fuck and be fucked. This is not appropriate or “normal” content in a climate where rock and roll has been reduced to young pretty folks following the rules and building a safe little rock and roll career. This stuff is actually dirty in comparison to the intellectualized toy Satanism Mick et al. were tinkering with in the run up to Altamont. The Stones in their dotage break the fundamental rule that rock and roll is for the young and pretty things. When Jagger snarls “Going to fuck your sweet ass” in “Sparks Will Fly” – or when Dylan lusts after Alicia Keys on Modern Times’ “Thunder on the Mountain” or when Springsteen leers at the “girls in their summer clothes” on his latest Magic – audiences and album reviewers get a little squirmy. It’s one thing to look the other way when confronted with the goatishness of ever-youthful Pan. But when hoary ol’ Zeus and Pluto start changing shape and absconding with the maidens, then rock and roll’s promise of unbridled sexiness seems merely “gross.”
However, believing in a rock and roll where normalcy prevails and prettiness reigns and where children learn of the proper types of rocking via videogame simulations thereof, is ultimately harmful – especially for folks who see creation as a way to harness and cope with “non normal” views and ideas. The pressure to be always young and always vital eats away at folks. Cobain admitted as much in his suicide note. I think rock is a form (and maybe this is just my punk rock sympathies showing) needs to allow for the not normal, the unexpected, the frankly flawed. Without that release, without the ability of rock music’s voodoo powers of regeneration (even in half-measures), we’ve got nothing but death – either by attrition or through the black magic intentionality of suicide.
