Not Fade Away

Feb. 15, 2006

The whole world seemed divided into two camps last week: those who thought the Rolling Stones sucked at the Super Bowl and those who thought the “World’s Greatest Rock Band” still had the juice.
Personally, I was pleasantly surprised. The Stones were all so trim they looked like they exist on NutraSweet and cigarettes. And despite a crappy P.A., there was a level of density to the music that was as beefy as a meat locker sparring session. And surely the frenzied crowd must have woken up the next morning with sore ribs from their fist-pumping show of support.
But there were critics. In the Village Voice, one young writer was appalled by Mick Jagger’s croaky-crow voice, his tasteless belly shirt, and the gall of dancing around the stage at the past-shelf-life age of 62. Then there was his withered, wrinkled face and ropey arms -- gross, he said.
And the writer added that the Stone’s didn’t deliver half the show that Justin Timberlake and Janice Jackson put on a coupla‘ years ago. Ouch... talk about fighting words.
Well, some folks would complain even if they were hung with a new rope. Jagger has never had a particularly good voice -- it’s always sounded like a fight between two cats, a violin and a washboard -- but he succeeds because his voice oozes character and nuance. And if Sir Mick can’t be tasteless, who can? He helped invent tasteless.
Tasteless to me was Sir Paul McCartney’s saccharine GM commercial at last year’s Super Bowl, singing “Baby You Can Drive My Car,” or that bitch Justin Timberlake scrambling to blame the obviously staged “wardrobe misfunction” on Janice Jackson, who took all the heat.
The real reason critics hate the Stones is because they have the gall to keep going when they should be growing old gracefully, sipping tea in their English manors while rock‘s scepter is passed to a new generation.
Some have pointed out that no one gives aging black musicians a hard time over their longevity. No one piles on B.B. King for plucking the strings past his ‘80s, or Buddy
Guy for rocking the blues at the age of 70.
But age seems to be the white man’s burden, especially if those musicians are still trying to be creative rather than just a golden oldies act. So, at what age do the critics feel an act should retire? The members of U2 are edging into their late 40s. Does anyone expect Bono to bow out?
Is it possible that some of these old baby boom bands have crept back onstage because of the dearth of talent by younger groups? Currently, much of rock is held hostage by the whiney “anger music” of emo, screamo and hardcore. Either that or an endless succession of Nickelback clones that seem interchangeable on the radio. It’s no wonder the Stones see their way back in -- there’s a black hole in rock, aching to be plugged. It’s no wonder their new release, “A Bigger Bang” and Paul McCartney’s “Chaos and Creation In The Backyard” were among the best reviewed CDs of 2005.
We’ll be hearing more about “ageism” in the years ahead, now that the boomers are entering the Depends Years. The bet here is that my generation will refuse to age “gracefully” into that dark night.
(Afterthought: Despite millions of dollars in magazine cover hype (including posing as Jesus with a crown of thorns), rapper Kanye West got passed by at the Grammys last week for U2‘s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.” It proves that “three chords and the truth” is always going to trump the latest musical gimmick.


Not Funny
Then there was that other melodrama: what to do about the Muslim world rioting their turbans off over the cartoon dissing the Prophet Muhammed?
There’s a part of the brain that neurologists have yet to discover that causes people to go nuts over cartoons -- completely berserko -- double-plus, cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs over ink squibbles on newsprint. Newspaper editors, however, are well aware of this part of the brain and rest assured, I’ve pulled a few rage-generators from the pages of the Northern Express through the years.
Several years ago, Tom Tomorrow had a cartoon featuring an orgy of naked male Greek statues in his “This Modern World” strip. I cravenly substituted a different strip and wasn’t surprised when newspapers which ran it were picketed, pillaged and boycotted across the country. There’s something about newspaper cartoons that can drive an icepick into the reader’s logic synapses when a similar ‘toon wouldn’t even produce a yawn in an animated TV feature such as “South Park” or “King of the Hill.”
Knowing this, it’s not hard to understand
why so many Muslims have their turbans in a knot. They have nothing. No jobs, no hope, no future. And in their world of sexual repression their only source of dates are the ones that grow on trees. Mad, bored and horny -- how‘s that
for a combination? All they have is Muhammed, founder of the world’s most backward, medieval religion. And they’re chained to their religion like men shackled to a corpse on a sinking raft.
You didn’t see middle-class Muslims rioting on CNN; it was mostly poor young men, eager to have a diversion from just standing on the corner with their hands in their pockets with nothing to do.
On the other hand, if Jesus was portrayed having a good laugh at a witch-burning
from the days of the Inquisition, maybe Christians would be rioting too. Let‘s polish up the Golden Rule, -- the basis of all religions -- and play nice.