Where Have All The Rockstars Gone?

I’m completely out of touch.

I tend to keep my head down, work hard, and stay mostly oblivious to trends in pop culture. I don’t know Khloe Kardasian from Jack Kevorkian. I don’t know The Hills from The Hills Have Eyes, nor if Jennifer Aniston is ovulating. I’m told there’s a girl on Glee in a wheelchair and that “The Situation” is an orange person, but that’s about it.

Still, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “We poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.” So every six months or so I lift my ostrich beak out of the sand and sniff around.

In terms of music trends, sometimes the landscape changes so quickly and so dramatically that I literally feel as if I’ve landed in a parallel dimension — or in Canada. Like, everything is familiar… yet shittier.

You know that final scene in Planet of the Apes where Marky Mark thinks he’s back home in Washington DC, but then he sees that the Lincoln Monument is an Ape statue? That was my exact state of shock as I attended a huge summer music festival last month. My. Dear. God.

What the fuck have you people done? Where have all the rock stars gone?

Last time I checked, bands had four or five members, were reasonably fit, and had a sense of style. Singers were larger than life personas, shows were a dizzying circus, and songs created a rich elevated atmosphere of sex, danger, mood and romance.

Now I’m standing in a “delighted” crowd of 30,000 Iced Frappuccinos watching a dozen bearded farmers and geeks politely take the stage. I literally can’t tell who’s officially in the band and who’s there to repair the Wifi. At one point someone’s playing a washboard — not as a joke, and the music is so clean and innocuous that it’s almost… soothing. Am I at a rock concert or buying a duvet cover at Bed Bath & Shoot Me in the Urethra?

Since when have we accepted these Quaker oatmeal-y, flannelled, baby-powdered banjo vaginas as heroes? So painfully… white. So painfully… safe. Even the crowd could be swapped with a freshman orientation at MIT, or a cult love-in — minus any bohemian flair or a single flash of beaver.

After the final song, (I recognized it from a Kia commercial) the headliner, bespectacled I.T. professionals, responded to a thunderous cheer by saying, “Thank you. Drive safe now.”

Really? Drive safe now? DRIVE SAFE NOW? FUCK YOU! Eleanor Devine tells me to drive safe! Do you know her? No? I’m not surprised- she’s my 92-year-old grandmother. She probably shouldn’t be headlining a massive rock festival either, but if no one pumps the brakes on this trend… her odds are looking good for Lollapalooza 2013.

It’s bad enough you people let Snookie procreate. What will it take for you to wake up from your vagina comas and revolt? You “Occupied” Wall Street when the middle class started vanishing. So what now, when rock stars face a similar fate?

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I read a Kabbalah book that claims that where we find the most darkness (or in this case dorkness) we find the most Light. And indeed there IS a SILVER LINING:

With all this sweet, wet manure on the airwaves, it’s PRIME TIME for new bands to take seed and grow! Remember the words of Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

So as you sit in boredom at your desk this fall, think about what you can do to subvert, usurp, and sabotage the current state of music. Start sketching logos and provocative band names, and hopefully I’ll be watching YOU on stage next summer.