A maroon T-shirt with led zeppelin and 1973 tour printed in yellow on the front is going on the block at Christie’s in New York on Saturday. It’s one of just a handful made for the band’s road crew, and it’s expected to go for $1,500. When I think about that shirt—probably saved from ending up as a shop rag only by luck, and now treated as an object of veneration—I’m reminded of everything that’s terrible about the rock ‘n’ roll establishment.
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If 30 is the new 20, the new 30 must be somewhere between 45 and 70, considering how many people in that age bracket seem afflicted with a 30-year-old’s anxiety about becoming unhip. Pop is about destruction, about making something new and fun out of the bits and pieces of the past, but these self-serious boomers are fighting tooth and nail to keep the youth culture of the 60s and 70s alive—inflating its myth and exalting it so aggressively you’d think they’ve taken every musical development since 1983 as a personal affront. But despite their best efforts, and despite the presence of huge conglomerates in the industry—the Big Four, Clear Channel, Live Nation—music culture in the new century is less monolithic today than it was back then. It’s more fractured and less centralized, and it’s changing constantly at a rate that confounds most people who weren’t raised in the rapid-fire media environment of the past 25 years.
New York Times columnist and B-list neocon David Brooks is one of those people who still believes in the rock star—which shouldn’t surprise anybody, given that disconnection from reality is a prerequisite for neocon credentials. In a November 20 op-ed called “The Segmented Society” he mourns the passing of a fictitious pop monoculture, imagining it as a nation of fans united across social, class, and ethnic lines by a few acts that inherited the “long conversation” of American music and integrated rock, blues, country, and soul—utopia as embodied by the E Street Band, essentially. Of course, talking this way in 2007 leaves out everybody whose musical taste was forever changed by the mainstreaming of hip-hop—to say nothing of American artists influenced by bhangra, Afrobeat, or Balkan brass bands. In reality monoculture is never good for society: it was people united by the music Brooks worships who beat up punks, burned disco records, and made the Top 40 an artistic wasteland for the better part of two decades.
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