Less Artsy, More Fartsy

I've only been through New York, never to it, sadly, and I was never much of a fan of the late '70s post-punk scene spawned by CBGB's. Still, I can recognize it as the end of an era because it was where bands showed up to play and strut their stuff, and that's generally a good thing in the aggregate.

Roy Edroso has wonderful take on it all, from the perspective of someone who paid his dues and spent enough time there to see the good, bad, and ugly, and take 'em all in stride. And I can particularly sympathize with his distaste for schlepping the artifacts out to Vegas, as if they were rebuilding the London Bridge in the Arizona desert or some shit. As Roy says, it's not an "outrage" per se, but still rather creepy and unseemly. More than that, it's unnecessary.

This is the real problem with the commodification of rock (or any, but rock in particular) music -- it turns participants into mere customers, digging through curios and fetishizing the various sordid knick-knacks accumulated by hangers-on, associates who eventually fall on hard times and cash in by displaying their found goodies in a glass case and gouging the suckers.

So you have corporate museums like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the like, dickless curators draining the beauty and impact out of it by lamely attempting to freeze-dry the immediacy of the music, which is after all the point of it. I can't imagine venturing near such places; they'd make me not want to listen to that genre of music ever again.

It's something of a relief that as I approach the halfway mark through my fortieth year, I find myself gravitating toward ever harder, more aggressive, and sometimes more garage-y music, instead of falling into the horrid "adult-contemporary" niche, where radio stations sport cutesy first names, and every third song is from Sting. I'd like to keep it that way. I do not want musical wallpaper to complement my hamster-wheel lifestyle and mortgaged priorities, I want to feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Either there is vitality and passion, or somebody is just trying to sell me a fucking cheeseburger.

It's the energy of rock, in the end, and the commercialized failed attempts to bottle, transport, and sell the lightning to the rubes serve only to separate the fans from the tourists. I'll never find the time to partake of the listless taxidermy the museum dickheads traffic in; were I to venture into such a place and see a stuffed and mounted Lemmy, trapped forever in some lame pose for some schmuck to ogle, I'd have to cause some destruction. I figure I owe him at least that much.