The end of a decade is naturally a time for reflection, and the end of this decade has inspired overwhelmingly bad reviews from everyone who has taken the time to ponder the last ten years of depressing suckitude.
Although the desire to pile on and deliver a crushing death blow to the aughts is difficult to overcome, it is contingent upon me to find a silver lining to our decade of Enron and Viagra.
The last ten years have been exceedingly kind to old rock stars. Far from being cast onto the scrap heap of music and society, old rocker dudes have ascended over the last decade and now occupy a powerful spot atop our socio-musical structure.
The Rolling Stones are lining up stadiums to fill for their 17th annual retirement tour, and the hottest tickets in music for most of the recent past have featured bands that experienced the 1980s as taxpaying adults.
Don’t get me wrong — I can’t hear a good Billy Joel song without looking, to an impartial observer, like I just had a series of minor strokes, but my own dancing skills aren’t important for the terms of this discussion. How can it be that our society has been sonically steered into the first years of a new century by people who were born before houses had microwaves?
This veneration of old rockers seems to be gaining steam even as the digital age threatens so many old paradigms and tired prophecies.
Our country virtually shut down when Michael Jackson mercifully died this summer, placing an international spotlight on our greatest cultural resource: the eco-friendly way we recycle popular music and pop stars. Dead superstars are an excellent source of fodder for our universal condemnation machine known as the 24-hour news cycle, and the cyclical nature of popularity ensures that somebody, somewhere, will always think Don Henley doesn’t suck.
Since Justin Timberlake savagely revealed Janet Jackson’s sad-looking boob to an audience of millions at the Super Bowl in 2004, old rockers have absolutely dominated the entertainment at our nationwide sporting spectacles.
Michael McDonald is Yah Mo-booked for the next decade of national anthems at stadiums across our great land, thanks to our overzealous Federal Communications Commission and a teensy bit of breast.
But what is it about our venerated old rockers? Is it that they are simply the safe alternative to edgy new artists who may or may not become old rock stars themselves?
Are they clinging to a bygone era of power and influence by channeling their best years and riding as long as they can on accumulated goodwill?
Are we, as Americans, doing the very same thing geopolitically in the face of a wholly uncertain future?
I don’t think I am allowed to answer that question without first getting expresslu written consent from our Chinese landlords, so I will leave it up to you to ponder that query. It sure got weird in this country, though, when the people who didn’t trust anybody older than 30 got the keys to the kingdom.
