Today, I feel kind of depressed because let’s face it, most of the people I love in music are old. With the recent death of Lou Reed I realize more than ever than the coming years are gonna be a long series of death announcements. All the rock n’ roll legends are surely old by definition, Mick Jagger is 69, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon are 72, David Bowie and Iggy Pop are 66, Paul McCartney is 71, and Leonard Cohen is 79! Even Bruce Springsteen is already 64, Stevie Wonder and Tom Waits are 63, and nobody is getting younger.
Can you imagine the ten-fifteen upcoming years when we are going to learn one by one the death of all these pop-rock stars? Depressing with a big D. The other problem is that I don’t really see an entire new generation replacing them. Who is the new Dylan? The new McCartney or Lennon? I am well aware that these kinds of comparisons are pointless – why would you be the new someone instead of being you? – but not a lot people among the current music generation could pretend to leave an impact in the next few years as these giants did. I am going to sound very old when saying this, but the new generation of songwriters hasn’t satisfied me like the old one. Sure, there is Conor Oberst and there was Elliott Smith, as well a few others that I find interesting, but it is not enough. Most young people these days are listening to Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Drake and probably a lot of boring rap like Kanye and Jay-Z, a lot of soulless EDM, plus a few more crappy songs from ‘artists’ coming from nowhere, which stay in the top 40 for a few months before sinking in the most profound limbo of our pop culture. A teenager recently told me he had listened to the Beatles, and ‘the music didn’t do anything to him’. I felt soooo sorry for him, not being able to love or even like the Beatles represents such a loss for me, haven’t the Beatles almost invented everything in pop music? I was so grateful to have been born during a decade with a soundtrack by Lennon-McCartney rather than a decade with a soundtrack by… I can’t even find a name to define this decade, it’s noisy but not in a good way, polluted by these redundant ecstasy-fueled EDM beats produced by animals like deadmau5 and diplo(docus). This music is already dead before it started and who will remember about it in 20 years?
The amazing thing is that ‘old’ rock stars are still touring and performing even in their 70s! I just saw McCartney and he sounded and looked great… he has also released a new album as everyone knows. The Stones just did this impressive tour with the success we know, Bowie has just released an album after a long silence demonstrating once again that all the old guys are still relevant and still selling out arenas. Plus they don’t try to sound like Skrillex, they still sound like themselves, aging gracefully.
The passing of Lou Reed is just a beginning of a long series I am afraid,… it’s life, it’s the natural order of living things, life without death would not make sense, right? Still, death sounds like an absurdity for most of us but these people never really die, this is the all-mighty power of great art, it makes you immortal, it is the ultimate revolt against your destiny, given that you believe in destiny,… but even if we are facing chaos rather than fate, it also works, great art has freed these artists forever from whatever happened/will happen to them. And someone who managed to write ‘Sweet Jane’, ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, ‘Satellite of Love’, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, ‘Vicious’, ‘Perfect Day’, ‘Candy Says’, ‘Stephanie Says’ and so many others certainly cannot die.