After a certain amount of time spent living the flaneur life- walking the streets and alleys, people-watching outside the cafe, hanging out, mooching- you start to see patterns.
You no longer need fashion magazines and lifestyle columns to know what’s what as you instead see fads filter down from the mavens to the hipsters to the normies to the out of touch, month by month and year by year.
The strangeness of it becomes fascinating when viewed from a sufficient level of detachment. What fools these mortals be.
But it goes the other way too. You start to notice the absence of things, things that were once prevalent that have slowly died an unsung death. One that instantly springs to mind, which we are going to talk about today is the demise of the scruffy young boy (or indeed girl) with the guitar case in hand.
I think this is telling. But you don’t hear much talk of it.
Shall we?
Nostalgia Critic
This essay is going to be one long exercise in me showing my age (34 in a few months). Which is fine. However if it degenerates into a long nostalgic lament then I will have failed.
All nostalgia, as I have said before, is nostalgia for past optimism. And if you allow your optimism to erode away you are done for. See, the past wasn’t better or worse than today, it was just different. Some things were obviously and demonstrably superior to now, other things were simply not. You can cherrypick either way.
That being said I don’t think it is unreasonable to point out that the phenomenon of kids playing in awful garage bands has died off and that something important has been lost in the process. Something that stretches beyond the mere three chord racket itself.
Times change. Tastes change. This is all as it should be. But the death of rock and roll as a bottom-up youth activity feels emblematic of something. Of a certain retreat, a certain defeat.
Rock and roll- being the artform that requires the least objective talent or effort- is a bellweather. Rock is the canary down the mineshaft labelled culture. And the bird is not looking too healthy.
The Invisible Band of The Market
When the absence of kids carrying guitar cases first dawned on me, I began to do a little informal research. I windowshopped in my city’s music stores, I looked in on record shops (this was between lockdowns), I asked around.
One thing that instantly struck me was how expensive gear is now. Fenders and Gibson’s- even non-US ones- seem to be way more expensive than when I was a teenager. Even taking inflation into account. Amps too. And pedals.
Rock and roll inflation has priced working class kids out of the market. To get the dead-simple Johnny Ramone Strat and Marshall set up will now set you back a few grand. Let alone the fancier rawk set-up of an SG, a cabinet and a few overdrive pedals. Hell, even Fender Jags- which grungy bands like Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth used purely because they were so cheap and out of vogue- have become four figure commodities with retro cache.
Like the Stones once said: what can a poor boy do?
Well, the answer is simple. For less money than guitars costs (let alone the fact that you also need friends who have microphones and drum kits and a van and so on) you can buy a laptop and some software and some nice headphones.
You can produce.
And this is exactly what has happened.
There is a ton of great music being made today. Personally, I discover new music through Bandcamp and YouTube and to a lesser extent Soundcloud. But it is all electronic. It is all introverted Zoomer bedroom DJs making ethereal synth-laden soundscapes or 90’s inflected neo-boom bap hip hop beats.
Which is great, but again it’s kind of a shame also. Aside from the fact that none of this music contains the angry, righteous, anthemic, raw, zeitgeist-defining energy of a four-piece in a room raising hell, it also signals a shift in culture generally.
Which, as I say, is that vast swathes of people have been priced out of participation. This is why culture seems so moribund. If only those who can afford to spend thousands on gear or who have parents who are wealthy enough to bankroll them through acting school or film school or whatever can participate then culture is going to eventually reflect the exclusive worldview of that one particular group.
If only those whose parents are able to pay their rent can participate (as this enables the kids to perfect their craft via unpaying gigs at dive bars or comedy clubs or small theatres) then you are going to find that the artists of more humbler means are going to either retreat to cheaper forms of expression or else give in entirely and simply live a 9-5 life instead.
And over time this (perhaps) inadvertently top down culture will alienate and ignore the working classes more and more and so vast swathes of talent and cultural energy will go untapped. This, I feel, is where we are at the moment.
Our Band Could (Have) Be(en) Your Life
Because I have essentially limitless space within which to lay out nuance and caveats, I am going to go on a tangent regarding how rock and roll helps kids to socialise before I wrap this up with some hopefully rousing (or at least none-defeatist) closing remarks...
I was born and raised in an interesting cultural moment. Web 2.0 really kicked off when I was 18, so I was able to enjoyed an entirely analogue childhood before it took hold. Yet the timing means it has held sway over the entirety of my adult life. I am something of a daywalker in this sense, not fully immersed in either world.
It is fascinating to me how different the adolescence of people even five years younger than me was. I played in bands, I collected CDs and records, I read the music press. I lugged amps and cymbal bags into and out of cheap vans. I never got a record deal, never released anything beside a few bootleg CDrs, but in retrospect that doesn’t matter. What matters is what I learned along the way.
Which was essentially how to communicate. Both onstage in a creative context and also by dealing with promoters and venue owners and talking to girls backstage afterwards. Learning how to be around people and exist outside of my own head or at least my own small school-bound circle.
(Admittedly this was all mediated by what now seem to be unfeasibly vast quantities of rider beer, Jack and cokes and soft-pack Marlboro Reds but the point still stands)
This is what rock and roll is for. To be able to build some dreams with hometown friends. To get into a little trouble and banter and flirt and make something that attempts in its own inarticulate way to say something about the life you live and the things you think.
And that seems to have gone because the bottom has fallen out of the infrastructure. Music for most is now an infinite collection of pleasantly meaningless background sounds, rendered essentially valueless by the infinite Borgesian library of tunes that is only a few screen touches away.
This is the only world that those even a handful of years younger than me have ever known. They are both blessed and cursed with infinite and free access to all of the recorded music that has ever existed. This world is as vast and as wide as an ocean but experientially it is only as deep as a puddle. The monkey-paw wish always has a drawback.
And this is what I lament when I ponder the lack of guitarcase kids. It’s the worry that collaboration and controlled risk and unsupervised fun and learning to deal with public embarrassment and failure and so on have all been digitalised out of existence by a world that is simultaneously safer and more frightening.
I worry- perhaps without grounds- that kids are becoming mere spectators in their own lives rather than being active participants and creators and collaborators. I worry that teens are stifled, bemused, anxiety-riddled, consumers-in-waiting rather than the rebellious wide-eyes cultural saviours that they have traditionally served the world by being.
Reprise/Outro
But, as I say, this could all be without grounds. I could just be an aging man who is out of touch with what the Zoomers are up to.
In fact this whole piece could well be a simple Seinfeldian observation (‘Have you noticed how you don’t see so many greasy haired kids with guitar cases any more?’) that has been allowed to grow monstrous and terrifying by a man with an overactive imagination and time on his hands.
Maybe. But I don’t know.
I like to think that teens spirit springs eternal. I like to think that Covid will prove to have a galvanising, perspective-bringing effect which will in turn lead to a renaissance of live music and fuzz-pedal bands with bad names and OK riffs and great outfits.
I desperately want to be proven wrong on this hunch that rock is dead, for the sake of the Zoomers much more than for myself as a listener.
And if the future music doesn’t feature guitars and stompboxes and things that are familiar to me, then that is fine too. Change is the only certainty. I just hope that the music of the future will still be made by kids in a rehearsal space laughing, arguing, nodding theirs heads, pulling faces, trying, reaching, dreaming.
Because if you can’t have fun being creative with your friends then what’s the point of being young?
Until next time,
Live Well,
Tom.
Hi Thomas - thanks for keeping my head in reality and a link to the past, such a great observation. Keep up the writing. Simon
Haven't read this email but I read your piece on Quantity Culture. You killed it man. Still processing it, but well done.