Lundagård’s Jesper Lodin springs to the defense of classic rock against detractors both real and imagined in this week’s Culture Column.
Alright, so I’m not usually the type to hold grudges, nourish them and rage about them in the bathtub months after the fact (unless it’s a case of the cinematic sins committed by Prometheus. Man, that Damon Lindelof can go step on a Lego as far as I’m concerned), and hey, as a group, students generally have excellent taste in music.
However, something that has been a mildly recurring theme ‘round these parts has been me running into musical snobs at nations and getting condescendingly pegged as a person who buys all his music at gas stations or something just because I happen to let on that I enjoy the aural vintage wine that is classic 60’s and 70’s rock most of all.
I like to think of myself as pretty live-and-let-live when it comes to music. I’d never dream of slagging off anyone just because they enjoy bopping along to whatever’s topping the Spotify charts and such. I may associate primarily with the noble, sweaty rock music of yore, but I still maintain a healthy appreciation for hip-hop, EDM, classical music, that sort of stuff. I also have enough tact to refrain from dissing someone’s taste in music without a helluva good reason – to musically-minded people, them’s fighting words, you know?
… which is why I don’t particularly enjoy getting patronizingly lectured by some metalhead or indie-rock fan on how predictable and cliché it is to still maintain a wide-eyed fascination with that epoch. The music of the 60’s and 70’s is legendary for a reason, you know… Just because it’s been passed through the GI tract of our culture more times than World War II doesn’t mean that it’s somehow ”played out” or the musical equivalent of Velcro or something. Even if it’s not up your personal alley, I think that anyone who fancies themselves as musically knowledgable should at least respect those decades.
I mean, maybe this is all completely obvious to everyone, but the pop-cultural singularity that took place in the 60’s was nothing short of miraculous. Far from being a Fisher-Price Baby’s First Rock Band sort of deal as some people would have it, the 60’s were by far the most fertile hotbed of musical innovation yet… Once the British Invasion, drugs and Bob Dylan dropkicked the doors of perception wide open, musicians like Jimmy Page, Neil Young and Pete Townshend started splitting the rock ’n roll atom in earnest on a nightly basis as early as, oh, 1966 or so, and popular music is still largely coasting on the inspiration generated by that handful of art school dropouts who learned to fumble their way through the blues scale in all sorts of intrepid, visionary ways.
Yo, consider that in just ten years, rock music had gone from its NES-esque Chuck Berry-led roots to Jimi Hendrix running his soul through an amplifier the size of a grain silo and broadcasting it into the atmosphere of the earth at decibel levels usually reserved for A10 Warthog strikes in front of an audience consisting of probably a good 2-3% of the human race. Isn’t that weird? Throngs of people completely spellbound by the otherworldly sounds being weaved by some guy fingering an ornate electrical plank. Where the hell is that in our genome?
And that’s just one of the myriad, completely unexpected turns rock music took during that era. In reality, almost all of the oft-ridiculed ”dinosaur rock” brigade kick some Tyrannosaurus-grade butt all over the Paleogene… Even a band as terminally uncool as Genesis could fill an aircraft hangar with great, wildly innovative music, while most of today’s artists have yet to demonstrate that they can fill a milk carton. Ain’t no thick-rimmed glasses and smug demeanor gonna put a dent in that.
Cool beans. Never knew I had so much pent-up vitriol earmarked for musical vendettas. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I suppose I’m off to flying scissors kick anyone who happens to enjoy a different shade of M&M’s than me.
