I have repeatedly said that I find most of what is going on in the Rock scene bland and overproduced. It doesn’t say anything, stand for anything or inspire anything.
Rock Music was rebellion. Now it has become establishment. The rebellion has been consumed and regurgitated. It’s become a spectacle. Rock musicians appear on Test Match Special. They are there at the Queen’s bash and Olympic Games. They are recognised with OBEs and Knighthoods. They’ll be getting Victoria Crosses soon!
There were, in my book, three main periods of Rock rebellion.
The 1950s was a visceral rebellion where sex was let loose and threatened to shake the stolid conformity of society like a fifty on the Richter scale. The establishment were shocked into reflex prohibition.
The 1960s exploded with the Beatles. They blew strictures imposed by the Payola scandal out of the water and heralded the greatest period of youth rebellion ever seen. The values of society were challenged and found wanting. This was a philosophical rebellion combined with that basic sexuality and once again the establishment were shaken. There were marches, sit-ins, and anti-establishment rhetoric. In France the students and workers had barricades in the streets. There was talk of revolution.
The establishment were canny. They absorbed the protest, handed out their awards, and assimilated it into the commercial enterprise. The rebellious stars of the sixties Underground, who sang of street-fighting, were rubbing shoulders with the hoi-polloi.
In the later seventies it was the turn of the snarling nihilistic Punks. They weren’t likely to be lauded or to play at any banquets. Sid Vicious was never offered an OBE for contributions to the British economy. They were seen as vulgar, crude and offensive and that’s just how they wanted it. Their attitude to the establishment was to annoy them.
So where’s the next rebellion coming from? Is Rock Music dead? Has it been successfully incorporated into the establishment and castrated?
Who’s saying anything?