Pining for consensus is what this all comes down to, and it’s always by people who remember how “the Beatles united us all.” (Who’s “us,” though?) But, without even going into the whole digital thing, that kind of consensus is neither possible nor, I think, desirable in a market such as exists today. If nothing else, the “rock” audience covers everyone from early adolescence to consumers in their 70s. The only product with a consensus among a spread that wide is gonna be oxygen.

the thing elderly defenders of music seem to forget is that those revered icons were once iconoclasts, either intentionally or accidentally. Even those 60’s, 70’s and 80’s bands trying to ape giants who came before created often bizarre (and much more interesting) mutations thanks largely to incompetence, ignorance and/or altered chemistry.

It’s impossible to create music without reference (although you can make music that sounds like that), so the whole idea of wishing for new music to sound like music “used to” is really kind of silly. People do try to create music that sounds exactly like Zep/Beatles/Stones/Cure/Pavement, but nailing the sound of other band makes music that sounds exactly like you would expect: an academic exercise distinguished more for form than substance. Mistakes, ignorance, disrepect, and good old fashioned incompetence are almost always key ingredients in any really good music.

It’s not so much that hero worship and pining for the past is such a bad thing (maybe a little sad), but that spectacular failure to reach those unattainable ridiculous brass rings often leads to something much more interesting.

It’s the difference between a boring corpse and a freaky Frankenstein monster.