The Rotting Corpse of Lester Bangs and the New Rockers

I have this big end cut from a log right outside my back door. It's a leftover from a time long past when northwest forestry consisted of clear-cut logging, re-planting and clearing out the underbrush. A time when few people lost their houses and lives in rampaging out-of-control forest fires, and nobody in my mountain valley got sick from smoke inhalation. The log is a cool reminder that time marches inexorably onwards, and the best of each new generation builds on what the previous one set up for them, and the worst think that they are the first ones to have ever thought their thoughts. 

The log is where I go to smoke and pose like an out of shape Rodin sculpture while I contemplate the philosophical underpinnings of the sum total of life, the universe and everything. Ghosts of people long shuffled off this mortal coil come to visit me here. Some are cool and some are the opposite of that, but all of the ghosts are smart in their own way. I've never tolerated stupid people around me, let alone stupid hallucinatory phantasms. 

Today my visitor is Georges Polti. I really don't get on too well with him. He's 19th Century French which makes him insufferable by default, and I'm a Gen-X rock writer and pop culture critic which makes me twice as unpleasant and annoying. He's interesting to talk to even though I thoroughly disagree with his ideas about drama and story.

Today he's here to throw some shade around and generally pooh-pooh the state of modern rock music, reminding me that musicians only have twelve notes to work with and thus everything has already been done. Music is boring because it has no other choice.

"C'est de la merde!" He sneers at me through a heavy cloud of his malodorous pipe tobacco, redolent of Boudin noir and maybe burning dog hair. I hold up a hand in the universal signal of stop-right-there! He gives me a mildly offended look which may just be resting French face and I press forward with my thought.

"Look, I get it. You were weaned on that poor anonymous schlub that got his ecclesiastical smack-talk about there being nothing new under the sun ganked out from under him by people who wanted every semi-clever thing in that epistle to be attributed to King Solomon. Then you had the bad luck to be raised during an entire century buried in nihilistic whining! So, you're biased right out of the gate."

"And I really don't care that you and all your followers are stuck in an echo chamber of the last original story was created by William Shakespeare. Face it. You're just old and numb and you've lost perspective and empathy. Your idea that there's only thirty-six dramatic situations is dumb, just like the idea that there's only twelve musical notes is ridiculous. You're discounting the most important part of the artistic equation and that's voice."

The ghost of Georges Polti disappears in a huff of tobacco smoke and I'm left wondering if I'm just chiding myself for ignoring two generations of musicians that jump up and down on the shoulders of the giants that came before them, beating dead men at their own game. I stopped listening to the radio in 2018 because I thought there was nothing interesting to listen to anymore. I was wrong.

The kids get it, you see. Whether intuitively or through exhaustive study, the kids steadfastly refuse to trap themselves in mental oubliettes that result in things like Top 40 stations and Classic Rock radio. The new generations of rock musicians know the rules and they know how and when to break them.

Rock 'n Roll has always been a hybrid mix of everything. Like any form of art we either build on what has come before and combine the foundational blocks to create something new, or we give up and decide we like what we like and we refuse anything new, slipping into a repeating meme of the rotting corpse of Lester Bangs screaming, "Rock music used to be good!"

The ten bands on this playlist are my personal "suce-le" to the ghost of Georges Polti and his reductionist bullshit. From Blackberry Smoke who are the logical successors to and sometimes reincarnation of The Allman Brothers Band to Greta Van Fleet who regularly channels the voice of Robert Plant circa 1972, to The Interrupters who owe a karmic debt to Save Ferris and The Mighty Mighty BossTones, they all stand on the shoulders of giants and we are the better for it because these kids get it! They understand that Rock n' Roll will never die, it'll just change it up a little and keep on groovin'. The end result is magnificent and a fine reminder that the best part of life is listening to the new voices. 

Playlist Table of Contents:

1. Three Chords - Goodbye June
2. Highway Tune - Greta Van Fleet
3. Shakin' Hands With the Holy Ghost - Blackberry Smoke
4. Stone - Whiskey Myers
5. Watch Your Six - Sleeping Faceless
6. She's Kerosene - The Interrupters
7. I Am The Fire - Halestorm
8. Gasoline - Kicking Harold
9. Rolling 7s - Dirty Honey
10. Sweet Mountain River - Monster Truck

The New Rockers Playlist