Sex and drugs and rock 'n roll: Has music lost its edge?
Sharing my remarks from a panel discussion on Saturday 28 October in London.
I’m in London this weekend to participate in the Battle of Ideas weekend of events, and I’m sharing my remarks below. Our panel topic was Sex and Drugs and Rock n’ Roll: has music lost its edge?
For a full list of the weekend talks, see here.
To quote Erykah Badu, I’m an analog girl in a digital world. So of course I’m going to broadly agree with the premise of the question — yes, music has lost its edge.
But I have a lot of caveats.
We now live in a world where millions of normie kids are drugged to the eyeballs by their parents and Big Pharma, then saturated with social media distortions that have convinced them world is about to end. The average American teen is almost as out there as the most acid-drenched hippy at Woodstock — just without the hope. So the paradigm implied in the question — that we have musical artists who act as a gateway to hedonistic lifestyles — doesn’t really apply anymore. The kids engage in hedonistic lifestyles with the full knowledge and support of their Boomers and Gen X elders. We have raised a bunch of drug addicted nihilists, and its not the kids fault.
But when it comes to the music, first of all, I think the best music of today comes from the biggest pop acts of today. Beyonce’s music is creative and new — maybe it’s even groundbreaking. Taylor Swift — while apparently single-handedly keeping the American economy going with her epic tour — makes fun, highly relatable and at times even poignant music. I’m old enough to remember the pop acts of the 1980’s — I’d take Harry Styles over Rick Astley any day.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say the pop giants of today are far, far more interesting and certainly listenable than most of what is played on BBC Radio Six. Indie music has become dreary and doctrinaire, it reflects what looks from the outside like a very demoralised generation. Even worse, it’s not sonically distinct. Instead of the flash and whizz bang of the ’70’s or the weird electronica of the ’80’s or the garage band sound of the ’90’s, today’s young independent acts play up working class accents and bang on about the patriarchy. I find it irritating and forced — though in defence of these kids, they have to pay homage to the sacred cows of today in order to get anywhere.
While I’m sure their beliefs are genuine, like every other sector of the creative industries, young musicians must display their woke bone fides in order to secure patronage in a notoriously gate-kept industry.
To me, the 1970’s was the greatest decade of popular music — from Donna Summer to Led Zeppelin, the Beatles Let It Be album and Tom Waits Heart of Saturday Night. The sheer sonic diversity in musical output was remarkable.
So how much did sex and drugs and rock and roll shape that massively creative decade? I’d argue that it was in spite of, not because of, the drugs that those artists produced such incredible work. I think it might have been more the fact that they actually had a lot to rebel against, a much wider and more unbridgeable generation gap, than exists today between Gen X and Gen Z. What do today’s kids really rebel against, when their hipster parents are so supportive of their weird art?
Interestingly, today there’s good music for grown-ups: Chilli Gonzalez is endlessly fun and somehow high and low brow at the same time. Roísín Murphy’s album Hit Parade was restorative — it sounded both decidedly weird but also somehow very mature.
But has there ever been a time where artists — musical or otherwise— have been sober squares? Even with stars whose public persona was squeaky clean, like Elvis, sex and drugs ruled backstage.
Something funny happens when you hit middle age — maybe it’s just me, but youth culture does start to appear a little tiny bit ridiculous. It all looks derivative because you’ve been there, done that. And at the same time I feel a rush of something like tenderness because everyone looks like a goddamn baby and it’s kind of cute. So I admit that my judgement of contemporary acts might be a little skewed by that. But I think it’s objectively true that the indie bands of the 1990’s sounded new — but the indie acts of today sound like they just ripped off the 90’s, just with added social media and ‘fuck the Tories’ references.
Overall, for young people I think the picture looks grim. Contemporary rap is unlistenable, drill isn’t music so much as it is being inside the mind of someone who’s having a psychotic break. It’s demonic. I can’t put into words how much I hate it.
It makes sense though, because young people have been robbed of every other thing that made being young fun, so why not music too?
I can say that as a songwriter/producer and musician of the last 25 years, U are correct.
but as U also said, it's not the kids fault. they have inherited a dead culture. stripped away by the homogenous forces of technology and Neoliberalism/progressivism. there is simply nothing left to rebel against. Jane's Addiction came out with their seminal album 'Nothing's Shocking' in 1988 and it was prescient in every aspect(when all boundaries have been destroyed, what then?). the rebellious youth culture that began with Elvis and the birth of Rock N Roll has desintigrated into a lukewarm nihilism. the internet and the ubiquitous nature of smart phones/social media has rapidly turned art into content. for about 50 years, Rock/Pop/Hip Hop served as a giant cultural force that united each new generation in an almost religious manifestation.
there will always be talented, creative types born to every era, but without the cultural paradigm for expression, there is no format available to today's youth. I see parallels to Russian literature during the Soviet Empire. a culture that produced Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin etc found itself bereft during the repressive mandates of Communism. even the great works from that era were written in secret, only to be discovered by the west decades later (Bulgarov, Pasternak,Solzhenitsyn).
the successful artist you mentioned above came to prominence close to 20 years ago! we are no longer able to regenerate new ideas and sounds at the margins, because the margins have now been pushed to the center. If all of the teachers of today are embracing Gender Ideology, how do kids rebel? going trad? going anti-vaxxer? MAGA? haha.
the only way out is through tho. in the long run, Art will survive and have meaning again, but in the short term...it might be awhile...
I confess that I sometimes find myself returning to music from the 70's whenever I'm feeling down. I got my first transistor radio (hand-held, battery operated, with a tiny white plastic ear plug) for Christmas in 1970. I can still remember how thrilled I was, as a nine year-old kid, listening to the Beatles sing "Let It Be." My parents allowed me to listen to my little radio at night after I'd gone to bed (they'd turn it off and take out the ear-plug from my ear before they went to bed). I can still remember the thrill of listening to "Let It Be" in my darkened bedroom before falling asleep. It made my heart feel as if it were soaring. Thank you for prompting that happy memory. : )