scottvalid
THE GREAT punk rock vocalist Keith Morris— most musically notable for his stints with Black Flag and The Circle Jerks—is these days fronting a band called OFF!, a band I listened to for the first time recently, and expecting them to be horrid I was instead pleasantly surprised. But why would I expect a Morris project to disappoint? Both Morris’ Black Flag and The Circle Jerks were among my earliest and most influential forays into the world of punk rock music, so wouldn’t it make more sense if I expected his current endeavors to be decent at the very least?
Keith Morris was born in 1955. When I was 14 and first getting acquainted with his music, he was 35 years old. At that time, to me, a 35 year old may as well have been Methuselah: from my pubescent vantage point Black Flag and The Circle Jerks were venerable echoes from a distant past (11 and 1 years prior, respectively), and Morris himself, while legendary, was an elder, an ancient, a rock and roll demigod spirited away from the active, teenage world of the here and now and into a kind of post-30-year-old suspended animation. He was an object to be looked up to and admired, for sure, though strictly in the past tense.
But again, why? Morris recorded his most significant music (socio-historically speaking) between the years of 1976 and 1989, taking him through the entirety of his 20s and well into his 30s, and therein lies the reason. Rock and roll, as we are told by any number of advertising firms, record labels, and publishing conglomerates, is a young man’s game. Particularly in the subgenre of punk rock, a lack of creative longevity is almost a requirement. In an art form centered around snarling, youthful rebellion, aging is an embarrassing impossibility. A 50 year old Johnny Thunders is a joke. A 60 year old GG Allin is an abomination. ‘Live fast, die young,’ or so the saying goes.
And so, according to my own ingrained prejudice, a 55 year old Keith Morris fronting a new band couldn’t possibly be worth listening to. At 55, Morris is a punk rock paradox, anathema to the very idea of the punk aesthetic. Yet, as I mentioned previously, OFF! is good. In fact, from what I heard, OFF! can go toe-to-toe with anything Morris produced in his younger years, and if this is the case, as I’d argue it is, a huge hole is then torn in the dogmatic fabric of rock-and-roll-as-necessarily-youthful-terrain.
To be fair, rock and roll’s own track record has done plenty to encourage the worship of novelty and youth. For every OFF!, there are scores of Aerosmiths, Motley Crues, Rolling Stones, and Metallicas whose later career output ranges from irrelevant to ungodly. It seems that in rock and roll’s more mainstream/established quarters, the function of a ‘successful’ band is less that of charting new or varied terrain and more a matter of dilutedly reproducing that which has worked in the past. ‘The Rolling Stones LLC’ is not as concerned with releasing something creatively akin to what ‘Exile’ was in its day as it is with releasing an album that’s just Stonesy enough to fill arenas for another rendition of ‘Start Me Up.’
Further, in ‘mainstream’ quarters, rock and roll ultimately serves as an advertisement for youth-oriented consumer products, and so, whether said products are being consumed by the young or the elderly, it’s important that the aura of youth surrounds its pitchmen. Mainstream rock and roll acts are then seen as either young people appropriately making rock and roll music, or aging rockers rehashing their youth.
The response to this phenomenon in the world of indie/alternative/underground music has generally been to revile longevity in rock and roll. There is an ethos in the indie music scene that, in many cases, the lifespan of an act stands in negative correlation to the act’s credibility, abrupt and premature breakups being manna from the gods of esoterica.
Even if members of a disbanded group simply go on to produce music that could just as easily have been released by their previous outfit, there’s something more legitimate about this shuffling of names and individuals than there would be in continuing the original group.
Meanwhile, aside from a handful of exceptional standouts, those bands that continue past their temporal point of credibility are often shunted aside as tired or niche in favor of the latest, ‘youthful’ offerings, again even if said ‘youth’ is only the product of a name change and personnel shuffling, as ‘youth’ can come in the form of the actual ages of a band’s members or—so long as said ages have not sunk too far into the depths of ‘middle age’— the brevity of a band’s existence.
On one hand, this indie veneration of novelty can be seen as an understandable reaction to the mainstream rock and roll dinosaurs referenced above, a righteous rebellion against the bloated nature of corporate rock. Still, one could argue that the indie approach to youth, novelty, and rock and roll is itself rooted in the same world of gross consumption anchored by the arena set. Consumption, and the attendant machinery of advertising and planned obsolesence that fuels it, thrives on novelty. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: wrapped up within and secondary to its role as a social advertisement, a cultural product like rock and roll exists as a form of entertainment—something better to occupy one’s time with before death than staring at the walls—and new things can be entertaining.
So, whether it’s the low-minded world of mainstream entertainment clamoring for the idols of their youth to reproduce their youthfulness (even at the expense of losing the spark that made said idols stand out in the first place) or the high-minded world of indie entertainment craving the latest in credible newness (even at the expense of abandoning acts that might still have something left to give) both are two sides of the same coin, a coin that represents the cycle of production, consumption, obsolescence, and reproduction, fueled by the faceless, phantom tastemakers of sales and marketing that we so often give ourselves over to, unthinkingly.
This isn’t to say that there’s a vast and sinister conspiracy causing folks to think of novelty as mandatory for the making of rock and roll music, thereby causing long-lived bands to degenerate into shadows of their youthful selves, forcing indie bands with creativity left in the tank to implode prematurely, or making people such as myself think that entertainers over the age of 35 should be dismissed out of hand. As mentioned above, the cycle of production, consumption, obsolescence, and reproduction is the nature of commodified entertainment. In the world of mainstream music particularly, the notion of performer-as-commodity-to-be-reproduced-until-the-facsimile-is-no-longer-recognizable is a fairly easy one to swallow/understand. More troubling to me is the indie aesthetic of newness for newness’ sake.
From the most brain dead, knuckle-dragging punk rock band to the most pretentious, shoe-gazing display of organized indie brilliance, underground rock music purports, no matter how superficially, to be something other/more than entertainment.
Whether it’s an intellectual communication regarding the state of the world’s socio-economic affairs, an anti-intellectual statement regarding the absurdity of life in the post-modern world, a poignant waxing on love lost or found, or something else entirely, ‘underground’ or ‘independent’ stabs at rock and roll music come dangerously (and sometimes exhilaratingly) close to transcending the realm of consumption and entertainment in favor of the shores of art and meaning. However, when this stab is cut down at the knees by an arbitrary set of rules birthed from the very monotony that independent creativity seeks to rise above, that which could be so much more is made to be something less through nothing other than blind adherence to a herd mentality.
There are any number of ridiculous ‘rules’ music listeners allow themselves to swallow in regards to how rock and roll music should be made or how rock and roll performers should comport themselves, and the stereotype that rock and roll music is by its nature a playground for the young or novel is only one of them, but to my mind it’s the most constricting. Sure, ‘live fast, die young,’ is a cool, easy sell, but it’s a stilted, suffocating box when one looks at rock and roll as an art form with any kind of legs, as rock and roll’s earliest generations have already tread that ground well and better than anyone else ever can or needs to. Being, after all, a relatively young medium, it’s no surprise that rock and roll’s earliest practitioners would themselves be young and—in following with the medium’s incendiary proclivities—inclined toward an early burnout. But sixty years after the fact? It seems as though it’s time to move on and accept that there’s neither shame in rocking into one’s old age nor a necessity for age to be the death knell of rock and roll creativity.
By the same token, rock and roll consumers might be well served to forego the robotic practice of insisting, ‘I’m so over [insert act from five years ago], I’m only interested in new bands.’ There should be, could be, and is, I hope, room for both new and established acts in a world where quality rock and roll music is in such scarce supply.
True, there’s very little need to see Band X rehashing their ‘greatest hits’ once and again over a twenty year span of time, but in any art form, whether it be literature, cinema, visual arts or music, a good part of the interest, in my opinion, comes from growing with the artist, watching them unfold over the years, seeing how their worldview and their methodology of approaching it changes over time, and I see no reason why rock and roll should be any different. To me, the rock and rollers that are most compelling are those that have persisted through time and told their shifting tale as they’ve done so—the Ben Weasels, the Bob Dylans, the Paul Westerbegs, and so forth.
On a bleaker note, there are legions of ‘Working on a Dreams’ and ‘A Bigger Bangs’ out there casting all sorts of aspersions on the output of aging rockers, but again, I don’t think it has to be this way. As already mentioned, I myself was prejudiced against further works by Keith Morris until proven wrong by hearing OFF!. But imagine if rather than taking a multi-decade hiatus from any meaningful releases, Morris had stayed with Black Flag, or, more likely, The Circle Jerks and continued to put out quality music during the years when he was relatively inactive. OFF! says he certainly had the capability of doing so. Yet many appreciators of Keith Morris’ music seem to have punished themselves by not clamoring for more of it sooner, instead writing him off as done and middle-aged.
Logistics are, for sure, a wild card in the lifespan of a rock and roll band, as it’s often hard enough for a lone individual to coordinate creative efforts, much less a group of individuals to coordinate such an effort and sustain it over time. If it really is the right moment for a band to break up, there’s no sense in prolonging the death rattle. My argument though is that there’s no reason a band should have to break up for the sake of credibility, nor should a band feel it an inevitability that their later output must become a faded facsimile of their ‘glory days.’ Further, I don’t think consumers of rock and roll music should reject out of hand those people or bands that continue (or hell, even start) rocking into and past the mark of ‘middle age.’
If rock and roll is anything approaching a durable art form, then it doesn’t matter whether its practitioners are 18 or 80, or whether a band has been together for 20 years or two months. If the music is compelling, if it speaks to a listener, that’s all that counts. So why then does the specter of age loom so large over the the body of rock and roll?
I think the answer lies in death. For as much as rock and roll music can be seen as death obsessed—especially in light of its ‘live fast, die young,’ leanings—it’s more often and substantively in denial of death, a denial that’s twisted and self-defeating at its core. One of the tenets in the world of post-modern marketing is the notion that, through the right combination of consumer goods and services, one can somehow live forever. Be it through medications, electronics, vacations or what have you, the perfectly balanced, pain-free life of endless consumption awaits just around the next bend.
So long as rock and roll gives itself over as a pitchman for this worldview (and underground rock is just as guilty of this as the mainstream), it’s hard to expect the medium to do much more than languish in a sort of stunted adolescence, unable to ever evolve into the fully formed entity it might become.
Rock-and-roll-as-advertisement, no matter how catchy or memorable, can never progress past its miniscule field of interest into something more profound, whether by way of low or high brow. Instead it stands in place, stagnating, reproducing itself until the mimeographed ink has smeared beyond the point of recognition.
Rock and roll’s greatest gift as a medium, I think, is its playfulness, its snickering anger, its smirking snark, its mischievous rage, yet without growth over time these traits begin to lose their effectiveness and charm, and the once funny, plucky youngster becomes a perpetually infantile brat. Allowed to mature however, these traits might branch out into any number of salient directions, though in order to ever properly grow, rock and roll must first begin to accept death.
There are a few examples where this has happened. Johnny Cash, for instance, had one foot planted as firmly in the world of rock and roll as the other was planted in country, and he managed to release meaningful albums right up to the point of his own age-appropriate death. In fact, his final album is as immediate and urgent a meditation on the nearness of death as rock and roll has ever produced, though ‘The Man Comes Around’ is an anomaly in the greater world of rock and roll music.
More often we are stuck with vital artists either dying young or simpering into their golden years, trying to act like geriatric versions of their younger selves. Still, it seems to me that the rebellion, the sarcasm, and the humor inherent in rock and roll music deserves so much more. I don’t particularly want to listen to a rock and roll that’s comprised strictly of 18 year olds speaking to 18 year old angst, much less 30 year olds pretending to be 18. I want to know how one maintains a life of cultural rebellion into their 30s, their 40s, their 50s and beyond (though it’s fodder for another entry as to whether rock and roll music can possibly be culturally rebellious or whether it’s nothing more than a superficially rebellious outlet for cultural participation). Where does the snarling 70 year old stand in relation to the snarling 17 year old, and what took place in between?
As it stands now in the world of rock and roll (and again, I’m speaking largely in terms of independent/underground rock), a horrible cliche exists that if one continues to listen to a particular band or subgenre for an extended period of years or participates in a band beyond what is deemed a credible amount of time, one is ‘living in the past.’ However, one need look no further than Proust to realize that it’s only through the past that a present exists, and only through the present that we might find a future. And what waits us, ultimately, in that future? Death is without question the horizon, and that which transpires between now and then is the distance between us and it. It’s this distance that I’m curious to see, one way or another, infused into rock and roll music, the distance in its entirety and not just a microscopic sample size.
Obviously, I’m not saying that in every instance a person who creates rock and roll music should do so with the same group of people, unbroken through the course of an entire career, but more stabs at unfolding over the expanse of a non-intentionally shortened life, growing without fear and maturing without bounds would certainly be nice. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for, though many will probably, if only through apathy, disagree.
For those who do agree however, there’s then a debate to be had regarding the best way of achieving a mature rock and roll artistry: is it through a baroque methodology of intellectual posturing that veers into a territory unrecognizable from what was originally known as ‘rock and roll,’ or is it in keeping with rock and roll’s anti-intellecual roots while finding a way to let those roots grow into something even more cleverly stupid? I’d argue the latter, and at some point I might do so in another entry, but for now I’ll enjoy listening to OFF!, which, while not a perfect example, is at least one that gives a glimmer of hope in service of a rock and roll lifestyle that can indeed be nurtured from the cradle to the grave. Or, at least, from teen to middle age. Until things change, which they likely never will, it’s the best this dying, disenfranchised 30-something can hope for.
