The gardeners of the cultural landscape

Lew Scannon wrote a post on his site about classic rock which I found interesting. We're all aware that I have strong opinions about music, so you had to know I couldn't read it without having the rusty gears that occupy the space between my ears groaning into action. Music is important in that it provides a cultural road map for the period in which it was created. You can tell quite a bit about a decade based solely on the music that emerged from it. For instance, you can easily tell the 60's were a time of war, protest, and heavy drug use just by listening to a few songs by The Doors, Jimmy Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and The Beatles.

But after the 60's, something weird happened. Suddenly, you could no longer gauge the mindset of a decade by it's most successful bands. Instead, you had to look deeper, you had to look to it's flash in the pan bands to get an idea of what the decade was all about.

The 70's are characterized best by bands like KC and the Sunshine Band, Captain and Tennille, The Bee Gee's and The Village People moreso than they are by KISS, Boston, or Aerosmith. The 70's were about gettin' baked, gettin' laid, and lookin' good, and nobody embodied those ideals like the one hit wonders.

Then came the 80's, a decade rife with flash in the pan groups who gathered a cult following while the music industry ushered in a new age of marketing with MTV. The 80's carried on the gettin' baked torch from the 70's, but replaced gettin' laid with gettin' stuff in light of the AIDS scare, and took it's best shot at lookin' good. When you think of the 80's, what bands come to mind? It speaks volumes.

I don't even want to talk about the 90's. I still don't know what the 90's were about. Hell, as far as I can tell it was about lip synching, big butts, teen spirit, a room a thousand years wide, and Madonna's beaver.

A testament to my old-man-edness is the fact that I haven't even paid attention to music this decade. I saw a publicity pic of Mariah Carey in Borders today, and I haven't seen that much air-brushing on a unicorn festooned midnight blue VW conversion van. My God she looked like the warrior chick in Heavy Metal. Janet Jackson is flashing boobs, Madonna is writing children's books, and every new artist looks and sounds like the one who wrote that song they played on the radio all the time last month. What was her name? She looked kind of like that other chick, with the hair, you know, she wrote that song...it was about love or something.