– Translated from The American Conservative
We invite you to read Matthew Walter’s controversial article “Rock and Roll is Long Dead” (The American Conservative – 10/21/2021). It raises a deeper, more fundamental issue than just musical preferences. It deals with trends in the development of world culture. Which are critically described by the author against the backdrop of Covid-19 – as a tribute to the fierce internal American political competition – so you should not focus on this aspect when reading the text. What is important is that the energies that were destroying Western culture from within have accomplished their task and have subsided. Rock ‘n’ roll as a social phenomenon has disappeared, died. What will happen tomorrow: Camo coming? ***All of our artists became conformists long before the Qovid regime demonstrated their loyalty.
Covid-19 has revealed very little we didn’t already know about American society. All the cracks it has exposed existed long before the pandemic and were visible to anyone who looked closely.One of the best examples of this is the death of “rock and roll”. The spirit of rock music was voluminous. The Rolling Stones were rock stars, as were the members of NWA, a rap group whose name hides a phrase that cannot be printed in a family magazine. Half a century ago, rock was at the forefront of a cultural revolution whose scope is almost impossible to describe. When John Lennon declared that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus,” or suggested to us: “Imagine there is no heaven,” the world took notice.
The previously unimaginable combination of antinomian views and mass consumer appeal has given way to a combination of mass consumerism.
Back in 2021, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that rock is dead, and so is the spirit that made it possible. Today, popular musicians are simply an extension of the professional and managerial classes. Their task is to strengthen the elite’s worldview, not to question it. Try to imagine Keith Moon of The Who having fun driving a sports car into a swimming pool and taking the wearing of masks seriously, or Janis Joplin passionately telling us that she was injected with something other than heroin because the president said it was necessary.
The death of rock shows us that the cultural revolution to which it contributed most is over. A new establishment has emerged, and popular music exists to maintain the consensus, not to refute or even question it in the mildest terms. This is why, instead of praising her as a rebel, the liberal media establishment ridiculed Nicki Minaj for expressing doubts about vaccines that are widely distributed among African Americans.
The Mountain Goats is not a name that might appeal to most, but suffice it to say that in a world of 30-year-old men who know all about beard care kits and bad relationships with their parents, they are very appealing. In this bleak realm, they are considered one of the best rock bands of the last 20 years or so. So naturally, a few weeks ago, the band wrote a post on their official Twitter account hysterically complaining about an American Airlines pilot who drew attention to the fact that the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States) hasn’t exactly been a model of scientific clarity in the last year and a half.
Thank goodness a few aging rockers know nothing about it. Van Morrison and Eric Clapton worked together last year on a song (admittedly awkward and almost “unlistenable”) in which they express their disagreement with lockdowns. Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine recently told an audience in New Jersey that he was fed up with what he called the “tyranny” associated with Covid. Three decades ago, metalheads like Mustaine preached the destruction of all societal values, and were heroes to everyone except a certain fountain of sanity, Tipper Gore (former second lady of the United States). Now they are second only to Satan in the eyes of secular liberals.Let’s not lose sight of the main point. The question is not whether Morrison and Clapton were right (although I agree with them) about the lockdowns. The question is whether they were acting like rock stars in rejecting the consensus. They certainly were, and what’s striking is how little attention their arguments have garnered. Certainly, to lovers of classical music and jazz, its achievements today seem relatively insignificant. We could also do without the carelessness in dress and manners that it brought. Nevertheless, I can’t help but think that we should mourn this loss the way we would mourn the demolition of an ugly but iconic building. When rock was destroying the consensus culture of the 1950s, it could have thrown the baby out with the bathwater (idiom, overreaching). But he was still skeptical, which is not the case with today’s artists.
Matthew Walter is the editor of The Lamp magazine and the editor of The American Conservative magazine
Translation by Stanislav Bychek