Twilight of the Gods

This is the best summary of the subject of classic rock that I've read. Steven Hyden, author of [b:Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life 26245024 Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life Steven Hyden https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1458496509l/26245024.SX50.jpg 46238652] and former Onion A.V. Club rock critic, asks what the mythology of classic rock means to him and what will happen when the people who created it are gone. Many of them already are gone, and thus Hyden was inspired to write this book by a Who concert in 2012. How does Classic Rock fare in the age of streaming? What happened to it? Is Rock dead?These are all great questions, and I think most of all my similarities with the author make this a fun read. In other words, I already hate the author enough to know that he and I have a lot in common. This is a good book, with plenty of Classic Rock stories but without the author condescending to the audience by re-hashing all the old ones everybody knows (e.g. he mentions The Mudshark, but doesn't spend ten pages re-telling the story). He even mentions and recommends the best books that helped create the Classic Rock mythos. That's clearly something I have in common with the author: we both love music and love books. Best of all is Hyden's usage of mythology as a framing device: Classic Rock is a myth, in the best sense of the word, the way Der Ring or Mount Olympus or the founding of McDonald's have their own mythology. Classic Rock is a big story with a cast of characters that become godlike. Hyden tackles these characters in a series of topical chapters, e.g. about albums as an art form, drugs and alcohol, Satanism, and profile chapters where he goes in-depth on specific artists. In the topical chapters, he makes a lot of good points, especially the chapter about albums versus today's streaming playlist and “station” formats, which are oriented toward single songs. My favorite streaming service is unabashedly anti-album, which really pisses me off: I want to hear my favorite music from 35 years ago in the format it was meant to be heard in, not one song from here and one song from there. This book is recent enough that it captures the current contradictions and weirdness of remaining a Classic Rock fan with today's technology (which both I and the author certainly enjoy for its convenience), but it contributes to the demise of the Classic Rock mythos.The profile chapters are largely forgettable, telling about the author's predilections, or downright irritating. The profile chapter about The Eagles is funny, especially because Hyden is not afraid to say how much he hates that band. I'll forgive Hyden's ignorance of where The Eagles actually came from (most Classic Rock fans are unaware of it; it's esoteric knowledge reserved for bluegrass musicians like myself), and say he did a great job of hating The Eagles. The rest of the profile chapters, on Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Phish if you can believe it, just were useless to me. I think Dylan and Springsteen are great songwriters if you're into the Freudian Americana-Nonsense Axis, as I call it, but I just don't get the worship of these guys. I almost skipped both of these chapters in the audiobook. I did skip the chapter on Phish because I was screaming at the stereo in my car, reinforcing the author's point that people either love Phish or hate them. I hate them. I don't care if they reference Pink Floyd, Talking Heads, Genesis, and other bands I love. I hate Phish. Phish SUCKS.But the above just shows Hyden's different perspective, as does the way he talks about Pink Floyd. He's clearly a lyrics guy. When most people talk about “music,” they don't mean music at all. They can't even specify what they like about a particular song or artist. They like the artist's image or the artist herself or what she stands for. They might like some message in the artist's lyrics (which probably aren't hers). Still, they don't mean the particular sonic qualities of a recording or concert or the chord progressions employed by a particular song, or the way it was recorded. When people like Hyden say “music” they mean a particular aesthetic embodied by those artists. Hyden rarely actually talks about music. He doesn't talk about how Bob Dylan's songs changed after interacting with The Beatles, he talks about how The Beatles started dealing with new subject matter in their songs after interacting with Bob Dylan. Honestly, I'm not sure if this is because writing about music is a lot harder, though not impossible, and it's doubtful those in the audience who aren't musicians will understand what you're talking about, or because Hyden just doesn't care about the technical aspects of music. In my experience, most music critics don't know much about music or how it's created, and they really don't care because that's not what they're listening for. (Plenty of them don't give a shit about the facts of how musicians interact and how musical influence actually works; they just want to talk about people they find interesting)This mirrors the duality I encountered as soon as I became an impassioned Pink Floyd fan in high school. There are Gilmour fans and Waters fans (Rick Wright deserves his own fans and a lot more credit, but musicians who sit never get as much credit as those who stand). Gilmour fans are into the sonic textures, the clarity of the recordings, odd time signatures, the shape of the songs, and how they transition from one to the next. Waters fans talk about isolation, alienation, insanity, and the pressures of daily life. “All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be” is incredibly positive (because of how it scans in the context of the melody) to Gilmour fans and very cynical and negative to Waters fans. Furthermore, The Wall is the favorite album of Waters fans, while Gilmour fans, if they even bother with The Wall, point out that the songs credited as collaborations with Gilmour are the best songs on the album.Hyden is not a Pink Floyd fan, but he'd be a Waters-sided fan if he was. This means, I would argue, that he misses a few interesting facts that would affect his thesis or make it irrelevant. His thesis is, as best I can tell, that Classic Rock is a particular mythos that was created by radio programmers in the early 80s. He and I, as listeners in the 90s, didn't know this, and so Classic Rock, along with its mythology (including the interaction of band members and the antics of band members and road crew members along with the creation of the music) became a Real Thing. I agree with that basic idea, but what he misses in the creation of that myth has a lot to do with music sensu strictu, which is something that he misses entirely.For example, take Steely Dan and Pink Floyd, two bands that most listeners wouldn't group together. On musical terms, however, I would because both of them have a strong influence from jazz. The way they made music is totally different (Steely Dan was not really a band, but two songwriters with a revolving door of studio musicians; whereas Pink Floyd were four guys who met in school and continued making music together for almost 20 years), but their influences have a lot in common. They are both on Classic Rock radio. But what does either group have to do with Foreigner? Or Black Sabbath? Furthermore, what don't they have in common with Roxy Music, a band that is NEVER played on Classic Rock radio? Or Slade? Or Kate Bush, who has enough in common musically with Peter Gabriel and Elton John that she would fit right in, at least for some songs. The answer, which honestly reinforces Hyden's point, is that they all have enough in common musically, and in terms of “scene,” or tradition, that they make a good mix on the radio. But he never gets into the decisions made by those radio programmers, he simply resorts to the weakest of all arguments: racism, sexism, and homophobia.The idea that Classic Rock is “unbearably white” pervades Hyden's book to the point of irritation. He doesn't use that phrase, but he does say that the “whiteness” of Classic Rock is a problem that must be dealt with (or cannot be avoided). Oh really? Is the blackness of R&B, soul, and funk a problem that cannot be avoided? Or is it something to be enjoyed, just as the Englishness of Genesis, Yes, and Pink Floyd is? I definitely think the latter. Hyden kinda makes himself look ridiculous when he claims that James Brown, Parliament/Funkadelic, Earth, Wind, and Fire and other funk acts of the Seventies were playing rock music. Only someone who knows nothing about music would make try to make that point. MUSIC. Not a music scene, not the esthetics of rock bands. Music. Someone who understands music knows that funk and R&B are different musically from rock in terms of time signatures, chords, song structure, and even blatantly obvious things like the instruments employed (most rock bands wouldn't get away with having a horn section, whereas EWF without its horn section isn't EWF). The only big name artists who are credible as funk artists and rock artists are Prince and Rick James, and their particular songs always fit into one category or another. Furthermore, Hyden makes the point (basically) that only white males are permitted to be branded as Classic Rock, and yet doesn't deal with all the white males who were excluded. On musical grounds, Roxy Music belongs in Classic Rock if David Bowie does. Why not Leonard Cohen if Neil Young and Bob Dylan are on Classic Rock radio? Why not anything by Chicago after Terry Kath died? Why not Hall and Oates? Why not any KISS song other than “Rock and Roll All Nite?” Why not Mike Oldfield? Why were Asia, Journey, and REO Speedwagon immediately termed Classic Rock while still contemporary rock bands, and yet other bands more classic, such as Genesis were excluded (until they had such huge hits they couldn't be ignored)? I don't think the answer is that Journey were white men. There's some better explanation and yet Hyden never gets to it.If he can't hear that Dark Side of the Moon is a jazz album, then I'm not convinced that any argument he could make on the basis of musical technicalities would impress me. But that's okay because the book is still fun to read even if he doesn't get to the bottom of his point. Falling back on racism, sexism, and homophobia is really weak, but I don't think it detracts entirely too much from having a fun book about Classic Rock. Hyden at the very least props up the ethos, and talks about the feeling of being a Classic Rock fan. He recognizes that experience at the very least, even if he can't explain it. In his final chapter, in which he tries to say that artists are still carrying on the Classic Rock ethos, but some of them are gay men or lesbians, he makes another weak argument. The artists he mentions are so firmly within the Indie Rock scene that they have nothing to do with Classic Rock. But “that's progress,” he says, without noting the dissenting opinions about progress in art. I find the idea of progress in art to be totally vacuous and unintelligible, but Hyden is happy to just talk about what he wants to talk about, whether it makes sense or not. So all in all, I highly recommend this book, even if the author is just plain wrong about a lot of what he says.