I’m finding rock star deaths much harder to
cope with these days.
I know we’ve all now developed a rather
morose habit of clambering to our social media site of choice in order to solemnly
announce to our circle of friends just how much more the dead artist in
question really meant to us. As opposed to those mere casual fans now jumping
on the grief band wagon just because they happen to have a “best of”
compilation CD. But regardless of which of us actually has the most original
Bowie vinyl to justify how upset we really are, this recent spate of rock
legend demises is really hitting me hard, and I believe it’s hitting many others
pretty hard too.
Although their deaths we not recent, I was unsurprised
that I was so moved by the deaths of both John Lennon and George Harrison, the
guys were Beatles FFS, it’s to be expected. However my grief at the loss of
other rock stars has sometimes taken me by surprise. I’d always quite liked
Nirvana, but the untimely and tragic death of Kurt Cobain left me reeling for
some time at the sudden realization of the genius we had lost. However, possibly
the hardest rock star death that I’ve ever had to come to terms was for a man
who wasn’t even in a bloody band, yet I have never felt so robbed and cheated
as I did when I learned of the death of John Peel.
If I’d been invited onto Desert Island
Discs back in November (no reason why I would be), chances are that my
selections would probably have overlooked both Motörhead and David Bowie, but
the chasm they now seem to have left is both vast and profound. The sense of
loss is easily and immediately explainable by the titanic contributions,
ingenuity and passion both men bought to the music industry, but perhaps the
sense of loss is further amplified by the nagging realization that we may never
see their like again
The hitting comprehension that we
no longer have the capacity to back fill the immense loss of musical talent we
are currently suffering is adding to our sense of loss. I’ve seen loads of
jocular Facebook posts pleading with Death for the chance to swap Lemmy or
Bowie with Bieber, One Direction or [insert
name of this week’s primetime Saturday night karaoke TV show winners here].
We seem to be hemorrhaging rock and pop icons and being left with
strategically-groomed choreographed Muppets obeying the formulaic instructions
of soulless media executives. No wonder we’re upset.
The easy solution for old farts like me is
to wag the bigoted finger of blame at the unimaginative 13-year old girls
downloading this dull dirge. I could then opt to take no further part in this
music malarkey I once so loved and retreat to the familiar comfort of my neatly
ordered gapless Zeppelin and Floyd collections, safe in the opinionated predisposition
that modern music is dead. But the reality is that Justin Bieber and Simon
Cowell are no more undermining the music industry now any more than The Bay
City Rollers or Frank Farian were in my supposed golden age.
Great new music is still out there. Innovative
original musicians are still learning their craft in their bedrooms, they’re
making demo tapes (or whatever the equivalent of a C90 is these days), they’re forming
bands and playing gigs in small clubs. The problem is that many of us have
become too lazy to seek them out. We’ve stopped buying Melody Maker and the
NME, we no longer bother to read about new bands we haven’t heard of and small
gigs that hardly anyone went to. We just log on to Amazon and get told that
because we bought Now That’s What I call Commercial
Shite Vol. 67 we’d probably also want to buy a copy of Now That’s What I call Commercial Shite Vol. 68, because that’s
what everyone else did and it’s far easier than making the effort of broadening
our musical horizons.
Maybe the problem isn’t the decline of
music, it’s the decline of music journalism. When we abandoned the 12” 33.3 rpm
format we also abandoned the rich professional music journalism that informed
our careful choices and new discoveries. Fortunately now we’ve realized the error
of our ways and vinyl is back, but alas we no longer know what new records to
buy, so the vinyl charts are packed with 40th Anniversary Special
Editions.
It would be nice to also see the resurgence
of music journalism on new platforms like iTunes and Spotify (if hard-copy
magazine are no longer viable), but until then we have to accept that John Peel
is dead and that we’re just going to have to make more of an effort ourselves
to discover the next Bowie and Lemmy.
