Death of the rock Star

I think one of the biggest factors in the rise of the rock star has been the album. I’ve been trying to figure out why the death of the rock star coincided with the coming of MP3s but I think I’ve gotten my handle on it. It’s the album.

When you listen to 1 song off the radio, you get entertained for maybe 3 minutes. It is hardly an investment. You didn’t ask to listen to it, and so the depth of your involvement with the entertainer is limited. When you have a single, it is more like fanhood, where you go down to the record store to buy something, and you got at least 2 songs, an A and a B side, and most of the time the B side is deemed to be relatively inconsequential. But when you have a whole album, it is a bigger investment, more saving of pocket money is required. You have maybe 12 songs, and that act is entertaining you for around 50 minutes. The sleeve is very important, because it puts a picture onto the music that you’re listening to. It makes the experience more complete.

The music is a wonderful thing, and so are the lyrics, but it’s that album picture which completes the package by giving you a mental image of the music. On its own, Jimi Hendrix’s music would already be very impressive. But it would still be somehow a little abstract, where you have all that fuzzy distorted psychedelic guitar but not focus. With that mental image, it fixes the music in a certain time and place, 1 black guy and his 2 white sidekicks playing the crap out of their respective instruments. Colourful clothes. Illegal drugs (which is fine, nothing wrong with listening to people making music under the influence of illegal drugs, so long as you don’t touch that stuff yourself. There’s nothing wrong because, let’s face it, music itself is a drug.) Fuzzy hairstyles. Hippy lifestyle. Love and peace.

Or maybe you could take the cover to “Dark Side of the Moon”, a prism through which a ray of light becomes a rainbow. This is no tribute to Isaac Newton, but rather the idea is of an altered mental state, with the white ray representing your normal mind, the prism, marijuana, and the rainbow, your mind on drugs. Pink Floyd seldom put their band photos on their

Or the cover of “Horses”, the image is of an androgynous woman, dressed in a fashion throwback to the beat poets. It is ironic because on one hand those were the ultimate symbols of rebellion, but on the other hand by paying tribute to them you are according them the highest respect. The stare is alternately dreamy and visionary. One of the poets she pays tribute to is Muhammed himself visited by a vision.

And also there is this: a young poster boy in his young adulthood, enjoying his newfound confidence in his own sexual appeal, a talented musician, in the guise the world first took attention and loved him best, before the weirdness and sordid accusations of child molestation took over.

With the album, you could have the attention of a fan for 50 minutes. The experience of listening to a good album is much more than just a collection of songs. It almost has a plot of its own, and the songs bleed into each other. Why is a happy song follow a sad song? Why are they arranged next to each other? “Sunday Morning” by Velvet Underground is such a sweet and innocent song, so why is it followed up by a song about buying drugs from your dealer? And like a movie, there are highs and lows, and when it’s over there’s a bit of sadness.
Also the magic of music is that the listening to the music is the experience itself. This is not true for movies, where the core of the experience is knowing what happened in the movie. After you have finished a movie, a lot of the enjoyment you can derive from it is lost because there are spoilers. There are no spoilers for music. There can be musical surprises, but they will always be there. Thus the relationship between the listener and the rock star can be built because you can listen to a good album over and over again.

So I think that this relationship became a little lost when you have too many bands around, and you have to divide your attention between too many bands that fade into obscurity all too quickly. When, unlike those people behind the great albums I earlier described, they are not afforded time and space to develop something special and distinct of themselves.

It used to be that the person delivering the music was the rock star. The idea of delivery is very important, for during the rock star era, it was not only considered important that the person was the performer, but also that he was the songwriter. You had to be the total package, like John and Paul being the writers for the Beatles (I think they are the ones to the largest degree responsible for the idea that real musicians write their own songs, and in the future they will be remembered more for being writers than being perfomers). Or Stevie Wonder writing everything and being a one man band. Or Morrissey and Marr being the writers for the Smiths. So you are responsible for at least 2 stages of the delivery. The advantage of that is that the notes that come out of your own pen and the music that comes out of your guitar and your voice all becomes associated with you. So you could have a song like “Superstition” and it’s just 1 Stevie Wonder writing everything, arranging everything, performing everything, producing everything.

The people behind iPod realised the nature of this special relationship between the music and the person delivering the music. And since they are smarter than the guys at Creative, they set out to be that agent delivering the music. The special relationship between the listener and the rock star is gone, to be replaced with the special relationship between the listener and the iPod.

And that is why there are so many reunions these days. People know that there has been an entire lost generation of rock stars. Back in the day people criticise the stars of the 80s for being faceless and lacking a distinct identity, but now even in comparison to what you have today they are considered pop icons. I think you have the Police reunion, the Led Zep reunion. It’s not only lucrative, but they know that they represent a lifestyle that’s about to disappear.