Friday, March 06, 2009

wtf is "relevancy," anyway?

big mike scoffs at "the challenge of punk" in my neil young myspace blog post, while hickey sees the connexxxion between "artistic honesty and relevancy."

i've been thinking a lot lately about the concept of "relevancy" in music and i think it means standing for something more than just another entertainment option for young, hip listeners. when the rolling stones started, f'rinstance, they really represented a threat to the established order, more so than the beatles, i think, because among other things, the early stones were able to convince a significant number of young hetero males from bangor to bakersfield that androgyny was cool, paving the way for the gay rights movement as surely as jimmy reed kicked open the door for martin luther king (patoski, 2000). in the fullness of time, they've become something more like a tourist attraction than a band: "my grandmother went to see the rolling stones and all i got was this t-shirt." in fairness to sir mick and co., it's gotten harder to play "shock the grownups" when dad might have put on eyeshadow to go to the bowie concert in '72, but there's more to it than just playing epater les parents.

neil wrote and sang honestly about the dilemma of his time on both a social (the drug murder and pervasive sense of burnout on every level in "tired eyes") as well as a personal level (danny whitten's death in "tonight's the night" and "needle and the damage done"). that rang a lot truer at the time than, say, pete townshend bitching about how hard it was being a rockstar on the who by numbers and who are you (which begged the question, "who gives a shit?") which proves, i suppose, that introspection in songwriting goes a lot further when it can produce insights that are more than pure solipsism. i'll follow this thread more later, but right now it's almost time for me to go and sell vitamins. yeah!

1 Comments:

Blogger Grubbermeister said...

I'm off the internet for two days and see that you had a huge writing spree on the blog. Go, Ken, go!

12:58 PM  

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