You Are What You Is

You are what you is, Frank Zappa said, and you is what you am.

Well, I is, er, I am a baby boomer. So, to me, the best music of my lifetime is that great pop/rock music of the golden 1960s and 1970s, and the equally great (though not so prolific) music from the '80s, '90s and 21st century that still has that great spirit of '60s and '70s music.

And, what spirit is that?

Well, it's a lot of things. Sometimes it has that insanely idealistic and optimistic tone like a lot of the Beatles' best music. Sometimes it's angry and disillusioned like Frank and the Rolling Stones. Sometimes it's depressed like the best of the British blues--and, that would be Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac. In each case, it was unafraid to look at society and at ourselves (us young boomers) and our often self-serving belief systems (us boomers and the larger society, both of them) and to call it by its rightful name. You know, "you got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend," and "all your children are poor unfortunate victims of systems beyond their control, a plague upon your ignorance that keeps the young from the truth they deserve."

And "oh no I don't believe it, you say love is all we need, you say with your love you can change all of the fools, all of the hate, I think you're probably out to lunch." Like that.

And, musically, it's also pushing limits like the Beatles did, and Bob Dylan, and Pink Floyd and Frank and Led Zeppelin and, hey, even Phil Spector and so many others, creating new sounds, new landscapes that quickly became part of the inherited tradition and remain as such right down to today.

But what it's (Boomer Rock is) not is exclusive to the '60s and '70s. What it's not is over. What it's not is dead and gone. It's still here, not just the classics, but new music in that spirit. Sure, it's harder to find. You can't just turn on the radio anymore, you've got to turn over a lot more rocks than that. It's on the Internet, it's on CDs, it's on I-Tunes, it's on You Tube, for sure, but it's even on the TV sometimes (can you say Austin City Limits). It's out there. Talk to your kids and/or maybe your grandkids, they can help you find it. But just because you're not seein' it, just because you've gotten old and lazy and you're not seein' it or (more to the point) hearin' it, that doesn't mean it's not out there. It is.

So if the '60s and '70s were the golden age, what music am I talking about since then?

The 1980s

Well, there was a lot of it in the '80s because so many of the classic rockers were still working--Pink Floyd, Dylan, Springsteen. But there were a lot of new bands and artists who were totally plugged into the rock spirit. Talking Heads, Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler, sometimes Prince, Los Lobos, U2 and so on, just to provide a quick sampling.

But the late '70s and the '80s saw a couple of challenges to boomer rock. Metal or head-banger music was one challenge and punk was another. Both are rock 'n roll, of course, just not boomer rock. Theirs was a different spirit and everybody knew it.

The 1990s

Boomer rock began to become a minority music by the 1990s, though there were some great examples--Leonard Cohen's did the best work of his entire career, and Van Morrison ripped off a bunch of terrific records in the 1990s. And, there was Radiohead and Wilco among the newbies. But grunge was also not a boomer rock genre. Again it had another spirit that appealed to a lot of boomers, to be sure, but originated with and expressed the spirit of Gen X and Y rather than the boomers.

21st Century

If anything, Boomer Rock or "old time rock and roll" has had a resurgence in the 21st century. Just among bands and artists who've emerged since Y2K, you've got Sufjan Stevens, Conor Oberst and/or Bright Eyes, Rufus Wainwright, Ray LaMontagne, The National, The Hold Steady, Zero7, The Shins, Travis, Sarah Borges and many more. Then you've still got old-timers like Leonard Cohen, Bill Frisell, Ry Cooder, Jeff Beck, Steve Earle, Aimee Mann, the Flaming Lips and Larry McMurtry still working. All of 'em capture that spirit and fall into that tradition that I call Boomer Rock.

Sure, you can enjoy and understand and relate to these artists from other perspectives. But there's no way they're incompatible with the spirit of the '60s and '70s.

So anyway, that's where I'm coming from. And for now, enough said. Let's just start blogging.