It's been fun. If not for the occasional overdose, vehicular homicide, or paternity suit, I'd call it an out-and-out blast. And now it's all over.
It's like that scene in the middle of Goodfellas when Billy Batts is beaten to within an inch of his life by Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, and then his body is parked outside of Martin Scorsese's mom's house for a few hours, and then he's finally stabbed to death in the trunk of Ray Liotta's car. Or the scene in the middle of Boogie Nights when Little Bill, played by William H. Macy, shoots his wife, her lover, and finally himself at Burt Reynolds's New Year's Eve party. Or the part in The Social Network when Jesse Eisenberg meets Justin Timberlake. These scenes represent the "hump" chapters in their respective stories, the parts when everything that's seemingly right and wonderful starts to go wrong and dark.
This is where we're at right now in The Winners' History of Rock and Roll.
How low are we going to go? Let's take a brief detour to the lowest moment in recent rock history: Woodstock '99. The culmination of nu-metal's tenure as the preimminent sound of mainstream rock music, Woodstock '99 offered up a warped version of a bedrock trope of rock music: The lawless outlaw who cares fuck-all about societal conventions. Where the stars of the original Woodstock — Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Jefferson Airplane — used nonconformity as a rallying cry for hundreds of thousands of like-minded people to bond together in a new, utopian society forged in music, Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst, Korn's Jonathan Davis, and Kid Rock treated rock stardom not as a means to an end but as the be-all-end-all of a me-first, screw-you lifestyle. And that trickled down to the fans, who tired of paying a small fortune to eat bad food and drink warm bottles of water in the middle of a converted Air Force base situated in the midst of a punishingly arid hellscape. They took out their frustrations on each other — beating and degrading the weak (which mostly meant women) as the music roared out petulant anthems of self-absorption and furious entitlement.
Woodstock '99 illuminated an uncomfortable truth about what happens when masses of humanity are inserted into an uncontrolled environment: If a mob wants to take the social contract by the lapels, douse it in gasoline, and angrily demand to see its tits, a mob will do just that.
After Woodstock '99, the idea that a rock festival could be a metaphor for the hopes and dreams of a generation of young people seemed like a silly, outmoded, even dangerous notion. That same year, Napster revealed that the potential for communities of people to gather around music was best realized in the new online frontier, where a softer brand of lawlessness reigned. The shift of music's hub from a physical to a digital domain, coupled with albums and songs becoming literally worthless in the new world of file-sharing, did a lot to make rock irrelevant in the 21st century. But equally culpable were the hyper-aggressive, über-macho hard-rock bands of the late '90s. If a knobby-bearded, red-hatted jackal like Fred Durst was associated with big arena shows, big-budget music videos, visits to the Playboy Mansion, and shady payola scandals that greased the wheels for platinum popularity,1 well, who would want to emulate that? Limp Bizkit behaved like a third- or fourth-generation copy of a rock band. It was an imitation of Mötley Crüe imitating Van Halen imitating Led Zeppelin and the Stones. And it suddenly seemed really, really fucking stupid and gross.
Acting like a rock band was now the opposite of cool. At best, it was kitsch of the ugliest, dumbest order, and could only be enjoyed ironically. Woodstock '99 marks the unofficial beginning of rock's extended (and perhaps permanent) "post-decadent" period — a time when the "sex and drugs" clichés of rock stardom have lost all remnants of their former glamour, and credible rock bands are actively discouraged from acting like the rock bands of the past.
To get at the roots of post-decadence, we must study a band that was originally scheduled to perform at Woodstock '99, only to back out one month before showtime. Because when it comes to embodying and then forsaking the rock-and-roll lifestyle, Aerosmith was truly ahead of its time.
by Steven Hyden, Grantland | Read more:
Illustration: Casey Burns
