I dislike a lot of popular music because the themes bother me. Usually I rag on the sexist songs like Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" (never once does Marvin express any care for his partner's needs or desires; he demands she wake up and service him, he needs healing, as if masculine sexuality were a wound) or Rick Springstien's "Jesse's Girl" (we never learn the name of the girl, so I suspect she's more the object of the song and de doesn't care that much about her; the real story is the singer's frustrated competition with Jesse). But recently I've come to really dislike the songs about getting older.
If it weren't for Aerosmith and Bruce Springsteen, sometimes I'd despair at the state of aging rockers. John Mellencamp and Bryan Adams are deep on my shitlist because between Adams' "Summer of '69" and pretty much the whole of Mellencamp's discography, both are looking back and whinging about how great it was to be young and stupid and lusty and such. Both rockers act as if their greatest moments are behind them.
I'm 52, and I can understand some of that. I can no longer have sex for hours on end, eat a crapton of junk food or drink an entire bottle of wine and not pay for it the next day. I have to work out not to build muscle but just to maintain what I've got right now. I've got to do all kinds of miscellaneous knee and ankle, wrist and hand work just to keep the bones, tendons, and muscles in shape or they'll start to fall apart even faster.
But I refuse to believe that my my "best years" were high-school, or that all the glories of my life are in the past. I still have a working brain and a fairly intact soul, and as long as I have those I'll be damned if I'm going to believe that everything from now until death is just a pale shadow of my past.
Springsteen's "Glory Days" is a great middle finger to Adams and Mellencamp, with its final lyric of
Well time slips away
And leaves you with nothing mister but
Boring stories of glory days
If it weren't for Aerosmith and Bruce Springsteen, sometimes I'd despair at the state of aging rockers. John Mellencamp and Bryan Adams are deep on my shitlist because between Adams' "Summer of '69" and pretty much the whole of Mellencamp's discography, both are looking back and whinging about how great it was to be young and stupid and lusty and such. Both rockers act as if their greatest moments are behind them.
I'm 52, and I can understand some of that. I can no longer have sex for hours on end, eat a crapton of junk food or drink an entire bottle of wine and not pay for it the next day. I have to work out not to build muscle but just to maintain what I've got right now. I've got to do all kinds of miscellaneous knee and ankle, wrist and hand work just to keep the bones, tendons, and muscles in shape or they'll start to fall apart even faster.
But I refuse to believe that my my "best years" were high-school, or that all the glories of my life are in the past. I still have a working brain and a fairly intact soul, and as long as I have those I'll be damned if I'm going to believe that everything from now until death is just a pale shadow of my past.
Springsteen's "Glory Days" is a great middle finger to Adams and Mellencamp, with its final lyric of
Well time slips away
And leaves you with nothing mister but
Boring stories of glory days
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