Mark Mordue
December 14, 2010

It would be fair to say that U2’s latest album No Line on the Horizon is the sound of a great band falling to their knees and failing. And that their 360 ° Tour is an attempt to refresh what that album attempted as well as reinforce their position as the world’s most vital mainstream rock’n’roll band.

Their struggle for relevance goes to an increasingly dominant theme in modern music: the relationship between rock’n’roll and growing old. And if it’s possible to take Neil Young’s famous line from My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) all the way to our own horizon and discover it is ”better to burn out than it is to rust”?

Once the fire-starter for adolescent desire and rebellion (was their ever a more appropriate name for the home of Elvis Presley than Sun Records?) rock’n’roll long ago surrendered its flame to everything from hip-hop to the pop syrup that gets called R&B in the US, as well as market fractures that have lead to sub-genres such as emo and death metal. It’s certainly hard to think of a commercially dominant and artistically exciting rock band spearheading anything since Nirvana and grunge a generation ago.

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Superb bands such as Radiohead, the White Stripes and Arctic Monkeys spring to mind, of course. As do Kings of Leon, perhaps the great white hopes of the past five years. Unfortunately Kings of Leon have faded creatively as they sought to draw influence from heroes such as Bruce Springsteen, Radiohead and, yes, U2, for their own increasingly panoramic, and ultimately blander sound. This bloating is hardly unique to their career. It may be U2’s desire to remain at the top commercially and stay inventive are similarly irresolvable.

The likes of iTunes and digital delivery have sparked questions about youthful listening patterns, and the way most people prefer to create their own playlist when they use their iPod. Our attention spans appear to be correspondingly diminished and the era of the album has supposedly passed, along with the epic age of rock’n’roll and any post-Dylan efforts to communicate with what was once a highly literate audience.

That Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain killed himself and quoted Neil Young’s ”burn out” lyrics in his suicide note only emphasises the endgame feeling historically. A troubled Neil Young would go on to sing the lines ”once you’re gone you can never come back” even more forcefully live in response to Cobain’s death. Young, of course, has always had a touch of the Greek God Thanatos to his music, a desire to put death in a place of harmony.

It’s nonetheless feels as if rock’n’roll was talking to itself inside these events and the lyrics associated with them, signposting its own long-term demise. Even so, only a fool would deny the power of rock’n’roll in our lives, the way songs have been able to constitute a rare spiritual interval in our day-to-day and largely secular world.

Strangely enough when you listen to those first rock’n’roll records from the likes of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison in the 1950s, there is this ”voice in a room” quality they all emanate, as if amid the lust for life there is already something inherently ghostly going on. It’s the aural equivalent to sepia film footage: a sonic quality a great modern producer such as Daniel Lanois has used to help resurrect the careers of figures such as Bob Dylan on Time Out of Mind and more recently Neil Young with Le Noise.

In the case of Sun records what we basically hear is youth; in the case of latter-day Bob Dylan and Neil Young (and the likes of Leonard Cohen), it’s the reality of age and death encroaching. This may be one reason why youth do not embrace the reality of what rock’n’roll is now evolving into: a music through which people can learn about growing old and dying.

In counterbalance to that existential weight there’s an argument in favour of growing old disgracefully, as those Keith Richards Life memoirs marching out of bookshops indicate. According to man who inspired Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow character in Pirates of the Caribbean, “getting older is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.”

It seems best to leave the final words to our own Nick Cave, who will be here soon with his much-feted ”midlife crisis” project, Grinderman, singing about life as an ageing rock’n’roll star on songs such as No Pussy Blues: “My face is finished / My body’s gone / And I can’t help but think / Standing up here in all this applause / And gazing down at all the young and the beautiful / With their questioning eyes / That I must above all things love myself!”

Mark Mordue is the winner of the 2010 Pascall Prize for Critical Writing.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/age-does-not-fan-the-rocknroll-flame-20101213-18vdz.html