Coming down the mountain

A Rock and Roll Invervention
Look: there's something I've been meaning to talk to you about. I'm worried about us. It's okay, we're all friends here. Hip friends. And like hip friends, we like hip, contemplative music.

Freak-folk, folktronica, post-folk. Whatever. We like hip, accessible music. Brit-pop, new-wave, neo-wave, no-wave. Whatever.

We like genres.

We like to put music into little bins like the bins mean something and then draw conclusions as though square-pegging a sound or a movement adds something to it. It's almost like making music ourselves. It's not enough anymore to be consumers, we also have to be critics. All of us.

We like to be hip by association. Or rather, in as much as we, the consumer, are responsible for our buying trends, we create hip. We are the pop King Makers. We. Our web logs. King Makers.

But this is exhausting, and sometimes we just want to rock a little. Sure we do. Come on. We're all friends here.

It's hard to decide what's going to be the new thing all the time. All that buying. It's hard to decide who lives and dies. Every once in a while we want to put down that pissy, moany pop and that glitchy, schizophrenic hip hop and just rock our faces off. Without cynicism or commentary or psychoanalysis. Uno, dos, tres, catorce. Like that.

Sometimes we want to bang around, thrash, not caring what number comes after tres. Like Bono. But he's a little wiener, so not like him. Like other people who rocked and didn't care. Old people. They knew how to rock.

Sometimes it's good to rock like our parents rocked. Like their parents rocked. To Lynyrd Skynyrd and Chuck Berry. Sometimes we need to.

We need to rock like music means something beyond the categories we place around it. We need to rock without constraints or distinctions. Holistically. Wholeheartedly. We need to rock like Buddha would have. Rock like Foghat did.

Sometimes it's good to get in a massive-ass truck with a lift kit and speakers mounted in the wheel wells and spin brodies on our neighbors’ lawns. That narc's lawn who busted up the keg on state land.

Back in the hills there. After the big game. Just before graduation.

Come on, it's okay. We're all friends here. Every once in a while we want to rock like we don't know any better. Own it. It's alright.

Do you feel better? Let it out.

We want to rock, yes. God, yes. But we've forgotten how. We've lost our way. We tried to double back, through lo-fi and delta blues. We even started listening to Tool again, but it was no good. We couldn't find our way. But it's okay. It'll be fine.

Black Mountain is here.

They'd like to show us how to rock again.