Patrick Leigh-Pemberton: The Rock of Our Ages

The Rolling Stones (for those of you that don’t know, a group that consists of one Knight of the Realm and three other old men who should know better – much like many Parliamentary Inquiries), are headlining Glastonbury this year. This is terribly exciting for anyone who has a vague interest in Rock music. At the same time, it is actually terrible for Rock music itself. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Rolling Stones belonged to the original generation of “angry young men.” Along with other hell-raisers, they horrified the establishment with their music and incredible mockery (notably after the Redlands bust), and ignited a generation to break boundaries and push parents. Whether or not they were a product of rebellion, or instigators of it, is not something I am prepared to discuss with this publication’s tyrannical insistence on 500 word columns. However, the fact that fifty years later The Stones are the ones playing to another generation of music fans, while a testament to the power of their music, acts as a signal to a decline in modern rock music.

Where are our hell-raisers? Punk musicians thought they had broken the hegemony of The Stones within rock and allowed other greats to appear, but that fracture has long been closed up and nothing will supersede them now. When you listen to the charts these days, there is an incredible amount of talent (some of it modified, most of it not), but there is no sense of rebellion. On top of this, there is just a tacit acceptance of this state of affairs.

Of course, there are some notable exceptions to this (Plan B’s “Ill Manors” comes to mind), but there doesn’t seem to be anything that our generation wants our music to say – apart from that recreational drugs, sex, and fame are a good thing.

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Especially with the increase in the popularity of house music, the ability to communicate powerful thoughts through music is rapidly diminishing. As a result, when we want to listen to music that describes our feelings, rather than music that just makes us dance in blissful ignorance, we have to tap into the revolution of past greats.

Perhaps the most damaging revelation of all of this is that, in reality, little has changed since these songs became popular. The wealth gap is increasing, economies are unravelling, and politics is still controlled by a few superpowers on the international scale. Maybe we still find the Stones’ music powerful simply because we are still constricted by the same fears and controls that previous generations were frustrated by. As long as these problems remain relevant, we’ll all keep tuning in.