THE TIMES, they are not a-changin'. They've ground to a halt. A few weeks ago, undergraduates flocked to the John Paul Jones Arena to listen to Bob Dylan, the hero of those who wouldn't trust anyone over 30 -- now a senior citizen. In contrast, in the sixties and seventies, no one not on Medicare was excited by Bing Crosby, who was as old to them as Dylan is to us. Now we have weekly eighties retro dance nights, but back then no one was caught dead swaying to the Glenn Miller Band. John Mayer tours with The Police, but who toured with the Andrew Sisters? Did Simon & Garfunkel ever appear with Sinatra?
Music is dead. The rock music from the sixties to the eighties hasn't died -- it doesn't have the smell of nursing homes to us -- exactly because music has died. Can it be that rock is forever, that it is the final or perfect form of popular music, and that nothing will ever supplant it? If so, we would be living through one of the great turning points in history. Since the most powerful motivation for creative artists is the reputation or honor they receive, and since popularity is the key to honor and fame in commercial democracies, invention in music will come to an end if the music that fully answers popular taste has been already been discovered -- if the glory of the last revolutionary has been used up. The Beatles rocked the world in a way that no later band can hope to rival without killing rock. But the Beatles are still topping the charts even as they die.
To avoid missing the woods for the trees, let's look at it this way: Will there ever again be as great a change away from the current form of popular music, as there was from the 1930s or 40s? The argument is even stronger if we go back before the first world war, when national differences were still strong and the logic of equality had not spread to the point of weakening ethnic or national differences among Western democracies, or even making them suspect. Then even the songs that had international success had a sharply local sound: for example, an "O Sole Mio" in Italy or a "Danny Boy" in Ireland, or in America, a "Meet Me In St. Louis, Louis" or nearly the whole of John Philip Sousa. But now the biggest hits even in the inscrutable East have been rock bands, some of the same ones we know.
The pace of globalization has only increased with the advancement of technology: from sound recordings in the 1890s and radio in the 1920s, all the way to CDs and MP3s today. It has become ever easier for music to travel vast distances, across nations that have become ever more alike. It has become ever quicker and cheaper to make music, to listen to it, and to get it heard by vast audiences. Only now, after these changes and democratization, has it been possible for the popular taste to express itself for what it is, with its new-found money and leisure, and liberated from the tastes of elites or other restrictions. Only now can it, without hindrance or delay, mix and elevate any strand of music, from any place or time, that catches its fancy. Rock has been the result of rapid experimentations in folk, country, and most of all, jazz, rhythm and blues and other African-American music, all sifted and mixed by the gigantic vote-a-meter of the mass market.
If globalization and democratization are permanent, then we may be at the end of history, and music. But perhaps people will never rest satisfied with anything, not any government, religion, fashion, politics -- or music, not even their own, or especially not their own. The erotic element in all creation is a dissatisfaction and restlessness with oneself and a reaching out to something terrible, even alien, in its beauty and promise. Perhaps rock will not survive the ravages of old age as well as its finer and more demanding, but timeless rival at the opposite end of music and politics.
Manuel Lopez's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at mlopez@cavalierdaily.com.
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