Rolling Stone magazine celebrates its 1,000th issue this week with a 3-D holographic cover in the style of the Beatles? “Sgt. Pepper?s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Forty years of cultural icons like Bart Simpson, Art Garfunkel and Bill Clinton are crammed into the familiar tableau, with a peace symbol beaming good vibes down on them all.
Between this and the goofy, also-holographic Target ad on the back cover are a couple of hundred pages of the following: fawning coverage of the pop music scene and self-congratulatory retrospective essays; lots of really cool pictures of really cool people by really cool photographers; and lots more ads for cigarettes, booze and digital gadgets.
Not unlike the album it venerates, the millennial Rolling Stone is a just another kitschy piece of baby boomer bric-a-brac.
To be fair, Rolling Stone once fostered brilliant writers like Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O?Rourke. But it also fired the fine music critic Jim DeRogatis from its editorial staff for daring to submit a negative review of Hootie & the Blowfish. And it has never panned a Yoko Ono album.
Rolling Stone?s treatment of new subpar albums by two of the rock era?s finest artists illustrates how the magazine is desperate to perpetuate its own mythology about the ?60s generation.
Bruce Springsteen fronting the E Street Band is the most powerful ? emotionally and sonically ? force in the history of American rock. But ? with the exception of 1982?s cold, raw “Nebraska” ? the Boss has never been able to make a good album without them. “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions” continues the trend.
The title is as clunky and formulaic as the performances Springsteen and his 14-piece hootenanny band turns in on 13 songs popularized by folksinger Pete Seeger. The singing is painful to hear. Springsteen again fails to out-hillbilly Woody Guthrie. His earnestness is not soulful, but a forced obligation.
Rolling Stone praises Springsteen?s courage for using protest songs from “our shared past to find a moral compass for a nation that?s gone off the rails.” For that,and for paying dutiful tribute to a certified liberal hero, Bruce gets a four-star (out of five) review.
Neil Young uses his own words on “Living With War,” also a four-star winner. Musically, it?s typically good Neil Young, aside from strident backing vocals from a hundred-voice choir.
“It is an indictment of the sorry state of open debate in this country ? and its rock ?n? roll,” writes RS reviewer David Fricke, “that the most direct, public and inspiring challenge to the Bush presidency this year has been made by a 60-year-old Canadian-born singer-songwriter.”
Nevermind that debate about Bush has consumed far too much airtime, ink and bandwidth to qualify as anything but “open.” Or that Young lives in the United States, but remains a Canadian citizen.
Young?s lyrics could have been randomly generated by a computer programmed with phrases culled from “Hardball,” Katie Couric and back issues of “The Nation.” Exhibit A: “Let?s impeach the president for lyin?/Misleading our country into war/Abusing all the power that we gave him/And shipping our money out the door.”
Sooner rather than later, this will be nostalgia like “Ohio,” Young?s 1970 yelp about the Kent State shooting.
Art misses the mark when it is not done simply for its own sake. Both Springsteen and Young have made records motivated by something other than the desire to make good music. The result is something other than good music.
Rolling Stone doesn?t realize that. But I suspect that the baby boomers that pay hundreds to see Springsteen and Young perform their new material this summer will. Whether they get it or not, they want to hear at least some of the compelling music that put them on the cover of the Rolling Stone in the first place.
Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited.He can be reached at [email protected].
