ROCK GODS
Why is music today so terrible?
It’s an argument I hear from anyone older (my generation included) who turns on any modern FM radio station: “Music isn’t like it used to be,” and “They aren’t even playing instruments now,” or, most frequently, “What do you call this crap, anyway?”
And I tend to agree. My golden age of music was from a post-punk UK indie movement where Bloc Party, Foals, Interpol, Kaiser Chiefs and the like were my Rock Gods and wrote the anthems that defined my adolescent years. They ruled the stage, sold out arenas, and changed the music landscape with a sound and attitude that still resonates.
My dad’s generation had The Beatles, Elton John, Chicago. The guys I play hockey with laud anything Rush, Led Zeplin, AC/DC, perhaps straying into the cheeseburger rock paradise of Jimmy Buffett. My generation likened teen angst to screamo ballads and frantic guitar strumming: Green Day, Foo Fighters, Paramore.
And on and on it goes, bygone eras where the music brought together droves of people and has lasted throughout our lives on Spotify playlists, blasting around campfires on JBL speakers the neighborhood over.
But not the music of today, it feels like. Why does it seem like today’s music lacks such defining bands and songs?
Where have all the Rock Gods gone?
That’s where it started for me this week. While at a friend’s house, I found an old instrument stashed away in a box in his basement. It wasn’t an old electric guitar, or the hard-shell case of an abandoned marching band instrument unused since graduation day. What I found was a miniaturized plastic guitar, shaped like a Fender Stratocaster, with six rectangular, rainbow-colored buttons assorted down the neck, one occupying each of the farthest frets. A large switch, maybe three inches long, clicked up and down, spring-loaded back into position where the strings would normally be strummed.
This was the controller of the game Guitar Hero and was instrument to some of the greatest Rock Gods that ever played.
Oh, I can see the grin of skepticism on all your faces. Don’t worry, I used to laugh at them, too. Why would anyone put all their efforts into fake learning “Sweet Home Alabama?” or “Thunder”? If they were so good at the game, why didn’t they just learn a real instrument?
And yet, everyone stopped to watch these Rock Gods play. The superhighway of colored rectangles flashed on the screen at breakneck speed, and these Rock Gods kept in rhythm with every chord progression, every solo riff, and we all watched in wonder while all the hits were played—Black Sabbath, Mötley Crüe, DragonForce. We couldn’t help ourselves.
We watched because music isn’t concerned about what is real or earned (like an actual guitar versus as a two-foot-long plastic one), it was all about being involved.
It’s the same reason we love the Rock Gods that we do. They make us feel alive with their music, with their swagger, and we channel that into our lives. There’s nothing like seeing a live band perform the shit out of the songs they’ve made. Even cover bands qualify. The same goes for players of Guitar Hero and Rock Band who hit 100% accuracy after a session of “Through the Fire Flames” and “The Pretender”.
“Hey, remember Guitar Hero?” I asked my friend after dusting off the old controller.
“Yeah, I don’t play anymore,” he said.
“No one does. We should play it, though.”
So we did, pretending we were the same Rock Gods that hadn’t aged a day past 16-years-old. And the joy of playing those old tracks came flooding back, all from a guitar-shaped piece of plastic and six colorful buttons.
“Music is anything but math,” Andrew Bird, perhaps on the greatest musicians of the last decade, once said.
I believe that goes for why we love the music we do, even if it comes from the Guitar Hero catalogue, or from the auto-tuning synth-lords of this generation.
We all pay tribute to our own Rock Gods because they move us. They make our lives meaningful, perhaps in a way that only music ever could.
And as long as there is music, even if we don’t like it, there will always be its Rock Gods.
That’s what I thought about driving home from playing an hour of Guitar Hero. I turned off my Apple Music playlist in the car, switched to a non-static FM station, and listened to something from today.
And immediately shut it off after a minute.
I tried. These aren’t my Rock Gods; but I know now that they are somebody’s.
Even those who listen to Jack Harlow.
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I’M HALLUCINATING, YOU’RE HALLUCINATING…
Here’s a thought to unsettle you for the rest of your life: everything you perceive, from sunshine beaming in through the window, to the sounds of people bustling around you, to the smell of the coffee steaming from the mug at your desk…all of it is made up in the mind as a glorious, biochemical hallucination.
Yes, this is the Matrix.
So, would you like the Red or Blue pill?
I’m joking, of course, but the premise of being plugged into our senses strikes closer to home when it comes to understanding consciousness than previously thought.
In Anil Seth’s TED Talk, he explains that what we perceive the world to be is really the body’s sensory system finely tuned over millions of years of evolution to calculate an accurate depiction of reality. We see color and shadow because it helps us identify contrast or danger (brightly colored berries, insects, reptiles usually signaled ‘danger’ in primitive man); we distinguish noises from loud to silent as we’re able to understand if danger is approaching. It became useful, through our evolution, to identify the world around us. Most humans interpret sensory signals in the same ways: grass is green, the sky is blue, a splash of water feels wet, etc, etc.
But within the finer points of our sensory organs, we are making approximations based on our own experiences and personal abilities to understand what is real around us. Even though we understand that grass is green (well, maybe not in your neighbor’s yard), the eye cannot actually “see” anything; rather, it is a bodily organ that translates wavelength frequencies to the mind, and the occipital lobe “determines” what is being seen.
And in some cases, the mind can be wrong about what it sees.
Take this famous optical illusion shown below:
The darkness of the checkered boxes outside of the pillar’s shadow seem to be darker in the checkered Box A than the checkered Box B, but this is only our mind’s approximation of what seems to be correct in terms of what we know of light and shadow. In reality, the two boxes are the same color:
So, who is to say our senses are to be totally trusted?
As Anil Seth says in his TED Talk: “Reality is the hallucination we all agree on.”
It’s a wonderful notion, isn’t it? To think this is why animals see things differently, like how dogs can only perceive different color spectra. We all see things in our own way…so long as we all agree that Jack Harlow is just ok.
I’m kidding. I have nothing against that guy, I just like his name as a punchline.
All of this and more is covered in the Anil Seth’s TED Talk below. It’s a cathartic 20-minutes and worth the watch:
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Wishing everyone as well as you can be. You’re not alone out there,
