I step into the drugstore to pick up some aspirin and I hear Elton John warbling "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road." I cross over to the barbershop and get clipped to the tune of Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland," David Bowie's "Rebel Rebel" and The Led Zeppelin Song That Must Never Be Named. (Oh, all right — "Stairway to Heaven," are you happy now?) Then it's off to the coffeeshop and Elton John again — "Bennie and the Jets."
In the record store, there's a long box with the remastered, beefed up version of Springsteen's Born to Run, just days after the 30th anniversary edition of Patti Smith's Horses.
It's time to face facts: I'm hearing more Seventies music now than I did when it actually was the Seventies.
The weird thing is, I see kids who were a decade away from being born when Born to Run came out digging the music. When I first bought the album, liking the music from an equivalent distance in time was unthinkable — rock and roll just barely existed in 1955.
For all the pissing and moaning I did about the Seventies back when I lived in them, that period looks more and more like the last great era of rock music experimentation and creative ferment. When I consider the range and diversity of the music being produced and selling well — Joni Mitchell and Bob Marley, Roxy Music and the Allman Brothers, Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and Parliament/Funkadelic — the only equivalent I can think of is the furious creativity of hip-hop music during the late '80s and early '90s, when it seemed that every week brought an amazing new group. Public Enemy was at the top of its game, weird and interesting rappers like Digital Underground, A Tribe Called Qwest and De La Soul made it seem like the next generation of Dylans and Beatles was at hand, only carrying mikes and turntables instead of instruments. Even the opening shots of gansta rap — the first three cuts on Straight Outta Compton, Ice Cube's scathing first solo album — sounded fresh and interesting. Then gangsta rap really took hold and I stopped paying attention. Not because of the violent lyrics — Jim Thompson and George Pelecanos are two of my favorite writers, so who am I to complain about violent lyrics? — but because it was so fucking monotonous and idiotic.
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