"Bring on Sha-Na-Na!"

Like the Oscars, I’m not sure how relevant the Grammys ever were, but I have to congratulate Robert Plant on winning a bunch last night, especially after the general disrespect the music industry showed Led Zeppelin during their heyday. Though his album with Alison Krauss came out well over a year ago, it’s quite good as far as mellow country-tinged albums go. Great to listen to while writing or just sitting around the house.

I’ve been a little bummed out about the direction of the music industry lately. It may just be that I’m getting older. Let’s face it—most music these days is geared towards the 14-18 crowd. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but over the years it’s led to music becoming more disposable. Today Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake are old pros, and though they’re both talented I can’t see them standing the test of time. My generation never had a Beatles, a Led Zeppelin, a Guns N’ Roses—even Pearl Jam and Nirvana were a little before our time. While we can still enjoy the old music, there hasn’t been a seminal event in music for decades, and the old styles are becoming more and more tired.

This could all just be due to the fact that I’m out of touch. Apparently Chris Brown got into some kind of trouble that prevented him from attending the awards last night, and to be honest with you I’m not 100% sure who that is. People come and go now without my noticing. As Grandpa Simpson once said, “I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s it seems weird and scary to me.” There’s a good chance I’m already far down that road. Have I become the kind of joyless old man who screams out “Bring on Sha-na-na!” at Woodstock? I hope not.

But I don’t think I’m mistaking in the lack of passion in the industry today. Musicians tend to hop in and go with the flow, and individual expression falls by the wayside. During the entire 8 years of the Bush administration, there was a deafening silence in anti-war songs or any serious statements from mainstream musicians (with few notable exceptions), and it’s strange that something as liberating as music has become, in an odd way, so conservative.

Yet there’s no way to give up on music. Arthur Machen once called it “the perfect art,” and I couldn’t agree more. As writers, “We are forced to devise incidents and circumstances and plots, to ‘make up a story;’ we translate a hill into a tale, conceive lovers to explain a brook, turn the perfect into the imperfect.” Musicians, on the other hand, have the power to speak directly to an emotion, without covering it up in the mechanisms of plot. For a writer to express a broken heart, for example, she has to create characters and a story and work her way to the emotion indirectly; a musician can strum the right notes and we instantly feel what they feel. Bruce Springsteen’s song, “The Wrestler,” conveys everything in three minutes that the movie spends two hours and millions of dollars showing us.

But we might just be experiencing a lull right now. There are great musicians out there, great songs are still being written. The whole world moves at a faster and faster pace, and it’s easy for great music to get buried as the industry moves on to someone else. This kid gives me a lot of hope, and he might just be on to something.

As Eric Cartman once so eloquently put it, “Real guitars are for old people.”