The boys in the band have become old men. Should the old men shuffle off the stage, or should their critics shut up?
It is an odd paradox that while the Stones have not made an album worth listening to since Tattoo You in 1981, they are bigger business now than they ever were – the prime example of Sixties and Seventies rock music as heritage industry. The Stones performing their greatest hits, Brian Wilson performing Pet Sounds, Van Morrison performing Astral Weeks – these are rock music’s equivalent of the blockbuster Jackson Pollock or David Hockney retrospective.
Some manage this trick better than others. It is a tired and familiar trope to point out the irony of old rockers, who can barely make it to the stage unaided, singing the anthems of their rebellious youth: The Who, for example, singing My Generation at the Olympics closing ceremony (or to be more precise, half the Who, the rhythm half having sadly fulfilled the song’s prophecy). Paul McCartney has become a national institution, wheeled out at state occasions to sing the creaking Hey Jude – the post-war generation’s We’ll Meet Again – with ever-diminishing effect. Surely it’s time to give it a rest?
The counter-argument is equally familiar. No one demands that the veteran bluesman B B King should hang up his guitar because he has reached a certain age. On the contrary, while the youthful fire may have gone out of his playing, there is still pleasure to be derived from a more relaxed and seasoned approach to his repertoire; and the blues are the blues, at whatever age you may be singing and playing them.
Both Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen continue to write and perform songs that reflect the people they have become, as much as the people they once were, and in so doing become peculiarly timeless.
But the Stones seem to be a special case, subject to the peculiar curse that no matter how much their artistry may hold up – and their performance on Sunday was, by all accounts, superb – their music is essentially and inescapably defined by the times in which it was made.
As someone who is getting up there, I say let them keep doing what they want to as long as there is a market for it? If someone is still willing to pay us for it, why should we stop doing it (whatever "it" is)? It's not like their presence is keeping some promising new artists from getting noticed.
But I get the point that the Stones have long since stopped making good music -- they're just coasting on their initial success, in a way behaving like Picasso was reported to in his final years, paying bills with scrawls on paper napkins just because he could. There is always a market for nostalgia, but i tend to like the people, like Dylan and Cohen, whose music reflects their journeys through life, not just snapshots of one or two stops along the way. But then, people like Dylan and Cohen went into music partly because they had something to say. But the Stones never did. They were just a band.
One hell of a band, yes, that can still kick ass in live performance. But just a band, nonetheless.
