It will come to the surprise of no one who haunts record store aisles or lurks around any band’s social media accounts that diehard fans of Classic Rock music—just like those who obsess over sports, model trains or Star Wars—love to argue.
To pontificate, to judge, to analyze, to put forth that their opinions and views are sane and correct and yours is, well, pretty fucked up.
To try and convince fellow sonic travelers that yes, the Syd Barrett-helmed Pink Floyd was vastly superior and more “pure” than the quartet who recorded The Wall. Or the Doobie Brothers sold their biker bar soul for AOR jazzy glory when Tom Johnston (of the hirsute moustache) left, and Michael McDonald (of the more hirsute beard) joined.
In 2008, prolific music author Dave Thompson lobbed a literary bomb with his I Hate New Music: The Classic Rock Manifesto. The polemicist pontificated on the superiority of Classic Rock and why most of what came after sucked.
And in the fighting spirit of long dead scribes Lester Bangs and Paul Nelson, Thompson’ takes were either loved or hated by his readers. There was no room for Switzerland.
But just to prove he’s nothing if not fair-minded, he’s back with I Hate Old Music, Too: How Familiarity and Overuse Killed Our Favorite Music (282 pp., $24.95, Backbeat Books). Buckle in, Classic Rockers.
Thompson calls his tome “the story of twentieth-century rock in the twenty-first century, and the grotesque recycling plant that it has become.” Calling rock the only popular music today that “is constantly droning on about its past,” he shows—often in wincing detail—just how much has changed in the past 15 years.
With sharp-edged wit and humor, Thompson runs the litany of things he feels have “destroyed” Classic Rock.
It seems that for every big Classic Rock act or album of 40-60 years of age, there’s Deluxe Editions, Revised Editions, Expanded Editions, Bonus Editions and Box Sets capturing for posterity every time a Beatle burped or Fab flatulated into the mic at EMI Studios.
Bob Dylan’s original 1975 Blood on the Tracks offered one vinyl record with 10 songs that clocked in at just under 52 minutes. By comparison, 2018’s More Blood, More Tracks box set unloaded six CDs with 179 tracks, and listening to all of it will take up nearly six hours of your ears.
And does anyone really know what “remastered” or “remixed” really means…and what makes it any better sounding than the “original” forms? Does it matter if you don’t have a NASA-level (or Neil Young-approved) system to play it on?
On the road, there’s Classic Rock band reunions some fans never asked for. On the radio (terrestrial, at least), it’s the tight playlist that sticks to the same selection of tunes with no regional changes or chances taken.
Why play “Misty Mountain Hop,” “Pretty Maids All in a Row” or “Tuesday’s Gone” when “Stairway to Heaven,” “Hotel California” and “Freebird” will do just fine, over and over and over. And those first three aren’t even deep cuts.
And the lists. The endless music media lists of “Best This” or “Best That” comparing bands, records, or players of individual instruments. Nothing but argument starters.
One of Thompson’s best chapters (which coulda/shoulda been even longer) discusses the endless and omnipresence of Classic Rock songs now used in movies, TV shows, video games, and commercials (not to mention TikTok).
Remember the hue and cry when Michael Jackson “sold out” the Beatles when “Revolution” was heard in a Nike TV commercial? Or Eric Clapton re-recorded “After Midnight” for a Michelob beer ad? No longer.
Now, you can hear not even a soundalike performer or tune with altered lyrics (“Sunkist Vibrations” anyone?), but the actual Classic Rock studio recording. Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” for a cruise ship company; the Zombies’ “Time of the Season” for an investment firm; and Steppenwolf’s “Born to the Wild” for a diet soft drink.
Once in a while, the commercial usage even eclipses the performer from the song. What does Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” bring to mind immediately if not the tour bus singalong from Almost Famous?
And after a symbiotic paring of a 13-year commercial campaign, when one hears the plaintive chorus of “Like a Rock,” is the first image your head of Bob Seger in concert, or a Chevy truck rumbling across the desert? And come to think of it…why haven’t we heard this in a Viagra commercial yet?
And it’s a win-win, purportedly. Streaming goes up and a new audience wants to know “What was that song?” There are now people at record companies (and firms who have purchased those catalogs) whose sole job is to pitch songs they own for placement in other media.
Along the way, Thompson touches on some ‘80s Classic Rock-era newsier items like the stickering Washington Wives of the PMRC and the purported “Satanic” panic about backward masking and evil themes. The Eurovision chapter, though…maybe not needed.
And don’t get Thompson started on Record Store Day (aka “Rip-Off Store Day”). Or Yacht Rock, of which he writes “Half the songs are a stalker’s manifesto, half are a loser’s secret diary, and the rest (because fractions are a figment of your imagination) are divided between blatant braggadocio, sordid self-flagellation, and frankly creepy insinuation and threat.”
Adding to the humor Thompson includes an “Index of Wholly Imaginary Artists.” Some of whom are thinly-veiled doppelgangers of actual acts, and whose names he spreads through the main narrative. It may send the more obtuse readers scurrying to find rare records by Rocky Biceps, the Dental Assassins, Nico Teen and the Stains, Cat Sandwich, Foxy and the Redcoats or Mark Syllabub.
Finally, Thompson correctly assesses that the line is more and more blurring between touring Classic Rock “Tribute Acts” and the Actual Act, which may have left two, one or no original/classic members actually standing on stage (we’re looking at your Foreigner).
The book is a fast, snappy and sometimes hilarious and ferocious screed that will surely get Classic Rock music nerds, of course arguing.
There’s a lot to unpack and think about in I Hate Old Music, Too, and even the most diehard Classic Rocker (this writer included) will find at least new pause in continuing to pursue some of the practices Thompson laments here. Did I really need that 5-LP box set of WAR’s The World is a Ghetto that detailed the rehearsal development of “Beetles in the Bog?”
Why yes. Yes, I did.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
