The Rolling Stones will reign supreme until there is a new counterculture
The new generation is blocked from moving on creatively, not only by the babyboomers but also their own inertia
Paul Morley
The Observer, Sunday 31 March 2013
The Rolling Stones at London's O2, November 2012. Photograph: Brian Rasic / Rex Features
Congratulations to the Rolling Stones on the announcement of their summer wedding to the Glastonbury festival, held one month before their lead singer turns 70. It is a marriage made in performance heaven, for those who believe, or creepy hell, for those who think the Stones on stage is more grotesque than beautiful burlesque.
Those who are uncomfortable with the grand old men of the 60s playing the festival that represents idealistic spirit are missing the point. This inevitable royal pop marriage between the well-branded greatest rock'n'roll band in the world and the greatest festival shows us how the energy of rock has transformed into something often pleasant and fun-filled, but it is not where you should be looking for whatever the new is. Festivals are the rock generation's equivalent of cruises, the convenient place to go to sample various preserved delights, obscure sites and classic monuments and celebrate ancient rituals from a safe distance.
As much as Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis always coveted an appearance from the Stones, they would have, until the last year or two, looked wrong at Glastonbury, because they were too corporate – debauched representatives of a mundane entertainment state. Glastonbury is now a major territory in that entertainment state and the great Pyramid performances the equivalent of formal state parades. It is now wrong for the Stones not to play at Glastonbury, where those of whatever age attend because they want the best views, the most treasured experiences, in the form of the all-time greatest hits and the historic bands. They don't give a damn that the Stones should not be there because of ancient, snobby critical concerns they had sold out. They would not be convinced by the thought that the cliches of rock and its sentimental support system now form the oppressive orthodoxy.
Compared with this year's other Glastonbury headliners, the Arctic Monkeys and Mumford and Sons, the Stones, perversely, have the real youthful, warrior edge. For better or worse, they are old men playing young music, not young people playing old music. The Monkeys and the Mumfords are the dutiful archivists; the Stones are the bloody archive, using their appearance on the Pyramid stage to help refine their own legend. They are also the most conceptually pure, as ludicrous as it can be to watch 70-year-old men romp through songs about lust, ambition and sexual triumph that are becoming as much songs about the wretched dying of the light.
The Stones at Glastonbury confirms how the 20th-century babies born between, say, the early 40s and the early 60s, the baby boomers, remain in control of the pop culture they invented and reinvented between the late 50s and the late 70s, even as the record industry and traditional media, business and television approach extinction. The boomers have turned out to be like cockroaches surviving all sorts of cultural catastrophes and even their own apparently allotted life span. Thirty-five years ago, the punk generation thought they had got rid of the Stones. I saw them in concert 40 years ago, and they seemed old then. I told Mick Jagger to his face in 1980 it was time to give up, because it seemed culturally vital that the new was allowed to prosper, to deal with dangerous new political forces, and the Rolling Stones seemed spent artistically and therefore a drain on unconventional, unprocessed versions of the energy they released in their prime.
His attitude then was along the lines of: you must be mad. This isn't about youthful rebellion, about forging fluid, collective identity; this is about smoke-screened showbusiness, a competitive, hyped-up masquerade of pose, illusion and self-belief for the general relief of pent-up tension. It's business, you fool. We provide a service that is ultimately beyond fashion.
As things turned out, he was right.
The Stones have come back like the royal family; ruthless manipulators of people's desires, shielded and amplified by social media, thriving in an age where fame is a new church and spinning, sensationalising publicists have taken charge. They belong now as much as they did in the 60s. The Stones have lurched through difficult times and occasional near exile all the way into the security of the current vintage period, which promotes their once dead corny imagery and cocksure approach as rock's indestructible classic house style.
Spoilt by all the immediate access to abundant pop culture, to a near infinity of packaged sensation, the current generation, unlike the boomers, have no need to strain forward and chase new forms of freedom that react against previous stultifying values. They are trapped inside a world of their parents' making but, unlike the stale, broken world the boomers inherited, this one supplies them with purpose-built, easily accessed pleasure and escape. It numbs any appetite to develop new ways of opposing the system, of inventing a disobedient internet-era counterculture that would make the old counterculture look as quaint and wasted as it actually is.
That the Stones are still so visibly functioning is not just because the arrogant, clingy baby boomers, with their domineering cultural presence, have so much power they block anything dangerously new. It is as much the young vintagers, the kids and grandkids of the boomers, the V generation, who have allowed them back in.
The new generation of teens and post-teens are blocked from generating novel, disruptive cultural space by the stubborn boomers. They are crowded out by older generations wanting to have fun until they die, stymied by a succession of reforming pop revolutions and media sensations that led only to more and more award ceremonies and greatest hits anthologies. They are bankrupted by the boomers' self-indulgent spending, let down by the boomers' complacent inability to anticipate the revolutionary consequences of the computer world, flustered by constant electronic distraction. The only way for a new generation to take control of what comes after this decaying period of pop culture is to conceive a dazzling cultural hybrid – perhaps involving computer coding, self-branding, comic book abstraction, architecture, a profound reconfiguring of rock's dissolving moral and social vigilance and a mutating speed of thought – that reverberates from the world as it is now, on the edge of collapse, not as it was then, recovering from collapse.
The mistake is assuming any potentially new youth-driven counterculture will resemble ones from the past, when rock music was the main element. Any 21st-century outburst of rebellion will not resemble the rock that is now formally collected at multiple festivals the world over in the way that the Stones did not resemble silent movies.
Meanwhile, those thousands gathered at the Glastonbury resort to witness the marriage ceremony between the bandy, rocking grooms and the blushing bride will have a very special time. Hopefully the pair will unwittingly inspire a post-millenial, post -vintage generation teenager to look at this freakish combination of epicurean pop festival and ageing dandy rock band and fully understand that if they want to radically represent the shape of their mind and the shifting world around them, they cannot possibly use rock music, which now only refers to its own echoing history. The Stones at Glastonbury will be both wedding and memorial service. Jagger, though, the bulletproof dark prince of the boomers, will somehow emerge with plans for the next 30-odd years.
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