Zippy-The-Pinhead wrote:
Not sure why you think Fitzgerald's doesn't host rock and roll, nor do I get the old people in chairs reference. I've been to a number of rock shows there and everyone was standing throughout. Reasonable prices & a decent beer selection as well.
Tall Midget wrote:
If you've been around long enough to remember how awesome a 1979 Subverts show at Oz was, you know what that makes you? Pretty fucking old! JORR, you are a self-hating senior citizen. I suggest you head over to the hospital to get checked for early-onset Alzheimer's--because you seem to have forgotten what decade you're living in--and stop being such a crabby old codger. Fitzgerald's is great: interesting music played to audiences who actually know why they're attending a given show. That's not what you'll find at a lot of rock venues around town where the comparatively youthful crowds you seem to fetishize are more likely to be talking over the music than listening to it.
First, I never suggested FitzGerald's didn't host rock and roll
bands. What they don't do is host rock and roll
shows. They are in business to accommodate the older crowd that cares about things like beer selection. And that is the very antithesis of the rock and roll ethic. Rock and roll and youth culture are inextricably linked. Rock and roll is a middle finger to your old man. But how can it be when he's banging his dopey head right next to you? To me, FitzGerald's is the embodiment of that.
And yeah, I am pretty fucking old. I'm also usually smart enough not to act like a teenager. But I don't want to go gentle into that good night either. The problem with today's rock and roll is like everything else. It's been co-opted by money. And who has the money? The rich old guy or the rich old guy's kid when he deigns to give it to him. And the rich old guy doesn't rock. He wants to take a fucking limo to sit in a skybox and eat from a dessert cart while watching Keith and nut. Again, it ain't what I call rock and roll. But to each his own.
Finally, the very fact that anyone thinks people should be expected to quietly watch a rock show misses the entire point of the medium. It isn't a fucking opera or the symphony. I don't need to sit like I'm in a motherfucking church service at a rock show. FUCK JOE JACKSON! Yeah, that's a motherfuckin' cigarette too! One of the best things about punk rock was the lack of a line between performer and audience. The fact that a punk rock stage is at floor level is symbolic. I'm sure some old guy with earplugs might shush me at FitzGerald's if I cough too loudly during another scintillating set by Clifton Chenier or Marcia Ball.
The problem with aligning rock with a rebellious youth culture is that such a culture does not exist. This isn't the 1930s or the 1960s. We aren't being led by a young revolutionary vanguard--who have stepped out of the pages of The Masses or Ramparts--that seeks to bring a new social vision into the light of day through sit-down strikes and mass protest. The closest thing we had to that was the Occupy Movement, and most Occupiers were motivated by their disappointment with the unfulfilled promises of capitalism, not their alienation from a capitalist ethos.
Your celebration of the "rebellious" spirit of punk makes me chuckle given your disgust for the people who might populate Fitzgerald's on a given night. Many of them have a great affinity for the folk music of the 1930s and the 1960s, which was precisely the engine for sweeping social change that punk pretended to be but never was. You've got it exactly right when you point to punk's "symbolic" rejection of hierarchical divisions between audience and performers--because just about everything related to punk was purely symbolic. Punk cultivated an aesthetic of the grotesque as a way of making itself impenetrable to the logic of commodity culture, but it never saw beyond capitalism. As Greil Marcus has pointed out, punk articulated a logic of self-negation but ultimately had no social vision. In that respect, it was tailor-made for a failing capitalist order--punk provided an outlet for culturally subverting capitalism without actually functioning as a social threat to the status quo. It was a politics of style--nothing more--that privileged radical feeling over radical action.
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