I’ve been thinking about this question for a long time. Maybe I am boxing myself into pop culture. But what I am wondering is…what kills the creative edge? There are so many rock bands that just come and go and so few with any staying power. Some of these bands explode onto the scene, only to die a year or so later.
Some bands enjoy a long career, but are mocked for a lack of creatively relevant to new output despite touring to sold out shows (Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd).
What is it that makes former rock gods lose their edge? Is drug use a factor? I’m honestly curious.
While it may be slightly due to age, I think it’s more due to Sturgeon’s Law and the fact that not everyone is musically good at all genres.
So, if there is an artist with a string of great albums, if Sturgeon’s Law were entirely randon, then chances are that the artist simply lucked into their best material and the rest of their stuff, even though it is in the same vein, will be bad. Of course real life doesn’t always work that way, but I think that it’s part of it.
Also, many musicians try to break out of the mold and do new things, and while it works some times, some times the musician simply doesn’t have enough talent to change their style successfully.
But I do think chronology has something to do with it, in an artist’s first album. They’ve been prepping for their first album their entire career and so will go all out with their best collected material, but then will only have a few years in which to write new stuff.
I think part of it is that you (and the bands) get older. Music that seems awesome to you when you are 15, 18 or 22 can seem hopelessly cheesy and dated a few years later. And it’s hard for the bands to keep singing to the kids when they are in their 40s and 50s and beyond.
Take Bon Jovi for example. He was cutting edge bad ass rock we used to listen to when we were getting drunk and making out with chicks at some 80s suburban house party in high school (or at least planning to). Now at best he’s adult contemporary light rock my mom listens to.
I don’t agree with your thesis. I think a lot of musicians want to grow and change, and their fans, critics and record companies won’t let them. It takes an extraordinary amount of talent, hardheadedness or a combination of both to disregard them.
My two favorite artists are talented and hardheaded, Kate Bush and Todd Rundgren. Kate works so slowly, and had the good fortune to have an extraordinary record company contract that gave her an unprecedented level of artistic control, that the record company takes what they can get. Todd had a parallel career as a highly successful record producer that allowed him to constantly experiment and not worry too much about the need for hits (some claim that he perversely sabotaged potential hits).
Todd’s approaching his 65th birthday, and his fans are eagerly awaiting his next album and tour, and they have no idea what it will be. His web site says:
Recent tours included being part of Ringo Starr’s “All Starr Band”, touring with the string quartet Ethel, orchestral shows, a Blues tour of Robert Johnson covers, and a Gilbert and Sullivan production. This is a guy who was asked to cover his old hits and he did them in Bossa Nova style, touring with a Tiki bar!And all along, he’s been producing music that could be hits, but there is no way for those who are not already fans to find out about it. Radio stations think they have him fit into a pigeon hole as a “nostalgia act” and have no interest in anything other than playing his old hits and won’t even needle-drop his current recordings.
It seems to me that artists are rewarded for staying the same. The more the new Rolling Stones record sounds like the old Rolling Stones record, the better Rolling Stones fans seem to like it.
I think this is a big part of it. Things are a bit different now but traditionally a band that has a big smash first album has had years to write music for it. As soon as it becomes a hit, the record company pushed hard or a follow up. If its not a big hit the record label would drop them for the next big thing, not wanting to give them time to mature and work up new stuff. Even Tom Sholz who had a lot of control over his band (Boston) and music took a lot of shit because their second album was too much like their first.
It’s a combination of fickle fans and more importantly how the music industry works. On the flip side, new sensation fun. singer Nate Ruess has had more success with his last album than any other. He has had time for his writing skills to develop and I suspect we will hear more good thins from them.
It seems to me that bands that focused on writing what they want instead of writing what happens to be popular at the moment tend to stick around. There are exceptions but for the most part the bands that stick to their vision tend to last.
For example, Dream Theater released their first album in 1989, they will release their next album this year. While they have changed during that time, the changed in a natural way instead of jumping on whichever bandwagon was hip. Rush is another example. Rush has changed a ton but the core style is always there. Ozzy is another.
Then take Metallica. They went off the rails a bit lately. It seems to me that the reason for that is they abandoned their core.
Additionally, most rock is rather shallow. The bands that right about sex/drugs are awesome when you are 18 and every other thought is about getting laid. When you are older, married, got a job, etc, that whole party mentality gets replaced by the real world.
You may interpret it that way, but it could also be the artist or band trying new things. It seems to me that Rush fans have pretty much demanded that Rush continue to sound like Rush.
I’m not attacking you, but that sounds like just another way to demanding that a band keeps churning out songs in the same style.
I can see the problem with that type of rock. But the artists that have some staying power seems to discard that type of thing as soon as feasible - The Who would seem to be a very good example. A man in his sixties would sound like a total prat singing “Hope I die before I get old.”
I think artists rarely have a bottomless supply of creativity. They have a finite supply and even if it’s being replenished, they use it up faster than it’s renewed. If they’re talented, they get discovered when they’re young and they start putting their ideas out there. But then they hit an age when they’ve used up most of their good ideas.
Rock music, more than any other art form, is about youthful sexual energy and the frustrations of youth. Its main audience are teens and twentysomethings, it is about their concerns, and it can only really be made well by people who are themselves teens or twentysomethings, or who were that recently enough to still remember vividly what that was like.
Older people are perfectly capable of making good music, but they can’t make good, authentic rock’n’roll music, and if they keep on trying to (perhaps because that is the only genre they know, or the only one their audience will accept from them) it is bound to fall short. Sometimes they can make a pretty good simulacrum of the real thing, but it is still just a simulacrum.
Perhaps it’s just a case of limited talent. That is, they hit it big with something that works and they never had anything beyond that. So they ran with it. Not a pejorative statement just likely the case for most entertainers and frankly people in general.
I don’t think that creativity is at all limited to the young. Inventors are creative and can think of examples who had their breakthroughs in their 30s or later. George Westinghouse returned to inventing after a business failure later in life and patented a few important inventions. Next to his deathbed were notes for a proposed electric wheelchair.
Why might rockers top out early?
Sex and drugs and other professional distractions
Only young people are naive enough to enter such a high risk field
The large audience required for success is young and faddish
Stressful work conditions lead to a desire for a career change to car sales
Creativity is hard to measure. In popular music, seems to me, what’s called creativity is more often hybridization and accretion rather than the radical change. Is Lou Reed’s solo work less creative than what he did with the Velvet Underground? Where do Transformer and Animal Serenade (well-received albums recorded some thirty years apart) fall on the create-o-meter? Did the Beatles become more creative between Meet the Beatles and the White Album or did they just become drugfucked public masturbators?
It may very well be that Jon Bon Jovi is a much more creative artist now than he was as a young man, I’d like to think so. His band’s early, popular work was crap and there was nothing creative at the time about forming a hair band and singing about running away to be a prostitute from home or being a cowboy wanted dead or alive for multiple counts of face rocking. Hm, on second thought, maybe I’ve underestimated the young Mr Bon Jovi’s creative skilz.
A lot of what interested me in my teens and twenties is tedious and uninteresting now except as an occasional nostalgic flashback of youth. We change. Middle-agers are grappling with a different reality than the young. That reality is not as easily translated into rock music.
Many, if not most, geniuses achieved their defining moments before they were 40. Einstein did relativity at 38. Michelangelo did Pieta in his 20s. Newton invented calculus in his 20s. Mozart did his piano quintet at 38.
