PARTY LIKE A ROCK STAR

A new book charts the afterlife of our greatest cliché Mike Doherty

could keep his background as dark as young Bob Dylan managed to do in 1961,” Hepworth writes. “It’s difficult to imagine the big stars of today still being big stars in twenty years’ time because we already know everything there is to know about them.” In other words, an artist’s everyday presence on social media obliterates the distance fans once had from their idols, and stops them from dreaming of what it might be like to be them.

Hepworth is right in a sense – fans no longer have to scrutinize magazine profiles for tantalizing tidbits about rockers’ private lives (and because of this, the internet has devastated the music press, too). But today’s stars don’t necessarily bare their souls on social media; they craft heavily edited narratives, conjuring up fascinating lifestyles that are just approachable enough. What’s more, A-list stars are less and less inclined to do press altogether – access to the likes of Beyoncé, Drake and The Weeknd is nearly non-existent. When you have enough money and resources, you can separate your public life from your private one, just like the rock stars of yesteryear.

Not that this makes Hepworth’s project of digging into the nuts and bolts of the star-making machine less worthwhile. He reveals the tawdriness, insecurity and absurdity at the heart of so much stereotypically rock ‘n’ roll behaviour. In the process, he deconstructs some of the myths in Post Malone’s litany of “Rock Star” excess – for instance, Jim Morrison’s arrest for indecent exposure in Florida in 1970: “There were seven thousand in the Dinner Key Auditorium that night. Nothing speaks more eloquently for the dehumanizing effect of the increased scale of the rock spectacular than the fact that people in the audience couldn’t agree whether Morrison had actually taken his penis out or not.” As for The Rolling Stones throwing a TV out of their Beverly hotel suite in 1972 (“Shit was legendary,” Malone raps), Hepworth explains how it was done “dutifully” for documentarian Robert Frank – “a process that, as the film showed, was a good deal more tiring than it ought to be. The Stones felt they had to act up to what the straight world was coming to expect of rock princes.”

As the woozy, numbed sound of Post Malone’s hit single suggests, from close up, even a legendary rocker’s lifestyle loses lustre. Over time, the image that sustains his (and it almost always is “his”) stardom can become embarrassing – see Hepworth’s chapter on Led Zeppelin at Knebworth in 1979: “In the era of the Jam and the Stranglers, this looked almost like historical reenactment.” And the more rock music recycles itself, the more stale and museumbound it can seem. Where once it represented the future (as symbolized by English guitarist Hank Marvin’s 1959 Stratocaster, which “combined the space-age lines of a super-car with the dazzling ingeniousness of a smartphone”), now, it summons up the Boomer.

Hepworth should know: he’s 67. And yet, he’s perhaps too quick to dismiss rock’s lingering relevance. As with other paradigm-shifting music from yesteryear, from baroque to jazz, it has mutated and cross-pollinated with other forms. Rock’s DNA is everywhere from EDM to hip-hop itself, in the foregrounding of the rhythm section, the thick textures achieved by just a few instruments, and the matterof-fact lyrics. Rock remains a huge concert draw, and not just in traditional rock shows, as most arena acts, no matter what their genre, are backed up by what’s essentially a rock band, complete with wailing guitar and flailing drums.

In his deeply researched, acerbic and often hilarious book, Hepworth does a compelling job of showing the differences between today and rock’s heyday – including how in the 1960s and ’70s, “the dictionary of disapproval had not yet been developed,” and “Rock stars who expected unfettered access to the bodies of any young women in their orbit weren’t yet said to have a problem with male entitlement.” Nonetheless, these myths, developed largely among straight, white men, continue to play out in unexpected ways in today’s more diverse pop and hip-hop realm. When Rihanna sings “Hey baby, I’m a rock star,” accompanied by Slash on guitar, is she claiming this stardom for herself, or subverting it, or adapting it to fit her own ends? Is she a rock star? Can Post Malone become one?

Not that this is strictly in Hepworth’s purview – he had to cut off his historical overview somewhere. In the end, Uncommon People is the best kind of pop-culture history book: One that can you can productively disagree with, ideally while getting elegantly wasted.