IT’S ONLY ROCK ’N’ ROLL
Book argues rock stars have become a relic of the past
If Post Malone’s new single, Rock Star, was actually a rock song, it probably wouldn’t have hit No. 1 in the United States (or No. 2 in Canada). “The rock era is over,” writes David Hepworth. “We now live in a hip-hop world.”
Indeed, when it comes to U.S. music consumption, Nielsen Media research says that, together with R&B, hip hop has overcome rock for the first time. Still, Malone’s rapping about the likes of Jim Morrison and Bon Scott is striking a chord. The myth of the rock star endures.
Hepworth, a veteran British music journalist and author of Never a Dull Moment: 1971, The Year That Rock Exploded, calls Kurt Cobain “a genuine rock star, possibly even the last one.” The first, he says, was Little Richard, and Uncommon People accordingly starts in 1955 with the Tutti Frutti singer’s rise, working its way chronologically, one chapter and significant musician per year, through to the Nirvana frontman and his death in 1994.
For Hepworth, the internet deserves most of the blame for the true rock star’s decline: It deprived the music industry of the highmargin physical-product business model that sustained alluring excess, and it robbed rock stars of their mystique.
“It’s inconceivable that any young musician coming along today 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 (20) 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 or 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 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.”
Yet, Hepworth is perhaps too quick to dismiss rock’s lingering relevance. 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 matter-of-fact lyrics.
Rock remains a huge concert draw, and not just in traditional rock shows, since 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.”
In the end, Uncommon People is the best kind of pop-culture history book: One you can productively disagree with, ideally while getting elegantly wasted.