Why Rock Music Has Sucked For 15 Years (2009)

You can’t learn that, you can’t imitate it, you can’t bottle it, you can’t package it, you can’t put a surcharge and $20 for parking on it, you can’t control it, you can’t capture it, you can’t imitate it.  All you can do is grab that sucker by the tail and hold on tight while it takes you where it wants to go.

That, my friends ($1 J. McCain) is the magic.  That is why I’m a musician.  Not because it gets me laid or makes me money or gratifies my ego, although it does do all those things at times.

I’m a musician because I have to be.  Because whether it’s just me playing with myself (pun definitely intended) in a basement, or me and my band, whoever they might be at the moment, playing to a couple thousand people, that magic, that power, that undefinable thing that leaves me hollowed out and spent in a way that no sex, no money, no fast car, no drug, no woman, no THING ever could…that’s what matters, and I don’t give a rip if you can fool ten million people into buying your pathetic imitations and flimsy, saccharine parody:  that is what the people and friends I respect from John Lennon to John Riemer have and were born having…and that is what almost nobody who so callously refers to themselves as musicians in 2009 could ever understand because they don’t have it, they can’t have it, and they wouldn’t know what it was if it slapped them in the face.

I don’t need a record contract or a multi-million-dollar tour or fifty grand in flashpots or computer-controlled laser shows, and I don’t much care if Britney or the Jonas Brothers or Coldplay are selling millions of records while I sit in a drafty shack in rural North Carolina re-rolling smokes from the butts of the ones I hand-rolled earlier.  I don’t need a billion hits on a MySpace page [chuckles in 2021] or a billion dowloads of MP3’s to prove that, because it’s mine and nobody can take it away, nobody can water it down, nobody can say it’s fake or not good enough or not ‘accessible.’

That is what’s inside me, and that is what flows through me when I play regardless of who, if anyone, is watching, listening, or even gives a rat’s ass, and that is what is most emphatically NOT in 99% of the shallow, commercial crap that pollutes the airwaves today, and the best and worst part of it is that it doesn’t have to be a big secret, it doesn’t have to be hidden or kept private or kept away from anyone finding out.  It can’t be stolen, it can’t be taken away, it can’t be bought or sold.  It just is.  Some of us have it, some of us don’t, but it’s sure doesn’t seem like anyone who is passing themselves off as a musician or rock star in 2009 could ever come close to understanding what that feels like.

And THAT is why rock music has sucked for 15 years.

[All of this applies to my writing, too.  If you pay attention you’re probably seeing a theme by now.  I’m real big on authenticity and sincerity and meaning it.]