"The War is Over; Rock Stars Have a lot of Feelings"

If Philip Seymour Hoffman is right (and, it seems, he often is), then the rock and roll war ended before '72 and there was nothing compelling, novel, or challenging left to do. When the outsiders become a larger part of the so-called "big, bad corporate tastelessness," when the central ethos of protest of an entire art form ceases to be its motivating spirit, then everything changes. It must. Was Mark Perry (later) correct: did punk die when The Clash signed with CBS?

And now its about cool. Or so Almost Famous  would dwell on. And that is what struggling rock bands (Stillwater) focus on. Controlling image in a media savvy world that they have not really begun to understand. This leads to, as might be inevitable of comfortable twenty-somethings, a lot of feelings. Yes, just like anything else in demand people will try to own what you have created. Tough. While it is nice to imagine that everyone leaves the tale more self-aware, what is the compelling reason why this type of story need be told? Ignored is how music continues to evolve and remains important, both to the creators and receivers.

For a movie ostensibly about rock music, people and rock remain highly foreign to one another. Beyond the assured nostalgia of a certain generation, there is surprisingly a lot of music over-dubbed, but little about why the music matters. Notions of "family" and "home" could be found in any other, attempted, counter-culture movement of young people. Why should we care about this, specific, movement? What relevance did it carry at the time? What does it carry still? Why did rock and roll continue to matter? What we have is comfortable people exploring a largely safe medium in which the accepted logic of retrospection is secure. David Bowie is hustled through a room of die-hard rock fans of different stripes and no one attempts to pontificate upon a distaste for Bowie? Really? Was the logic of taste and time so agreed upon in the moment?

Seymour Hoffman was only half-right. The first iteration of the rock war may have recessed from the mainstream, but artists continued to feel stifled by the limitations of the medium - and pushed it to new places. The music continued to speak to people because of the fierce urgency of the moment; this must breed dissension, or cease to speak meaningfully. The Clash and the Sex Pistols; Run DMC and N.W.A.; Nirvana and Pearl Jam; in essence, the song remains the same. Innovation continued to be explored; and innovation must always be at least partially uncomfortable.

How do music and personality integrate to form some semblance of a coherent life? How do people find meaning in someones else's art? What can this tell us about ourselves and the world we inhabit? I wonder.