When Them Becomes Us

April 22, 2018 — Greta Van Fleet played Coachella, the Indio, California music festival at which the headliner, Beyonce, was heralded so much you might have thought she was the coming of the Messiah, or the coming of the answer to unified physics theories, depending on which is more important to your personal belief system. I know because YouTube gave me a video of GVF’s performance. I like the performance. I like the singer’s scream, an almost trademark wail harkening all the best that Led Zeppelin had to offer. I like the Gibson SG-Marshall sound. I always have. I always will, even if this might be a bit of a re-boot sound.

I am not sure why, perhaps because I’m Whispergirl, perhaps because I like to see what people say, but I’m really interested in the comments on GVF. The one comment that struck me on this video of GVF, other than the comments about the slightly erotic palm tree getting in the way of the video, and the praise of the band members who kept going despite a power problem, was a comment by an obviously more-mature fan saying something to the effect of the band, Greta Van Fleet, being a reason that anyone over 40 would go to Coachella.

I get that. I know people in their 20s; for instance, the overly into himself hipster-son of the person I have my almost-ending part-time work for. His way of saying Coachella is like there is a choir playing when he says the word, like nobody my age could possibly be hip enough to ever go. And desert Old-Chella doesn’t count. We’re old. We don’t understand music. It’s us versus them. The youngsters, these late 20’s to early 30s millennials who control and have controlled music for so long, and who are aging out of relevance despite them not knowing it, versus … us, dinosaurs who listened to rock. Or is it….?

If you were to ask that demographic group, they would say people like Drake (who I heard won a Pulitzer recently, a crazy fact), like … I don’t even know, Kanye West (who I was told by several of that age bracket while eating at that last temporary job I had that Kaney is a genius, again that word, genius, sounding like there was choir playing behind it), rappers, hip-hop artists, whatever it’s called, will last forever. But I wonder. I wonder if they might just be wrong.

I saw another GVF story, an interview of the band members by Rolling Stone. The interview was telling on this subject. Just as my last story said, these guys, much younger than the people with the figurative choir playing to their opinions, called out current pop radio, making the same criticism I have of it:

“The scary thing about listening to pop radio is you don’t know if you’re listening to the same damn artists or if it’s different?”

What? No choir playing with the very mention of the name Drake? Or Kanye? Or Beyonce? Or any of them? They all sound the same? What? Is this guy old?

The answer is no; that’s a member of Greta Van Fleet, and those guys are barely out of high school, so definitely not old. Then the really interesting part: the guys talk about how they came to find rock ‘n’ roll, old rock ‘n’ roll, how they were influenced by blues standards. It’s almost as if one is listening to an interview of Robert Plant, circa 1969. But it’s 2018.

2018, after rock died. And people it did… die. It died and was replaced by metal that is not played at all on radio, by pop music that sounds the same, by rappers who get Pulitzer prizes, figuratively and now literally, and is followed by a demographic that simply has to say the names of the artists with their faux choir behind the artists’ name to make it revered. This same GVF guy admits it, says rock ‘n’ roll stopped dead in his tracks, but … a ray of hope here, he wants to recreate it and take it forward: “I think that the evolution of rock ‘n’ roll was cut off at some point, so this is … going back to where it was and evolving it forward again.” The really great part, for me, is there is no sound of that figurative choir playing when he talks. He deferential to the music that came before him, way, way before him, before those now-adults who praise all the garbage that’s on pop radio, and he sees a responsibility to make a change. “I think that our generation needs to carry the tradition of the way that that generation played music and to carry that forward”, he says.

There is a comment on that story, a commenter saying how he’s pleased rock is now underground again. Mind you, I’m sure that comment is by an “us”, but so many of us are watching to see whether the latest crop of youngsters will go the way that GVF wants to take them. The new them, the youngsters, those youngsters might just turn into us. And if they do, oh my goodness, if they do, I can’t wait to see the evolution – rock as it was meant to go forward.

Mind you, I know the criticism, that GVF is too much Zeppelin, that it isn’t new. But, with all of those comments, I’m thinking of some stories on the theory of general relativity that I read last week, this one particular book making the theory very “relatable”, my fun play on words there. There are theories about time I can’t really understand, things I’d like to understand, how the curve of space time, about time perhaps being a particle, makes everything one. It reminds me of the line in a T.S. Eliot poem: “time present and time past, are both present in time future”. Perhaps, that line is what it is. Perhaps rock music needs to have a bit of time past infused just so it can go forward, so it can evolve into time future. Perhaps GVF needs to channel its inner Zeppelin. And as far as the them versus us thing is concerned, perhaps, just perhaps, we will both be present in time future, all united, rocking out at one really great version of Coachella.