There are these terms “old soul” and “new soul”, referencing some Eastern philosophy for how many times one has been here on some quest to be reborn and attain ultimate wisdom.  I’ve heard people brag about being an “old soul”, I suppose as some affirmation that they know something I don’t.  No doubt that’s true; most people do.  I often say I don’t have the answers; I do however have plenty of questions.  So if there is such a thing as this “old” versus “new” soul stuff, then for sure I am a “new soul”.  I like things that are loud.  I like things that are scary.  I like things that are fast.  I like to jump, still.  I like to feel, even if that means feeling bad, even if that means getting hurt, physically, emotionally.  And I feel music.  Oh and that answer thing?  How can I be close to attaining the ultimate wisdom since I can’t get past the questions?  Probably writing should be left to the old souls, for people much less visceral than I am, but well… new souls don’t like rules.  So…

I suppose the ultimate question is what is the right answer for music (what is good, why is that good)?  But, and credit to Rev for indulging me on this one, I think that’s like answering what is love, or the even harder question, why do you love him (or her)?  Probably those – the music one, certainly the love ones – are rhetorical questions.  Hanging out on a rock website for the past approximately two years has showed me how music hits people is almost as subjective as love; there are as many answers are there are people.  Yet there are genres, and there are classifications, and there are types of things that hit lots of us in the exact same way.  Perhaps it’s an age thing, like when you turn a certain age all you can think about is wanting a boyfriend, then you turn another age and all you can think about is wanting all this stuff paid for and not working as hard.  Perhaps it’s some kind of style thing, like how we all start wearing skinny pants, or short shirts, or long skirts, or change the decorations in our houses from forest green to white, and don’t even get me started on how everyone has to have granite kitchen counter-tops.  So like those pants and skirts and forest green and granite counter-tops, is music-style just a fad or are there songs, sound, bands, records that stay forever-relevant?

I’m sure most of us will jump up and down and say yes, this band or that band is forever relevant, but to me relevance means universal relevance, and I’m not sure much has that.  The people who came after us loved grunge and sent our formerly-known-as “hard” rock to be forever-known as “classic” rock.  Sure there are forays of the “classic” into the “new”, and sure young people are embracing some of the old, think Slash and Guns ‘n’ Roses, while wearing Led Zeppelin t-shirts (more on that in the next article), but is it still relevant?  And in the new, what is missing?

Looking at us, there is one almost universal constant (okay totally universal because this even applies to me and I’m the trendiest of you all), and that is: we really don’t like grunge music, the music that was first considered “new”.  I think some of us know it, but it goes no farther than tolerating it.  And forget tolerance, some of us literally despise it so much that the very mention produces a sharp recoil.  All of us think those guys in those bands needed baths, a point that cannot be debated; they did.  Like I said, I think style changes are super important, and I’m going to hit those later, but for now what I think is missing from music, what the grunge artists took away, and only sometimes do you see glimmers of, is simple.  And that is … emotion.

Often I will read that you all think modern music is missing fun, and that the old music – Van Halen, the music of the ‘70s and ‘80s – was fun.  But not all music from that era was fun.  It wasn’t all smiles and happiness.  Face it, Van Halen’s Mean Street is not a happy song.  Led Zeppelin had unhappy songs galore, think the Rain Song, think all the way back to Communication Breakdown.  And nobody, well not anyone I’ve ever known, wants to hear a happy song when they break up, when they have to do something that scares them, when they’re in trouble, when they just plain hurt.  Then, we play sad songs, love songs, go-get-‘em songs, even angry songs, and those songs have always been there.  So it’s not the message of the song.  I don’t even think it’s the music part because, for me, those songs don’t make me happy.  The Rain Song, Communication Breakdown, Mean Street don’t make me happy.  I’ll Wait doesn’t make me happy.  Women in Love doesn’t make me happy.  They do something else.  They hit some other emotion.  And grunge?  It was supposed to be “angry”, but all of that anger in grunge just passed over me like a cloud of blah.

Alice Cooper said this about what is missing in modern music (credit to Rev on this quote from a June 2012 article): “my pet peeve right now is that 80-90 percent of the modern rock bands are just testosterone-free; I am listening to these bands and going, ‘Where is the spark? Where is the fire?’ These bands are whining like crazy…[I]t’s like they are trying not to be rock stars…That’s crazy. If you are in a rock band, you get in a rock band to be something different. I guess modern rock bands really just want to blend in and I think it is the most boring time in rock right now that I have ever seen.”  Coming full circle, Alice must be another “new soul” because he also has only questions, and even though there are no answers (and the statement that modern music sucks is not really an answer, I don’t think), Alice does say he likes some people.  So something must be there for Alice.  In particular, Alice said he likes Jack White (me too, especially that cover of U2s Love is Blindness from The Great Gatsby soundtrack), the Foo Fighters (which most of the people here would probably not agree with) and the Black Veil Brides (for their image, and I have to admit, I’ll have to get back on that one).  And then there’s the surprise; the article said Alice’s criticisms don’t apply to Lady Gaga.  I even remember David Lee Roth praising Gaga during his monologue in his Café Wha performance; what was that January, 2012?  Back then, people mocked me for saying I agreed with David Lee Roth, that Lady Gaga was something good, at least then.  And of course, time will tell on the staying power of Gaga.

So, for me, listening to you all, listening to Alice, and throwing a heaping dose of my own views in, it comes down to emotion.  If the music isn’t just going along in some kind blah – the style-trend, formula, short skirt or baggy pant that gets replaced by a longer skirt or a straight leg pant, or white kitchen that gets replaced with granite counter-tops to look like every kitchen, the testosterone-free that Alice derides –  then and only then does the music have emotion.  Indeed, I think emotion is equivalent to the performer putting on a show, selling it, making you feel it, making you feel like you are going faster, jumping higher, even on the sad songs, you know, making us laugh or cry with them.  That’s what I said was missing for me in those new songs I almost like; I miss the vocal emotion, the emotion that actually transfers from the band or the artist to me.  Perhaps all those rock stars who made all those songs we love were people who feel more than these newer artists.  Perhaps they made us feel their emotions, their love, their tears, their happiness, their sadness.  For me, the grunge artists couldn’t sell it; for me, they just annoyed me with their so-called anger.  I didn’t feel it.

I think that’s it, what is needed in music: emotion.  Perhaps it goes so far as the emotion of a dream – a dream of love, a dream of tears, a dream of happiness, a dream of sadness, a dream of the impossibly, amazing thing of standing up there on a stage.  Speaking of dreams, that should be the given.  Perhaps that’s Alice’s “testosterone”; the rock star should make us feel the dream right along with him/her.  And while I’m at it, you know, doesn’t a rock star have the ultimate dream job?  Well that … and astronaut, the ones on the Apollo missions who went to the moon.  And if one could be a rock star and an astronaut?  Well now then you’d have something!  See?  I told you I was a “new soul”.  And this “new soul” needs what “new” stands for – all the faster, higher, crazier,  I need emotion.  Give me true emotion, the good, the bad, all of it, just make me feel!  Now, if I could just figure out relevance… more on that later.

Video clips of Alice Cooper, with Orianthi on guitar, performing Lady Gaga’s Born this Way (top) and Lady Gaga performing the song her way (below).