It's Only Rock N' Roll (But I like It): Where Are the Real Rockstars?

What's wrong with the rockstars of the 21st century? There are none. I'm not sure where the brilliance of rock n' roll that was discovered in the late 60's and early 70's got lost, but it seems we live in an age of rock amnesia.

Granted, the world of pop has become a consumerist monster, gnawing at the music industry with its mass production of image and sound. But it seems to me the industry has failed to realize that rock n' roll - real rock n' roll - was a tornado of public obsession, too. The difference was, the music was good then and the stars were real.

They weren't talent-less faces walking into studios with a smile and walking out with a boob-job and a record deal. They were musicians who were just too cool to ignore. And the public loved them because that couldn't be ignored.

Rockstars lived the dream; only it wasn't the dream of bling-bling mansions and commercial deals with Pepsi. It was the dream of being able to do and say whatever the hell you wanted, to tell the world and its problems to go f*ck themselves because you were about the music and the crowds and the right-here-right-now way of life.

You don't watch recordings of Robert Plant on stage for a second and wonder who his fashion consultant was or if there was some hidden track playing to help him sound better in a live venue. You know that he was the bearer of some unearthly gift and that the people who were lucky enough to be sitting in that audience were experiencing something divine. His cool wasn't manufactured in some studio. It was in the way he leaned back, his hips jutting forward, as he sang into his microphone. It was in the thrashing of his long blonde hair, the desperate wail of his voice.

The rockstar's job is to be what everyone dreams of being, not simply to own what everyone dreams of owning. True, celebs like Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Jim Morrison - they had the mansions and the jets and the women, the booze, the drugs- they had it all. But when they got up on stage they had something else, something you can't buy no matter how much cash you have.

They had a certain hypnotism, a grace that comes from the desperation that feeds rock n' roll. They had an indefinable charisma, a raw necessity to wail and krang and rip in front of thousands and thousands of hungry people. Those people needed rock n' roll to do to them what nothing else in the world could- to make them feel alive and powerful, to give a visceral, audible sensation to the dissatisfaction and quiet rage of tedious everyday existence.

Yea, Rock has gone on since the likes of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. It has squeezed out an existence in the pseudo-saviors: Guns n' Roses, Nirvana, maybe Pearl Jam or Stone Temple Pilots, though just barely. But none of these bands, and certainly not a single band who's been on the charts in the last five plus years, has had the energy or magnetism of the rock n' roll greats. Is it possible that the world has simply run out of rockstars? Well, then perhaps the apocalypse isn't pending; it has already come.