Thursday, April 24, 2008

Shine A Light: Part 2







Why does music have to be made by young people to good? This is the question i found myself asking while watching the Rolling Stones new concert doc. At first i was like Jesus these are some old fuckers. Then i thought who cares? These guys are cool.
I liked this concert, the songs never sounded tired. Even the ones i was overly familiar with sound loose and different. I think if you want to here the record then listen to it, if you want to hear (or in this case see) a performance then listen to it live and this is it. The guest performance were all good especially Buddy Guy who got me so worked up a yelled "God Damn". Also Scorsese does a nice trick by putting interviews in between the songs to give you a breather and let you in on the bands personalty.
I would say if you like their music this isn't a waste of time. It's a whole lot better than all the other recent docs where their playing in a football stadium. The Buddy Guy thing brings up another point when these blues musicians get old its a positive thing but if 4 skinny white Englishmen get elderly then its bad? I'm calling Bullshit on this whole aging theory. Tell me different.
This movie made me smile alot. When you see Keith Richards crazy face if you don't laugh then you fucking stupid. I know when all of us get old were gonna be like these fuckers and i say bring it on.

1 comment:

dRchunkerton said...

I think that on the whole music has to be created by young people to be good. The stones may still be able to breathe life into there back cataloge, but they haven't produced an album in thier antiquity that can hold a candle to what they did in thier youth.

this isn't a hard and fast rule- youth doesn't have the market cornered on creativity, but they do own 90% of it. It's somehting to do with being hungry, i think, the need to prove oneself, and the general exhuberance of youth.

people get bogged down with life when they age. the more money they make, the further removed they become from where it is they came from and what it is they were once about. and in the event that doesn't happen, they just run out of fresh ideas and endlessly repeat themselves, with a drop in quality ranging from negligable (ac/dc) to profound (pink floyd- i don't care what anyone says, the division bell sucks).

of course there are always exceptions, and they are always celebrated- i would put the last 10 years of dylan up as the best example. the last depeche mode and bunnymen albums are great late career resurgences. Remember when snoop was on no limit and we all thought he was finished?

But these are exceptions, mostly, and i'd still say the most exciting music belongs to the young, the fresh, the new. except for dylan.