All the New Boys Look Like Mick

For some reason, my cable company decided to give me "expanded basic"--which means I now have MTV. I haven't had MTV since I graduated (yes, we had cable in our rooms)--and I've probably been irrelevant to the MTV demographic even longer. Yet there's still a novelty--or is it morbid curiosity?--about watching young men ape it up for the camera. I've been watching boys do that since Ed Sullivan and Hullabaloo. MTV, to me, is just an extension of that--a combination of Sullivan, Hullabaloo, American Bandstand, and any number of other music shows squashed into one network with bands presented in their own little highly produced vignettes.

So, I'm sitting there the other morning, having my coffee, and My MTV, when this band (Taking Back Sunday) pops on the screen...
and their lead singer is doing these things with his mic and he's making these faces that are tweaking something in my vast pop-culture image memory...

And I realized that this new boy is reminding me of this old boy It was horrific! I was transported back to the early 1960's and my childhood--watching (and simultaneously getting one of my first crushes) on Mick Jagger!

Only it wasn't Mick but some boy named Adam Lazzara....and there was no way I could be mistaken for a kid...

Then it hit me that, within the past five years, there'd been a rash of 60's impostors...like that other Mick-imitator Pelle Almqvist of The Hives a band whose last CD looked kinda like an LP label from the 1960's...

I stared to feel very, very itchy at this point. Back in My Day, people accused Nick Lowe of *sounding* retro--but never of actually *looking* retro. Or of looking like anybody but Nick Lowe. Still...Nick never acted like Mick...

Boys don't just look like Mick. They act like Mick.

Maybe it's just copying of a style--repeating a successful formula while hoping for success. You know the old adage about lightning striking twice? Maybe that's what so many band's visual marketing strategists are hoping. I can't help but to think how much Franz Ferdinand


reminds me oddly of the Dave Clark Five (or even the Beatles in that half-lit black-and-white)

and the Strokes might not be wearking a ton of pancake makeup and bad lipstick, but my gosh they remind me of the New York Dolls (maybe they're actually trying to do the Sex Pistols, but the long hair doesn't quite cut it.)

I can't help but wonder what's going on here--why so many ghosts of pop culture boys past seem to be replicating in the present time. Have we lost some essential creativity? Is it that immitation is the sincerest form of flattery as much as it could be a good marketing strategy?

All I know is that it's beginning to creep me out, and it doesn't mean I'm going to actually buy any of these bands CD's.

When it came out in '04, I bought a Hives CD. It was okay. It gave me a headache actually. But I don't think it's the music. Rob Zombie and KMFDM still figure in my Pandora lists--and they can match the Hives decible-for-decible any day, with any song.

It's more that I'm seeing boys I've seen before, and I'm hearing stuff that sounds like the musical equivalent of Pasturized Cheeze Food Product than it does anything retro.

A recent article in the local paper dicussed the closing of For the Record a music store in Amherst. Downloading music has hurt John Hallock's business terribly--but I don't think that's the whole story. Hallock thinks nobody really wants to buy music. How could that be? One of Hallock's employees, Faye Wilson, noticed something that I noticed a short time back--that people seem to make less of an emotional investment in music than before. Music isn't as 'collectable' as it was when it was vinyl--and the idea of shelling out a goodly amount of money for one song because the rest of the CD stinks (even if it's traded in at a re-sale store) doesn't make buying music all that much fun any more. About all the downloading, esp. of individual songs, and mixing them in various ways, Wilson said "A lot of them (people) are creating this little soundtrack, but they're missing out on the whole album."

If Faye listens, she'd probably find that, with a lot of bands, there isn't all that much to miss by not buying the whole album. If stats were taken, they'd probably show more one-hit wonders these days than in, oh, the past 10, 15, even 20 years.

Here today, deleted from iPod tomorrow.

Maybe all the new boys need to look like Mick, just so that somebody will remember them.

But in 20 years, will they? Or will we still be looking at Mick, and Mick alone.

photos coutesy of starpulse.com