A Long Dark Night

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The past, my road-weary friends, is a plague on the future.

Oh I know, those who fail to learn the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them and all, but that's advice from a simpler time. Right now, I fear, all of our shining aspirations for the future lie in dark prisons, held there by the tyrannical grip of a past that just won't die.

I speak, of course, of retro. Yes that's right, I speak of the unstoppable wave of nostalgia that has crashed over North America, drowning new ideas, fresh promise and myriad forms of creative endeavour. I speak of an army of undead zombies, marching in disjointed unison under a dark sky to feast on the brains of the living. I speak of a near-biblical apocalypse.

The past, my road-weary friends, is a plague on the future.

Mostly I speak of the fact that I can't hear new rock on the radio.

Seriously, it's just about impossible to find any new music on the airwaves of this radio-blighted city by the Rockies. Everywhere I turn on the dial all I get is Blue Oyster Cult, Led Zeppelin and some gender-unspecific person singing Roxy-Roller. There are classic rock stations devoted entirely to the residue of past decades, and then there are the album rock stations, which seem to be sixty percent oldies, twenty percent prank phone calls, and twenty percent new rock, which consists of the top five new songs in revoltingly heavy rotation. And it seems to be like this in a lot of the cities I visit.

So what the hell happened? Did we stop making new music? No, for a while I thought we had but I checked around and there are groups out there, they're just hard to find because radio is being eaten alive by the reanimated corpses of long dead bands. I'm seeing this in TV and movies too - shows about the way we were, reliving the grand and simple past of our prematurely tired-eyed continent. Movies about comic book superheroes from our collective childhood, TV shows about growing up in America in the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties. A cornucopia of history-worshipping entertainment goods that bury alive all attempts to do anything new and worthwhile.

And this raises a worrisome spectre - are we witnessing the complete and wholesale breakdown of Darwinian evolution? Is this the absolute cessation of progress due to the development of a dominant strain in our genetics that wants no change? Imagine - a world that stopped somewhere in the 1970's. A million dusty millennia can march forward while we continue to listen to old Boston albums and suffer periodic bouts of Bell Bottom jean popularity. An artistic ice age that stretches off to infinity, crushing all hope of change.

So, late at night when the moon rides a flying carpet of thin clouds, the wind howls and groans and the zombies are at the door, prying and kicking and trying to find their way in, I ask myself, who's to blame for this mess? The obvious answer is the baby-boomers. Yep, baby-boomers, those bastards are always trying to force us to eat the same meal that was being served in the high-school cafeteria on the day they graduated. They never stop.

But wait. It isn't just the damn boomers - it's us too, Generation X, the hip and disaffected kids who all have nice professional jobs now; only with us it's the 80's. I can't spit without hitting something from the 80's (not that I do a lot of spitting, but it'd be nice to know that I could should the need arise).