Rock Music

Dear Classic Rock Music Fans,

For those of you who listen to classic rock music, I write this with not one iota of derision or disrespect but with a message: stop living the way you're living. I only ask for alterations in your lifestyles and behaviors because the fate of the human race depends on it, not out of any personal opinion of my own.

A funny thing happened on the way to the future, 2009 Americans. Despite the emergence of Google and the iPhone, DVRs and Napster, a select group of you who experienced your 20s and 30s in this day and age decided to stop listening to rock music after Nirvana fizzled out and Pearl Jam became irrelevant. Despite an objective surge in creativity and content from the likes of Jack White and TV on the Radio, you retreated to the Stones and the Beetles and fell into what psychiatrists from my era will call "early-onset Grandpa-ism", a mental disease that spreads like a virus and festers like a sore. As you know, in 2008, the Los Angeles rock station Indy 103, a petri dish for creativity and a haven for men and women of taste, collapsed. By 2017, the Coachella music festival will be no more. Unless we change the future, our most talented musicians will be left without the perfect outlet for adolescent rage, rebellion, and redemption.

Now no one wants to call you people "lame" or blame you all for the downfall of American creativity. Nobody wants to say, "Grow up. Look at the world around you. There's amazing music being produced. Go to a concert. Stop sitting in your room, sulking, and living in the past." Not a single person from my era wants to do this. What we want to do is blame you for the collapse of human society. Because it is your fault.

Let me explain more clearly so you can understand more acutely the pain you have caused. In the year 2014, genetic engineering becomes possible much sooner than we think it will now (in your era). A group of jacked-up uber-humans with brains like mush emerges. They take over our schools in ways the bullies of your era never imagined, destroying the smaller children's psyches and breaking their bones.

Out of this rubble, a genius emerges. He's Bob Dylan wrapped in Neil Young, with a little Mick Jagger sprinkled on top. (I can't tell you his name in the hopes that he'll be saved.) He's five years old today, and he's already mastered every Led Zeppelin song on his little guitar. The kid becomes a star at age 16 with his breakout hit "Before the Jihad". By 2022, he's ready to tour nationwide. His manager sets up the opening show at Yankee Stadium. He's touted as the one who'll save rock music. And maybe if rock music had been saved, we could have maintained hope after our government crumbled. We might have been able to maintain a national unity - an identity in the face of what came next...

But the manager was a dreamer, not a planner. The Steinbrenners were out of the loop. No one was marketing the kid; they thought, in the age of instantaneous information, the kid would market himself.

True rock fans didn't make it to New York that day; they thought the ticket prices would be out of control. They didn't know that anyone with any taste had left New York in the trailing months, the Big Apple now a wasteland of designer suits and rotten toro.

And the kid was devastated. He never recovered from the nearly-empty stadium he played to that day. They told him that the opening act wanted to bag the show altogether, but the kid said, The show must go on; if I play, they will come.

He was wrong that day. But he doesn't have to be.