recovering the pastre

Once I was young, and now I am old. (Psalm 37:25)

1969 is 43 years ago. And I forget that because it was my life and I remember it.

But it came to mind when I was looking at something related to the Monkees. I got to thinking about them so I went to Wikipedia to see if they had anything interesting on them. And they did.

I read that Peter Tork was the first to get tired of the Monkees format and bought the four remaining years of his contract out. Mike Nesmith went next.

Their problem? Lack of any say in their music and the fact that all they could see for the next four years was more of the same: silly Monkees dancing around.

But as I read, it dawned on me that I was reading about music history. This was music history as surely as Mozart was music history.

Now the Monkees and Mozart were not necessarily equivalent, but they were both in the past and will not come up again like they did. There will be and have been imitations of both the Monkees and Mozart, but the Monkees and Mozart are gone now. The three guys that perform as the Monkees look like old versions of themselves and, quite frankly, a little pathetic.

Not long ago I read two things that really struck me. One was a young man bitterly complaining about the “cultural death grip” the boomer generation had on music. He wanted new stuff, although I cannot see what could possibly replace it from the music around today.

I am a music lover who will listen to any kind of music, at least for a few times. But there is nothing out there that they will play in grocery stores in fifty years like they play oldies now. There will be no stations dedicated to millennium music like there are to classic rock and roll.

So when the “cultural death grip” stops, so will a lot of musical quality.

I realize I say that like an older adult, like they did during our youth. But the thing was, there was a great volume of good music behind us also. 1920’s ragtime, 1930’s big band, 1940’s swing, 1950’s seminal rock and roll – it all stood behind us as good music and I still listen to it, as do many, today.

But somewhere in the early 1990’s music took a turn for the worst. The musicians and the music both became ugly.

Now I know that none of the rockers I listen to were angels, but even so, there is an ugliness to music today that seems to be purposeful. It is as if the musicians and the audience to which they play were nihilistic to the extreme.

It is no wonder so many kids are angry that music has turned from the 60’s. It is amazing at the amount of kids I see and read that want it to be the way it was then, sometimes thirty years before they were born. With all of its attendant problems, there was a sweetness and an innocence then that is gone today.

The second thing I read was in a novel. A character died, and the main character said: “And he was as dead as Napoleon.” The man had just that second died, but as far as his life went, he was in the same boat as Napoleon, Caesar, Moses, Adam. Once you die, you die.

And the same goes with history. Once it is gone, it is history. All the things I did as a young man are all in history books. The music I listened to, the clothing I wore, the food I ate.

There are whole webpages devoted to chronicling the 1960’s and 1970’s, harking back to it as a golden era. I agree, but that is because it is my golden era.

But we cannot go back to it. All we can do is press forward. As the apostle Paul said, in Philippians 3:13-14: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us.

We cannot go back, no matter how badly we want to. We cannot recover our youth, we cannot recover the culture we had, we cannot recover the music. And when we try, we look like a bunch of goofy old men trying to pretend that we are a 1960’s young, vibrant, beloved rock group.