Classic Rock and the Betrayal of History

The Beatles

When I was sixteen, I rebelled against my parents’ household strictures in perhaps the most common way: I started listening to music they didn’t like. As rebellions go, it was pretty boring. Who hasn’t stamped their feet and said, “You just don’t get it, Dad, metal (rap, emo, EDM, punk) is the voice of a generation, and you’re just an old fossil who will never understand.”

Except I rebelled by choosing classic rock radio.

In the early 1990s, classic rock was more narrowly defined than today, because the generation that invented rock still controlled the programming. I consumed a steady diet of the Beatles, the Doors, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, all groups that disbanded before I was born. Sure, my country music-loving parents hated it, as rebellious teenagers always hope. But these rockers were, in many cases, older than my father.

The past had an appeal to moral clarity that I appreciated, and found lacking in then-current society. Issues seemed less contentious, with the simplicity of a medieval morality play: Dr. King was clearly a hero, Bull Connor was clearly a villain. Compared with developing battles over racial gerrymandering, a dispute that remains unresolved today, battles in the past appeared straightforward.

Such moral coherence applied across the board. Labor rights? Americans clearly needed labor unions during the Gilded Age, but strikes today are too fraught. Anti-government protests? Draft protesters during Vietnam stood up for right, but anti-war protesters during Operation Desert Storm didn’t get the moral complexity. Yes, things were pretty awful in the past, but people of high character fixed these problems, and now things were okay.

Music, for me, was the outward expression of this moral outlook.

The Doors

Classic rock radio played music that spoke to important issues, from race (“Say It Loud, I’m Black and Proud”) to war (“Fortunate Son”) to, well, love (“I Wanna Hold Your Hand”). And it did so in ways that even conservatives found uncontroversial. By 1991, when I embraced such music, even old-school nationalists believed racism, sexism, and Vietnam were wrong… though debate continues about why they persisted, and what the terms even mean.

So, classic rock provided me a way to be politically engaged, while still fleeing the sloppy, morally inconsistent present. If today’s issues seem difficult, without easy resolution, the past seemed uncomplicated and understandable. The important ethical disputes had already been resolved, somewhere around 1973, when FM radio largely stopped playing protest songs. The good guys already won. Everyone else could go home.

But if heroes like Dr. King already won, everybody else, it followed, needed to stop fighting. Civil rights activists, trade unionists, feminists: give up! We’ve already given you what you asked for! This isn’t an exaggeration. I seriously believed all moral issues were resolved two or three years before I was born, ipso facto, QED. Nor was I alone; earlier this month, I heard someone saying trade unions were important in 1956, but needed to cede the moral high ground today.

In those pre-Internet days, realizing my morally absolute worldview, for which classic rock radio served as shorthand, wasn’t easy. One couldn’t Google “Top Hits of 1968” and see that mawkish trifles like Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey” outscored muscular classics like Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart,” or that crap like the Lemon Pipers and 1910 Fruitgum Company even existed. Classic Rock Radio edited these travesties out.

Any casual stumble backward through Casey Kasem’s archives reveals that Top-40 music has always been dominated by swill. Most hits from the past aren’t worth listening to. Professionals have curated how we perceive the past, removing inconsistencies and room-temperature fillers. When I realized this, I began realizing the past was much messier than high school history textbooks will admit. Important debates aren’t resolved. History isn’t a closed case file.

Creedence Clearwater Revival

In 2014, Colorado students staged a mass walkout because their school rewrote their AP American History course to emphasize patriotism and loyalty over facts and ambiguity. Looking back on myself at that age, I realize now, I would’ve sided with the school. I couldn’t accept ambiguity then, and I justified it substantially on a sanitized vision of yesteryear that was curated by for-profit institutions. Like radio programmers, for instance.

Classic rock radio isn’t malicious. But in certain ways, it’s deeply dishonest. It’s part of an industrial cleansing of our shared heritage, eliminating uncertainty. Most music then, as now, was unlistenable piffle. And most social issues then, as now, were characterized by deep doubts and moral compromise. We just can’t see it anymore.