Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock
Steven Hyden
Top 10 Best Quotes
“In the hierarchy of eighties heartland rock, Bruce Springsteen was president, Tom Petty was vice president, John Mellencamp was speaker of the house, Bob Seger was president pro tempore, and Bryan Adams was (I guess?) secretary of leather jackets.”
“people probably hated disco because it inflamed something dark inside of them that they might not have known was there, and they also probably hated disco because disco (like a lot of pop music) was getting pretty fucking ridiculous and played out in 1979. What’s not disputed in either narrative is the suggestion that”
“This view was forwarded most prominently by music critic Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone, who observed at the end of 1979 that “white males, eighteen to thirty-four, are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks and [Latinos], and therefore they’re most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security.”
“This era and the collapse of its bright and flimsy liberation are what the Stones leave behind with the last song of Let It Bleed,” Greil Marcus wrote in Rolling Stone when the album was released. “The dreams of having it all are gone, and the album ends with a song about compromises with what you want—learning to take what you can get, because the rules have changed with the death of the ’60s.”
“The mythology is what hooked me. Some kids read comic books; others glamorize athletes. My superheroes were rock stars who either had been deceased for decades or were well ensconced in the throes of middle age by the time I discovered them.”
“The hot-shit, skinny-ass white guy in leather pants who takes pulls off Jack Daniel’s bottles while blasting blooze-rock riffs out of his Gibson—that archetype is finished, and it’s never coming back.”
“The best you can hope for at any gig is Altamont-like spontaneity where nobody happens to get killed.”
“The best of these early albums is 2011’s Twin Fantasy,”
“The albums chart is still expected to be a reliable indicator of what’s happening in pop culture at this very moment. If the chart measured strictly actual album sales, it would be reduced to music that appeals only to people who still buy music. And then we would have to accept that the apotheosis of popular culture is Adele and Christmas records by dorky vocal groups like Pentatonix.”
“That’s the real reason why music critics and cool kids hate Phish so much—they operate as if punk never happened.”
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