Editorial:
‘It’s been too late for a long time’

Sometimes it’s hard not to be a little jealous of our parents’ generation when they complain of watching their favorite rock stars age ungracefully. We may have never seen firsthand what Robert Plant looked like before his jowls gave in to gravity or recall a time when Keith Richards didn’t look like an animated corpse, but we at least understand that watching time take its toll on our musical heroes is better than losing them at an early age.

Clearly, not all rock legends from decades passed survived to sing their children lullabies about groupies, psychedelica and rock in its heyday, before it fathered pop music’s bland and aesthetically unholy offspring. Baby boomers felt the pain of losing Hendrix, Bonham, Moon, Morrison and a handful of their musical peers too soon. The rock ’n’ roll lifestyle claimed its share of victims for the Reaper, but it was also the understood penalty of living too hard and rocking too loud.

Nowadays, our musical heroes are still claimed by drugs. And we idolize lonely singer/songwriters whose lives end in accidental deaths or tragic suicides that peter out into murder suspicions. Since the music industry exhausted the vast majority of its finite energy supply in the glory days of rock ’n’ roll, musicians and their songs are a little more unassuming than they used to be. The image of the rock star is a hackneyed one that’s best saved for Halloween costume ideas; it’s hard to take a musician seriously when his grimy hair hasn’t been washed for days and his open shirt leaves nothing to the imagination, though we wish it had extended the courtesy.

This generation’s musical heroes aren’t larger-than-life idols. They’re singer/songwriters to whom we can relate. It often feels as though the only difference between us and them is that they’re willing to open up the diaries of their music to share with an empathetic audience. They sing of the things that make more sense as we grow up and we find that the songs they write get us through a lot as time marches on. Our generation’s musical heroes are made not of sex and sweat and over-indulgence, but rather intuitiveness and tears and never appearing quite at home in the limelight.

It’s hard to say goodbye to the singer/songwriters we adore. The first losses — Kurt Cobain, Brad Nowell, Jeff Buckley — hit us right on the cusp of adolescence. They became symbolic and martyred, their songs posthumous reminders of musical talents who went out with a bang at the zenith of their fame.

And it hits even harder as we grow older. On Oct. 21, 2003, many of us found out that it’s not easy to balance the busy life of a college student while taking the time to mourn a fallen musical hero. We were paralyzed with grief when the news of Elliott Smith’s unexpected death tore through the indie rock community. While fans were familiar with Smith’s depression and general discomfort in his own skin, no one was expecting to hear that Smith’s “hard-earned peace of mind,” as described by musician Ben Folds, had disintegrated to the extent that he saw no other choice but suicide. While medical examinations suggest Smith’s death may not have been at his own hands, it doesn’t change the fact that we lost a beloved musical hero two years ago.

While feeling connected to musicians makes their music more personal, it makes losing them even harder. It feels as though we’ve lost a friendly figure in our lives, someone whose lyrics echoed our own daily trials and triumphs. The hardest part, though, is accepting that it’s too late to tell them that.